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

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.

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“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 also 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:

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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.

“Though the language is simple, conversational and seemingly direct, there is always something going on under the surface,” said Schwartz.

In an email, he added that he considered Mr. Ferry “our Horace,” an heir to the great Roman lyric poet, “mainly because of his deep wisdom and sometimes shocking insight into the ordinary events of life.”

Like Virgil, who devoted the last years of his life to his epic poem the “Aeneid,” Mr. Ferry seemed only to become more ambitious with age. His first poetry collection, “On the Way to the Island” (1960), was published the year he turned 36. Twenty-three years would pass — much of it spent teaching and raising a family — before he released his follow-up, “Strangers.”

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Then came decades of steady publication, as Mr. Ferry seemed to make up for lost time with dozens of new poems and translations. Although he had never studied ancient languages, he turned toward translation after an encounter with Harvard colleague William Moran, an Assyriologist who introduced him to the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” a foundational work of world literature that Mr. Ferry came to consider “the greatest story there ever was.”

“I certainly didn’t start out with an ambition to become a translator,” he said in a 2011 interview for Amherst College, his alma mater. “Sort of accidental, but also kind of a love story.”

Mr. Ferry said he used commentaries and scholarly word-for-word translations to craft “Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse” (1992), and applied a similar approach to Latin translations including “The Odes of Horace” (1997), “The Eclogues of Virgil” (1999), “The Georgics of Virgil” (2005) and “The Aeneid” (2017), a capstone work published when he was 93.

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“I don’t know of an American poet who has had an achievement of this magnitude so late in life,” said poet George Kalogeris, one of his colleagues at Suffolk University, who praised Mr. Ferry’s ability to write “across the page and down the page,” maintaining the flow of the narrative while sustaining intensity across each of the epic’s nearly 10,000 lines.

Mr. Ferry’s translations had their detractors. Reviewing “The Aeneid” for the New York Times, Princeton classics professor Denis Feeney praised Mr. Ferry’s literary style — “vigorous, intimate and formal too, when it needs to be” — but argued that he “too often” misunderstood the original text: “Errors or omissions are present on most pages.”

Still, his work was widely credited with helping to introduce younger generations of poets to classic works. Chiasson, among others, wrote several Horace translations inspired by Mr. Ferry, whose renderings frequently showcased as much wit as intelligence.

“Sensible people run from the crazy poet,” went one line he translated from Horace’s “The Art of Poetry.” Another line from the translation, which Mr. Ferry sometimes deployed at readings, suggested his own obsession with poetry and literature: “If he catches a man, he’ll read that man to death.”

The youngest of three children, David Russell Ferry was born in Orange, N.J., on March 5, 1924. He grew up in nearby Maplewood, where his mother was a homemaker. His father worked in the textile industry, ran trade associations and moonlighted as a church organist during the Depression.

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Mr. Ferry inherited his love of music, learning the piano and with it the foundations of rhythm and meter. It wasn’t until he enrolled at Amherst that he discovered his love of poetry, reading Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens with his English teacher Reuben Brower, a critic and educator whose students included the poets Richard Wilbur and James Merrill.

Mr. Ferry graduated in 1948, following service in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and continued his English studies at Harvard University, receiving a master’s degree in 1949 and a PhD in 1955.

By then he was writing poems and teaching at Wellesley, where his colleagues included poetry scholar Anne Davidson, whom he married in 1958. An expert at meter, she “caught every metrical error I made,” Mr. Ferry said, and gave him the titles to most of his books.

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For decades, Mr. Ferry and his wife volunteered each Tuesday night at the Church of the Advent in Boston, preparing and serving sit-down meals for the hungry and homeless. Mr. Ferry drew on the stories of some of the people he met there for his collection “Dwelling Places” (1993). After he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2011 Ruth Lilly prize for lifetime achievement, he donated the $100,000 prize money to “organizations focused on hunger and homelessness,” his daughter said.

Anne Ferry died in 2006. In addition to his daughter, an anthropology professor at Brandeis University, survivors include a son, photojournalist Stephen Ferry, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Ferry noted that he often wrote about people who were displaced and confused in life, “like myself.” His other collections included “Of No Country I Know” (1999), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, and “Some Things I Said,” which was edited by his children and his friend Kalogeris, and is slated for publication Dec. 13.

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In his late 80s, Mr. Ferry wrote about his advancing age in the poem “Soul,” which begins with a question: “What am I doing inside this old man’s body?”

“I feel like I’m the insides of a lobster/ All thought, and all digestion,” he continued, before writing — humorously and poignantly — about his flagging memory and “waving claws.” He maintained the crustacean imagery while turning to his frailty and the loss of his wife:

And I’m aware of and embarrassed by my ways

Of getting around, and my protective shell.

Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as

This cold sea water’s washing over my back?

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