Sherry Chandler

Poppysmatus has pointed out to me the contradiction in the fact that the University that was home to Guy Davenport for a quarter of a century should now have a radio station that cancels something as bland as The Writer’s Almanac for offensive content.

Check out this paragraph from the Wikipedia bio of Davenport (who would qualify as an Appalachian writer, by the way, having been born in Anderson, South Carolina and attended Duke):

Many of his short stories are highly acclaimed, but the fact that they often contain significant “forthrightly homoerotic” content (Bruce Bawer, Artforum, 04.05) has prompted enthusiastic reviews by Andre Furlani, as well as defenses of Davenport’s willingness to consider taboo topics by Wyatt Mason in Harper’s, as well as book-length studies of the interdependance of his visual and verbal art by Erik Reece (”A Balance of Quinces,” New Directions, 1996). Talking in 2002 with John Jeremiah Sullivan for an interview for The Paris Review, Davenport explained, “When Tatlin! was accepted for publication, I remember being anxious and frightened, truly frightened, that reviewers would say, ‘This is pretentious.’ What they said is, ‘This is obscene’. I’ve gotten over that.” Negative reactions continued well into the 1990s, when Tatlin! and Da Vinci’s Bicycle were on the “stop, seize and destroy” list used by Canadian customs officers, and even a broadly sympathetic Christopher Cahill review in the Boston Review began “If Guy Davenport were to publish his fiction, criticism, and drawings on the Internet, he would likely find himself trailed by the FBI.”

O, Mr. O. Leonard Press, we certainly have gone a far piece. There and back again.

Davenport was fond of translating the classical poets who, if you’ve been reading your Poppysmatus, you’ll know tended to be frank if not downright scatalogical. His volume 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995) has become a standard. Here is Sappho 102, one of her most famous, as translated by Guy Davenport without a single stopper word in it:

I
Raise the ridge-pole higher, higher,
0 marriage night 0 binding god
Carpenters! Make the roof-tree taller,
0 marriage night 0 binding god
He comes, the husband, and walks like Ares,
0 marriage night 0 binding god
He’s taller by far than a tall man,
0 marriage night 0 binding god

II
Pitch the roof-beam higher, builders.
0 hymn Hymen, high men, 0!
Joiners! The roof is far too low.
0 hymn Hymen high, men 0!
He stands, the husband, as long as Ares,
0 hymn high Hymen, men 0!
And he can’t get it through the door.