Guy Davenport as Translator By Jeet Heer National Post (August, 19, 2004) (expanded and revised). The ancient Greek love of beautiful athletes ripples through history in many forms, as can be seen not only in the modern Olympics but also in the Bible. St. Paul and many of the other early Christian were Jews who fell under the sway of Hellenic culture, so it is natural that they frequently drew on metaphors taken from such competitive activities as racing and wrestling. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” Paul thundered in a letter to his Ephesian friends. “This sentence, in which we can see oiled athletes grappling in dust of a gymnasium at Tarsos, was first written down from Paul’s dictation by his secretary Tykhikos around the year 60,” Guy Davenport notes, in a typically lovely essay which places both pagans and Christians in a fresh light. “Paul I see as a figure in Plutarch’s world, an intellectual with both a Jewish and a Greek education. He belongs to a renaissance of that moment in the fifth century when one could hear Aristarchus or Diogenes or Socrates in an Athenian gymnasium. He echoes them, sometimes literally. Diogenes said that the love of money is the marketplace for all evil; Paul changed marketplace to root. Paul, like his Greek predecessors, was a man of cities. Jesus preferred villages, hillsides, lakeshores. In my imagination I see Jesus as a man so attractive (eyes, gestures, a man whose genius was compassion) that people might easily drop what they were doing and follow him. Paul, however, I see as a bald and seriously bearded official, born to officiate.” Jesus and Paul are such impossibly distant figures, so buried under dense archeological layers of piety and tradition, that is it startling to encounter a writer such as Davenport, who can mint crisp and witty words (“seriously bearded”) to make them seem alive. But Davenport is a miracle-worker in prose. He is deeply steeped in ancient literature (especially that of the Greeks), yet alive enough to modern culture to give his prose evergreen vitality. Davenport describes Paul as a product of a renaissance. Typically, we think of the renaissance as beginning in the late 14th century, when humanists revived classical learning after the long medieval darkness. Yet Davenport is correct in using the word renaissance as he does. For the fact is, there have been many renaissances, including one that took place during the Middle Ages. The ancient Greeks so thoroughly cultivated the ground of civilization that every fresh cultural development has been nourished by returning to the soil they first tilled. Virgil and Ovid wrote sequels to Homer; Muslim and Christian theologians wrestled with Aristotle, in the vain hope of reconciling pagan wisdom with monotheism; Michelangelo re-discovered the beauty of the human nude; Rousseau longed for a republic as virtuous as Sparta; the orations of Abraham Lincoln borrowed their high-toned noble concision from the Periclean tradition. Davenport himself is child of the most recent renaissance, the astonishing recuperation of primordial artistic instincts by such modern creators as Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. As a young Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late 1940s, Davenport wrote a pioneering thesis on Joyce. Soon thereafter, he took as his mentor Pound, rejecting the poet’s mad politics but cherishing his pervasive cultural intelligence. Like Pound, Davenport has turned translation into an art form, making dead tongues speak with a jolting vernacular urgency. "Translations, in fact, became a guiding strategy for all of his poetic compositions,” Davenport once wrote about Pound. “The Cantos begin with a translation of the episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus talks with spirits of the dead. In order to speak they mist drink sheep’s blood. Pound saw a beautiful metaphor here: Translating provides blood for the past to have a voice.” Davenport is always at his eloquent best when drawing surprising links between ancients and moderns. “What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic,” he once observed. “The sculpture of Brancusi belongs to the art of the Cyclades in the ninth century B.C. Corbusier’s buildings in their cubist phase look like the white clay houses of Anatolia and Malta… Neils Bohr is our Democritus. Ludwig Wittgenstein is our Heraclitus. There is nothing quite so modern as a page of any of the pre-Socratic physicists, where science and poetry are still the same thing and where the modern finds a kinship it no longer has with Aquinas or even Newton.” To prove this point, Davenport has spent decades translating the pre-Socratics, as well as more recent Greek writers. (This translation work is usefully gathered together in his 1995 volume 7 Greeks). Each of his writers walks with a distinct gait and talks with a unique lilt. Davenport’s Sappho is quick-witted even in the midst of erotic frenzy, his Herakleitos sweeps like an eagle surveying the world, his Diogenes is sassy and disrespectful as only a former slave can be. “Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves, whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience,” Diogenes