‘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
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
In mid-November, 1945, when Justice repatriated Pound to be tried for
treason, the poet knew the dangers awaiting him: his last gesture to his companions
in the Detention Camp in Pisa mimed a broken neck. And yet, during the
transportation over the Atlantic, he gave himself time to discuss his methods of
translation, as if the unavoidable association coined in the implacable Italian adage
had forced the course of his thoughts. One of his escorts, Colonel P. V. Holder,
testifies:
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.1
Expounding translation procedures on the way to a trial for treason? Proposing the
knowledge of foreign literatures as evidence for a pro se defence? Our amazement
need not be exaggerated, nor diminished by an appeal to madness. For there was
something vital at stake. From Pound’s first publication in a college magazine –
1
“Affidavit”. H. V. Holder. Lt. Colonel. In Ezra & Dorothy Pound. Letters in Captivity, 19451946, pp. 199-200.
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“Belangal Alba”– to the versions of Horace’s Odes he produced in the 1960’s, just
before falling into silence, translation provided him the way to become the poet he
chose or found himself chosen to be. Amid the uncertainties of the flight across the
ocean, then, when Pound appears obsessed by the translator’s task, by transfer
itself, it was his whole life-stake as a poet which was passing through his mind.
First of all, his literary achievement amid the Modernist poetic revolution, which is
most of the time impossible to separate from the many creative versions he
produced from a multiplicity of languages, literatures and cultures. Then, his
ground-breaking poetics, which is a poetics of translation: a reflection and
experience searching for equivalence in literary terms which decanted in an holistic
conception of poetic meaning –plain sense charged by musical, imagistic and
contextual effects (melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia)–, dismantling most of
the binary oppositions in which translation and literary theory had been trapped
through history, beginning with the ones between sense and form, meaning and
style. Finally, the cultural implications Pound devised from the translator’s task,
proposing a conception of culture and history as translation; the ways he thought
poetic transfer, through its very technical donation of forms of meaning and
representation, is able to modify language and experience: strengthening
perception, expanding a world-view, reviving the voices of the past to criticise and
shape the present.
In other words, even before examining some of the creative versions Pound
shaped from a variety of tongues (Provençal, Chinese, Latin, and others), one must
be aware of the cultural and historiographical impact he devised from the
translator’s task as well as the conception of poetic language that decanted and
defined his differential approach to literary values, texts and literatures. For there is
no sustained translation practice, much the less one of the dimension of Pound’s,
without an idea of culture and a conception of language behind it.
1. ‘Transportation is civilisation’:
the cultural and historiographical programme
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
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Pound’s cultural and historiographical programme as a translator can be
summarised as an attempt to reverse what he calls ‘provincialism of space’ and
‘provincialism of time’ by intensifying transfers between languages, literatures, and
cultures, an insemination by poetic forms of meaning in which the same gesture
that opens up new possibilities of representation, triggers an encounter between
different nations and time-periods.
The diagnosis is clear: “Provincialism is the enemy,” he starts. And it would
have two united fronts: “(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”.2 On the face of it, Pound’s attack on ‘provincialism’, which
grew more explicit and energetic as a response to the causes and disasters of the
First World War, was aimed against what he considered to be at least three
interrelated manifestations: nationalist politics, monotheistic religion, and scholarly
education (especially the impact of German positivist philology in the humanities).
More broadly, when it comes to art itself, the teaching of literature included, he
warns: “The stupid or provincial judgement of art bases itself on the belief that
great art must be like the art that it has been reared to respect”.3 This “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”.4 Inversely, he adds: “The humanities rightly taught can but give
one more points of contact with other men”.5
It is against those forms of provincialism –nationalism, monotheism, and
scholarship of unconnected minutiae– that Pound urged the intensification of both
‘transfers’ and ‘differences’, giving the central role to translation itself. Since if
transportation of goods requires new roads, tunnels and the abolition of taxes, when
it comes to the privileged realm of the arts, literary transportation –let the
tautology be allowed– means translation, a privileged performance among the vast
series of intermingled circulations, communications and migrations required to
reverse provincialism and shape a new kind of civilisation. With his usual selfassurance, Pound states at thirty years’ distance:
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
2
E. Pound. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose. Contributions to Periodicals. vol. II, p. 231
[1917]. From now on EPPP.
3
EPPP, I: 203; 1913.
4
E. Pound. Literary Essays, p. 218; 1914.
5
EPPP, I: 107; 1912.
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interest from foreign literature.6
The large vol. of translations. Rub it in that EP has spent 30 years introducing the
BEST of one nation to another.7
Now, a first thing that remains crucial here, is that Pound regarded such a
translation task not solely or primarily as a transmission of information, a utilitarian
transfer of the plain meaning of texts (it is only the ‘bad’ translation of positivist
philology which does so, he thought, systematically negating the relation with the
behaviour of the foreign under its disguise of scientific ‘exactness’). He regarded
the task as a transfer of the poetic forms of meaning, of the stylistic behaviour of
the foreign language and literature, which is what assures the irruption of a strong
difference in the native.
Then, of no less importance, Pound’s ideal of civilisation as translation was
from the start grounded in what at first sight and for a certain Modernity appears to
be a paradox: an intensification of both the ‘transfers’ and the ‘differences’. He
warns:
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.8
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.9
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.10
It is against all forms of homogenization that the translator’s task, an operation
which must intensify both the transfers and the differences, must reverse not only
6
EPPP, III: 84; 1918; my emphasis.
E. Pound. Ezra Pound and James Laughlin, Selected Letters, p. 167; 1947.
8
EPPP, III: 11; 1918.
9
EPPP, III: 145; 1919.
10
EPPP, IX: 347; 1962.
7
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provincialism of space, including a stunted and standardizing cosmopolitanism, but
also provincialism of time, including the prophesying of the end of the mediations
of the historical.
i. 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 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
It is not to unlearn my language that I learn others… But I walk in
foreign gardens to gather flowers for my language.
–J. G. HERDER
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
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
Literary provincialism, Pound thought, represents not only an
irresponsibility towards one’s own language and literature, but also towards society
and culture as a whole. For it is through contact with the foreign that the language
through which a culture perceives and thinks, represents the real, is kept precise
and alive. In general terms, he starts: “Language, the medium of thought’s
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preservation, is constantly wearing out. It has been the function of poets to newmint the speech, to supply the vigorous terms for prose..., and poets may be ‘kept
on’ as conservators of the public speech”.11 It is amid this double task of the poet –
as ‘renovator’ of a worn-out language and ‘conservator’ of the living elements in
it– that translation reveals itself as the crucial performance.
To begin with, if the most basic task of literature would be to keep language
accurate, which implies everything from the use of the exact word to a mastery of
the poetic forms meaning, it is through translation that such a linguistic asepsis can
best be accomplished. Pound states:
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. There is no end to this discipline and the living mind
must find ever increasing stimulus in the practice.12
It is not only “that 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”.13 It is above all that the very act of comparing two languages –the
very task of finding le mot juste, the trouvaille, to render a foreign word, perception
or emotion– becomes an effective palliative against rhetoric and imprecision. Thus,
when it comes to Pound himself, one could examine how translating from a very
distant literatures –as from the clear-cut Chinese words he gets through Fenollosa’s
cribs in Cathay, for instance– toned down his early rhetoric, not to mention the way
it revolutionized the Modernist poetics of the Image.
Since the development of civilisation through translation, Pound thought,
demands not only that language be constantly cleansed, but also made new; that
besides rectifying the receiving language, translation also brings new expressive
possibilities, inseminating both new and old literatures at times of exhaustion or
crisis, expanding the possibilities of experience and representation, the world-view
itself. Pound warns:
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single
11
12
13
EPPP, I: 74; 1912.
EPPP, VII: 82; 1936; my emphasis.
