DAVENPORT, Guy (Mattison)

(1927-)

   US academic, translator and short-story writer, long a teacher at the University of Kentucky, known for his translations from the Greek, his poetry, his literary essays - collected primarily in The Geography of the Imagination (coll 1981) and Every Force Evolves a Form (coll 1987) - and for the FABULATIONS assembled in Tatlin! (coll 1974), Da Vinci's Bicycle (coll 1979), Trois Caprices (coll 1981 chap), Eclogues (coll 1981), The Bowmen of Shu (1983 chap), which also appears in Apples and Pears (coll 1984), The Bicycle Rider (1985 chap), which also appears in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (coll 1987) and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers (coll 1990). Although J.G. BALLARD and others had insinuated a fascination with French Surrealism into their NEW-WAVE tales, GD's own collaged and hallucinated conflations of data and visuals and Sehnsucht - as in "Tatlin!" (1974), the novel-length "The Dawn in Erewhon" (1974), "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" (1975), "The Richard Nixon Freischutz Rag" (1976) and "Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta" (1980) - mediate neatly between the solitary despair of the 1960s work of Ballard and others and the more broadly socialized and nostalgic vision of sf writers like Howard WALDROP. Indeed GD's work can be seen as an important adumbration of the sudden late 1980s growth in alternate-history tales (ALTERNATE WORLDS) which plunder the earlier 20th century for icons and protagonists and for moments of haunting significance.

   JC