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Article by Off the Shelf Correspondent Michael Todd Steffen

The Boston area has lost a great voice and friend in poetry. At the age of 99, David Ferry passed on Sunday, November 5. As a remembrance, I wanted to share my introduction to David’s reading at the Hastings Room on November 4, 2015. As I’ve recalled elsewhere, that evening while David read, a cellist was practicing Bach in a nearby room at First Church, where we do the readings. The sonorous draws of the bow across the cello seemed so appropriate for David’s reading, the beauty and classical air of the music sweeping softly behind his voice. I know many will be remembering David with gratitude for the generosity he showed in his encouragement, in his classes at Suffolk with George Kalogeris, as well as reading our manuscripts. I know I feel a great loss, but as great a gratitude.

David Ferry

In his Introduction to a presentation of 10 of David Ferry’s poems, in honor of awarding the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, in the July/August 2011 edition of Poetry, Christian Wiman wrote, One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise … without any preconceived notions of what we wanted [poems and people] to be.

Wiman’s “capacity for surprise” could also be seen as the enthusiasm in David for people and for poetry. I am surely not alone to have witnessed this quality in him, above all as an animated reader of poetry. And of the many, many comments come across as to what poetry is, and what makes a good poet, one of the most convincing is that a good poet is a good reader of poetry. Richard Poirier was one of a few scholars to mention this about Shakespeare, that he was such a good reader of poetry. I say this with no intention of clobbering David by comparing him to that summer’s day.

“My subject is pleasure,” David wrote in an essay about the difficulty of getting translation right.

My subject is pleasure, the pleasure of hearing somebody else’s voice and the play-acting pleasure of pretending for awhile … that you’re in on how the wonderful thing happened.

David’s discussion in the essay leads him to reflections on the subtleties of courtly love and the good of a beautiful woman’s disdain during the French Renaissance, and even farther back to how a word Virgil used for “mask” (ocilla) eluded his every attempt to get a compressed, accurate and ringing translation of the passage in the Eclogues. His subject, if frustration at the inevitabilities of mistranslation, is pleasure, the pleasure at discovering these deeper nuances and ironies possible in the target or original text. It is profoundly and so admirably a reader’s pleasure.

More and more in the last 16 years David has been appreciated for his original poetry, in the year 2000 winning the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress for his book Of No Country I Know published the previous year. In 2012, for his book Bewilderment, David was awarded the National Book Award.

It’s not my intention this evening to shift the nation’s attention back to David as a translator. Yet his work as a translator has continued to thrive, and all along as the contents of his books have suggested, he has maintained both roles as poet and translator throughout his writing career. He has published translations of Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and I believe he has recently completed a translation of The Aeneid. (Any publication date projected for that yet?)

In 1992 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published David’s A New Rendering in English Verse of Gilgamesh, which is not so much a work of translation in the sense that his Horace and Virgil are. William L. Moran described David Ferry’s Gilgamesh as “a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation” of previous linear translations and freer adaptations. While the story of Gilgamesh has been so essential as to have survived for 4700 years, dating back to some of the oldest writings in the Bible, no modern English version was able to win over much critical conviction until David’s version. The work boosted him to national acclaim. It was through this book that I first encountered David’s name in 1994, when I was back in the States from France where I was living and teaching, and myself trying to translate the poems of Pierre de Ronsard, the great French Renaissance poet.

I remember the year was 1994, because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy and my attention was being preoccupied by the Bayeux Tapestry and Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer. Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros published in 1990 was getting a lot of attention at the time. So David’s Gilgamesh struck me as wonderfully appropriate to all that was in the air culturally and historically bridging past to present. Memory traditionally is such a key concept to poetry. Auden said poetry is “memorable speech.” The Greeks made Memory a goddess, Mnemosyne, and she was the mother of the 9 muses who principally inspire poets and the arts. David’s undergraduate studies at Amherst, in fact, were interrupted by service in World War II, and to have Gilgamesh published in the 50-year mark of that war must have meant and must mean something to him. Two other students at Amherst who would become well known for their poetry, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur, endured similar interruptions to their careers for the same cause.

It’s a big deal to have a poet of David Ferry’s depth in the art and renown read for our series. In April this past spring we celebrated the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a magnificent reading by Lloyd Schwartz of that poem and of selections from Browning, Swinburne and Baudelaire, who had influenced Eliot. This is how it feels for me this evening. David has been a friend and supporter of my work, as he has been for many in the community. So it’s also with a great sense of personal appreciation that I stand here this evening to welcome him.