E. Pound. Machine Art & Other Writings, p. 107.
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language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human
comprehension.14
Thus, for instance:
The Jap who appears to us vague in certain ideas is “vague” merely because his
categories cut in a different way. An individual with clear form categories may be
vague in colour. As an eastern rug maker will have colour categories finer than that
of a “great” European painter or “colourist.”15
If different languages express different comprehension of the real, are more or
less prepared for different degrees of representation according to their vocabularies,
categories and more complex poetic forms of meaning, it is above all in the
translation or poetry –in the attempt to transfer the poetic behaviour of language
which charges meaning and explores representation– that the enlargement of the
receiving language is accomplished. Pound distinguishes:
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.16
Poetic translation reveals as no other the latent possibilities of the mother tongue,
bringing features and shaping procedures which, if they first appear as part of a
‘language of translation’, are soon recognised as unexplored possibilities inherent
in one’s own literature, responding to and shaping new modes of meaning and
representation. Hence Pound’s further pontifications:
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.17
14
15
16
17
E. Pound. ABC of Reading.
E. Pound. Machine Art & Other Writings, p. 107.
EPPP, V: 310; 1931; my emphasis; original in italian.
EPPP, II: 19; 1915.
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What is being defended here is a collaboration across languages so that they share
and import from one another some of the peculiarities they lack, some of their
poetic forms of meaning as possibilities of representation, of perception and
thought.
Since, for all languages, one can postulate a ‘virtual’ correspondence with
another, i.e. a coincidence which is never attained as such, but is developed in
history by translation. Against the universalist Esperanto-inspired impetus which
attempts to suppress the babelish dispersion by appealing to an absolute language –
the grammar of human reason which underlies the chimera of positivist philological
translation–, Pound insists that the richness and stimulus of languages for one
another lies not in their similarity or uniformity, but in their retaining their
differences. He adds:
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.18
If these differences have value for reading, they have even greater value for
translation, inseminating the language that receives them. For besides expanding
the vocabulary, a much stronger and more important way in which translation
extends the borders of a language, and consequently the experience or
representation of its users, is by the importation of new poetic ways of signifying.
Pound states:
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.19
If grammar appears more resistant than vocabulary, opposes a greater obstacle to
18
19
EPPP, V: 251; 1930; original italian.
EPPP, VIII: 201-202; 1943. original italian.
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the translator, its transfer forces and transforms the receiving tongue to a much
higher degree, as can be seen in Pound’s own translations from Anglo-Saxon and
Chinese. But over and above grammar, it is the importation of the whole set of
poetic forms of meaning through which the speakers of different tongues have
managed to charge language and explore representation which holds out the greater
promise of linguistic revolution and expansion of the receiving tongue. For
regardless of whether the forms and rules developed in one language can be applied
literally to another, when a foreign or old poetic device is grafted into a language, it
is often able to achieve strong effects, making available a series of new ways of
signifying for society as a whole, liberating realms and possibilities for human
representation.
These revolutions are not hard to find and have often been both sudden and
lasting. It is enough to consider what has happened in the past hundred years with
the forms of meaning of ‘montage’, which, after they arose in Modernist and other
avant-garde literatures under the influence of the accentuation and linkage
strategies of Oriental poetics –especially of the ‘dynamic image’ techniques of
classical Chinese poetry–, they would soon go on not only to revolutionize poetic
language, as can be seen already in Pound’s own early Cantos or Eliot’s Waste
Land, but also our contemporary ways of representing space and metaphysical
topology, as well as conceiving time and history.
ii. 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
There is always this danger with an old yet virile culture–that it
may grow insular, parochial: translation is the best corrective for
such a tendency. 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,
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Où sont des morts les phrases familières,
L’art personnel, les âmes singulières?
–C. DAY LEWIS
Shifting from a synchronic to a diachronic perspective, from space to time,
one finds the same diagnosis of provincialism and the same solution of translation.
Pound begins: “Provincialism of time is as damned as provincialism of place.”
Accordingly, the task of the poet, even of the scholar, is to be “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”.20 The most effective way
of rescuing fine things from the past would not be the erudite presentation of
multitudinous detail, ultimately not even interpretation and criticism as such. As
with provincialism of space, it is translation that emerges as a performative means
to subvert the barriers between epochs, conferring in a same event new life on an
original poem, a dead author and a past age, recasting the present and announcing
the future.
If one starts at the level of the individual author, Pound often conceives of
inspiration as a communion between the living poet and the great masters of the
past: not so much as a possession by the gods or the muse, but by past men who
express themselves and find a new life through the poet in the present. He
summarises: “Besides knowing living artists I have come in touch with the tradition
of the dead”.21 Perhaps Pound’s most well-known strategy here is his shaping of
personae, which are not only masks to assist in the search for the self, but also
ways of transferring a revitalised past as a civilising force to shape the present. And
if these personae crystallise as a result of Pound’s ability to recreate the style or the
poetic meaning of a past poet through creative adaptations, all of his major
personae –“The Seafarer,” “Exile’s Letter” and the Homage to Sextus Propertius–
were forged through translation. Pound explains:
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.22
Now, if there can be objective encounters between past and present generations of
20
EPPP, II: 235; 1917.
EPPP, I: 147; 1913.
22
EPPP, I: 277-278; 1914.
21
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writers, these are often strengthened by analogous historical experience or strong
personal affinities and coincidences between the parties. Thus, in Pound’s own
versions, one can witness the twentieth century poet opposing the British empire
overlapping with the first century Propertius opposing the Roman empire. Or one
can see how the lament of the women in wartime in the China of the Tang period
can be overlaid with that of European women in the First World War. Later, even
when Pound starts to become aware of his own blind spots and aberrations,
referring to the versions of Confucius he worked on at the DTC in Pisa, he states: “I
do not know that I would have arrived at the centre of his meaning if I had not been
down under the collapse of a regime”.23 For when translation gives new life to a
dead author, it also acts as a privileged witness of an age.
Thus, if one broadens the perspective from the personal to the cultural,
translation is seen as a way of unfolding the past to shape the present and future of
culture. The translator who revitalises a literary work not only resurrects the
individual life of a dead author, but also renews the permanent elements of a past
ethos. There is a sort of boomerang effect or double gesture here: just as the revival
of the past trough translation informs the present, the past is completed from the
perspective of the present: “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”. 24 And the temporal tensions become even more
complex as the ‘future’ enters the game. For the unfolding of what has been
prefigures through the vortex of the present what could and should be: “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”.25 It is not abstract ideas, then, but ideas in linguistic behaviour,
style, which carries the secret of cultural and historic revolution.
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
23
E. Pound. Selected Prose, p. 16.
E. Pound. Guide to Kulchur, p. 19.
25
EPPP, V: 193; 1929.
24
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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
specialised function of language, so translation is a specialised
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
As one moves to Pound’s linguistic principles, a first sight, his conception of
translation could not seem to be more conventional: “Does not give A DAMN, so
long as the meaning gets across”. But, as it happens, what Pound understands by
‘meaning’ is completely different from what had been understood by the tradition,
from classical rhetoric to modern philology. For he does not posit a dualism
between sense and form, between spirit and letter (classical dichotomies in the
theory and practice of translation), but proposes a holistic conception where
semantics cannot be separated from stylistics, what the language says from what
the language does. As he summarizes: “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’”.
In principle, Pound’s ideas about language per se appear as those of a realist:
he holds the common-sense view that there is an autonomous reality ‘out there’ –
however impalpable and full of mysteries it might be– which words ‘refer to’ and
‘represent’. But to this idea of referential conventional signification, Pound adds
that “Literature is language charged with meaning”, and “Great literature is simply
language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”.26 That is, literature
is not merely a lexical denotation (‘plain meaning’, in Pound’s terminology), but
lexical denotation to which something else has been ‘added’. And it is this ‘plus’,
this ‘extra charge’ that becomes extreme in the poetic uses of language, which
determines Pound’s whole position as a literary translator.
