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. 

Donald Davie, Gioia and Bishop, Bach

Donald Davie was the paragon of a high church scholarly critic whose essays made it sound virtually impossible to write a good poem. Not in fashion these days, you'd think, he brought  rigour and directness to his readings of other poets that might make him seem a dry old stick were it not for flashes of humour and some sympathy.

His The Poet in the Imaginary Museum was suggested in recent Gioia Studies and arrived ahead of the tardy Gioia books. Although at first it seems abstruse stuff, one can see that he's telling you things you've realized for yourself, just expressing them in a higher form of considered utterance. He is enlightening on Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Lowell and others and even makes a case for poetry in translation that I might not entirely accept but can appreciate his effort. It will not be a book to read all of because some of the lesser known Americans are even lesser known now than they were fifty years ago but it is possible to enjoy the essays for their own sake without fully taking their points which is a bit like reading poems sometimes, the sound rather than the sense. 

 

But then Dana Gioia's Studying with Miss Bishop arrived and one is glad to hear about her idiosyncratic teaching methods, openly admitting when she doesn't 'get' poems and turning down the suggestion of Ashbery as a poet to look at because he's a case in point. Unorthodox and apparently disorganized she may have been but the diminshed numbers who didn't desert her course in favour of Lowell's perhaps found it more demanding, and instructive, than it first looked s if it would be. Gioia and Bishop ws a meeting of great minds, one in maturity with the other just setting out and Dana's memoir almost makes one see Harvard seminars as idyllic.

Two good people, wonderful poets making the most of a situation perhaps neither of them entirely relished but if there's anything better than reading them, or about them, separately it's reading about them together.

--

The Davie inroads were made to a soundtrack of the Complete Works discs of The Well-Tempered Klavier. I decided it was time to venture into something familiar although familiar it turned out not to be. 

Of course Bach would have played and heard his own music on the harpsichord or organ, not in the pianoforte versions we might be more accustomed to now so it's hardly for me to say it's wrong. But one instinctively thinks that what one knows is right and anything different is aberrant.

Robert Levin's harpsichord pieces take the quicker tempi at hectic, flashy speeds that sound all for pyrotechnic effect. Not all of it is recognizable as the measured, thoughtful exposition of the Bernard Rodgers 4-discs I've had for so long. Some upcoming spending spree might bring Tatiana Nikolayeva here to be made number one preference but Bernard has done good service. But the unity of the set is thrown away by a good proportion of the 48 being played on organ. Luminous, gorgeously recorded and glorious in their way they are a different thing to the harpsichord and clavichord performances, never mind piano, and it makes for something inconsistent. Not un-brilliant but not as if they are all one work, either. Having said that, having them on piano already it's no bad thing to have these entirely different versions because it ostensibly makes for different music.

Continuing with the sacred cantatas, BWV 41 and 42 made for a fine disc, the cello in the aria in 41 being another 'find' to return to again one day. And if I had only ever known the Well-Tempered Klavier as organ music then the French Suites, BWV 812-817, would have served the purpose the 48 have been doing for so many years and I'd have been none the wiser but that was all a bit of a bombshell, finding music to be quite so amorphous. And yet, really, while worrying about non-period instruments in the orchestral music, it's the switch to instruments that Bach would have known, away from the ersatz piano that has disconcerted me. You just can't win.