‘Transportation is Civilisation’:
Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Translation
Andrés Claro
Universidad de Chile
Translation is increasingly becoming a philological labour conducted,
rather fearfully, under the watchful eye of the dictionary. In the Middle
Ages there were no dictionaries and translators re-created their originals as
they saw fit, guided by nothing but the desire to prove that their vernacular
tongue was of no less worth than the other. In the thirteenth or fourteenth
century, a literal translation would have risked seeming absurd and
clumsy. I suspect that such notions owe their origin to the sacred fear of
altering, however slightly, the syntax of the Holy Ghost…
I shall not say that Ezra Pound has revived the medieval concept
of translation; what I will say is that, indifferent to literalness in any form,
he has attempted a curious experiment that has been misunderstood by
many… Those of us who have given ourselves with whatever degree of
success to the exercise of poetry know that the essence of verse is its
intonation and not its abstract meaning.
The scholars accuse Pound of making slipshod errors, showing his
ignorance of Anglo-Saxon, Latin or Provençal; they refuse to grasp that his
translations reflect impalpable forms.
–J. L. BORGES
For Ezra Pound is not a writer, he is a literature.
–R. BOLAÑO
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EXERGUE
Traduttore/Traditore
If we were to translate into English the traditional formula
Traduttore, traditore as “the translator is a betrayer,” we would
deprive the Italian rhyming epigram of all its paronomastic value.
Hence a cognitive attitude would compel us to change this aphorism
into a more explicit statement and to answer the questions:
translator of what messages? betrayer of what values?
–R. JAKOBSON
“J’ai pardonné,” let him make it clear that it is the translator he is
pardoning.
–E. POUND
So do not imagine that I am preaching treason to you when I say
that you will be something less than a reader of poetry if you do not
read the poems of Ezra Pound.
–F. MADOX FORD
(1) “During the trip Pound conversed freely with all three of the escorting officers....
His hobbies are the translating of ancient documents such as Pluto [sic] and
Confucius. The bulk of our conversation was carried on concerning these matters. He
explained in detail the sources of his knowledge and the means by which his
translations were accomplished.... In so far as his attitude to the United States is
concerned, I got the impression that he was trying to impress upon us his loyalty and
his desire to be considered an American who was trying to help America rather than
hinder her..., [/] on the grounds that through his contacts in Japan and China he is in
possession of information which is of much more importance to the United States
than his trial as traitor” (“Affidavit”. H V. Holder. Lt. Colonel. In Ezra & Dorothy
Pound. Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946).
(2) “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance,
every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of
translation, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer, Le Grand Translateur” (E. Pound. Ezra
Pound’s Poetry and Prose. Contributions to Periodicals. vol. V, p. 117; 1929).
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1. ‘Transportation is civilisation’:
the cultural and historiographical programme
i. Reversing provincialism: the privileged performance of translation
Translation is and will continue to be one of the most important and
dignified tasks of international traffic.
–J. W. VON GOETHE
The translator is a messenger between nations, a mediator who
brings mutual respect and admiration where there was only
indifference or even rejection.
–A. W. SCHLEGEL
So invent in your language if you can or wish to understand mine,
invent if you can or wish to make it understood—my language, and
yours, where the event of its prosody takes place only once it is
brought home, where its being at “home” disturbs your fellow
occupants, fellow citizens and fellow countrymen? Fellow
countrymen of all countries, poet-translators, rebel against
patriotism!
–J. DERRIDA
* Provincialism, the enemy: nationalist politics, monotheistic religion, and the scholarly
education of positivist philology
(3) “Provincialism is the enemy”; “(a) An ignorance of the manners, customs and
nature of people living outside one’s own village, parish or nation. (b) A desire to
coerce others into uniformity” (E. Pound. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose.
Contributions to Periodicals. vol. II, p. 231 [1917]; From now on EPPP).
(4) “This is modern civilization. Neither nation has been coercible into a Kultur; into a
damnable holy Roman Empire, holy Roman Church orthodoxy, obedience, Deutschland
über Alles, infallibility, mouse-trap” (EPPP, II: 232; 1917).
(5) “The stupid or provincial judgment of art bases itself on the belief that great art
must be like the art that it has been reared to respect” (E. Pound. EPPP, I: 203;
1913); “[The] crime is perpetrated in American schools by courses in ‘American literature’.
You might as well give courses in ‘American chemistry’, neglecting all foreign discoveries.
This is not patriotism” (E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1914).
(6) “America has as yet no notion of reforming her universities. The connection between the
destruction of Rheims, the massacres of near-Eastern populations, etc., and the peculiar tone
of study, is not too clearly apparent. Provincialism I have defined as an ignorance of the
nature and custom of foreign peoples, a desire to coerce others, a desire for uniformity–
uniformity always based on a temperament of the particular provincial desiring it.
“The moment you teach a man to study literature not for its own delight, but for some
exterior reason, a reason hidden in vague and cloudy words such as “monuments of
scholarship,” “exactness,” “soundness,” etc., “service to scholarship,” you begin this
destruction, you begin to prepare his mind for all sorts of acts to be undertaken for exterior
reasons “of State,” etc., without regard to their merit” (EPPP, II: 234; 1917).
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* Translation, the task: an intensification of both ‘transfers’ and ‘differences’
(7) “From my point of view as an artist, it is infinitely preferable that there should be
Internationalism of any sort than that there should be nationalism. Civilization has
everything to gain by internationalism, by tunnels, by aerial posts” (EPPP, III: 11; 1918).
(8) “‘Transportation is civilization’ was Mr. Kipling’s last intelligible remark, and it is
doubly true in art and in thought” (EPPP, I: 102; 1912); “This includes transportation of
thought as well as transportation of food-stuffs and calico” (EPPP, III: 187; 1919).
(9) “The humanities rightly taught can but give one more points of contact with other
men” (EPPP, I: 107; 1912).
(10) “Translations. There are three hundred younger… writers.... They are all of them
clamouring to be printed, but none of them, apparently, has the patience or
intelligence to make up this simple labour of importation, or to select things of
interest from foreign literature” (EPPP, III: 84; 1918; my emphasis).
(11) “The large vol. of translations. Rub it in that EP has spent 30 years introducing
the BEST of one nation to another” (E. Pound. Ezra Pound and James Laughlin,
Selected Letters, p. 167; 1947).
(12) “The first step of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting,
sculpture or writing… We must learn what we can from the past, we must learn what other
nations have done successfully under similar circumstances, we must think how they did it”
(E. Pound. Literary Essays, p. 215; 1915).
(13) “The sooner we are international, the sooner shall we escape the tyranny of
uniform laws for great areas. I do not mean this as a paradox” (EPPP, III: 11; 1918);
“The whole of great art is a struggle for communication… And this communication is
not a levelling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of
differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different.
Kultur is an abomination; philology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming
education is an evil” (EPPP, III: 145; 1919).
(14) “Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular
character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche towards
uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the
suppression of history” (EPPP, IX: 347; 1962).
ii. Reversing provincialism of space: sharpening the expression and expanding
the representation of the real
Translation is valuable by a double power of fertilizing a literature:
by importing new elements which may be assimilated, and by
restoring the essentials which have been forgotten in traditional
literary method. There occurs, in the process, a happy fusion
between the spirit of the original and the mind of the translator; the
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result is not exoticism but rejuvenation.
–T. S. ELIOT
Translation is fruitful ... it introduces new kinds of sensibilities.... It
does not particularly matter if the translators have understood their
originals correctly; often, indeed, misunderstanding is, from the
point view of the native writer, more profitable.
–W. H. AUDEN
Just as our soil itself has probably become richer and more fertile,
and our climate more fertile after much transplanting of foreign
plants, so do we feel that our language, which we impulse less
because of our Nordic lethargy, can only flourish and develop its
own perfect power through the most varied contacts with what is
foreign.
–F. SCHLEIERMACHER
(15) “Language, the medium of thought’s preservation, is constantly wearing out. It
has been the function of poets to new-mint the speech, to supply the vigorous terms
for prose... and poets may be “kept on” as conservators of the public speech” (EPPP,
I: 74; 1912).
* Rectifying language as a basis for perception and thought in society as a whole
(16) “Technique is the means of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means”
(EPPP: I: 57; 1911); “Bad technique is “bearing false witness”” (EPPP, I: 138: 1913); “You
can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness. You can be wholly a liar in pretending
that the particular vagueness was precise in its outline” (E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1913).
(17) “This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is an art that
makes false reports” (Idem); “‘Good art... can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that
bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise” (Idem).
(18) “I mean it maintains the precision and clarity of thought, not merely for the benefit of a
few dilettantes and ‘lovers of literature’, but maintains the health of thought outside literary
circles and in non-literary existence, in general individual and communal life” (E. Pound.
