E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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 ...