He summarizes in his well-known technical categories:
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
26
E. Pound. ABC of Reading; my emphasis.
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words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes account in a 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.27
Melopoeia includes all those musical forms of meaning superimposed upon the
plain sense that are activated mainly when the poem is read aloud, or by an inner
voice; thus the rhythm, for example, or assonance, consonance, alliteration, rhyme,
vowel modulations, onomatopoeia, the iconic value of sounds, etc. Phanopoeia, in
its turn, refers to the poet’s imagery, ranging from simple images (that is, a refined
objectivity placed before the visual imagination) to complex ones, among which
one can further distinguish between those that are static or discrete (such as
metaphor and other classical tropes, where the displacement is contained, running
from a literal sense to a figurative one), and dynamic, open images (such as the
more complex imagery of Chinese classical poetry, for example, which sets up a
permanent process, a mental vibration without any fixed ending, just as some forms
of modern montage). Lastly, logopoeia encompasses all those effects of language
that draw on the reader’s context, especially the way literary and cultural
conventions leave their mark on linguistic usages, as happens with the semantic
charge of connotation, allusion, irony, puns, double meanings, etc.
Now, if the meaning of a poem as a whole consists of denotation further
charged by melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia, a faultless translation would
have to bring across the intertwined lexical and grammatical, phonetic and musical,
imagistic and contextual aspects of a poem in such a way as to achieve a version
which would have no variant from the original. In other words, we would fall into
the tautological task of Borges’ “Pierre Menard”: to translate a text would entail
repeating exactly the same text (and even then, the new context might betray the
original’s meaning).
Pound had no such illusions. In fact, he was aware that already at the level of
the plain or denotative meaning the translator encounters unsurpassable obstacles, a
priori difficulties, as when it comes to proper names, for instance, which in a
foreign language might refer to more than one thing at a time. Pound jokes about
the problem: “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
27
EPPP, V: 114; 1929.
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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”.
Moreover, as one moves from the possibility of transferring the plain
meaning –where still, broadly speaking, one could remain relatively optimistic– to
the possibility of translating the poetic ‘plus’, things become much less promising.
Pound summarises:
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.28
Beyond these individual difficulties, if one considers that when it comes to an
actual poem the constituent ingredients of its total meaning –pertaining to
denotation, melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia– are not found in isolation, but
intertwined in complex arrangements, one begins to appreciate the old cliché that
poetry is ‘untranslatable’; Pound himself states: “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”.29 In less radical terms, however, he
explains: “Any poem worth translating is worth translating in THIRTY or more
ways”.30
To begin to understand how Pound thinks the untranslatable is to be
translated, then, one needs to be aware that any poem worth translating is worth
translating in different ways depending on which element of the original is to be
privileged from the start, considering the difference between the languages
involved, as well as what one is capable of experiencing at a particular time in
history. Pound specifies: “There must be of course a plain literal version
28
29
30
EPPP, V: 114; 1929.
EPPP, V: 134; 1929; my emphasis.
E. Pound. Letter to J. Laughlin, 1949.
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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”.31
Take just two lines from the troubadour Arnaut Daniel; the original
Provençal canso starts:
En breu brisaral temps braus
Eill bisa busina els brancs
One can provide a crib translating only the plain meaning. Thus, commanded by
word-syntax equivalence, Pound translates amid his studies in The Spirit of
Romance:
Soon will the harsh time break upon us / the north wind hoot in the branches.
Or one might privilege from the start the most obvious and strongest poetic value,
the melopoeic effect that charges the meaning: the verbal music of the labial
alliterations that imposes in its sound iconicity a material sensation of the menacing
weather. Thus, in his complete versions from Daniel, Pound also translates (my
emphases):
Briefly bursteth season brisk,
Blasty north breeze racketh branch
Or one might privilege the impact of the images, with its implied parallelism, in
what would make us suppose a sort of Chinese original:
Black sky
North wind
breaks upon us
hoots amid branches.
Finally, one might even paraphrase the self-conscious ironic gesture of Daniel’s
winter incipit, which plays against the conventions of the spring opening of the
traditional love song (just as Eliot does in the beginning of the Waste Land).
Privileging logopoeia, then, one gets:
Another spring-opening? No please!
Let us sing of stormy weather.
31
EPPP, VII: 475; 1939.
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All these versions are partial (some quite bad). But their multiplication in time
forms a textual body which approaches asymptotically the transfer of the whole
meaning of the original into a new language, the demands of the complex
behaviour of the foreign in the realm of the native.
Now, the fact that multiple translations of a poem can be made does not
mean they are all equally good or valid. What finally matters for a good version is
that the translator is able to grasp not only what the language of the original ‘says’,
but also and especially the several things it ‘does’, and find a way to do the same in
the receiving tongue. The process is arduous and risky. For “it is not that one
language cannot be made to do what another has done, but that it is not always
expeditious to approach the same goal by the same alley”. In other words, literary
fidelity means trying to reproduce not the absolute facticity of the original (Pierre
Menard’s utopia), but the type of poetic system that allows such a facticity to take
place. And to do this it is necessary to start by taking the most important element
and then trying to get in as much of the rest as possible.
Pound’s way of proceeding becomes clearer if one considers certain
analogies used by him to comprehend poetical translation, of which there are at
least two that are recurrent: 1. a revealing photograph of one side of a sculpture, 2.
solving a complex equation.
Take the first. For Pound thinks that poetic translation is like a photograph of
a sculpture in that while it is able to capture one side accurately, and even reveal to
the initiate certain details of that side that have never been seen before in the
original, the others remain concealed. Thus, what the good translator needs to do is
to look for the best angle, that is, the angle which allows the largest amount of the
original to be encompassed by a single shot; the angle, so to speak, that best
captures the character of the original.
On the other hand, if one plays the game imposed by Pound’s metaphor of
the equation in the light of his conception of the poem’s meaning, one can say that
among its variables one must count the denotative meaning as well as the series of
poetic devices belonging to melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia combined in
various relations. All these variables might concur, be found together, forming an
incredibly complex equation, although this is almost never the case; Pound warns:
“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”.32 Thus, the
first thing the translator must find out is which variables have more specific weight:
let us say the rhyme or ‘vocalic modulations’ amid the troubadour’s sound
32
EPPP, IV: 124; 1920.
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defensive technique, or the dynamic images in Chinese poetry responding to an
immanent and correlative world-view, or Propertius’ irony embodying his
resistance to the Augustan imperial ethos. Consequently, he will devise an ad hoc
strategy of resolution, privileging the chosen variable (as a constant), and, if
necessary, converting or dropping some of the other charges. As Pound concludes:
“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”.33
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
If Pound is the Western writer who succeeded in introducing the greatest
changes into English poetry in the early twentieth century, who made it more
porous to the behaviours of foreign languages, triggering a revolution that altered
literature permanently, this was due to his technical and stylistic penetration and
mastery developed by a constant effort of translation, where the most basic aim of
his first sustained translation project was a conscious and differential study of poets
he considered to be the masters of melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia.
i. Translating the masters of melopoeia: bringing over the vowels of love 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
When a poem not only contains verbal music, which is almost always the
case, but its sense is charged by predominantly musical forms of meaning, its
33
Letter to F. M. Ford, 1920.
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translation into another tongue, in Pound’s view, should proceed in much the same
way as musical interpretation was taught in the pre-Romantic era, that is, as an
interpretation based on a basso continuo, a harmonic structure, not on a detailed
score. He explains:
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. 34
Just like the old performers, a translator who gives the priority to melopoeia should
not proceed by trying to reproduce mechanically every detail of the sound of the
original understood as a full score, but should discover the basic musical structure –
the basso continuo of the poem, so to speak– and then transfer it, adding details
with the interpretive possibilities provided by his own tongue. The translator will
most probably favour some structural device –rhythm, rhyme, alliterative patterns,
vowel or consonant progressions, etc.– where the morphology of the meaning of a
line, passage or whole poem depends more evidently on a musical strategy. And
then, when the time comes to complete the score, he will leave aside details of the
original which do not integrate into a unified effect and add some details of his own
improvisation.
Take an anonymous troubadour alba of the eleventh century. Listen first to
the original:
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.
34
EPPP, II: 236; 1917; my emphasis.
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Now listen to Pound’s version:
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.”