Literary Essays, 1929).
(19) “It still seems to me that America will never look anything, animal, mineral, vegetable,
political, social, international, religious, philosophical or anything else, in the face until she
gets used to perfectly bald statement” (E. Pound. Letter to J. Quinn, 1918).
(20) “Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify
different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical
thought degenerates into a soup. A soft terminology is merely an endless series of indefinite
muddles” (E. Pound. Literary Essays).
(21) “The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor cannot act
effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is
in the care of the damned and despised literati. When their work goes rotten… i.e. becomes
slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and individual
thought and order goes to pot. This is a lesson of history, and a lesson not yet half learned”
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(EPPP, V: 113; 1929); “A tolerance for slipshod expression in whatever department of
writing gradually leads to chaos, munition-profiteers, the maintenance of ... misery,
omnipresent obfuscation of mind, and a progressive rottenness of spirit” (E. Pound. Machine
Art & Other Writings).
(22) “The function of writing (as writing) in the state is to keep words in order, to
make ever more clear their demarcations of meaning to leave no scoundrelly mind a
network of hiding places for its frauds, and its half frauds.
“Time and again good writers have told us, and shown by example, that no
discipline is as effective to this end as the constant measuring of one language
against another by translation” (EPPP, VII: 82; 1936; my emphasis).
(23) “Reading a good author in a foreign tongue will joggle one out of the clichés of one’s
own and will as it were scratch up the surface of one’s vocabulary” (E. Pound. Machine
Art...).
* From expanding the language to widening perception and world-view
(24) “Your suggestion that because bullheaded Britons can’t think beyond the language
smacked into ’em by precedent schoolteachers EVERYONE shd/ remain INSIDE the cage
of English language as they recd. it in school is the most craven, yet encountered by the
undersigned” (E. Pound. Ezra Pound and James Laughlin, Selected Letters).
(25) The whole thing is an evolution. In the beginning simple words were enough: Food;
water; fire. Both prose and poetry are but an extension of language. Man desires to
communicate with his fellows. He desires an ever increasingly complicated
communication.... Gradually you wish to communicate something less bare and
ambiguous than ideas. You wish to communicate an idea and its modifications, an idea
and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions....
You wish to communicate an idea and its concomitant emotions, or an emotion and
its concomitant ideas, or a sensation and its derivative emotions, or an impression that
is emotive, etc., etc., etc. ...
When this rhythm, or when the vowel and consonantal melody or sequence seems
truly to bear the trace of emotion which the poem (for we have come at last to the
poem) is intended to communicate, we say that this part of the work is good. And ‘this
part of the work’ is by now ‘technique’.... It is only a part of technique, it is rhythm,
cadence, and the arrangement of sounds (E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1913).
(26) The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single
language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human
comprehension.
...
Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities,
different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulse and
unwillingness, different constructions of throat, and all these leave a trace in language,
and leave it more ready and more unready for certain communications and
registrations (E. Pound. ABC of Reading).
(27) “The Jap who appears to us vague in certain ideas is “vague” merely because his
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categories cut in a different way” (E. Pound. Machine Art & Other Writings).
(28) One translates prose, perhaps, to give currency to an idea, but poetry gives more
life. Translating it stimulates and enriches the language, or at least it should.
When a word or phrase is translated and no general equivalent is found but
rather precision is sought, the receiving language is enlarged. Translation
highlights the sound, the weak spots in the receiving language, and awakens it,
stirs it up.
Otherwise the language dies. It remains an idiom of the past.
(EPPP, V: 310; 1931; original in Italian).
(29) Objections from the gallery: “Oh, it’s French, you’ll never get it in England.”
“It’s Chinese, you can’t do it in English.”
Yes, gentleman, precisely, it is French, and Chinese, and Greek, and Latin,
and English.
(EPPP, II: 19; 1915)
(30) I have struggled against monolingualism in America, and I think I have been
right to do so. But the stimulus from a foreign language depends upon its being
different and felt as radically different. The outside language should have a
place apart in our knowledge as a different system of unaccustomed categories,
one that in many cases is not even comprehensible for the native.
One should read a foreign book with the suspicion that the author might think
differently from us, that even when he employs a familiar form of words he may
be concealing another colour, another predisposition beneath it. Uncovering
these differences gives value to the reading (EPPP, V: 251; 1930; original in
Italian).
(31) To the best of my knowledge, I have never used a Greek word or a Latin one where
English would have served. I mean that I have never intentionally used, or wittingly
left unexpurgated, any classic or foreign form save where I asserted: this concept, this
rhythm is so solid, so embedded in the consciousness of humanity, so durable in its
justness that it has lasted 2,000 years, or nearly three thousand. When it has been an
Italian or French word, it has asserted or I have meant it to assert some meaning not
current in English, some shade or gradation.
The new word or unsanctified term was justified when it conveyed something that
could not be otherwise conveyed (E. Pound. Machine Art & Other Writings).
(32) “Speaking with a foreigner does not only mean having to use the vocabulary of a
foreign language, but also requires an understanding of the foreigner’s way of speaking, that
is, of his mental syntax; of the way the ideas recorded for centuries in the foreign language
follow on from one another” (EPPP, VIII: 201-202; 1943; original in Italian).
(33) “Different languages –I mean the actual vocabularies, the idioms– have worked certain
mechanisms of communication and registration. No one language is complete. A master
might be continually expanding his own tongue, rendering it fit to bear some charge hitherto
borne only by some other alien tongue, but the process does not stop with any one man”
(EPPP, V: 118; 1929).
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iii. Reversing Provincialism of Time: unfolding the meaning of the past and
modifying the present
Translation is not only interpretation, but also tradition...; it belongs
to the most intimate movement of History.
–M. HEIDEGGER
1. The problem of translation, as a philosophical problem, is a recent
and strictly localized problem...
2. This problem is indissolubly linked to the invention of the
philosophy of history...
3. The locus of this problem is art, for all that it may be determined
essentially as Dichtung (poetry or, indeed, literature).
–Ph. LACOUE-LABARTHE
As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and
sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of
history in the era.
–W. BENJAMIN
(34) “Provincialism of time is as damned as provincialism of place”; “engaged in an
attack on provincialism of time... His job is much more to dig up the fine things
forgotten, than to write huge tomes “about” this, that, and the other” (EPPP, II: 235;
1917).
* The existential perspective: giving new life to the ghosts of the past
There is something mediumistic about every translation. The
translator deals with a spirit world; he must conjure spirits, must
give them a temporary habitation. If he is lucky, he too is
transformed –the spirit of the original passes into him, a little of that
spirit for a little while– so that he liberates not only it but something
in himself as well.
But greater still is its value in preserving our links with the past, the
near past and the more distant of other literatures which are germane
to our own. For the translator’s work is a perpetually renewed
attempt to answer for each generation, in its own terms and
according to its own lights, that question of Paul Valery’s,
Où sont des morts les phrases familières,
L’art personnel, les âmes singulières?
–C. DAY LEWIS
In each of the elements or strands there is something of Pound and
something of some other, not further analysable. And good
translation like this is not merely translation, for the translator is
giving the original through himself, and finding himself through the
original
–T. S. ELIOT
(35) “Besides knowing living artists I have come in touch with the tradition of the dead”
(EPPP, I: 147; 1913).
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(36) “And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great / At times pass through us, / And
we are melted into them, and are not / Save reflections of their souls. / Thus I am Dante for a
space and am / One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief / … that is the ‘I’ / And into this
some form projects itself / ... And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on” (E. Pound.
“Histrion”, 1908).
(37) In the search for “sincere self-expression,” one gropes, one finds some seeming
verity. One says “I am” this, that or the other, and with the words scarcely
uttered one ceases to be that thing.
I began this search for the real in a book called Persona, casting off, as it were,
complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in a long series of
translations, which were but more elaborate masks. (EPPP, I: 277-278; 1914).
* The cultural perspective: unfolding heritage to shape civilisation
(38) “The play is nearly untranslatable and is fairly incomprehensible until you get the
clue... to the “sense of the past time in the present” (E. Pound. Letter, 1915; my emphasis).
(39) “One of the rights of masterwork is the right of rebirth and recurrence”; “As the present
is unknowable, we roust amid known fragments of the past “to get light on it,” to get an
inkling of the process which produced what we encounter” (E. Pound. Guide to Kulchur).
