Interview with Donald Davie
In 1992 I interviewed for Radio 3 six distinguished literary translators. The conversations with Ketaki Dyson, Michael Hamburger and Charles Tomlinson were published in 1994 in Modern Poetry in Translation 5; but Daniel Weissbort, the editor, declined to publish the one with Donald Davie, while Christopher Logue in turn refused permission for publication of his interview, and Anthony Vivis, the sixth translator involved, decided to make his own arrangements over publication.
On 27 February 1992 The London Review of Books carried Davie’ s review of Weissbort’s anthology The Poetry of Survival. The collection was, as the title indicates, devoted mainly to the work of poets (from East-Central Europe) who came to maturity under Nazi domination. As the interview makes clear, Davie chose the occasion to express his strong objections to the way in which recent poetry from that part of the world had been sprung on the English readership.
It was Davie’s interest in Polish poetry that drew my attention to him many years ago. He contributed ‘Pan Tadeusz in English Verse’ to Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature, published in 1955 to coincide with the centenary of the poet’s death. And in 1959 he published his Poundian reduction of Pan Tadeusz entitled The Forest of Lithuania. I reviewed the translation in Kontynenty, a periodical edited in London by a group of young expatriate writers and intellectuals.
In 1988 I published a harsh review in Notes & Queries of The Insufficiency of Lyric, Davie’s study of Milosz’s poetry. I was therefore apprehensive about his reaction when soon afterwards I invited him to contribute to The Mature Laurel, a collection of essays on modern Polish poetry which I was editing. Davie responded generously with a piece on Aleksander Wat. Unluckily, I found it muddled and therefore declined to accept it but pleaded with Davie either to recast it or write on another topic. He responded in time with a querulous review of The Mature Laurel in Poetry Review.
So when I approached him with the idea of this interview, I was prepared for a rebuff, but Davie’s response was enthusiastic and friendly. Following the interview, we maintained a close contact and just before his death on 18 September 1995 I was planning to visit him in Silverton. The poetry of Jan Kochanowski proved an important area of mutual interest. At that time I was completing my translation of Kochanowski’s Treny, a celebrated sequence of elegies on the death of the poet’s daughter, and had asked Davie to write an introduction to the translation. This he promptly produced.
AC: Donald Davie, we think of you mainly as a poet, literary critic and theorist of literature, as well as a distinguished academic. Recently your name reappeared prominently in the literary press as a consequence of a review you wrote of an anthology of translated poetry edited by Daniel Weissbort. It was a very critical account and you used fairly strong language. The theme of your review was debated, discussed and attacked in other literary journals. You suddenly brought the art of literary translation into, one might almost say, journalistic prominence from a safe academic and literary backwater. Could you explain what it is that chiefly motivated you in being so harsh in your appraisal of the Weissbort anthology?
DD: The aspect of Weissbort’s anthology that most, yes, exasperates me is the implication that the translation of these poets, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and so on, is as easy as falling off a log; that, as it were, anyone with diligence and a dictionary can do a perfectly good job. He specifically says, about the firmest thing he does say about what these selected poems have in common, that they are translatable. Well, that may be but it makes me think the worse of those poets. The translation of poetry that I have been interested in and have practised a little is at the opposite extreme. The translations that I value are themselves works of creative engagement. When Charles Tomlinson, to name just one of your interviewees, translates a poem from the Italian, from the Spanish, from the Russian, that is not, as he understands the matter, a totally distinct operation from what he’s doing when he writes his own poem, and when I read his versions, say from Fiodor Tiutchev, that is how I read them and how I can read them. They give me as much pleasure and the same sort of pleasure as I get when reading one of his own poems. That is the aspect of poetry translation that most fascinates me. I would go so far as to say that the great verse translator is an even rarer and more admirable creature than the great poet, and this view of translation seems at the opposite pole altogether from the view of translation which is embodied explicitly, as well as implicitly, in Weissbort’s anthology.
AC: There is also another criticism, as I understand it. The fact that the Cold War created a demand, perhaps, an interest in East European poetry because it was a witness to the horrible events that were occurring at the time, and so one was reading the poetry to understand the politics of the situation rather than because these were good poems. Do I understand that criticism there correctly too?
DD: Yes, you do understand. It is perfectly true that Polish poetry is now a talking point in poetic circles in this country, but we are never invited to see you or any of your contemporaries in a perspective which goes back to Mickiewicz, not to speak of further back to Kochanowski. So the exposure given to post-1945 Polish poetry seems to me to have helped occlude earlier Polish poetry, and indeed the whole sense that Polish poetry and Polish culture is in fact long, ancient and continuous from the Renaissance onwards in a way that, for instance, Russian is not. That seems to me one of the things that is most fascinating about the Polish tradition as I know it. There is no sense of that available. It is never said, indeed, in England.
AC: Now that the Cold War is over should we not look again at that poetry and say to ourselves, well maybe 80% of it was created for this specific purpose. However, there may be a residue, let’s say 20%, which is valuable as poetry and therefore has contributed to, as I say, expanding the sensibilities of English readers. Wouldn’t you agree that translators over the years, over the centuries, were working to extend the scope of the native culture into which they were bringing the translations?
