'A Pointless Love for Sound and Sense Allied'

I’ve been accused by an angry reader of sins committed by men dead long before my birth. I won’t go in to particulars. Such indictments now are commonplace and some of you have no doubt shared the experience. The rational mind moves to muster evidence for the defense, but that takes the soft-headed self-righteousness seriously and steels the accuser’s resolve. Such people are in it for power, not truth. 

Dick Davis addresses his poem “To Eshqi” to Mirzadeh Eshghi (né Sayed Mohammad Reza Kordestani), an Iranian poet murdered by his country’s secret police in 1924. It begins, “I’m someone you wouldn’t want to know.” Born in England, Davis and his Iranian-born wife fled Iran in 1979 after the start of the Islamic Revolution and eventually settled in the U.S. Eric Ormsby has called him “the finest translator of Persian poetry since Edward Fitzgerald.” Davis says Eshqi would have considered him the embodiment of “England’s avarice and treachery.” He writes:

 

“I’m used by now to acting out the son

The fathers’ sins are visited upon –

Imputed sins or true, it’s all the same:

The ache is real enough, and so’s the blame.”

 

Davis looks for commonality between himself and Eshqi. There’s “wandering,” “Long years in self-elected banishment,” with his language held against him. Davis wonders if that could have pushed the Iranian into poetry:

 

“The sudden sense that language is a maze,

That meaning mystifies, that sound betrays?

And then the sense that if this sense were true

You might as well exploit what threatened you?

Above all, words themselves, and poetry –

I see in you what I once felt in me,

A kind of drunkenness for what the past

and language lend us, and which will not last,

A pointless love for sound and sense allied,

Bequeathed by all the poets who have died.”

 

Davis tells Eshqi that he has become his “would-be friend,” like members of a guild, practitioners of the same craft. It’s a touching, futile declaration; too little, too late -- and Davis knows it. He concludes the poem:

 

“Dear poet, here, too late, is sympathy,

Late friendship from a helpless enemy –

An unavailing monologue, but made

In homage to your absent, angry shade.”

 

Some differences, whether true or otherwise, can never be resolved. Some people can’t be happy without being miserable.

[“To Eshqi” is collected in Davis’ Touchwood (Anvil Press, 1996) and in Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017).]