This is indeed one of those miracles where melopoeia –beginning with rhythm and
rhyme modulation– does translate, and for more than half a line at the time. But one
could add that this would be no more than a feat of technical prowess if Pound were
not thereby responding to the precise ways the troubadour’s world view and
emotion are embodied in their unparalleled development of these poetic forms of
verbal music.
Let us see.
To begin with, one must be aware that Provençal albas constitute a classical
troubadour genre defined by its subject-matter: a secret and concerted encounter
between two lovers who enjoy a night of ecstatic love-making while a watchman,
normally a friend of the male lover, keeps guard and awakens them when the day is
coming, so that they are not discovered, the whole scene ending in suspense (at the
end of some other albas one finds the lovers lamenting that the night has been too
short, cursing the sun or addressing some insults to the friend who has helped them,
before resigning themselves to separation). In this sense, the alba constitutes a
dramatic progression, an objective presentation of changing events towards the
menacing appearance of ‘dawn’, which was an established symbol of the coming of
Christ and the Christian orthodox message, just as one finds it in the albas of the
Church fathers.
In other words, what is finally decisive is that this dramatic progression
based on the confrontation of night and day becomes, in the context of the precise
way of conceiving the world and organising reality which constitutes the Medieval
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worldview, the arena in which a series of explicit and implicit oppositions are
staged. To begin with, that between the trinity lady/lover/watchman, associated
with night, and the trinity husband/gelos/lauzengiers, associated with day. This
confrontation, which is also the never enacted but always potential one between
adultery and discovery, embodies in its turn a more general opposition between two
worlds of values: that of the sensualist naturalist philosophy of the gai saber of the
troubadours, on the one hand, and that of Christian orthodoxy, on the other, which
was to finally destroy the troubadour’s ethos during the first Crusade. As Pound
puts it:
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 make
their revelations to those who are already expert.35
Now, if one returns to the tiny alba with this clarifications in mind, one can
see that for the musicality of its diction and the dramatism of its vocalic contrasts
this anonymous poem might be considered not only the most delicate of the
nineteen Provençal albas preserved, but also among the masterpieces of Medieval
poetry as a whole, summing up in its system of musical contrasts this whole
opposition between two world views.
Already the plain meaning of its words includes all the demands of the genre
in a compression difficult to surpass; literally, it runs:
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.”
The poetic quality of “Quan lo rossinhols escria” is already revealed by the
precision with which its very dense syntactic arrangement embodies the whole
alba’s dramatic sequence, in a compression that includes all the demands of the
genre and many motifs of the Provençal poetic cult at its height: the nightingale’s
35
E. Pound. Spirit of Romance.
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song, the nature setting, the lovers, the watchman and the reference to light. The
poem is sculpted from a single sentence, the thoughts all organised within a unique
gesture of calculated proportions: the main phrase is followed by a temporal one,
which precedes the appearance of the imperative and explicative phrases of the
culminating moment. We thus witness how it is in the dramatization of the passage
of ‘time’, symbolised in the night and day succession, that all this system of
oppositions and inversions of values is summarised and receives its ultimate
dramatic force. The lovers are the enemies of time and Dawn: they seek to live in
an eternal nocturnal bliss (a sort of pleasure principle) which is suddenly
interrupted by the hated Dawn of which the watchman reminds them (a sort of
reality principle).
But of course, this is not all. The main reason why one can present this small
anonymous original as a ‘luminous detail’ embodying the whole troubadour
worldview and Pound’s version of the same as one of his divine accidents
translating melopoeia, is that they both transform the whole system of explicit and
implicit oppositions characterising the genre into an aural sensitive experience. For
if Pound is neither literal nor reproduces the same metrical or rhyming pattern of
the Provençal (not even masculine and feminine endings), he does create the same
overall musical effect. First of all, by a powerful rhythmic variation, especially in
the last lines, to emphasise the sudden announcement of the day and the necessity
for the lovers to wake and separate. Then, and above all, by an opposition between
‘light’ and ‘dark’ vowels, which in the original are contrasted inside many of the
lines themselves, but also, and more importantly, in the rhyming progression,
dramatizing through sound iconicity both the explicit motif of the night and day
contrast and the implicit system of oppositions which it embodies in the
troubadours’ world-view.
Witness now the original and Pound’s version with some of their melopoeic
features emphasised:
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
When the nightingale to his mate
Sings day-long and night late
My love and I keep state
In bower,
In flower,
escria: [/] “Drutz, al levar!
qu’ieu vey l’alba [/] e-l jorn clar.”
‘Till the watchman on the tower
Cry:
“Up, Thou rascal, Rise
I see the white
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Light
And the night
Flies.”
Besides the changes in rhythm, one can thus grasp the open-closed-open sound
demarcation which intermingles with the narrative of the poem. In what concerns
the original, as the day closes into night (end of line 2), the open timbre (‘ia’)
closes; the lovers are together in joy during the dark night of ‘o’s (lines 4-5), and
finally, at the precise moment that the watchman announces the coming of the day
(line 6), the sounds open again (‘ia’/ ‘ar’). In what concerns Pound’s version, it is
these iconic suggestions of the vowel progression and rhythmic variation that it
chooses to concentrate on. Thus, the Provençal ‘ia’ (lines 1-3) –an open sound
which beside the day iconicity suggests the cry of the nightingale– is replaced by
the English ‘eit’; the ‘or’ of the original (lines 4-5) –a closed ‘o’ reverberated in ‘r’
(“Tro la gaita de la tor”)– finds an equivalent in Pound’s opaque ‘ower’, where the
sound closes from ‘o’ to ‘u’ with the same ‘r’ reverberation; the final ‘ar’ (lines 67) –an open ‘a’ reverberating– finds an English replacement in the series ‘ai’ (cry),
‘aiz’ (Rise, Flies) and ‘ait’ (white, Light, night). The overall timing of the three
movements is also equivalent, for what Pound has done in the last part of the poem
is to indent some of the lines in the places where the irregular internal rhymes break
the rhythm (marked in the original by [/]). Here Pound emphasises the rhythmic
punctuations and pattern, imposing on the reader the tempo and pauses he must
respect, also compensating for the absence of the tune, which would have certainly
emphasised the rhythmic stress at the climactic moment, when the watchman cries,
as the irregularity of the final internal rhymes and assonance makes clear.
Beyond and sometimes subsidiary to the overall reproduction of the rhyme
progression of contrasting vowels, Pound also grasps a series of other delicate
sound echoes in the original and adds some of his own récolte. His assonance
between ‘day’ (line 2) and ‘mate’/‘late’, for instance, is placed exactly where the
original has one between ‘par’ and ‘escria’/‘dia’; his ‘Light’ echoes ‘late’ as the
original ‘clar’ echoes ‘dia’. One can further notice the ‘i’ sound repetition
throughout the first three lines; or the echo between nightingale, night late and,
slightly less perceptible, day-long, all rendering the ‘l’ sound omnipresent in the
original; or the very effective use of the monosyllable ‘cry’, which brings the same
surprise emphasised by rhyme as the Provençal ‘escria’, catching up with the ‘i’
sound of the beginning as ‘escria’ itself catches up with the first rhyme sound ‘ia’;
finally, how Pound’s closing ‘z’ sound, contrasting with the ‘t’s of the last rhymes,
makes the poem end in suspense, neither too open nor too closed, the phonic
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feeling once more echoing the thematic incertitude. Perhaps the only major absence
in the English version is that while in Provençal the third rhyming sound results
from a blending of the previous two –the ‘ia’ intermingles with ‘or’ to give ‘ar’–
something which brings its own suggestions for the sexual scene of the alba, it is
difficult to extract a blending from ‘eit’ though ‘ower’ to ‘ai/ais/ait’ (except
perhaps, in the way the ‘a’ of ‘tower’ plus ‘eit’ gives ‘ait’). But yes, we are now
asking the impossible from the translator.
