Bunting in Persia: A Post-War Poetics of Simultaneity

Abstract

BUNTING IN PERSIA argues that Basil Bunting refined his post-war poetics primarily through his translations from Persian, which facilitated the development of what I call his poetics of simultaneity. My first chapter examines Bunting’s early translational praxis by reading his first translation from Manūchehrī Dāmghānī (c. 11th) against another one from the same poet written a decade later. In doing so, I draw out Bunting’s version of a Poundian poetics of translation and expose a lie surrounding the Manūchehrī translations that seems to have gone unnoticed by other critics. This chapter establishes the foundational role translation played in Bunting’s nascent formal poetic and generic ambiguity. Chapter Two turns to one of Bunting’s understudied masterpieces, Ode 36 (1949). I show how this ekphrastic poem about Isfahan’s Masjed-e Jame’ mobilizes architectural, art-historical, and urban modes of seeing to transform the poem into a pluralistic and palimpsestic object in its own right. I attend to the personal correspondence of this time to demonstrate their valence as what I call ‘draft work’ — a coinage that draws on Bunting’s own term for his translations, ‘overdrafts’. I contend that Bunting’s epistolary writing becomes ‘draft work’ when he uses them to work through an aesthetic principle, poetic schema, and drafting poems. Given that he left no drafts in the conventional sense, these correspondences offer unique insights into Bunting’s compositional process. Chapter Three extends these architectural epistemologies to The Spoils (1951). In it, I examine the draft work in which Bunting discusses the politics of his new poetics. By drawing on the field of spolia studies, I demonstrate that Bunting’s art-historical eye was by this time ethically ‘corrupted’ through an analysis of the manifold spoliations that operate in this complex poem. Chapter Four is a prelude to Briggflatts (1965) that fills the contextual gap between 1952-1964 and constitutes the first ever extensive account of Bunting’s expulsion from Iran by Mohammad Mossadegh (1952). In the Prelude, I posit that the humiliation Bunting experienced following the expulsion conditioned the composition of Briggflatts, particularly that it would take the form of a national autobiography that has a homecoming love story at its centre. Finally, using archival evidence, Chapter Five illustrates how Briggflatts’ soil, sky, and inaugurating bull-cry can be traced to Bunting’s time in the Zagros Mountains. Extant work on the impact of Persian literature and art on Bunting’s work is scant. This thesis aims to address this gap and encourage further work on Bunting’s engagement with the Persian literary and plastic arts.