DD: Yes, there are two things there. First, you’re prepared to write off 80% to think that 20% may survive. That seems to me a grudging percentage but that’s beside the point. Yes, it is what I very much would like - to have, say, Tadeusz Rôzewicz presented to me out of the ambience which Weissbort and Alvarez and Tom Paulin and others have created for him. To get him pulled free of the purely adventitious historic matrix in which he has been presented to us so far. If someone would do that - it has been done up to a point, I think, with Zbigniew Herbert and I don’t know why we shouldn’t do the same for Rózewicz - that I would value. It is something which it seems to me that the Polish poet, or Hungarian, requires of us. As it is, he is being sold short as a merely arguing and debating point. That is why I feel, and said in the review, that the people who suffered most were the Poles, Hungarians and Yugoslavs, who were being used in order to apply a lever to what was essentially an insular quarrel. The Polish names, for instance, have been wheeled into place from the 1960s onwards in order to shoulder aside the native product, the English poetry, and Weissbort now denies this. But time and again in his commentaries there is the plain implication that he presents these poets to us, and has ever since the 1960s, as an example of what we English poets ought to have been doing, instead of what we have been said to be doing, which is genteel and finicky and dealing only with marginal and domestic matters. Of course I resent that on my own behalf and on behalf of others. The second and more important thing really that you raise: yes, indeed I do believe that the noblest and most useful motive for translation is to enrich the resources of the native language. That is why I undertook my translations from the Russian or whatever you call them imitations - from the Polish, and I’m immensely grateful, and I’ve said so, to Boris Pasternak, to Adam Mickiewicz; they gave me things I needed at that time in my poetic career. They liberated me as I don’t believe any English language poet could have done. And I hoped, and still hope, that that is not peculiar to me but that through me a different range of sensibility, which we might associate with Pasternak on the one hand or Mickiewicz on the other, is thereby available.
AC: You mentioned Adam Mickiewicz and that takes us back many years to the time when you published The Forests of Lithuania, which is a kind of Poundian version of Mickiewicz’ s epic. At that time you were putting Mickiewicz forward as a model. You weren’t saying: oh well, let him drift into the British consciousness. You were actually addressing the British poets and saying: enough of Surrealism, enough of this confessional verse. Let’s have some of this clarity and hardness of the classical purity of Mickiewicz, and latterly I think you had a similar view of Milosz’s work. Well, how do you view the scene now? Has Mickiewicz performed the role for the British poet that you were hoping for?
DD: Not at all. Not at all, of course. That is what I have to reply. Those hopes were no sooner expressed than they were dashed. I see no sign at all that Mickiewicz or Milosz are any more presences in modem British poetry than they were thirty or forty years ago. And of course I think this is sad, and I think that it happens partly because of the idleness and obtuseness of the English public, but it has not been helped, let us say, by the way in which Polish poets of your own generation have been presented to us.
AC: May I turn now to your view about the translator’s craft, as you perceive it? This awkward question of faithfulness, of accuracy. You make quite bold statements about the way in which one can change the original, including rhyme and rhythm, and of course your Mickiewicz translation is a sort of quintessential mix of a much longer poem.
DD: I realise that, as you say, these claims that I seem to have made are brazenly impudent. It’s all involved really in what you started out with. Yes, my master in the matter of verse translation is undoubtedly Ezra Pound and, of course, the liberties that Pound took are notorious and are still derided and assailed in many quarters. What is more, it’s perfectly true that he did take enormous liberties and sometimes he came a cropper. Not all his translations are successful. His attempts to translate Horace, for instance, seem to me bizarre. There was never a less Horatian temperament than Ezra’s. The particular instance that you gave of dropping rhyme and rhythm is rather a special one. I do indeed say that the translator should be prepared to do this if necessary, though I do allow that there are special cases in which the euphony of rhyme and metre is so crucial to the original that, if you can’t translate it, you may as well throw it aside. And in fact it is the case that in The Forests of Lithuania, and indeed in my Pasternak translations I do rhyme rather more than most people do, and certainly a good deal more than the Weissbort clan. I like to rhyme in my own writing too, when I can, but it is a matter of when one can, without distorting the tone of the original, without having recourse to outlandish, archaic English in order to get a rhyme word.
AC: Given what you’ve just said about the importance this poem had in your own version for your own development as a poet, perhaps we could conclude our conversation with an extract from your Mickiewicz translation.
DD: I am as proud of this work as of anything I have done, so I’m very glad to read from it. I’ll choose a passage which is in fact extremely Poundian - as you say, in the whole venture Pound is a presence behind it - but this is one where I’m particularly aware of it, in fact of a particular passage in a late Canto of Pound. It is the account of a spring morning, the day breaking at the time when the Lithuanian people meet the Polish legions from abroad who are on their way with Napoleon to Moscow in 1812:
Fair weather and the day breaking,
Day of our Lady of Flowers;
The sky clear, hung over land
Like a sea curved forwards and backwards;
Pearls under its wave
Some few stars still, though paling;
White cloudlet alone.
(Wing feathers spray out in the azure),Spirit departing
Belated by prayers,
Fares fast to its heavenly fellows.Pearls dim and go out in the deep.
Pallor on the sky’s brow midmost
Spreads, and one temple is swarthy
Crumpled, pillowed on shadows,
The other ruddy. The distant
Horizon parts like a lid
On the white of an eye.
Iris and pupil, and a ray circles
Dazzles, a gold shaft
Struck through the heart of a cloud.Fires cluster and dart
Cross over, light over light
Overarches the sky round:
Drowsy, a broken
Light over lashes shaken.
The eye of the sun rose up
Glittered, seven-tinted:
Sapphire by blood is to ruby
Ruby by yellow to topaz
Crystal by lucent
To diamond, and by flame
Great moon or fitful star.
And the eye of the sun rose up
Alone across the unmeasured.
Page(s) 23-30
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