1. Guy Mattison Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.
24 Facts About Guy Davenport
1. 2.
Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in the foothills of Appalachia on November 23,1927.
3.
Guy Davenport's father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency.
4.
Guy Davenport left high school early and enrolled at Duke University a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday.
5.
Guy Davenport was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year.
6.
Guy Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1950.
7.
In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Guy Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps.
8.
Guy Davenport befriended Ezra Pound during the poet's incarceration in St Elizabeths Hospital, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound's release, in 1958, and later at Pound's home in Rapallo, Italy.
9.
Guy Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story "Ithaka".
10.
Guy Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound's poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983.
11.
Guy Davenport corresponded a Pound scholar and friend, the literary critic M Bernetta Quinn.
12.
Guy Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement, at the end of 1990.
13.
Guy Davenport dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to "Bonnie Jean", his companion from 1965 to his death.
14.
Guy Davenport died of lung cancer on January 4,2005, in Lexington, Kentucky.
15.
Guy Davenport began publishing fiction in 1970 with "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," which is based on Kafka's visit to an air show in September 1909.
16.
Guy Davenport's fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage; and the depicting of a Fourierist utopia, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.
17.
Guy Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review and The Hudson Review, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine.
18.
Guy Davenport published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus Notebook and Objects on a Table.
19.
Guy Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic period.
20.
Guy Davenport translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke's, some ancient Egyptian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz], and, with Benjamin Urrutia, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia of Yeshua.
21.
From college forward, Guy Davenport supplied cover art and decorations to literary periodicals.
22.
Guy Davenport supplied illustrations for others' books, notably two by Hugh Kenner: The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters.
23.
The previous year they had produced Ezra's Bowmen of Shu on the same press, a double broadside that published for the first time, with a brief introductory essay by Guy Davenport, a drawing by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a letter of Gaudier's from the trenches of World War I that cites Pound's poem "The Song of the Bowmen of Shu".
24.
Guy Davenport received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 1996.