Ian Pople reviews
Bunting’s Persia: translations by Basil Bunting ed
Don Share;
Six Vowels & Twenty-three Consonants: An Anthology of
Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi ed. and trans. by Ali Alizadeh and
John Kinsella
Basil Bunting fell in love with Persian poetry when he was
staying in Italy. He found a French
translation of Firdusi’s national epic Shah-na-Meh (King of Kings) at a
bookshop on the quays at Genoa. He took
the book back to Rapallo, where he was staying near the Pounds. According to Bunting’s biographer, Keith
Alldritt, ‘All three of them were immediately fascinated.’ For Pound, that fascination waned. And
Bunting put that loss of interest down to Pound’s interest in character in The
Cantos, and his, Bunting’s, own interest in action. That interest wouldn’t be an accurate
description of what goes on in Briggflatts; though ‘action’ does underlie
a number of the passages that Bunting chose to translate from the Persian, and
which are contained in this lovely, beautifully produced edition of those
translations.
Bunting saw an analogy between Firdusi and Homer, and it has
to be said, partly in Bunting’s defence, that the kind of attention to detail
and character paid in The Iliad also has a place here; ‘Faridun grew
old, dust drifted over the garden,/ a changed conversation, strength turned
weakness by age,/ and the nobles huffed when any business was muffed./ Salm’s
heart slid away, his ways and ambitions altered,/ greed swamped his mind, he
brooded in public, chafed/ at the settlement giving the youngest the Golden
Throne.’ There is something very
typically Bunting-esque about this translation;
the avoidance of the Latinate and the polysyllabic, the consonantal grit
of the writing that Bunting had absorbed from his, and Pound’s, absorption of Anglo-Saxon
alliterative verse. Bunting’s interest,
as it is in Briggflatts, is with the solid, the visual. That is not to say that Bunting has no
interest in the philosophical, but, I would suggest, Bunting’s writing is
dedicated to the world as he found it rather than the world as he wished
it. And certainly Bunting’s own life
story was never that far away from the difficult.
Alizadeh and Kinsella’s selections are, of necessity,
somewhat skimpier than Bunting’s; though, interestingly, Alizadeh and Kinsella
miss out Manuchehri altogether, a poet Bunting rated as one of the very
greatest. Their translations are also of
also a selection of modern and contemporary Persian poets, including Mimi
Khalvati, whose work will be well known to many readers. Their translations are, if anything, slightly
more mellifluous than Bunting’s, although their selections from the classical
poets do not overlap with Bunting’s, which means that, reading the two books
together, you get a really strong introduction to Persian poetry.
Ali Alizadeh makes the point that Persian poetry in the
twentieth century swiftly broke away from the classical ghazal form and into a
much freer writing, influenced by the modernism of the west. This latter, perhaps slightly ironic, given
Bunting’s position as one of the high priests of modernism. With the move from
the classical forms to free verse, there is, on the evidence of this volume, an
analogous move from the epic to the political.
The editors trace this move to Nima Yushij, the first poet in the second
half of their collection. Yushij, they
maintain was influenced by the French Symbolists. Eagleton suggests that, ‘In some mysterious
fashion [the Romantic symbol] combines the individual and the universal,
setting up a direct circuit between the two which bypasses language, history,
culture and rationality.’ Here, I would suggest, Persian poetry finds a way actually
to discuss ‘history, culture’ and thence the political, with Yushij’s parable
‘The Phoenix’ addressing how culture might re-emerge through all the pain of
surrounding conflagration. A later poet,
Forough Farrokhzad, also uses the image of the bird to show women’s position in
Iran, ‘The bird, airbourne over/the warning lights/ was naively soaring higher/
and ecstatically knowing/ the blue moments// The bird, alas, was just a bird.’
And, yes, the political surges through the selection of
contemporary poets in Alizadeh and Kinsella’s book. But what also surges through so strongly is
an immense verve and absorption of what Bunting teaches us, a need to address the world as is in all its
depth and richness.
Ian Pople's Saving Spaces is published by Arc.
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