Bewilderment

Bewilderment is a poetry collection by David Ferry, published by the University of Chicago Press. It brings together Ferry's original poems with his English versions of poems written in other languages, and each translation appears in the book alongside the original poem it belongs to.

Ferry's verse moves between plain, elevated speech and lively colloquial language. His phrasing and his handling of meter work against each other, so the rhythm of a line can pull against the sense of the voice speaking it. The poems use this flexible speaking voice to explore psychological and spiritual questions and to convey strong feeling. Meter tends to heighten the conversational quality of his lines, and it gives him access to a wide range of emotion rather than keeping him within a narrow band of experience.

The translations read as English poems in their own right, carried by the same voice and craft as the original work. Their connection to the poems around them is part of how the book is built, so the collection is meant to be read as a whole.