David Ferry, poet and translator of Latin classics, dies at 99

The Washington Post David Ferry, a renowned poet and translator who transported modern readers to Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamia, to Horace and Virgil’s Rome and to a startling literary landscape that was entirely his own, rendered in blank verse that was supple and energetic, died Nov. 5 at an assisted-living community in Lexington, Mass. He was 99. He had pneumonia, said his daughter, Elizabeth Ferry. Across a nearly seven-decade literary career, Mr. Ferry worked as a poet, translator, critic and professor, chairing the English department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and later teaching at nearby Boston College and Suffolk University. Mr. Ferry saw few boundaries between his vocations. He found poetic inspiration in the classroom as well as the classics, translating Latin and Akkadian works that he would later quote in his original poems and sprinkle across his collections. Picking up a copy of “Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations” (2012), which brought him a National Book Award at age 88, readers could find a Virgil translation next to an elegy he had written for his late wife, literary scholar Anne Ferry. “What strikes me about the poems is how suddenly, arrestingly personal they could be,” his friend Dan Chiasson, a poet and critic, said in a phone call. “They sometimes seem to be wandering at their own leisurely pace, and then it’s like the bottom drops out: You’re suddenly face to face with mortality.” Mr. Ferry, he added, “brought Wordsworthian virtues into American poetry,” employing a contemplative style in long-lined, unrhymed poems that tended “to crest in some kind of epiphany, insight or reckoning” – just like the work of William Wordsworth, the subject of Mr. Ferry’s Harvard dissertation. In one of his later poems, “That Evening at Dinner,” Mr. Ferry recounted a party among friends, including a widow who is recovering from a stroke and is carried from the car to the lobby to the elevator to the apartment. The poem goes on to detail not just the other guests but the books on the shelf, quoting a dozen lines from Samuel Johnson before offering what poet Lloyd Schwartz, another friend, described as a “devastating” final stanza: ––The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds, And yellows, produce of the season due, And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink. ––