A ‘Polyphonic Score’: Basil Bunting’s Persian Condensations

Abstract

In 1932, Basil Bunting was lodging with the Pounds in Genoa when he first encountered a French manuscript translation of Abul-Qasem Firdausi’s classical Persian epic the Shahnameh (1010). Upon realizing that the manuscript was incomplete, Bunting decided there was ‘nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so I undertook that’. By 1942 his knowledge of Persian was good enough for the Ministry of Information to send him to Iran with the Royal Airforce, at which point he toured the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. Through these travels, and in particular his time in Iran, he discovered renewed possibilities for his personal and poetic life. His engagement with classical Persian literature over the 1940s was extensive and allowed him to eventually compose masterful translations of canonical classical Persian poets. I argue that his later translations, especially those written from 1947, demonstrate how translating Persian poetry refined Bunting’s Poundian poetics of condensation. I show that this synthesis produced formally and generically pluralistic poems that straddle multiple cultures, such as Odes 35 (1947) and 36 (1948). Through an analysis of The Spoils (1951), I explore the way in which Bunting’s own poetry was inflected by the Arabo-Persian ‘bait’ such that its literary traditions were made resonant with Anglophone ones. I then conclude by illustrating how the translations, the later odes, and The Spoils enabled him to write his irreducibly multiple magnum opus Briggflatts (1965).