This tiny alba of Pound’s constitutes one of those miracles in poetic
translation where, beyond keeping the plain meaning and elaborating on some of
the logopoeic connotations of the vocabulary by clever trouvailles, melopoeia
‘does’ translate, and for more than half a line at a time. Without attempting to
preserve rhyme or other sounds literally, but grasping the overall musical
progression, faithful only to the ‘character’ and overall ‘effect’ of the melopoeia of
the original amid the conventions of his own language, Pound shapes a poem which
flows effortlessly, elaborating on the complex rhythm and the single syntactic
gesture of the original. In the end, what matters though is that, as in the Provençal
poem, Pound’s confrontation of dark and clear timbres stimulates the perception of
the conflict between night, the time for love, and day, the time for separation,
which in its turn embodies the whole system of implicit oppositions of the
troubadour ethos as staged in the alba genre, the resistance of the naturalistic
philosophy of the gai saber to the ideology of light which was to triumph in the
gothic church.
More broadly, one can realise that, after a long period of neglect, Pound was
able to appreciate what the troubadours had been trying to do and had in fact
succeeded in doing with language: the ways in which their extremely sophisticated
forms of poetic meaning –particularly their almost mysticism of rhyme– generated
an acoustic dramatization and tension that paralleled their amorous and ideological
tensions. And to the extent that he was able to host these ways of signifying in his
translations, he was to give them permanent citizenship in the English language.
Take an extraordinary line from the Cantos that has seduced generations of
readers:
In the gloom the gold gathers the light against it
The modulation of the vowels, from closed to open, from darker to lighter –
u/o/a/e/i: “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it”– is something
Pound’s English takes from the Provençal troubadours, as we just saw in the alba
that moved from darkness to light. Superimposed upon this modulation, in turn, is a
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quantitative accent that prolongs these same vowels –“In the glôom, the gôld
gâthers the light agâinst it”–, something that Pound recreates from classical poetry.
Nor is that all, for even in this one line he superimposes a structural alliteration and
consonance – “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it” –, thereby hosting
a feature of ancient Germanic, and more specifically Anglo-Saxon, poetry, which in
this case give it its staccato rhythm and isolates individual images that interact
effectively. For the truth is that, in prosodic terms, no single system can account for
a given passage of The Cantos. If Pound’s ear has been considered the most
inventive in modern English literature it is because he was able to graft and
integrate into a complex and synthetic voice the different sound devices and
metrical systems he worked on through translation, not to mention his work in the
realm of poetic images.
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
In the course of his early work as a translator, Pound soon realised that
rescuing the music of past verse did not account for the whole of new poetic
possibilities in the present; more precisely, that the lyric poetry of the Western
Middle Ages by no means offered the only productive rhyme with the
contemporary, the only way to bring asepsis and insemination to the English
language, as well as criticism by the afterlife of the past. If by 1912 he could
already affirm that “Imagism is concerned solely with language and presentation”,
by the time one gets to Vorticism, Pound had displaced his attention from
melopoeia to phanopoeia, revolutionising the conception of the Image after his
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encounter with oriental verse. That is, if Pound’s novel conception of the poetic
Image appears as a juxtapository technique with a dynamic effect, completely at
odds with the substitutive forms of Western metaphorical figuration, it is because it
was shaped under the impact and insemination by Chinese and Japanese poetics. As
he put it:
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.36
As on other occasions, the way of achieving such a precise knowledge of this
poetic forms of meaning pertaining to phanopoeia, especially of getting acquainted
with an imagistic technique that escapes the duality and substitution of Western
figuration, was through translation itself.
On the face of it, Pound’s privileging of the image-patterns in Cathay
accounts not only for the most important values of the selected originals, but for the
only ones he could in fact access and render in any systematic way from
Fenollosa’s notebooks. Pound could not and does not translate the melopoeia of the
originals (not the rhyme, nor the tonal rhythms, nor the metrics, nor the staccato
acoustic sense of the Chinese language), but introduces his own free-verse rhythms
in such a way as to isolate images so that they interact effectively. Nor does he
translate the logopoeia—the connotations of the characters, which in a
monosyllabic language like Chinese are rich in homophonies, or the allusive force
of the poems, which depend on a cultural baggage very different to that of the
West.
Now, that despite the indirect access to the Chinese originals, and the almost
exclusive focus on phanopoeia, Pound was able to translate with a certain
awareness of the metaphysical bearing of Chinese images was due above all to the
guidance provided by Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry.” More precisely, to at least three main general insights articulated in the
essay that had a decisive impact on Pound’s way of rendering the Chinese poetic
language. In the first place, the idea that Chinese poetry is superior to Western ones
in what concerns visual objectivisation due to the characteristics of its writing
system (which is due to anything from the pictographic suggestion of some simple
characters to the image isolation by discontinuous syntax, especially in regulated
verse). Secondly, the idea that Chinese system of representation in writing presents
36
EPPP, V: 115; 1929.
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things in nature as ‘actions’ or ‘processes’, not as state or essence (which is due to
anything from the images energised by verb-like characters to the properties of
transitive phrases and the dynamic effect of the imagistic arrangements themselves,
which impose a synthesis as vibratory process, not as a discrete movement, as
metaphor does). Lastly, in the third place, the idea that these ‘seen’ natural actions
or processes staged in writing are further used and combined to present what is
‘unseen’: thoughts and correlations (which is due to the Chinese classical worldview solidary and in fact synthesised by this unrivalled development of dynamic
images, including the broad juxtapositions between the subjective and the
objective, all of which is part of a conception of literature, wen, as an entelechy of
the cosmic correlations, something that can be observed in both the Taoist and
Confucian classical traditions).
For even if conceptions over time have been far from monolithic, Chinese
poetics has interrogated ‘dynamic images’ with a different set of questions to the
ones applied in the West to ‘metaphor’, i.e. with questions about process and
correlation (especially pairing) in the context of an immanent metaphysics where
man is part of and accounts for a self-generated cosmos, not about mimesis
(knowledge as similarity and analogy) in the context of a dualistic ontology where,
just as the natural is surpassed in the transcendent, the literal is superseded by the
figurative. In other words, if Chinese cosmology dramatizes the view of a paired
and correlated nature, the epistemology and the poetics of this world-view is based
precisely on these correlative structures and counterparts. Instead of the essences
and attributes, genera and species through which Aristotle understands and
structures the performance of Western metaphor, what we have here are
interdependent parts and phenomena which are often grasped as a process of
correlations.
It is only by taking account of this epistemological and metaphysical basis,
then, that one can understand why, considerations of poetic technique aside, it was
so important to give the priority to images when translating Chinese classical
poetry. For the fact is that just as the troubadours’ dramatization of sounds
embodied the joi in the world view of the gai saber, dynamic images reflect the
predominant Chinese world view embodied in the poetry of the Tang period, the
cosmic correlations which constitute the cosmos, including those between the
objective and the subjective, nature and man. As Pound puts it:
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
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sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things.37
Thus, for instance, in what constitutes the broader dynamic arrangement of Chinese
poetry, one finds an interplay between objective perception and emotional
response: on the one hand, one encounters spans of imagistic lines, which tend to
emphasise the objective, showing a preference for discontinuous grammar,
parallelism and juxtaposition; on the other hand, corresponding to then, one finds
spans of propositional language, which tend to emphasise the subjective, using a
more continuous grammar that indicates relations between parts. But what finally
matters is their broader correlation, i.e. the ways these modes of objective
perception and emotional response, which constitute the very basis of Chinese
poetics, interact, the ways the manifest, articulated expression of emotions plays
against the objective images ‘witnessed’ by the visual imagination to ignite broad
dynamic resonances.
Witness first the way Pound understands and stages such a juxtaposition
between objective presentation and subjective reaction in an archaic non-regulated
poem, the third of the Nineteen Old Poems:
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.
The poem confronts us with a classical Chinese literary subject: the
abandoned woman. In this case, an ex-concubine now married to a more common
man who often leaves her alone, maybe by going off to war, searching for a
position or simply becoming a drunkard, as Pound interprets it. (The original is less
precise in this respect than Fenollosa’s crib; the Chinese word which qualifies the
37
EPPP, III: 110; 1918.
