The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. It doesn't matter, because there are plenty of other connections that ring true, and the point isn't so much whether the artists were aware of it as that, with the trained eye (or guided, as I was by the author), it's possible to recognize and appreciate the subtleties permeating their art.

Davenport compares the various translations of Odyssey: Chapman, Logue, Bryant,Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Pope, Fenton, and Broome, Butcher and Lang, Samual Butler, Col.It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown.

I came to the book for Davenport's essay on his neighbor, the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (both men worked and flourished in the same "rotting Kentucky town", Lexington), but all 40 of these essays (written in the 1970's) are well worth devouring. Robert Frost, teaching a class at America’s most prestigious and snootiest university, is surrounded by sycophantic “Harvardlings. Davenport published over 40 books, among them collections of short stories, translations from the Greek, illustrated works, a novel, and critical studies on literature, culture, and art. Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed.So it was strange to read Davenport calmly, humbly, almost professorially explicating the ideogrammatic densities and “architectonic” collages of Pound and Olson, Marianne Moore and Paul Metcalf, without dropping even a hint that he is a part of their lineage, playing in the same league. Davenport’s criticism feels so self-contained that one swallows it with the hungry thoughtlessness of an eternal student.