And lances, making the valley a cornfield

Reflections of Persian poetry in Armen Davoudian and Basil Bunting

As chance would have it, a couple of weeks ago I received two books on the same day that seemed designed to be written about together: the beautifully produced Flood Editions volume of Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian (Bunting’s Persia, edited by Don Share), and a particularly accomplished first collection of English verse taking its inspiration from Iran, Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars (Corsair Poetry, 2024).

Armen Davoudian, The Palace of Forty Pillars. Published in the UK by Corsair and in the UK by Tin House Books, both 2024.

Both of these are slim volumes. The Palace of Forty Pillars contains — like the palace at Isfahan itself — actually only 20 separate titles (or ‘pillars’). (The point of the title is that the pillars are reflected in the water: twenty of the forty are the reflections.) Two of these ‘titles’, though, refer to quite long sequences, the longest of which, ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ itself contains twenty sonnets. The other sequence, ‘The Ring’ contains five linked sonnets. The maths doesn’t quite work: you end up with twenty poems (counting titles), or 39 (counting only ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ separately), or 43 (if you count ‘The Ring’ sonnets separately as well). But as a conceit it’s neat enough, and it’s a great title, especially as the motif of the palace is linked to a recurring slogan or saying, Isfahan nesfe jahan (‘Isfahan is half the world’), rendered several times in the collection in both English, Roman transliteration and in Persian script.

The phrase refers to the artistic and cultural wealth of the ancient city of Isfahan: there’s so much there that it amounts to “half the world”. But in a biographical and literary sense, too, Iran is ‘half’ but not all of Davoudian’s world. The poet was born and raised in Isfahan, but he is of Armenian heritage, and now lives in California. Poetically, this is a collection in English which draws richly on the genres, forms, styles and stories of Persian literature, but does so in a style of English verse which is always keenly aware of English literary heritage. We find ghazals, quatrains of the type used by Rumi in the Rubaiyat (a word that means ‘quatrains’) and allusions to many of the great Persian poets and poems, but also sonnets, sonnet sequences and an echo poem, and allusions to Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Shakespeare.

Davoudian takes particular pleasure in word-play: his lyrical English has a kind of tender self-consciousness which is found particularly often in the work of poets who write in an acquired language. You encounter it often in both medieval and early modern Latin poetry, for instance, but also in a poet like Clément Marot. We think of Marot as straightforwardly ‘French’, but he describes himself, like Davoudian, as leaving one language (some kind of Provençal) for another (French) when he ‘came into France’ (that is, from Cahors to Paris) as a child:

Car une matinée,
N’ayant dix ans, en France fus mené;
Là où depuis me suis tant pourmené
Que j’oubliai ma langue maternelle
Et grossement appris la paternelle.

Since one day,
Being not yet ten, I was brought into France;
Where after that I continued to live
So that I forgot my maternal tongue
And learnt in detail my father’s language.¹

Here’s the tenth poem from Davoudian’s sonnet sequence, ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’:

And then a rock dove, astonished midair, dove
from its own ghost that stamped upon the pane,
in dovetailed detail, a short-lived afterlife,
before it all came avalanching down
and I was left to split the difference
between transparence and sheer emptiness.
Lifting a palm, I spread it on the pane

of your still-lifted palm, spreading in pain
behind the far side of the fading moon
of breath now misting up the wall of glass
that splits the terminal in half. Isfahan
nesfe jahan, you’d boast, lifting a glass.
If you’ve seen Isfahan, then you’ve seen half
the world. I’ll see you in the other half.

This is a very clever, intricate poem which is perhaps just slightly over clever but demonstrates well many of Davoudian’s particular strengths. It’s part of a sonnet sequence, and it has fourteen lines and the ghost or reflection of a rhyme scheme, but if I read it alone I’m not sure I’d immediately think of it as a sonnet. The division into two equal halves suits the sense, of course, but takes a step away from traditional sonnet structure, both metrically and rhetorically. (Most of the other poems in this sequence have a more traditional division into eight and six lines.)

The poem is structured around both actual repetitions (‘rock dove’, ‘dovetailed’, ‘pane’, ‘pane’, ‘palm’, ‘palm’, ‘half’, ‘half’) and quasi-repetitions, words which either look the same but sound different (‘rock dove’, ‘dove’) or look different but sound the same (‘pane’, ‘pain’), or both look and sound the same but are referring in this case to different things (‘wall of glass’, ‘a glass’).

All these features of the poem reflect its sense of repetition and reflection; they also suggest the sound and effect of the key Persian phrase Isfahan nesfe jahan, which is itself almost-a-repetition. Perhaps most importantly, they also point to the ways in which Davoudian uses aesthetic features of Persian poetry in his English verse. There is much more repetition in Persian poetry than in most English verse, and the repetition of sounds at the end of lines or half-lines, particularly, recalls Persian structures.

The collection includes several ghazals, but also many other poems that reflect the influence of Persian poetics. Two of the “sonnets” in ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’, for instance (numbers 12 and 13) are separately numbered but continuous — No. 13 begins in the middle of a sentence — and consist of seven pairs of rhyming lines. The two poems together form a kind of narrative, linked memories of the poet’s grandfather, but many of the couplets have a suggestive independence of imagery, like the couplets of a classical ghazal. Here’s the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth poem in this sequence:

Clouds and camels, amulets of eyes,
dust bunnies, cigarette butts, and two dead flies . . .

