Two Issues with Donald Davie

Donald Davie takes poetry very seriously or at least at a very high level of thinking about it. Some might think such an attitude could detract from the enjoyment but for others it provides the enjoyment. I admired his early poems very much and appreciate his highbrow commentaries as far as I can keep up with them but on subjects like Pound, imagism and symbolism that isn't the whole way.

Not all of The Poet in the Imaginary Museum is going to get read but there's been value enough in those pieces I have. Interestingly, just because he's demandingly intelligent, rigorous and knows his stuff that doesn't mean he's always right.

In Remembering the Movement, he seems to accept there was such a thing when he says,

in the metrical places wasted on inert gestures gestures of social adaptiveness- 'no doubt', 'I suppose', 'of course', 'almost', 'perhaps'- you can see the same craven defensiveness which led us, when we were challenged or flattered or simply interviewed, to pretend that the Movement didn't exist,

and he takes a severe view of some aspects of the perceived shared mindset. While ready to be associated with them he is critical of their deprecating, ingratiating humility and the way they addressed their readers. Their fault is diagnosed as finding it,

difficult..to conceive of or approve any 'tone' that isn't ironical, and ironical in a limited way, defensive and deprecating, a way of looking at ourselves and our pretensions, not a way of looking at the world 

although he finishes by accepting that such 'applies equally well to most English and American poetry in the present century and at the present day', in 1959. So he hasn't differentiated anything about that poetry and a lot of the other poetry written in the same age and that puts strict limits on what he's managed to say. If the Movement poets had certain things in common with each other but also had some of those things in common with non-Movement poets it might be better to say that they didn't form such a coherent group and that from the start their kinship was at best loose and soon became looser to the point of unravelling.

 

It reads like tough talk and one feels intrepid taking on Davie because his acumen is intimidating and he would surely have seen off my objections with profound arguments if he'd felt it within his dignity but I can't agree with what I take to be his line of reasoning in The Translatability of Poetry, 1967, either. 

He usefully divides the idea of 'poetry' into two discrete senses. The first is what I understand it to be, an inclusive term that includes all that writing that claims to be poetry. The second is poetry as 'a hooray word' that makes it approbatory. Davie imposes this second meaning of the word onto what Robert Frost and Robert Graves said about poetry in translation but not necessarily with their permission. Davie makes claim to 'common sense' from thereon in after performing some sleight of hand. He goes on to argue that 'poetry is better, the less translatable it is' but he is already there conceding degrees of translatability and has shot himself in the foot.

As soon as any poem is made comprehensible to someone who doesn't understand its original language, its original music, for better or worse, is altered. For example, asking the computer's Translate function to render the first two lines of The Cathedrals of Liverpool, it offers,

Ce jour du Nouvel An, la bruine s'est finalement transformée en pluie et vice-versa.  

I hadn't been aware that 'vice-versa' was a Freuch usage but the point is that the 'music' is different and even if that untalented translator has successfully reproduced the sense, not even the most gifted translator ever could reproduce both sense and sound, for better or worse. 

It can't be the same poem in any other language and I'm surprised that the august Donald Davie tries to make a case for translation. By all means, some poets quite high up in my hit parade wrote in languages I'm not fluent in- Wisława Szymborska, mainly - but I like her in spite of the translation rather than because of it. 

Poetry's a limited thing, its medium being language. I'm always going to be more likely to appreciate Beethoven than Schiller or Goethe.