Comments on: Castor and Pollux walking naked, side by side, past Kafka

Castor and Pollux walking naked, side by side, past Kafka

languagehat — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:25:51 -0800

Guy Davenport is dead. The irrealist writer, translator of Archilochus, friend of modernists, and influential teacher has joined Hugh Kenner in whatever lies beyond this mortal coil. More links at today's wood s lot, where I learned the sad news.

By: jokeefe

jokeefe — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:37:11 -0800

Sad to hear this. Thanks for posting, languagehat.

By: safetyfork

safetyfork — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:09:56 -0800

Sad news. And, I think the first link(s) (two mashed up in post) is supposed to be for here and here.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:24:40 -0800

D'oh! Yes, they were. Administrator please hope me...

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:31:47 -0800

Thank you, languagehat. I was composing an FPP myself when you posted this. Guy Davenport's "The Geography of the Imagination" is one of the most essential and lively books on literature written in the last hundred years. He was one of the secret geniuses of our age. His voice, from a review of Melville books in Harper's, where Davenport was a frequent contributor: "William Morris admired Moby-Dick, and T. E. Lawrence took it as his model for his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Ezra Pound never bothered to read it. William F. Buckley Jr. discovered it at sixty and demanded to know why no one had told him about it before. Gide was praising it in France well before Jean Giono's translation in 1941. Camus ranked Melville with Kafka as a modern mythologist, preferring Melville's sensuous reality to Kafka's abstractions. Nor has Melville aged. A novel by Cooper is now an antique, and his Leatherstocking is all but extinct as a type; Irving's world is under glass in a museum. A few fine-tuned intellectuals can still enjoy Lowell and Longfellow, and four or five people have heard of Bayard Taylor (the poet in Melville's day). But Ishmael can be stumbled upon in the Peace Corps and on every campus; the crew of the Pequod works on offshore oil rigs. And in Dr. Strangelove we have seen Captain Ahab riding a hydrogen bomb."

By: condour75

condour75 — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:55:30 -0800

When I'm not condour online, I'm often Archil0chus. Sad to see his translator go. My favorite fragment:

I don't give a damn if some Thracian ape strut Proud of that first-rate shield the bushes got. Leaving it was hell, but in a tricky spot I kept my hide intact. Good shields can be bought.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 19:38:18 -0800

The translation I memorized in college:

Some lucky Thracian has my shield, For being somewhat flurried I dropped it in a wayside bush As from the field I hurried. Thank God, I made it clean away— To blazes with the shield! I'll get another just as good When next I take the field.

Still with me, decades later!

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 05:23:25 -0800

RIP

By: davy

davy — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:24:27 -0800

Reviews of some of Davenport's fiction, such as this, reminded me of this. Who wants some orange juice? Don't forget your crowbar!