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man –t’ang– is normally rendered as ‘wandering’ or ‘vagrant’, rather than as the
more limited ‘dissipated’).
A common characteristic of the Nineteen Old Poems to be observed in the
original for “The Beautiful Toilet” is its construction through a series of repetitions
and variations of formulaic expressions which build towards a climax (and which
attest, among other things, to its lost musical accompaniment). These syntactic and
rhythmic repetitions/variations, which can be clearly observed in the first part of
this poem, further define a strong imagistic progression. For the images of the first
six lines (five in Pound’s version), all constructed upon a strong and emphatic
adjective repetition at the beginning of the line, builds towards a climactic moment
by closing the focus upon the objective scene. Thus, the first two lines, using the
old stimulus technique, view the scene from a distance, providing a general
establishing shot (river bank grasses, willows in the garden); Pound translates:
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
The next lines zoom in closer and closer (the lady moving, her face on the door or
window):
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Finally, we get to the climactic moment, when the attention is focused solely on the
gesture of her thin hand; cutting a line of the original, Pound translates:
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;
But at this precise climactic point, the enchantment of the succession of cinematic
shots is broken, and a propositional-subjective mode of presentation comes in to
explain the overall scene from a completely different perspective, modifying the
sense of the previous images and redefining the overall perception of the poem.
Pound translates (my italics):
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.
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It is the general correlation between a moment of objective-imagistic and one of
subjective-propositional presentation that Pound’s version grasp and transfers
masterfully, then, accentuating it, among others, by a strong rhythmic shift and by
spacing out the poem into two parts. More precisely, he achieves a strong
contraposition between the hesitant rhythms and strong accents of the first moment,
which isolate images while the reduplications or the original are sometimes woven
into the lines (“And the willows have overfilled the close garden,” “Slender, she
puts forth a slender hand”), and the flat pace of the second moment, which stresses
its tone of direct statement and straightforward explanation (“And she was a
courtesan in the old days / And she has married a sot”). Among other effects that
emerge from this dynamic arrangement, he is thus able to make us feel how the
aura of the lady’s beauty, which we had been led to admire by the closing objective
focus of the images as well as by the hesitant rhythms marking each of her body
parts, is suddenly subverted by the straightforward and abrupt subjective
description of her real situation.
Now, as one moves from old Chinese poetry to that of Tang times, the great
technical development and phanopoeic invention of the age is to be found in the
chin t’i shih or ‘new style poetry’, and more precisely, in its basic form: the lu-shih
or ‘regulated octet’, which includes a quite complex set of correlations at various
levels.38
Pound translates several of Li Po’s lushi amid the “Four Poems of
Departure” in Cathay. A good example, both of Li Po’s experimentation, staging
the juxtaposition between the objective-imagistic and the subjective-propositional
through novel arrangements, and of Pound’s success as a translator of the same, is
to be found in the middle poem of the series (my italics):
38
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
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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.39
39
Fenollosa’s crib gives:
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
ground
At this place we have for once to separate
make
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]
mind
His (or your) mind may be that of a floating cloudlike wanderer
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)
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Li Po’s original lu-shih, written while in his late thirties, is not only one of
his most successful poems in any form, but also a radical example of the universal
direction he is able to give his poems of departure. We witness here a separation
scene in a crepuscular landscape outside the city, amid which two friends –one of
them the poet himself– profit from their last moments together before the final
good-bye and leave on horseback. And while this general setting already allows the
reader to identify himself with the scene, the fine juxtaposition of the observed
natural images arouses feelings of sadness and loss, of the apprehension and
anxiety of the occasion caught, feelings which are never stated literally, but
embodied in these kinds of ‘objective correlatives’ –‘winding river’, ‘dead grass’,
‘floating wide cloud’, ‘sunset’, ‘neighing horses’, etc.– which are as appealing to a
Western as to a Chinese reader, bringing with them a series of rich echoes from
their respective cultures and literary traditions.
It is above all the silent correspondence between the natural scene and the
human emotions that Pound’s version captures well, his succession of images
inciting the reader’s visual imagination so that the unsaid becomes heard and the
invisible staged. True: Pound’s ‘images’ were all there in Li Po’s original, the
translator here bringing across precisely what does translate from one language to
another. But besides the intrinsic qualities of his version as an English poem, Pound
deserves credit not only for placing the simple images in emphatic positions –
giving them prominence by syntax, especially at the extremities of the lines, so that
they interact with each other effectively–, but also for understanding and
reconstructing the inventive and sophisticated overall arrangement through which
Li Po generates the correlations between the objective and the subjective that
dynamise this irregular lu-shih.
As so often, the first clue had come to Pound from Fenollosa, who in his
introductory note to the crib explains:
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.
Sho
sho
separating
horse
neigh
onomatopoeia for
solitary horse neighing
(We men have so decided) and yet our very horses, separating, neigh sho, sho
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After noticing Li Po’s sparse use of the regulated octet, Fenollosa stresses the fact
that in a normal lu-shih the two middle couplets observe strict verbal parallelism,
whereas in this poem we find an unorthodox arrangement consisting of two
successive alternations between parallel and non-parallel couplets. The result is a
poem formed of two symmetrical parts of two couplets each, which construct a
broader kind of structural parallelism than the one between the lines themselves.
Alerted by Fenollosa’s indications, Pound manages not only to reproduce the
general architecture, but also emphasises its two symmetrical parts by critically
spacing them out. More importantly, he assures the overall dynamic effect of this
irregular lu-shih by following and stressing Li Po’s original pattern of linguistic and
perceptual shifts.
Thus, in the first couplet, which in literal terms provides a sort of
establishing shot of the ‘landscape’ (mountain/river) for the departure –the vast
mountains in the distance and the winding river extending beyond the familiar
boundaries of the city, all at a late hour–, Pound discards the propositional language
of Fenollosa’s paraphrases and sticks to the compressed syntax of the crib –which
presents a strict parallelism of the form colour-adjective/ landscape-noun/ verb/
adjective of direction/ city-noun– achieving a visual feeling of parallelism and even
dropping the verbs to make the natural images stand as single perceptions:
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
The vibratory quality of these initial lines is strengthened by the strong
adjectivation of the two landscape images emphasised in initial line positions. As
Fenollosa’s note explains, whereas the pairing ‘mountain/river’ is a commonplace,
‘blue mountain’ against ‘white river’ is not. On the face of it, the two images
suggest we are at the end of the day –an implication which announces the idea of
departure–, when the mountains look blue in the distance and the river becomes
silvery white, reflecting the sunshine. Moreover, by their unexpected chromatism
and further juxtaposition, these images make the couplet more vibrating, raising its
imagistic potential to a high degree of intensity.
It is in sharp contrast to this first imagistic climax shaped through natural
perceptions that the second couplet shifts to a subjective-propositional mode of
presentation:
Here we must make separation
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And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
One notices how precise Pound is in following Li Po’s sharp turn at the very
beginning of the third line, this time not following the crib literally, which in
English would have preserved a certain objective touch (“in this ground, separation
at once”), but using instead a grammatical marker of place (‘here’) and adding the
personal pronoun (‘we’) followed by the sharp modal verb ‘must’, all of which
imposes a clear subjective-propositional point of view, carried through the next
line. The actual separation of the friends is thus literally announced through a direct
address to the poet’s friend in two lines with a continuous syntax further joined by
Pound’s introduction of the connective ‘and’. The image which concludes the
fourth line –‘a thousand miles of dead grass’– while no longer an objective and
atemporal apparition, but one subjectively determined as a possible future, vibrates
against both the natural setting of the first couplet, adding similar overtones of loss
and death, and the return of a series of natural images with increased emotional
overtones in the couplet which immediately follows.
As noted already, the second part of the poem duplicates the structure of the
first, once more shifting from objective-imagistic to subjective-propositional
language, although this time we find in each of the individual couplets, from their
contrasting forms of presentation, a literal interweaving of natural elements with
human attitudes and emotions:
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.