Look, it’s here! Tucked under the trellised band,
I always found it, just as you had planned.

XIII

from rugs to riches, Kashan to Heriz,
you made it seem like money grew on trees.

Of course it did. You could do everything,
thumbing our days like beads along a string:

Here the adoption of ghazal-style ‘independent’ images is emotionally effective, suggesting the discontinuous nature of powerful memories, especially from childhood. I wrote a piece a couple of months ago on whether ghazals — now a popular Anglophone form — ever really work in English, and even Davoudian’s very sensitive versions (like ‘Swan Swong’, after the Persian of Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi) did not entirely convince me that they do. I thought the best poems here were the ones that sought to carve out a space between the two traditions.

Davoudian’s is an impressive first collection, one of the best I’ve read in the last few years. I recommend it highly, but it’s still a first collection, with some weaker poems, some bits that felt like fillers, some experiments that perhaps don’t quite come off, and outside, I imagine, the odd very high-profile prize winner, it’s only fairly “serious” poetry readers who buy first collections. Bunting’s profile, of course, is of an entirely different order, but Bunting’s Persia, too, is really one for the afficionados.

Bunting’s Persia. Translations by Basil Bunting. Edited by Don Share. (Flood editions)

Bunting’s Persia looks lovely, and any real Bunting fan will want to have it, but, truth be told, it doesn’t actually add very much. The edition of Bunting I use most of the time is the handy paperback Complete Poems (Bloodaxe, 2000), edited by Richard Caddel — a very trusty edition, with proper stitched binding (crucial for anything you are going to read to death). By my count, all but three of these pieces are in Caddel’s Complete Poems in their entirety, and two of those three are represented by extracts in Caddel, so are not completely new either.² The main attraction of this edition is just to have all the versions of Persian poetry conveniently together, rather than scattered around.

I enjoyed the snippets of extra Bunting that Share includes in the Introduction and the brief section at the back about the Persian poets — it was a good idea to use Bunting’s own comments on Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri, Sa‘di, Hafiz and Obaid-e Zakani in this section. But I was a bit disappointed not to find, in a volume dedicated to translations from a single language, some notes on the translation practice itself, or even a few pages, perhaps, outlining for the reader with no knowledge of the language a little about Persian and the styles and traditions of Persian poetry. Although the book is arranged by Persian poet, the lack of notes also means the curious reader armed only with this new edition has no way of tracing these translations back to their originals. Claddel’s notes, by contrast, though they offer no real commentary on the translations, do always give a terse indication of the original passage (e.g. ‘Version of Firdosi’s Shahnameh, ‘Faridun’, ll. 543-92 (see e.g. Tehran, 1934).

I love Bunting and return to him again and again. (Some previous pieces discussing his poetry are here, here and here.) I think he was a towering genius and though he didn’t “change the weather” of the international Anglophone poetry scene in the way that Eliot and (in different ways) Pound both did, I quite often feel that he’s better than either of them. His approach to translation was a serious and in certain respects a scholarly one and any dedicated reader quickly realises how central translation was to his poetry as a whole. But his translations themselves are often not particularly beautiful and they don’t always work entirely successfully as poems in their own right. Bunting called his translations and closer versions “overdrafts” — borrowed, that is, but also poems ‘written over’ others, with a suggestion of something incomplete (drafts). My experience of the Latin and French translations is that they are profoundly rewarding if you know the original. They are readings, interpretations, responses, ‘takes’ on the original text, rooted in deep engagement with the language, and often relying in part on reference to the original. This is why I felt frustrated by the missed opportunity for some commentary — I know how much there would be to say about the French and Latin versions. I don’t read Persian so I can’t comment on the extent to which this is true of these poems, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

The best of Bunting’s poems often emerge from the translations, but they are not translations themselves. (Witness the extraordinary two books of Odes, inconceivable without all that translation, but entirely independent of it.) That’s what I mean by saying that this lovely little edition is really one for completists. It’s not where you should start if you’ve never read Bunting. These translations would for sure be the peak of achievement for many poets, but a great deal of Bunting is — purely as English poetry — much better. Still, there are many lovely passages here which jumped out at me in this edition as they hadn’t before, and I’m glad to have it:

The sound of their anklets reached me
with chatter and clatter of bells
stilted on herony legs;
bells within bells, gilded,
hanging to the camels’ knees,
and lances, making the valley a cornfield.³

1. This is from Marot’s remarkable long poem ‘L’Enfer’, written in prison in March 1526. I wrote about Marot at greater length a few weeks ago:

2. The only piece that was entirely new to me is a poem entitled ‘The Beginning of the Stories’, a version of Ferdowsi (called Firdosi by Caddel). Share’s edition has a glossary and some notes on the Persian poets, but no notes keyed to individual poems, so I’m not sure why this is new here. Otherwise, Share prints a much larger portion — seven sections, running to 25 pages — of the long poem ‘Faridun’s Sons’, also a version of Ferdowsi. (Caddel prints only the last of these sections, beginning ‘Faridun watched the road’, pp. 209-210.) Share also prints the whole of the story ‘A tale from The Rose Garden’, which contains several verse extracts, two of which are also in Caddel (one on p. 203, one only in the notes, on p. 230). In a couple of cases, the texts Share has used also differ slightly from those in Caddel, as noted by Share on p. xix.

3. The final lines of a version of Manuchehri. For this poem, Claddel refers us to the edition edited by A. Kazimirski (Paris, 1886), no. 29, ll. 1-46.