(40) “The past should [also] be a light for the future.... The purpose of history is ... [to] guide
their thought toward what will elucidate today and tomorrow... aim chiefly to focus their
knowledge upon the most vital issues of today (or, conjecturally, of tomorrow)”; “Not only
are these people ‘translating’ or, having intended to translate, been deflected, but they are
also moulding styles in their respective tongues or at least anticipating what later happens”
(EPPP, V: 193; 1929).
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2. Transportation of the ‘Poetic Meaning’:
the semantic/stylistic principles
If it were possible accurately to define, or, perhaps more properly, to
describe what is meant by a good Translation, it is evident that a
considerable progress would be made towards establishing the rules
of the Art; for these Rules would flow naturally from that definition
or description. But there is no subject of criticism on which there has
been so much difference of opinion.
–A. F. TYTLER
In recent years, perhaps because of the increasing primacy of
linguistics, there has been a tendency to deemphasize the decidedly
literary nature of translation. There is no such thing –nor can there
be– as a science of translation, although translation can and should
be studied scientifically. Just as literature is a specialized function of
language, so translation is a specialized function of literature.
–O. PAZ
I know of nothing more barbaric, more fruitless and thus more
idiotic than a system of study that confuses the supposed acquisition
of a language with the supposed understanding and enjoyment of a
literature.
–P. VALÉRY
i. Translatio/Traductio: from ‘getting across the meaning’ to the ‘poetic ways of
charging meaning’
People might think they like the form because they like the content,
or think they like the content because they like the form. In the
perfect poet they fit and are the same thing; and in another sense
they are always the same thing. So it is always true to say that form
and content are the same thing, and always true to say that they are
different things.
–T. S. ELIOT
This is what makes translation at once an experimental poetics and a
unique vantage point from which to look at the theory of language.
–H. MESCHONNIC
(41) “Does not give A DAMN, so long as the meaning gets across” (EPPP, IX: 512;
1955; my italics); “Don’t translate what I wrote, translate what I MEANT;” “Don’t bother
about the WORDS, translate the MEANING”.
(42) “Literature is language charged with meaning”; “Great literature is simply
language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (E. Pound. ABC of
Reading; my emphasis).
(43) MELOPOEIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain
meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that
meaning.
PHANOPOEIA, which is the casting of images upon the visual imagination.
LOGOPOEIA, “the dance of the intellect among words,” that is to say, it
employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes account in a
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special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word,
its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds
the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation and
cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music. It is the latest come, and
perhaps most tricky and undependable mode.
(EPPP, V: 114; 1929).
(44) “T. J. Everest has made the best summary of our contemporary aesthetics that I
know in his sentence ‘A work of art has in it no idea which is separable from the
form’” (EPPP, IV: 183; 1920).
ii. The impossibility of completion of an absolute task
He undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the
outset. He dedicated his scruples and nights “lit by midnight oil” to
repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed.
–J. L. BORGES
Isn’t the act of translating necessarily a utopian task? Don’t
misunderstand my words ... as if I would criticize my colleagues
because they don’t do what they propose. My intention is, precisely,
the opposite. The destiny of Man –his privilege and honour– is never
to achieve what he proposes, and to remain merely an intention,
living utopia. This is what occurs whenever we engage in that
modest occupation called translating.
–J. ORTEGA Y GASSET
All translation is impossible and that is the reason why one does it.
–M. HAMBURGER
(45) “Sannazaro… translated himself as Sanctus Nazarenus, I am myself known as Signore
Sterlina to James Joyce’s children, while the phonetic translation of my name into Japanese
tongue is so indecorous that I am seriously advised not to use it, lest it do me harm in
Nippon. (Rendered back ad verbum into our maternal speech it gives for its meaning, ‘This
picture of a phallus costs ten yen’). There is no surety in shifting personal names from one
idiom to another” (E. Pound).
(46) The melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even
though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. It is
practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another,
save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time.
Phanopoeia can, on the other hand, be translated almost, or wholly, intact.
When it is good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy
it save by very crass bungling, and the neglect of perfectly well known and
formulatable rules.
Logopoeia does not translate; though the attitude of mind it expresses may
pass through a paraphrase. Or one might say, you can not translate it “locally,”
but that having determined the original author’s state of mind, you may or may
not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent. (EPPP, V: 114; 1929).
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(47) “La poésie ne se traduit pas”; “The prose is translatable, whereas the poetry must go,
nearly always, in the original tongue, if it is to go with plenary powers” (EPPP, V: 134;
1929; my emphasis).
iii. Multiple asymptotic versions and the need of finding the best angle
Since I said before that a repetition of a work is impossible ..., it
stands to reason that diverse translations are fitting for the same text.
It is, at least it almost always is, impossible to approximate all the
dimensions of the original text at the same time For that reason, it
will be necessary to divide the work and make divergent translations
of the same work according to the facets of it that we may wish to
translate with precision.
–J. ORTEGA Y GASSET
No translation can do everything; you concentrate upon reproducing
one main element in the original, and hope that some of the others
will follow.
–C. DAY LEWIS
(48) “Any poem worth translating is worth translating in THIRTY or more ways” (E.
Pound. Letter to J. Laughlin, 1949).
(49) “There must be of course a plain literal version somewhere available, with
explanations and notes, however tiresome and unpoetic. There should also be the best
available translation of poetic values, in whatever European language this may have
been attained” (EPPP, VII: 475; 1939).
(50)
En breu brisaral temps braus
Eill bisa busina els bracs
(Arnaut Daniel: Provencal original)
(a)
Soon will the harsh time break upon us,
the north wind hoot in the branches.
(E. P. The Spirit of Romance: plain meaning)
(b)
Briefly bursteth season brisk,
Blasty north breeze racketh branch.
(E. Pound. Translations: melopoeia)
Black sky breaks upon us
North wind hoots amid branches
(phanopoeia)
(c)
(d)
Another spring-opening? No please!
Let us sing of stormy weather.
(logopoeia)
(51) “There are a half-dozen arts of poetry… It is possible, though perhaps a little
Wagnerian, to imagine a poetry which should be a synthesis of the lot” (EPPP, IV:
124; 1920).
(52) “In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone,
or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular”
(Letter to F. M. Ford, 1920).
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iv. Two general perspectives: ‘translations of accompaniment’ and ‘creative
translations’
A translation (involving, as it does, the necessity of settling many
points without discussion), remains perhaps the most direct form of
commentary.
–D. G. ROSSETTI
Literary translation ... is still an aesthetic activity. It has to do with
form feeling as much as with sense giving, and unless the
practitioner has the almost muscular sensation that rewards
successful original composition, it is unlikely that the results of the
text-labour will have life of their own.
–S. HEANEY
(53)
In the long run the translator is in all probability impotent to do all of the work for the
linguistically lazy reader. He can show where the treasure lies… he can very materially assist
the hurried student who has a smattering of a language to read the original text alongside the
metrical gloss.
This refers to “interpretative translation.” The “other sort,” I mean in cases where the
“translator” is definitely making a new poem, falls simply in the domain of original writing, or
if it does not it must be censured according to equal standards, and praised with some sort of
just deduction, assessable only in the particular case. (E. Pound. Cavalcanti, 1934).
14
3. Pound’s early legacy as a translator (1908-1919):
the Modernist revolution of poetic language
No one living has practised the art of verse with such austerity and
devotion; and no one living has practised it with more success. I
make no exception of age or of country.
Pound’s work is not only much more varied than is generally
supposed, but also represents a continuous development... before the
Cantos.
–T. S. ELIOT
* Training through a conscious and differential strategy of translation: melopoeia,
phanopoeia, logopoeia
(54) “I knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do. I believed that the “Impulse” is with
the gods; that technique is a man’s own responsibility... His recording instrument is in his
own charge. It is his own fault if he does not become a good artist–even a flawless artist”
(EPPP, I: 147; 1913); “There simply is no one in America (or here either), who writes, and
who has made anything like the study of the laws of the art. the fundamental eternal etc. in
ten languages that I have. I set out 12 years ago determined that whatever I might eventually
be able to DO <compose> – (<creation> would depend on inspiration on any number of
things outside my control.) this at least I could do and it would be my own fault and no one
else’s if I didn’t. i.e. know more about poetry of every time and place. than any man living.
Not conventions, but laws, like the laws of physics and chemistry, resistance, light pressure,
the logical magic” (E. Pound. The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson).
(55) “By ‘imitation’ I do not mean anything derogative, nor does the term necessarily imply
want of inventiveness; any good artist, or, at least, every comprehensive artist must be filled
with curiosity about the work of his predecessors; he will want to “see if he can do it”, he
will wish to make analyses more minute than can be made by any means save that of doing
the thing with his own hand” (EPPP, IV: 7; 1920).
