'Why is it this that stays...?'

Yesterday I was walking with my brother and walking friends by the Thames in London, from Southwark Cathedral to Rotherhithe, by way of St Margaret Pattens, All Hallows by the Tower, Tower Bridge, the Mayflower Inn (lunch) and St Mary, Rotherhithe, accompanied by a more than lively breeze and flurries of hail. In the event, this enterprise involved a total of something over eight hours of travel by train, London Underground and Overground, a chunk of it occasioned by a lengthy delay on the return journey to Lichfield. Never mind – I was equipped with two books to while away the time. One was Max Beerbohm's Mainly on the Air, a collection of pieces most of which were broadcast on the radio (and duly published in the late lamented Listener).  The other was my latest Dick Davis acquisition, a slim volume titled Belonging.
   Davis, as well as being a fine poet, is a widely admired translator of the classical Persian poetry that was one of the great achievements of that civilisation, centuries before Iran fell prey to a brutal, life-hating theocracy – which soon, God willing, will be gone, whereas the poetry of Fardousi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and many others will live on. Here, in a poem from Belonging, Davis addresses those great poets –  

To the Persian Poets

What rights have I, trespassing in your rooms,
Pilfering your lines, sifting your sacred dust,
Searching for what you were and are not now?
As if I came to where Achilles flickered,
Drawn by the blood Odysseus spilt for him.

But, in another tongue, a stranger speaks,
The revenant who shows me what I am:
In whose hermetic words I recognise
The animals and angels of my heart,
My happiness, my longing, my despair.

This poem, too, honours the poets, albeit obliquely: Hafez was a native of Shiraz, Nayshapur was the home town of Omar Khayyam and of the sufi poet Farid uddin Attar. The poem also describes and explores a curious phenomenon I've often noticed myself, when after visiting some magnificent and supposedly memorable place, what I recall most vividly, often many years later, is an incidental detail, an apparently meaningless moment... 


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 for ever 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.

From Max Beerbohm and Mostly On The Air, I offer you this little nugget: in the essay 'Music Halls of My Youth', Max reveals that he was such a devoted admirer of the 'frankly fantastic, but nevertheless very real, very human and loveable' singer Albert Chevalier (of 'My Old Dutch' fame) that he was 'sorely tempted to offer him an idea which might well have been conceived by himself: a song about a publican whom the singer had known and revered, who was now dead, whose business was carried on by his son, Ben, an excellent young man, – 'But 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz'. The chorus was to be something of this sort: 
(Sung) 'I drops in to see young Ben
            In 'is tap-room now an' then,
            And I likes to see 'im gettin' on becoz
           'E's got pluck and 'e's got brains,
           And 'e takes no end o' pains, 
           But – 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz.'

All together now...