Dislanguaged: David Ferry’s Orphic Turn Martin W. Michálek (bio) David Ferry is one of America’s most accomplished poets and translators. In addition to his contributions to English verse, his translations of Horace’s Odes (1997), Virgil’s Eclogues (2000), the Georgics (2005), and the Aeneid (2017) have considerably swayed our modern, Anglophonic appreciation of Augustan poetry. While much has been said about Ferry’s original poems and translations, the extent to which they depend upon each other, and the meticulousness with which Latin informs his English (and vice versa) merit further consideration, particularly from classicists. As Ferry nears his eleventh decade of life, now seems as fitting a moment as ever to reconsider some of this poet’s classically influenced work. Make no mistake, Ferry has no shortage of recognition. In 2012, he received the National Book Award for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, a slender volume written in the wake of the death of his wife, Anne.1 Original poems blend with translations from Catullus, Cavafy, Horace, Martial, Virgil, and the Anglo-Saxon Bible, as though a retinue of poets— who have come before, who speak other languages, who have suffered loss and put it into poetry—can aid David’s efforts to confront death in verse. This is precisely what we find in a sonnet near the collection’s end called “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember.” Where did you go to, when you went away?It is as if you step by step were goingSomeplace elsewhere into some other rangeOf speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,Knowing nothing of the language of that placeTo which you went with naked foot at nightInto the wilderness there elsewhere in the bed,Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking. (1–8) [End Page 33] Like Dante, the poet wanders in a wilderness. The further afield he goes, the more disoriented the poet seems. The poem, in content and form, reflects this disorientation. His question, “where,” is answered by “someplace elsewhere”—words that will not orient someone who is lost. The steady iambic pentameter of the opening line is disturbed by trochees (“Someplace elsewhere”), pyrrhics, and dactyls (“into some other range”). By his own admission, language begins to fail the poet. The despair of the scene (the bed bereft, the wilderness of uncertainty) prompts the following avowal: I have been so dislanguaged by what happenedI cannot speak the words that somewhere youMaybe were speaking to others where you went.Maybe they talk together where they are,Restlessly wandering, along the shore,Waiting for a way to cross the river. (9–14) A dazzling volta—the near-midway turn in a sonnet, in this case a Petrarchan sonnet, when the octave that introduces a crisis (“Where did you go to when you went away?”) yields to the sestet, which seeks closure. Ferry’s sestet moves the lover’s initial query not toward an answer, but rather acceptance of the uncertainty surrounding death (a duplex of “maybes”), and an agnostic consideration of ancient ideas about the afterlife. “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember” seems like the zenith of Bewilderment—with the wild from the collection’s name briefly appearing in the poem’s title. That title, however, Ferry has taken from a verse penned by the sixteenth-century court poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt: They fle from me that sometyme did me sekeWith naked fote stalking in my chambre.I have sene theim gentill tame and mekeThat nowe are wyld and do not remembre . . . (1–4) [End Page 34] In Wyatt’s poem, the poet looks back at past lovers with shades of fondness and frustration. In her book, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (2001), Anne Ferry reads multiple versions of Wyatt’s poem, noting how various editors have changed its spelling, edited its punctuation, and added words to make the lines of uniform syllables. These are not superficial changes, Anne argues, but augmentations capable of undoing the poem’s “powerful immediacy” and the “bewildering resentment of pain, anger, and bereavement” felt by Wyatt for the lover who no longer...
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Oct 30, 2024
Tomasz Babnis 
Open Access