(56) “For three decades I have believed, taught and practised that translation is the absolute
best among all forms of writer’s training. When a translation is made into a castigated and
tried segment of the mother tongue itself, that training is, or can be, intensified (EPPP, VI:
251; 1935).
(57) “With regard to the following list, one ingenious or ingenuous attacker suggested that I
have included certain poems in this list because I have myself translated them. The idea that
during twenty-five years’ search I had translated the poems BECAUSE they were the key
positions or the best illustrations, seems not to have occurred to him” (ABC: 41).
15
i. Translating the masters of melopoeia: bringing over the vowels of love and
consonants of harshness from medieval naturalism
We can now see that there was no movement, no revolution, and
there is no formula. The only revolution was that Ezra Pound was
born with a fine ear for verse.
–T. S. ELIOT
It’s the best damn ear ever born to listen to this language!
–W. C. WILLIAMS
* Interpretation based on a basso continuo: musical structure, not detailed score
(58) There was a certain amount of liberty of detail permitted in the playing of early
“classical” music. A musician attacking music “historically” will feel the relation
between embroidery or optional filling and the essential structural features...
All this is a plea for pattern music... but it is also advice to performers of whatever
predilection not to neglect the study of their art, of their structure...
The old way of music, teaching a man that a piece of music was a structure, certain
main forms filled in, with certain decorations, stimulated his intelligence, spurred on
his constructive faculty... In a sense that is true of any performer, but the
contemporary way of approach lays stress on having a memory like a phonograph.
(EPPP, II: 236; 1917; my emphasis)
a. The Provencal corpus: the music of the gay saber or the subversive ethos of the
troubadours’ melopoeia
* Alba: from ideological resistance to vowel contrast and modulation
(59) “We will never recover the art of writing to be sung until we begin to pay attention to
the sequence, or scale, or vowels of the line, and of the vowels terminating the group of lines
in a series”; “Rhyming can be used to zone sounds, as stones are heaped into walls in
mountain ploughland” (E. Pound. ABC of Reading).
(60)
Quan lo rossinhols escria
ab sa par la nueg e·l dia,
yeu suy ab ma bell’amia
jos la flor,
tro la gaita de la tor
escria: “Drutz, al levar!
qu’ieu vey l’alba e·l jorn clar.
(Anonymous. XIIth century. Lit.: “When the nightingale sings beside his mate,
night and day, I stay with my fair love under the blossom; until the watchman
on the tower cries: ‘Lovers, arise! since I see the dawn and the clear day’”.)
16
(61)
When the nightingale to his mate
Sings day-long and night late
My love and I keep state
In bower,
In flower,
‘Till the watchman on the tower
Cry:
“Up, Thou rascal, Rise
I see the white
Light
And the night
Flies.”
(E. Pound. “Langue d’Oc”. Personae)
(61) “The forms of this poetry are highly artificial, and as artifice they have still for
the serious craftsman an interest... No student of the period can doubt that the
involved forms, and the veiled meanings in the “trobar clus”, grew out of living
conditions, and that these songs played a very real part in love intrigue and in the
intrigue preceding warfare”; “We find these not so much in the words –which anyone
may read– but in the subtle joints of the craft, in the crannies perceptible only to the
craftsman... They are perhaps subtler. They make their revelations to those who are
already expert” (E. Pound. Spirit of Romance).
(62)
Quan lo rossinhols escrIA
ab sa par la nueg e-l dIA,
yeu suy ab ma bell’amIA
jos la flOR,
tro la gaita [/] de la tOR
escria: [/] “Drutz, al levAR!
qu’ieu vey l’alba [/] e-l jorn clAR.”
When the nightingale to his mATE
Sings day-long and night lATE
My love and I keep stATE
In bOWER,
In flOWER,
‘Till the watchman on the tOWER
CrY:
“Up, Thou rascal, RISE
I see the whITE
LIGHT
And the nIGHT
FlIES.”
(Anonymous. XIIth century. Lit.: “When the nightingale sings beside his mate,
night and day, I stay with my fair love under the blossom; until the watchman
on the tower cries: ‘Lovers, arise! since I see the dawn and the clear day’”.)
(63) Original timbres: ‘ia’ + ‘or’ = ‘ar’
17
* ‘Translations of accompaniment’ of Arnaut Daniel: pointing to and reconstituting
the troubadours’ subversive melopoeia
(64)
En breu brisaral temps braus
a7
Eill bisa busina els brancs
b7
Qui s’entreseignon trastuich
c7
De sobreclaus rams de fuoilla;
d7’
Car noi chanta anzels ni piula
e7’
M’entreseign’ Amors qu’ieu fassa adonc f8
Chan que non er segons ni tertz
g8
Ans prims d’afrancar con agre.
h7’
Briefly bursteth season brisk,
Blasty north breeze raketh branch,
Barren rasps each branch on each
Tearing twig and tearing leafage,
Chimes now no bird nor cries querulous;
So Love demands I make outright
A song that no song shall surpass
For freeing the heart of sorrow.
Amors es de prestz la claus
E de proesa us estancs
Don naisson tuich in bon fruich
S’es qui leialmen los cuoilla;
Q’un non delis gels ni niula
Mentre ques noiris el bon tronc;
Mas sil romp trefans ni culvetz
Peris tro leials lo sagre.
Love is glory’s orchard close,
And is a pool of prowess staunch,
Where comes every goodly peach
If true heart come but to gather.
Dies none frost-bit nor yet snowily,
For good sap forletteth blight
Tho’ culroun hack the base
Leal heart saineth it on morrow.
b. “The Seafarer”: creative transposition of Anglo-Saxon alliterative versification
(65) “‘The beginnings of English poetry... made by a rude war-faring people for the
entertainment of men-at-arms, or for men at monks’ tables’... Has the writer of this sentence
read The Seafarer in Anglo-Saxon? Will the author tell us for whose benefit these lines,
which alone in the works of our forebears are fit to compare with Homer –for whose
entertainment were they made? They were made for no man’s entertainment, but because a
man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold himself from speaking. And that
more uneven poem, The Wanderer, is like to this, a broken man speaking... an apology for
speaking at all, and speech only pardoned because his captain and all the sea-faring men and
companions are dead” (E. Pound. “The Constant Preaching of the Mob”, 1916).
(66) “Seafarer, ruggedness, quantity gone, as inflection had gone, new mechanism of poetry
needed” (EPPP, IV, 273; 1923).
(67) “I have been questioned, though rather in regard to “The Seafarer” than to Arnaut, how
much of this translation is mine and how much the original. “The Seafarer” was as nearly as
literal, I think, as any translation can be” (EPPP, I: 68; 1912); “By the way, returning to
“Ripostes” the “Seafarer” [sic] is translated & dam well translated, it is not adapted” (E.
Pound. Letter to W. C. Williams; 1912).
(68) “Dear Kostetzky, If you have sense enough to make the selection of Seafarer poems
that you have made, and to conserve the alliteration with the accommodation to nature of
Your own language AND in general to give signs of intelligence which appear in your
letters, I (and we) don’t need to bother about any yank or kenuk professors” (EPPP, X; 39;
1956; my italics).
18
c. Linguistic asepsis and insemination: from new sounds to new forms of naturalistic
perception
(70) In the gloom the gold gathers the light against it
(E. Pound. The Cantos)
(a) In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it
[vowel modulation, from dark to light]
(b) In the glôôm, the gôld gâthers the light agâinst it
[quantitative accent]
(c) In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it
[alliteration and consonance]
ii. Translating the masters of phanopoeia in Cathay (1915): from the invention of
China to the re-invention of Western poetics of the Image
A very, very good poet can do a version of something from another
language, even if he doesn’t know the language. That is, he can write
a poem based on somebody else’s prose paraphrases of the thing.
But this is purely and simply a matter of the translator’s having a
certain kind of poetic skill, a very rare thing to find.
–J. HOLLANDER
He doesn’t know a damn thing about China… That’s what makes
him an expert.
–W. C. WILLIAMS
Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time... This is as
much as to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it to-day, is
something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a
Chinese poetry-in-itself, waiting for some ideal translator; but that
Pound had enriched modern English poetry as Fitzgerald enriched it.
–T. S. ELIOT
a. Transferring ‘dynamic images’ under the guidance of Fenollosa’s linguisticometaphysical intuitions
When the language is common,
the images must be telling.
–LU CHI
In responding to things, the Ancient Poets operated on the principle
of endless association of ideas. They lost themselves in myriads of
images, completely absorbed in the visual and auditory sensations.
They depicted the atmosphere and painted the appearances of things
in perfect harmony with their changing aspects; the linguistic and
tonal patterns they used closely corresponded with their
perceptions... The Ancient Poets probe into the depth of the
fundamental nature of things.