says. In the one word “shimmy” we can see a glint of the wit that guides this translation: as a young man growing up in the South in the 1920s and 1930s, Davenport must have met many old African-Americans who had once been slaves, just like Diogenes. So Davenport naturally creates a cultural rhyme between the ancient Greek aphorist and modern black culture: an unexpected connection that makes the deep past seem close at hand. The father of cynicism also offers some thoughts on the character of athletes: “I have seen the victor Dioxippos subdue all contenders at Olympia and be thrown on his back by a girl.” The sports page of any newspaper is filled with such athletes. In his translations, Davenport is always careful to respect the strangeness of an alien culture, yet also find a linguistic bridge between past and present. In a 1976 interview with the journal Vort, Davenport spoke with great passion about the obligations of a translator. “Two Sappho editors went mad, three went blind, men give their lives to these things and they usually end up in Greek on the page of a scholarly book,” Davenport said. “One duty of the translator, I think, is simply to make these things available, hook or crook.” “Hook or crook” means flexibility: The translator has to be either as literal or as freestyle as a passage requires. In a great 1967 essay entitled “Another Odyssey” Davenport surveyed the vast range of Homeric translations into English, spanning the spectrum from the rigid exactitude of Richard Lattimore to the free-wheeling inventions of Christopher Logue. While acknowledging Lattimore’s diligence, Davenport correctly pointed out that Logue’s translation moves as a only true poetry can. In Davenport’s novella “The Cardiff Team” (which serves as the conclusion to a volume of the same name) the process of translation is broken down into its constituent parts, with literalism and freestyle egging each other on. Two school kids, Cyril and Sam, work on a Latin passage from Horace: “Intermissa, Venus, diu/ rursus bella moves? Parce precor, precor.” Cyril, a repressed soul who is just starting to open up, offers a painstakingly exact crib: “Rurus is a return, so I suppose again, as movere bella is to declare war. I’ve got it, I think. After a long truce, why do you want to start a war again? Venus, goddess of love. Parce, in little, I pray you, I pray you.” Using Cyril’s patient handicraft as a launch pad, the wild child Sam takes a linguistic leap: “Give me a break, Venus, … I’m too old to be tomcatting around.” Davenport confident flexibility, his wide-ranging search for the exact English equivalent of alien words and ideas, has influenced many younger translators: Richard Pevear, Anne Carson, and Wyatt Mason have all learned a trick or two from their careful study of Davenport. The ancient Greeks gave us much but in certain respects they remain strangers. Take their attitude towards the body. Much of the original Olympics resembled a nudist colony, except without a trace of shame or self-conscious tittering. “Few societies have been as afraid of the body as ours, and in the West none has, within history, been as solicitous as the Greeks,” Davenport notes in 7 Greeks. “The Egyptian eye first saw dignity and suave elegance in the body, transferring man’s millennia of appreciation of the animals splendor to his own physique. The Egyptian, though wigged in porcelain, braceleted, ringed, and painted, went all but naked; women’s clothes kept to the contours of the flesh. It was for the Greeks to see the natural growth of the body in full health as a beautiful thing, abhorring all mutilations, scarrings, tattooings, elongations of the skull, circumcisions, subtractions of teeth or fingers. The old Aphrodite was fat and long of breasts and behind, and the cow was her rich sign. Sappho’s Aphrodite was slender, trim of line.” As with so much of Davenport writing, this little discussion of the Greek body squeezes tight an enormous amount of learning, not just from books but also from seeing and thinking. Aside from being a translator, Davenport is also a marvelous short story writer, a first-rate literary critic, an original iconologist, an accomplished painter and a witty cartoonist. (For many years, the covers of the classics journal Arion were adorned by his art). We in Canada owe him a particular apology. In the late 1960s he published two study guides for Homer, which were later pirated by the Canadian company Coles Publishing, as part of a shoddy crib notes series they produced. To get even a taste of his range one would have to read several books. I would recommend The Geography of the Imagination (essays on everyone from Shelley to J.R.R. Tolkien, who unsuccessfully tried to teach Davenport Old English), 7 Greeks (translations), Objects on a Table (art criticism), and The Death of Picasso (short stories and more essays). He has also supplied the introduction to a new book of translations, titled Pure Pagan, which I haven’t seen yet but have harassed several bookstores to order. In everything he does, a love of Greek culture shines forth. In sum and in more ways than one, Guy Davenport is a true renaissance man.