Dick Davis

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 Dick Davis

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Iran Twenty Years Ago

Each summer, working there, I’d set off for

The fabled cities – Esfahan, Kashan,

Or Ecbatana, where Hephaestion died,

The poets’ towns – Shiraz and Nayshapour,

Or sites now hardly more than villages

Lapped by the desert, Na’in or Ardestan . . .

Their names now mean a dusty backstreet somewhere

Empty and silent in the vivid sunlight,

A narrow way between the high mud walls –

The worn wood of the doors recessed in them

A talisman to conjure and withhold

The life and lives I never touched or knew.

Sometimes I’d hear a voice, a radio,

But mostly there was silence and my shadow

Until a turn would bring me back to people,

Thoroughfares and shops . . .

                                              Why is it this that stays,

Those empty afternoons that never led

To anything but seemed their own reward

And are more vivid in my memory

Than mosques, bazaars, companionship, and all

The myriad details of an eight year sojourn;

As if that no epiphany, precisely,

Were the epiphany?  As Hafez has it,

To know you must have gone along that way;

I know they changed my life forever but

I know too that I could not tell myself

– Much less another – what it was I saw,

Or learnt, or brought back from those aimless hours.

© Dick Davis; originally printed in The Hudson Review.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Dick Davis (1945- ): “The Translator’s Nightmare”
ディック・デービス「翻訳家の悪夢」
Born in Portsmouth, England, Dick Davis is one of the most brilliant and witty poets working in formal verse today.  For links to several of his other poems, including one of my favorites, “Iran, Twenty Years Ago,” click here. 

In addition to writing his own poetry, he is also the most prominent translator of Persian medieval verse, having translated the great Persian epic, the Shahnameh; an early version of the Tristan and Isolde legend from Persia called Vis and Ramin, and many other great works of Persian literature.  Davis now teaches at The Ohio State University.
It was while I was a graduate student there that he taught me much of what I know about translation, and it was in his class that I did one of my first translations, Hagiwara Sakutarō’s “The Town of Cats,” which was published several years later.  It was in large part thanks to him that I started down the path to becoming a translator.  I still owe an enormous debt of gratitude to him.
ディック・デービスはイギリスで生まれの詩人だが、長くアメリカに在住している。韻と律を踏む詩人の中で、最もユーモラスでウィットに富んだ一人である。その他に、中世ペルシア文学の最も有名な翻訳家にもなっている。ペルシアの偉大な叙事詩シャナメーと、トリスタンとイゾルデの伝説の原型とされているヴィスとラミンの他に、ペルシア文学の英訳が多い。現在デービスはオハイオ州立大学で教えている。
大学院生の頃、私はデービス先生の翻訳講座を取ったが、その講座で翻訳の理論と実践を初めて味わえた。振り返ってみると、その講座は翻訳家になる 切っ掛けだったというのは、決して大げさではない。その講座の期末プロジェクトのために、萩原朔太郎の「猫町」を翻訳して、数年後にその英訳を本の形で出 版した。十五年が経った今でも、デービス先生に心から感謝している。
In honor of National Poetry Month

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