–LIU HSIEH
19
Literature thus stands as the entelechy, the fully realized form, of a
universal process of manifestation... In this formulation literature is
not truly mimetic: rather it is the final stage in a process of
manifestation; and the writer, instead of “re-presenting” the outer
world, is in fact only the medium for its last phase of the world’s
coming-to-be...
Each level of wen, that of the world and that of the poem, is valid
only in its own correlative realm; and the poem, the final outward
form, is a stage of fullness.
–S. OWEN
(71) “It is not quite enough to have the general idea that the Chinese (more particularly
Rihaku [Li Po] and Omakitsu [Wang Wei]) attained the known maximum of phanopoeia,
due perhaps to the nature of their written ideograph... One wants one’s knowledge in more
definite terms” (EPPP, V: 115; 1929).
(72) “Undoubtedly pure colour is to be found in Chinese poetry, when we begin to know
enough about it; indeed, a shadow of this perfection is already at hand in translations. Liu
Ch’e, Chu Yuan, Chia I, and the great vers libre writers before the Petrarchan age of Li Po,
are a treasury to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance
had from the Greeks” (EPPP, II: 13; 1915).
(73) “Mrs. Fenollosa did not hand over her husband’s papers to the first academic idiot with
a knowledge of pidgin. She had kept them for several years (1908 to 1913) until I met her at
Sarojini Naidu’s and had considered them if not as a sacred trust at any rate as a very serious
trust, and gave them to me because she had found in my writing qualities which led her to
believe that I would edit and present them as Ernest Fenollosa had wished (E. Pound.
Machine Art ...).
(74) “It is because Chinese poetry has certain qualities of vivid presentation, that one labours
to make a translation, and that I personally am most thankful to the late Ernest Fenollosa for
his work in sorting out and gathering many Chinese poems into a form and bulk wherein I
can deal with them” (EPPP, III: 84; 1918).
(75)
(a)
(b)
sho
hatsu
sho
mistress
hair
first
My hair was at first covering my brows
(Chinese method of wearing hair)
fuku
cover
gaku
brow
(Fenollosa’s notebook)
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
(E. Pound. Cathay)
* “Chinese’s superior phanopoeia due to its writing system”: ‘simple images’ from
pictographic suggestion to syntactic isolation
–The pictographic suggestions of simple primitive characters
(76)
Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a
vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature...; the Chinese method follows
natural suggestion.
The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the
20
imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional modifications.
(Fenollosa. In PP, III 332)
(77)
And we were drúnk for mónth on mónth, forgètting the kíngs and prínces.
(Pound. Cathay)
[Fen.]
Once drink successive months disdain king princes
Once drunk for months together and despised kings and princes
-Dynamisation of simple images through syntactic isolation and parataxis
(78) “In his essay on the Chinese written character he [Fenollosa] expressly contends that
English, being the strongest and least inflected of the European languages, is precisely the
one language best suited to render the force and the concision of the uninflected Chinese”
(EPPP, II: 185; 1915).
(79)
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
(Pound. Cathay; my emphases)
[Fen.] trees fall
autumn grass yellow
The trees fall/drop leaves, and autumn grass are yellow
Ascend
high
look at barbarous prisoners
(Enemies foreign)
Ascending on high and looking from there[?] towards where the barbarous
lived
desolate
castle
sky
large desert
vacant
I see a ruined fortress in a vast blank desert
(Fenollosa; my emphases)
* “Chinese writing stages nature as ‘process’”: from the verbal tendency of the
characters to the transference of power in the transitive phrase
–The verbal property of the characters?
(80) A large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are
shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far
more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, original pictures to
compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added together do not produce
a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them…
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal
points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a true verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees
noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese
conception tries to represent them.
(Fenollosa. In EP III, 332).
21
In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of verbal meaning. We should try
to render this in translation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival abstraction
plus “is”.
(Fenollosa. In EPPP, III, 336).
(81)
[Fen.]
South of the pond [/] the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer
(E. Pound. Cathay)
south pond willow colour half blue blue
South of the pond the willows are already half blue
–Chinese transitive syntax?
(82) “In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the
concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms whenever
we can and seeking instead strong individual verbs” (Fenollosa. In PP, III: 335).
(83)
The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island grasses at Yei-shu,
(E. Pound. Cathay; my emphasis).
[Fen.] Eastern wind already green Yei island grass
The eastern wind has already made green the grass of Yei Shu island
(my emphases)
* “Staging cosmic correlations through visible perceptions”: the couplet and dynamism
in parallel arrangements
Nature, in its process of formation, configures the limbs always in
pairs. The Spiritual Reason operates in such a way that nothing
stands alone. When the heart illuminates literary expression,
organizes and shapes a hundred thoughts, what is high and what is
low correspond to each other, spontaneously producing linguistic
parallelism.
...
A body requires its limbs to be in pairs;
A phrase, once forged, must have its counterparts.
–LIU HSIEH
In literature, one must always practice parallelism... If nonparallelism commands, it is no longer literature.
–ESSAY ON PARALLELISM
(84) “So far we have exhibited the Chinese character and the Chinese sentence chiefly as
vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature. These embody the true poetry as
far as they go. Such actions are seen, but the Chinese would be a poor language and Chinese
poetry but narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry
deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure
relations… The Chinese compass these also, and with great power and beauty” (Fenollosa.
In EPPP, III: 348).
(85) The primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are
22
possible only because they follow objective lines of relation in nature herself.
Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate… Had
the world not been full of homologies, sympathies and identities, thought would have
been starved and language chained to the obvious. There would have been no bridge
whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen…
Metaphor, the revealing of nature, is the very substance of poetry. The known
interprets the obscure… Metaphor... is at once the substance of nature and of language
I have alleged all this because it enables me to show clearly why I believe that the
Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and
built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility,
been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigour and vividness than
any phonetic tongue.
(Fenollosa. In EPPP, III: 349-350).
(86)
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August. (E. Pound. Cathay)
[Fen.] Fallen leaves autumn wind early
And the fallen leaves indicate autumn wind which (to my thought only)
appears to come earlier than usual
8th month butterflies yellow
It being already August, the butterflies are yellow
(87) “Chinese believe butterflies become yellow affected by sorrowful leaves of autumn air.
Not that yellow is directly a sorrowful colour, but indirectly through autumn’s colour All
leaves turn yellow also” (Fenollosa. Notebook)
b. The quatrain in old style: dynamism as sparkling constellations
The net of images is cast wider and wider;
thought searches more and more deeply.
Images must shine
like pearls in water.
–Lu Chi
(88)
THE JEWEL STAIR’S GRIEVANCE
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
[Fen.]
Jewel Stairs
Grievance
grief, slightly tangled with hatred, resent.
jewel steps grow white dew
The jewelled steps have already become white with dew
(dew is thought to grow on things)
23
night long
permeate transparent gauze stocking
attack
For ? in the night, the dew has come into my gauze stock
let down water couplet? ??
crystal
So I let down the crystal curtain
transparent clear look at autumn moon
And still look on the bright moon shining beyond
(89) “Gioku kai [Jap for Jewel Stairs] means here the place where court ladies are living, one
of the imperial mistresses. The subject of the poem is that one of them was waiting for the
lord to come. The beauty of the poem lies in not a single character being used to explain the
idea of waiting and resenting; yet the poem fully expresses the idea. This is how. Thinking
that the lord will come, she was coming out to meet him at the entrance to a flight of steps
ornamented with gems. She was standing there ’til the very dewiness of night wet her
stockings. She lets down her curtain already despairing of his coming. And yet she can see
the moon shining so bright outside, and had to think of the lord’s still coming, because it is
so fine a night; and so passes the whole night awake” (Fenollosa. Notebook).
(90) “I have never found any occidental who could “make much” of that poem at one
reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, not merely by
“suggestion” but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction” (EPPP, III: 85; 1918).
(91) “Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of.
Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn,
therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has
not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized
because she utters no direct reproach” (E. Pound. Cathay).
(92)
THE JEWEL STAIR’S GRIEVANCE
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
(93)
ling-lung (transparency, clear)
lu (dew)
luo (silk, gauze)
lien (crystal curtain)
24
c. From the Nineteenth Old Poems to the regulated octet (lu-shi): dynamism through
the juxtaposition of objective-imagistic and subjective-propositional modes of
presentation
What had happened was that I had somehow, as a poet, guessed the
way the Orientals had constructed their poems. The parallelism of
construction, casting back and forth from the observer to thing
observed, is surely manifest: and the same self-same quality is
omnipresent in Ezra Pound’s Cathay.