Pound’s rendering of the third of Li Po’s couplets (one of the most famous in all
Chinese poetry and a locus classicus of Chinese criticism), although it achieves a
general imagistic compression by following the crib closely, is perhaps the one
place where more might have been expected from the translator. The problem is not
with Pound’s inversion of the order of the images in the fifth line, since even if this
destroys the categorical parallelism of the original, due to the facility with which
alternative functions can be assigned to nouns as subjects or objects in Chinese
syntax, is still able to retain a strong sense of syntactic and visual parallelism,
achieving in fact an ‘inverted parallelism’ where the multiple horizontal and
vertical echoes between the four main images linked together in two main pairings
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–‘floating cloud’ vibrating against ‘sunset’ and ‘wanderer’s mind’ vibrating against
‘old friend’s departure’– could have been kept intact. The fact, however, is they are
not, and this due to Pound’s closure of their dynamic play by introducing the word
‘like’, which reduces the multiplicity of potential echoes to a couple of ‘similes’,
repressing the dynamism of the complex image by the substitutive logic of
metaphor. For Li Po’s lack of comparison words is motivated by the aim of
achieving not only the linguistic compression characteristic of parallel couplets,
but, above all, a strong juxtaposition between the natural and human images
involved in the lines so as to make them vibrate against one another, setting out a
process of similarity and difference which charges the meaning of the poem beyond
both the literal sense of the images which conform the physical setting and their
conventional emotional associations. The important thing to realise is that amid the
horizontal and vertical echoes between the four juxtaposed images of Li Po’s third
couplet, there is no definite substitution.
Pound is much more successful in capturing the interplay between the
natural and the human in the last two lines of his version, corresponding to the
closing subjective-propositional couplet of the original. Wang Qi comments about
the original: “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?”. Amid this final
silent communion of the two parting friends at a loss as to how to express their
feelings, the horses take their place, Pound’s final couplet rendering well this
superior form of cosmic correspondence between nature (animal) and human
emotions.
If “Taking Leave of a Friend” is one among the best ‘translations’ in the
“Four Poems of Departure” in Cathay, it is also one which helps us understand
Pound’s plea that phanopoeia ‘does’ come across from one language to another.
For, despite minor changes, Pound’s version not only works as an English ‘poem’
in its own right, but also brings across what was almost ‘literally’ there in the
original. Both in the simple images –mountains, walls, river, cloud, sunset, horses,
etc.– and in the general arrangement into couplets which juxtaposes the objective
and the subjective –the imagistic and the propositional, parallelism and nonparallelism, each line and couplet working as contained units interacting with the
whole in a dynamic network– Pound is basically calquing on the original as
received from Fenollosa’s crib, thus revolutionising the conception of the Image for
Western poetics.
For Pound’s Cathay was perceived at the time as a meteorite. First of all,
because of the expressive capacity of the new forms of dynamic and correlative
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imagery translated, which were to be the decisive factor in the subsequent
development of the great literary montage in the mature Modernist poetics. Indeed,
they were these unprepared shifts between perspective of experience, between
objective and subjective presentation reflected in different uses of language to build
dynamic effects between individual elements the pertinence of which is only
progressively revealed, which were to govern important moments of the method of
montage of Modernist writers. More broadly, if the correlative forms of the
dynamic imagery produce a synthesis of the real which, far from spoiling the
natural situation concerned by replacing it with a spiritual meaning, actually
generate a series of vibratory echoes among the elements of a cosmos conceived as
a horizontal, correlative process, these forms would provide a way out from the
inertia of the ontological dualism that is bound up with metaphorical substitution,
generating meaning as a ‘process’ of horizontal correlation rather than as the
‘movement’ of hierarchical substitution.
In the second place, Cathay was felt as meteoric because it wrought a
remarkable and far-reaching rhetorical asepsis, cleansing English of the
rhetorisation of the dominant aestheticism, generating a kind of pared-down
language that delivered every one of its simple words as though they were hard,
cleanly cut objects from a new world. In the face of it, this crystalline,
straightforward and colloquial diction responds to the Chinese originals via the
‘plainness’ of Fenollosa’s cribs and paraphrases, further embodying the
timelessness Pound perceives in Chinese poetry. But the main success is also in
generating a convincing English syntactic feeling out of the predominantly
paratactic lines of Chinese verse, for which Pound had to reverse the tendency
towards normalisation and syntactic domestication in Fenollosa’s prose versions.
Finally, in more political terms, Cathay was perceived as a meteorite
because the afterlife it gave to the poems and authors of the past acted as an
unprecedented criticism of the situation in the present, the Great War during which
the book appeared, placing the emphasis where contemporary poetry had not yet
placed it: not just on the inhumanity of war, but particularly on the suffering of the
women left behind and the friends separated as a result of it (just as Eliot’s “The
Game of Chess” in The Waste Land would later do). If Cathay was among Pound’s
most emotional responses to the First World War, it was possible only through the
way he brought the voices from the past, especially the afterlife for the work of Li
Po, to criticise the present, just as he was to do later with Propertius.
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iii. Translating logopoeia in the Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919):
dissimulatio against the vates of the Roman Empire as modern irony against
the confiscation of language in the British Empire
All that which is ancient becomes new through the study of the
classic, and all that which is new is ancient, i.e. classic, and
becomes old, i.e. bygone, perished.
–F. SCHLEGEL
Pound hammered throughout his life:
The classics should be humanly, rather than philologically taught, even in classrooms. 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.40
In the case of Greek classics in general, and of Homer in particular, it is above all
the musical qualities of the poetry which he considers must be privileged. In the
case of Latin literature, however, Pound insists that its value is for the most part
verbal rather than rhythmic; if among the Romans one often finds a literature
extremely conscious of a strong literary past, it is often a more intellectual play
with words and literary expectations that charges the meaning. Thus, when it comes
to the elegiac tradition, he writes as early as 1913: “Propertius –except in spots–
and Tibullus remind me of French poetry of 1878”. The reference is to Jules
Laforgue, and what he implies in literary terms by the comparison is that Propertius
used his poetic language in extremely sophisticated ways to subvert the literal
surface of his discourse, to express double meanings: in short, that Propertius was
an essentially ironic author. Then, in ideological-cultural terms, Pound’s
comparison points to a sort of objective temporal rhyme between the past and the
present, to the possibility of a critical encounter between two ages through the
relationship between two poets. Since, as he adds, “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”.41 More famously,
Pound would state:
[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
40
41
E. Pound. Literary Essays, 1917.
E. Pound. Letters, 1916.
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some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the
Roman Empire.42
Certainly Propertius’ feelings about Augustan values and conquests were of a
different kind from those of Pound towards the British Empire. But the two poets
shared a central concern that allowed the historical encounter to take place: a strong
resistance to safeguard their artistic integrity against public propaganda in a hostile
context, the desire to keep writing clean in a time of war and imperialism when
most people had swallowed the official views and rhetoric (unfortunately, in
Pound’s own case, this resistance was later to be deluded, but that is another story).
In this sense, Pound’s selection of the old writer’s work from the point of
view of its present pertinence and value, implied a critical insight responsive to
something not highlighted before in the undifferentiated scholarly amalgam of
classical poetry, i.e. to something which comes from Propertius’ very conscious use
of the Latin language and play with ‘literary’ expectation and context. To begin
with, it involved Pound playing a pioneering role in recognising a series of forms of
classical dissimulatio active in Propertius’ elegies, a classical form of irony
activated as a defence against the pressures of the Augustan imperial ethos and the
official literary vates, Horace and Virgil. Then, it involved Pound redirecting this
defence and ironical criticism of the Roman imperial situation, expressed via the
classical forms of dissimulatio, against the modern imperial situation, for which he
used the forms of meaning of modern irony as learnt from Laforgue, often turning
them against the act of translation itself, playing with the literary expectations to
which his work was subjected as a ‘translation of a classic’. It is thus that to the
mocking of the old representatives of the law in Roman times was superimposed a
mocking of what Pound identified as their contemporary equivalents, from the
authority of the British imperial ethos to the linguistic economies of classical
philology and decadent aestheticism.