–J. G. FLETCHER
(94) “There is another sort of completeness in Chinese. Especially in their poems of
nature and of scenery they seem to excel western writers, both when they speak of
their sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things”
(EPPP, III: 110; 1918).
(95)
THE BEAUTIFUL TOILET
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;
And she was a courtesan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.
(E. Pound. Cathay; my italics)
(96) Correlations in the lu-shi:
line 1
line 2
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x(a)
a
(non)rhymed
rhymed
non-parallel couplet
line 3
line 4
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
a
non-rhymed
rhymed
parallel couplet
line 5
line 6
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
a
non-rhymed
rhymed
parallel couplet
line 7
line 8
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
a
non-rhymed
rhymed
non-parallel couplet
25
(97)
TAKING LEAVE OF A FRIEND
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at distance.
Our horses neigh to each other
as we are departing.
(E. Pound. Cathay; my italics)
[Fen.]
taking leave of a friend
blue
mt.
lie
North
side of walled city
horizontally
Where blue Mt. peaks are visible towards the northern suburb
White
water
encircle
East
And white water flows encircling the east of the city
This
place
once
make
ground
At this place we have for once to separate
castled town
separation
Solitary
rootless
10000
miles
go away
plant
deadgrass
Like solitary dead grass (blown by northern wind) the departing one goes through
1000 [sic] miles
Floating
cloud
wanderer [compound]
His (or your) mind may be that of a floating cloudlike wanderer
mind
Falling
sun
old
acquaintance
emotion
setting
(As for me) the sorrow of parting with an old acquaintance is comparable to the
setting of the sun
Shaking
hands
from
this
away
brandishing
place
Wringing hands is despairing resolution from this place it is away! (We have decided
to separate)
Sho
sho
separating
horse
neigh
onomatopoeia for
solitary horse neighing
(We men have so decided) and yet our very horses, separating, neigh sho, sho
26
(98) “Here come two specimens of Ritsu (2 pairs of two lines) rather rare in Rihaku. First
two lines are in pairs: blue mt. – white water – white under sunshine, green water mt. is
commonplace. Usually 3 + 4, 5 + 6 are in pairs. Here 1st + 2nd are. Here R.[ihaku] not very
fond of regularity of Ritsu, inversed the place of the paring” (Fenollosa. Notebook).
(99) “The host’s and guest’s horses are about to take separate paths and neigh xiao xiao for a
long time, as if they were responding emotionally to leaving the others. If beasts feel this
way, how can the humans bear it?” (Wang Qi).
e. The poetic insemination and political criticism of the present
The Imagists, being dependent on such hints as they could find in
accessible translations, constructed a poetry rather more akin to the
Chinese spirit than the critics have hitherto suspected. Chinese
poetry became for them a crystallising influence, rather than a model
to be slavishly imitated.
–J. G. FLETCHER
What interests me about XLIX is not the ivory fishpond, but the fact
that you have use words and sounds, cadence & beat (& pause) like
strokes of the Chinese characters, that it is a development of
technique 20 years after Cathay, the outgrowth but not at all like
Cathay (whatever its beauties) –and I told you since prob. no more
than 3 people in Europe will verify you.
–L. ZUKOFSKY
* The transcendental linguistic economy: from rhetorical asepsis to literary montage
(100)
CANTO XLIX
For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.
...
A light moves on the north sky line;
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp
In seventeen hundred came Tsing to see hill lakes.
A light moves in the south sky light.
State by creating reaches shd. thereby get into debt?
This is infamy; this is Geryon.
This canal goes still to TenShi
though the old king built it for pleasure
kei
kiu
jitsu
tan
mei
man
getsu
fuku
ran
man
ko
tan
kei
kei
kwa
kai
27
Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field; eat of the grain
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?
The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.
(E. Pound. The Cantos; my italics)
* The historical economy: the new voice of the ghost from the past as criticism of the
wartime situation in the present (abandoned women and broken friendships)
iii. Translating the inventor of logopoeia in the Homage to Sextus Propertius
(1919): classical dissimulatio against the vates of the Roman Empire as modern
irony against the confiscation of language in the British Empire
Few persons realize that the Greek language and the Latin language,
and, therefore, we say, the English language, are within our lifetime,
passing through a critical period. The Classics have, during the
latter part of the nineteenth century and up to the present moment,
lost their place as a pillar of the social and political system... If they
are to survive, to justify themselves as literature, as an element of
the European mind, as the foundation of the literature we hope to
create, they are very badly in need of persons capable of
expounding them. We need someone –not a member of the Church
of Rome, and perhaps preferably not a member of the Church of
England– to explain how vital the matter is.
If the uninstructed reader is not a classical scholar, he will make
nothing of it; if he be a classical scholar, he will wonder why this
does not conform to his notions of what a translation should be. It is
not a translation, it is a paraphrase, or still more truly (for the
uninstructed) a persona. It is also a criticism of Propertius, a
criticism which in a most interesting way insists upon an element of
humour, of irony and mockery, in Propertius, which, Mackail and
other interpreters have missed... I felt that the poem, Homage to
Propertius, would give difficulty to many readers: because it is not
enough a ‘translation’, and because it is, on the other hand, too
much a ‘translation’, to be intelligible to any but the accomplished
student of Pound’s poetry.
–T. S. ELIOT
a. Literature which stays new: from the problem of giving ‘new life’ to a classic to
Propertius in the present of the British Empire
(101) “A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain
definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is a classic because of a
certain eternal and irrepressible freshness” (E. Pound. ABC of Reading).
(102) “The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgeling of
28
schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature” (E. Pound. EPPP, III: 140; 1917).
(103) “It is ... important that the classics should be humanly, rather than philologically
taught, even in class-rooms. A barbaric age given over to education agitates for their
exclusion and desuetude. Education is an onanism of the soul. Philology will be ascribed to
De la Sade [sic]” (E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1917).
(104) “The Roman poets are the only ones we know of who had approximately the same
problems we have. The metropolis, the imperial posts to all corners of the known world” (E.
Pound. Letters, 1916).
(105) “I tack on a title relating to the treatment –in a fit of nerves– fearing the reader won’t
sufficiently see the super-position, the doubling of me and Propertius, England today, and
Rome under Augustus” (E. Pound. EPPP, IX: 481).
b. The critical insight: classical irony in Propertius – dissimulatio against Augustan
imperial policies through subversion of the ‘official poetry’ of the established vates
(Horace and Virgil)
May be mortall synne and such synne is named yronye.
–Thordynary of Chrysten Men
Earnestness, that dreary refuge where fools silently ponder their
lack of ideas!
–TH. GAUTIER
(106) Unless I am right in discovering logopoeia in Propertius (which means unless the
academic teaching of Latin displays crass insensibility, as it probably does), we must almost
say that Laforgue invented logopoeia –observing that there had been a very limited range of
logopoeia in all satire, and that Heine occasionally employs something like it, together with
a dash of bitters, such as can (though he may not have known it) be found in a few verses of
Dorset and Rochester” (E. Pound. EPPP, V: 117; 1929).
(107) “I do think, however, that the homage has scholastic value. MacKail [sic]
(accepted as the ‘right’ opinion on the Latin poets) hasn’t, apparently, any inkling of
the way in which Propertius is using Latin. Doesn’t see that S. H is tying blue ribbon
in the tails of Virgil and Horace, or that sometime after his first ‘book’ S. P. ceased
to be the dupe of magniloquence and began to touch words somewhat as Laforgue
did” (E. Pound. Letters, 1922).
(108) “The spirit of a young man of the Augustan Age hating rhetoric and undeceived by
imperial hog-wash” (E. Pound. EPPP, IV: 272; 1923).
c. Creative ironic translation: potentiation of classical dissimulatio through modern
reflection
Our censors of the raised eyebrow reward him by decrying his work
because of... attempts that have gone wrong, by taking all his bold
experiments for linguistic mistakes and by treating an artist’s
endeavours as they would a schoolboy’s homework.
–J. G. HERDER
29
Thus ironically, translation transplants the original into a more
definite linguistic realm... It is no mere coincidence that the word
‘ironic’ brings here the Romantics to mind. They, more than any
others, were gifted with an insight into the life of literary works–an
insight for which translation provides the highest testimony.
–W. BENJAMIN
* Translating logopoeia: shaping general derivatives and non-local equivalencies to make
Propertius’ subversive irony active amid modern audiences
(109) “[There is] “nothing that isn’t S.H.. no distortion of his phrases that isn’t justifiable by
some other phrase of his elsewhere” (E. Pound. Letters, 1922).
(110) “Logopoeia... probably underestimated by the typically British critic. –For after
twelve years of residence I at last and tardily begin to feel the full weight and extent of the
British insensitivity to, and irritation with, mental agility in any and every form” (EPPP, IV:
133; 1921); “I have also read in some reputable journal that one shouldn’t use irony in
England, because it wouldn’t be understood” (EPPP, I: 252; 1914).
(111) “Hale is a bleating ass and Harriet Monroe is another”; [I refuse] “to argue with the
monkey house” (E. Pound referring to critics of his translation).
* The great trouvaille: a modern urbane tone of ironic detachment (criticizing the
verbosity of the contemporary intelligentsia by reviving the subversive mixture of
registers in Propertius via the forms of Laforgue)
* The most creative derivative: irony displaced towards the event of translation
(Propertius’ dissimulatio against the language of official Augustan propaganda as a
challenge to the philological methods and expectations of modern aesthetes)
-Grafting of ostensibly scholar-like comments: mocking the erudite annotations of
classical scholars as a way of unfolding Propertius’ irony against the literary law
(112) (a) I had rehearsed the Curian brothers, and made remarks on the Horatian javelin
(Near Q. H. Flaccus’s book-stall).
(b)
et cecini Curios fratres et Horatia pila
(Propertius 3.2.7: “and sang of the Curian brothers and the spears of the
Horatii”. Loeb. Goold).
(c)
I want no stall or pillar to have my little works [Nulla taberna meos habeat
neque pila libellos] so that the hands of the crowd –and Hermogenes and
Tigellius– may sweat over them. Nor do I recite them to any save my friends,
and then only when pressed –not anywhere or before any hearers. Many there
are who recite their writings in the middle of the Forum.... That delights the
frivolous (Horace. 1.4.71-76. Loeb. Fairclough).
-Bilingual puns and translatorese
30
(113) (a)
(b)
The small birds of the Cytherean mother,
Their Punic faces dyed in the Gorgon’s lake;
et Veneris dominae volucres, mea turba, columbae
tingunt Gorgonio Punica rostra lacu
(Propertius. 3.3.31-32: Lit. “And the birds of my lady Venus, the doves that I
love, dip their red bills in the Gorgon’s pool” (Goold))
(c) “Where Propertius speaks of the ‘purple beaks’ (punica rostra) of the doves of
Venus, Mr. Pound renders by the nonsensical phrase ‘their Punic faces’ –as one were to
translate ‘crockery’ by China” (Professor Hale. University of Chicago, 1919).
(d)
‘Their punic faces dyed in the Gorgon’s lake’
one of my best lines. Punic (Punicus) used for dark red, purple red by Ovid and
Horace as well as Propertius. Audience familiar with Tyrian for purple in English. To
say nothing of augmented effect on imagination by using Punic (whether in translation
or not) instead of ‘red’.
Re the ‘punic’ faces. It might instruct Hale to tell him that the Teubner text (printed
1898) uses Punica with a cap. P, especially emphasizing the Latin usage of proper
name in place of a colour adjective. I.e., the Teubner editor is emphasising a Latinism
which I have brought over. He is not allowing the connection of the proper name with
a particular dark red to drift into an uncapitalised adjective.
(E. Pound. Letters, 1919).
(e) “In III.3 he [Propertius] picks up an idea latent in III.1, that his elegies are a
worthy counterpart to Ennius’ Annales; but where Ennius wrote of Punic battles around
Carthage, Propertius will chronicle the “Punic” struggles symbolised by Venus’ doves
dipping their red bills (punica rostra) in the lower, tranquil waters of Hyppocrene” (H R.
Nethercut. “Propertius’ ‘Roman Elegies’ III, 1-5: Imitations of Horace and Vergil”, 1970).
* Epigrammatic and collage renderings. (From Propertius’ interruptive texture to the
forms of modern montage)
(114)
3
It is noble to die of love, and honourable to remain
uncuckolded for a season.
And she speaks ill of light women,
and will not praise Homer
Because Helen’s conduct is “unsuitable.”
laus in amore mori: laus altera, si datur uno
posse frui: fruar o solus amore meo!
si memini, solet illa levis culpare puellas,
et totam ex Helena no probat Iliada...
31
(115)
VI
When, when, and whenever death closes our eyelids,
Moving naked over Acheron
Upon the raft, victor and conquered together
Marius and Jugurtha together,
one tangle of shadows.
[2.13B.1]
[3.5.13-16]
Caesar plots against India,
[3.4.1]
Tigris and Euphrates shall, from now on, flow at his bidding, [3.4.4-6]
Tibet shall be full of Roman policemen,
The Parthians shall get used to our statuary
and acquire a Roman religion;
One raft on the veiled flood of Acheron,
[3.5.13-16]
Marius and Jugurtha together.
Nor at my funeral either will there be any long trail,
bearing ancestral lares and images;
No trumpets filled with my emptiness,
Nor shall it be on an Atalic bed;
The perfumed cloths shall be absent.
A small plebeian procession.
Enough, enough and in plenty
There will be three books at my obsequies
Which I take, my not unworthy gift, to Persephone.
[2.13B.3-14]
You will follow the bare scarified breast
Nor will you be weary of calling my name, nor too weary
To place the last kiss on my lips
When the Syrian onyx is broken.
“He who is now vacant dust
was once the slave of one passion”:
Give that much inscription:
“Death why tardily come?”
You, sometimes, will lament a lost friend,
For it is a custom:
This care for past men,
Since Adonis was gored in Idalia, and the Cytherean
Ran crying with out-spread hair,
In vain, you call back the shade,
In vain, Cynthia. Vain call to unanswering shadow,
Small talk comes from small bones.
[2.13B. 19-20]
[2.13B.34-36]
32
* The selection process: shaping a caricature based on Propertius’ programmatic
recusationes of epic writing
(116) -Section I: ‘Rejection of epic’ (translating Propertius’ 3.1) and ‘power of love
poetry’ (3.2).
-II: ‘The poet’s dream and mission: elegy, not epic’ (3.3).
-III: ‘Cynthia’s midnight summons’ (3.16).
-IV: ‘Lygdamus as go-between with Cynthia’ (3.6).
-V: ‘Elegy against epic’ (2.10/2.1).
-VI: ‘From fear of death to rejection of epic and war’ (montage of passages from
various elegies).
- VII: ‘A night of love with Cynthia’ (2.15).
-VIII-IX: ‘Prayer for Cynthia’s recovery from illness’ (2.28A-B).
- X: ‘Attacked by amorini and left in Cynthia’s room’ (2.29A-B).
-XI: ‘No escape from the torments of love’ (montage of various passages).
- XII: ‘Power of love and rejection of epic’ (2.34).
c. A reading of “Homage I”: activation and contemporary heightening of Propertius’
irony against the imperial ethos as embodied in Horace’s Odes
(117) [First moment: Ironic invocation of Callimachean sophistication as a shelter from
which to reject the pompous celebration of imperial values; parody of Horace’s Ode 3.1]
(a) Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas
It is in your grove I would walk,
I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,
and the dance into Italy.
(Homage I.1 ff. trans. Prop. 3.1.ff).
(b) Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae,
in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus.
primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos
Itala per Graois orgia ferre choros
(Prop. 3.1.1-4).
(c) Porpertius, 3.1.4: lit. ‘to carry Italian mysteries in Greek dances’
(d) Odi profanum vulgus et arceo:
favete linguis. carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto.
(Horace. Od. 3.1.1-4: “I hate the uninitiated crowd and keep them far away.
Observe a reverent silence! I, the Muses’ priest, sing for maids and boys songs
not heard before” [Loeb. Bennett]).
33
(118) [Third moment: the irony of love elegy against the solemn chaste vates; from
the parody of Horace’s 3.1 to duping modern philologists]
(a)
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality.
And who would have known the towers
pulled down by a deal-wood horse;
Or of Achilles withstaying waters by Simois,
...
If Homer had not stated your case!
And I also among the later nephews of this city
shall have my dog’s-day
With no stone upon my contemptible sepulchre;
And in the meantime my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over their strangeness,
For Orpheus tamed the wild beasts–
and held up the Threician river;
(Homage I. 39-50, trans. Prop. 3.1.39-3.2.8; my emphasis).
(b) “There is no trace of the decadent meaning which Mr. Pound read into the
passage by misunderstanding tacta, and taking the preposition in as if it were
a negativing part of the adjective insolito” (Professor Hale. University of
Chicago; review of the Homage, 1919).
(c) “Precisely what I do not do is to translate the in as if it negatived the solito.
If I was translating, I have translated the solito (accustomed) by a
commentary, giving “when they have got over the strangeness” as an
equivalent, or rather emphasis of “accustomed.” Absolutely the contrary of
taking my phrase, as the ass Hale does, for the equivalent of unaccustomed.
He can’t read English.... I note that my translation “Devirginated young
ladies” etc. is as literal, or rather more than his. I admit to making the puella
(singular) into plural “young ladies.” It is a possible figure of speech as even
the ass admits. Hale, however, not only makes the girl into ‘my lady’, but he
has to supply something for her to be ‘touched by’. Instead of allowing her to
be simply tacta (as opposed to virgo intacta), he has to say that she is touched
(not, oh my god, not by the – – – – of the poet, but by “my words””
(E. Pound. Letter to A. R. Orage, 1919)
(d)
gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono
may the girl, touched, rejoice in familiar music
34
(e)
If the division of in and tacta is wholly accidental, then Propertius was
the greatest unconscious ironist of all times....
In the line which your reviewer quotes from Prof. Hale of Chicago
Gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono,
he finds, apparently as Prof. Hale, no trace of anything save Victorian
sentimentality. All of which is beautifully academic; the carefully
shielded reader, following Professor Mackail’s belief that Propertius
was a student of Rossetti and Pater, and filled with reminiscences of the
Vita Nuova, is asked to read one word at a time and one line at a time.
(EPPP, IV: 12; 1920).
(f)
carminis interea nostri redeamus in orbem,
gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono,
(Propertius. 3.2.1-3: “To our usual round of songs let us meanwhile
return / may a ‘touched’ girl rejoice in familiar music”).
(g)
... carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto.
(Horace. Odes. 3.1.2-4: “Songs never heard before, I, priest of the
Muses, / sing for virgins and boys”).
(h) “And for accuracy, what are we to say to the bilge of rendering ‘puella’ by
the mid-Victorian pre-Raphaelite slush of romanticistic ‘my lady’?” (Pound
Letters, 1919).
(119) [Fourth moment: refusal of luxury and riches - consumerism as a cause of war]
(a) Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian columns
from Laconia (associated with Neptune and Cerberus),
Though it is not stretched upon gilded beams:
My orchards do not lie level and wide
as the forests of Phaecia
the luxurious and Ionian,
Nor are my caverns stuffed stiff with a Marcian vintage,
My cellar does not date from Numa Pompilius,
Nor bristle with wine jars,
Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent;
Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books,
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my
dance tune.
(Homage I.51-62 trans. Prop. 3.2.9-14).
35
(b) quod non Taenariis domus est mihi fulta columnis,
nec camera auratas inter eburna trabes,
nec mea Phaeacas aequant pomaria silvas,
non operosa rigat Marcius antra liquor;
at Musae comites et carmina cara legenti,
(Propertius. 3.2.11-16).
(c) Non ebur neque aureum
mea renidet in domo lacunar
non trabes Hymettiae
premunt columnas ultima recisas
Africa, neque Attali
ignotus heres regiam occupavi,
nec Laconicas mihi
trahunt honestae purpuras clientae
at fides et ingeni
benigna vena est, pauperemque dives
me petit: nihil supra
deos lacesso nec potentem amicum
largiora flagito,
satis beatus unicis Sabinis.
(Horace. 2.18.1-14. “Not ivory or gilded panel gleams at my home, nor do
beams of Hymettian marble rest on pillars quarried in farthest Africa, nor have I,
as heir of Attalus, become unwittingly the owner of a palace, nor for me do
high-born dames trail robes of Laconian purple. But I have loyalty and a kindly
vein of genius, and me, though poor, the rich man courts. I importune the gods
for nothing more, and of my friend in power I crave no larger boon, happy
enough in my cherished Sabine farm” (trans. Loeb. Bennet).
d. A reading of Homage XII: activation and contemporary heightening of Propertius’
irony against the imperial ethos as embodied Virgil’s epic
(121)
Upon the Actian marshes Virgil is Phoebus’ chief of police,
He can tabulate Caesar’s great ships.
He thrills to Ilian arms,
He shakes the Trojan weapons of Aeneas,
And casts stores on Lavinian beaches.
Make way, ye Roman authors,
clear the street, O ye Greeks,
For a much larger Iliad is in the course of construction
(and to Imperial order)
Clear the streets, O ye Greeks!
And you also follow him “’neath Phrygian pine shade:”
Thysis and Daphnis upon whittled reeds,
36
And how ten sins can corrupt young maidens;
Kids for a bribe and pressed udders,
Happy selling poor loves for cheap apples.
Tityrus might have sung the same vixen;
Corydon tempted Alexis,
Head farmers do likewise, and lying weary amid their oats
They get praise from tolerant Hamadryads.
Go on, to Ascraeus’ prescription, the ancient,
respected, Wordsworthian:
“A flat field for rushes, grapes grow on the slope.”
(Homage XII, 31-52 trans. Prop. 2.34.61-78; my emphasis)
(122)
me iuvet hesternis positum languere corollis,
quem tetigit iactu certus ad ossa deus.
Actia Vergilium custodis litora Phoebi
Caesaris et fortes dicere posse rates,
qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma
iactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus.
cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai:
nescioquid maius nascitur Iliade.
(Propertius 2.34.59-66: “Be it my delight to loll amid the garlands of yesterday, for
the god of unerring aim has pierced me to the bone: be it Virgil’s pleasure to be able
to sing the Actian shores of Apollo, and the brave fleet of Caesar; even now he is
stirring to life the arms of Trojan Aeneas and the walls he founded on Lavine shores.
Make way, ye Roman writers, make way, ye Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad
is coming to birth” (Loeb. Goold)).
e. Conclusion. The Homage as ironic translation that ‘makes history’: afterlife of the
past as criticism of the present (the subversion of the threefold alliance that perverts
language and perception: warlike imperial propaganda, estheticizing rhetoric, and the
method of positivist philology)
(123) People see no connection between philology and the Junker.
Now, apart from the intensive national propaganda, quite apart from German
national propaganda, the 'university system' of Germany is evil...
It is in essence provincialism. It is the single bait which caught all the
German intellectuals and which had hooked many of their American confrères (even
before ‘exchange professorships’ had set in).
Its action in Germany was perfectly simple. Every man of intelligence had
that intelligence nicely switched on to some particular problem, some minute
particular problem unconnected with life, unconnected with main principles (to use a
detestable, much abused phrase). By confining his attention to ablauts, hair-length,
foraminifera, he could become at a small price and ‘authority’, a celebrity. I myself
am an ‘authority’, I was limited to that extent. It takes some time to get clean.
Entirely apart from any willingness to preach history according to the ideas
of the Berlin party, or to turn the class room in to a hall of propaganda, the method
of this German and American higher education was, is, evil, a perversion.
37
It is evil because it holds up an ideal of ‘scholarship’, not an ideal of
humanity. It says in effect: you are to acquire knowledge in that knowledge may be
acquired. Metaphorically you are to build up a dam’d and useless pyramid which
will be of no use to you or to anyone else, but will serve as a ‘monument’. To this
end you are to sacrifice your mind and vitality...
No one who has not been caught young and pitchforked into a ‘graduate
school’ knows anything of the fascination of being about to ‘know more than anyone
else’ about the sex of oysters, or the tonic accents in Aramaic. No one who has not
been one of a gang of young men all heading for scholastic ‘honours’ knows how
easy it is to have the mind switched off all general considerations, all considerations
of the values of life, and switched onto some minute unvital detail...
In the study of literature he has buried himself in questions of morphology,
without ever thinking of being able to know good literature from bad. In all studies
he has buried himself in ‘problems’, and completely turned away from any sense of
proportion between ‘problems’ and vital values...
It is time the American college president, indifferent to the curricula of his
college or university, and anxious only to ‘erect a memorial to his father’ (as an
American provost once said to me), it is time that he and his like awoke from their
nap, and turned out the ideal of philology in favour of something more human and
cleanly.
(E. Pound. “Provincialism: the Enemy”, 1917).
(124) “A sense of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it would have
been useful to our diplomats. The mot juste is of public utility. I can’t help it. I am not
offering this fact as a sop to aesthetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We
are governed by words, the laws are given in words, and literature is the sole means of
keeping these words living and accurate” (E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1922).
(125) “The tacit question of my “Homage to Propertius” is simply: ‘Have I portrayed more
emotion than Bohn’s literal version or any other extant or possible strict translation of
Propertius does or could convey?’” (E. Pound. PP, III: 366; 1919).
(126) “My Homage to Propertius is not only a ‘Persona’ but a Persona which implies
that one empire going to hell is very much as another (Bri’sh as Roman). Mr Eliot
knows that the Bri’sh reader won’t like this” (E. Pound. PP, V: 265; 1931).
(127) “[The Homage] presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the
infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius
some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the
Roman Empire” (E. Pound. EPPP, V: 282; 1931).