Having said this, to fully understand the ways Propertius’ logopoeia
signifies in the originals –by dissimulatio, allusion, the apparent disorganised
structure of his elegies, and other ways of charging meaning– one needs complete
contextual analyses, including detailed explanations of important aspects of
Augustan politics, literary milieu and poetic conventions. The same applies to the
equivalents and derivatives Pound finds for Propertius’ irony in his modern context
of Georgian politics, literary aestheticism and positivist philology. But even if there
is no time here for such detailed contextual analyses of the original elegies as a
whole or Pound’s versions of the same, to get at least a taste of Pound’s way of
42
EPPP, V: 265; 1931.
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translating Propertius’ logopoeia by paraphrasing his attitude of mind in new
contexts, take a couple of passages of the Homage, its beginning and end, which
translate Propertius’ own programmatic poems.
Let us concentrate first on the opening of the Homage, which translates the
first two elegies of Propertius Third Book. The original, which starts with an
invocation of soft Hellenistic poetry (3.1.1-6), rejects epic celebration of conquests
(3.1.7-20), meditates on poetic immortality through songs of love for young ladies
(3.1.21-3.2.8), spurns riches (3.2.9-14), and returns to a meditation on poetic
strength and immortality (3.2.15-24), constitutes the most exhaustive programmatic
whole in Propertius’ four books; in fact, it displays him, together with Horace, as
the Augustan poet who most meditated on the art of poetry and the status of the
poet. But behind this literal surface there is something else. For among the reasons
for Propertius’ shift from the status of ‘love’ in his previous books to the status of
the ‘poet of love’ at the beginning of Book 3, is his desire to answer and mock the
claims of Horace’s own third book of Odes, which had just been published. That is,
Propertius’ program includes a quite detailed and sophisticated allusive dialogue
with (and mockery of) the newly proclaimed lyric vates and his defence of
Augustan virtus and Romanness.
It is precisely this attack on authority that Pound’s Homage reactivates for
the modern reader by rendering logopoeia non-locally, by using new verbal
associations to subvert the literary and political law in a modern context. If the
most basic task was to shape a highly self-conscious poetic tone with subversive
potential, the Homage starts:
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.
Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,
in what hall have you heard it;
What foot beat out your time-bar,
what water has mellowed your whistles?
(Homage I.1-9. trans. Prop. 3.1.1-6; my emphasis)
The poem opens with an invocation to Callimachus and Philetas, who are presented
almost as divinities replacing the Muses; then follows a beg for admission to their
secret place of learning. The original deploys a solemn tone, more hyperbolic than
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usual. So does Pound, whose version remains relatively close to the surface of the
Latin, although, as one would expect, he modernises throughout. Thus, the mythic
‘grotto’ (antro), where the Hellenistic poets would have learned to polish their
verses, becomes a modern ‘hall’, where they might have heard the secret (or
gossip) of a poetic technique; the ‘foot’ with which they entered the cave, now
beats out a time-bar (Pound seizes upon and unfolds the double meaning –anatomic
and metrical– of the Latin pedes); the sound of the water (the Muse as a fountain)
that the poets drink –quove pede ingressi? quamve bibistis aquam?– is transformed
so that the water flows with the softness of an ars tenuis: “what water has mellowed
your whistles?”
Other than these adaptations, Pound shapes an extraordinary trouvaille that
will be explained in a moment: his provocative rendering of ‘orgies’ for orgia (lit.
‘mysteries’). And he effects even more emphatic renderings of the kind in what
follows:
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 ff., trans. Prop. 3.1.39 ff.; my emphasis)
Pound’s ‘devirginated young ladies’ for tacta puella, just as ‘orgies’ for orgia
before, have been read as gratuitous distortions of Propertius’ text, when not as
schoolboy blunders, raising immediate cries of indignation and condemnation.
Professor Hale of the University of Chicago, who considered Pound incredibly
ignorant of Latin, was the first to bite the bait. He thought these were “peculiarly
unpleasant” renderings, and felt himself compelled to warn in respect of the latter:
“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.”43 Pound, who knew that he, like Propertius before
him, was here being misunderstood by the naive to be mocked, wrote privately to
A. R. Orage:
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
43
Professor Hale. University of Chicago; review of the Homage, 1919.
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“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”).
Pound claims to be translating logopoeia, then, to be taking account of how
Propertius “employs words not for their direct meaning, but taking account in a
special ways 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.”
Well, let us see: gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono.
To begin with, even if scholars and translators, moved by immediate
expectation and inertia, usually assume that the girl is touched by the sound –“May
the girl rejoice, touched by familiar music”–, in grammatical terms the girl might
be touched by anything, and there is no objection to reading tacta as an adjective,
the line then literally translating as something like: “May the girl, touched, rejoice
in familiar music”. To this possible reading of the line Pound further adds that
Propertius shapes a double entendre, that as the word intacta means ‘virginal’,
tacta (touched) is used here to imply the opposite. In less technical terms Pound
adds:
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.
Let us do so: read word for word, and line for line. This is Propertius:
carminis interea nostri redeamus in orbem,
gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono,
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(3.2.1-3: “To our usual round of songs let us meanwhile return / may a
‘touched’ girl rejoice in familiar music”).
Now let us read what Horace had solemnly written and published not long before:
... carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto.
(Odes. 3.1.2-4: “Songs never heard before, I, priest of the Muses, / sing for
virgins and boys”).
One thus realises that Propertius is mocking Horace by invoking and inverting
every single one of his claims. If Horace pretends that his songs are ‘never heard
before’ (non prius audita), Propertius’ are mockingly ‘the usual stuff’, ‘familiar
music’. If Horace, the newly proclaimed vates, pretends to sing as a priest
(sacerdos) for the purity of ‘virgins and boys’, Propertius sings as a lover to give
‘pleasure’ to a ‘touched girl’. With Horace’s Ode 3.1 in mind, then, an ode
Propertius parodies in fact throughout the beginning of his third Book, one realises
that Pound’s choice is the ‘correct’ meaning, the one ‘intended’ by Propertius’
dissimulatio which here mocks the words of Horatian moderation at the service of
Augustan moral reforms. As he does with passages throughout the Homage, Pound
clinches here the anti-Georgian, anti-Puritan and anti-philological possibilities of
Propertius’ passage, his ‘devirginated young ladies’ making Propertius’ irony
perceptible against the contemporary social and literary law.
And the same must be concluded about his rendering orgia as orgies at the
beginning of the Homage. For the original gives:
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; my emphases).
If already the elegist’s Callimachean incipit is a direct allusion to and parody of
Horace’s pretensions to being a Roman Alcaeus, Propertius not only echoes
Horace’s boast of having been the first to bring the melic rhythms into Latin, but
also mimics his solemn liturgical tone, parodying the airs of the self-proclaimed
Musarum sacerdos (priest of the muses). In fact, Propertius makes sure that none of
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his informed contemporaries will miss the echo (and that his accomplices will grasp
the parody), using the key word sacerdos, which summarises Horace’s new
pretensions as a priestly vates, in exactly the same position as Horace does at the
start of Odes 3. Even more subversive, Propertius shall not sing for virgins and
boys, but introduce orgia, which alludes to enthusiastic cults such as those of
Dionysus and Demeter, i.e. precisely to the great mysteries which official Augustan
policy was eager to suppress. In other words, by presenting himself as a new
‘priest’ (sacerdos) who will initiate and reveal such Dionysiac ‘mysteries’ (orgia)
to his compatriots through subtle modes –Callimachean poetic dissimulatio–
Propertius was mocking not only the vatic pretensions of Horace, but also official
religious policies, the word orgia, like sacerdos in the previous line, effecting a
strong emphasis, i.e. leaving something to be discovered by the audience.
Pound does discover it, and shapes an equivalent emphasis for his English
modern audience: ‘orgies’ for orgia. That is, his bilingual pun not only stresses
Propertius’ key word in the passage, but also, by playing with translation
expectations, achieves a subversive effect equivalent to that of the original (not
least because the naive representatives of the philological ‘law’ continue to see it as
the first major ‘howler’ of the Homage, proof of Pound’s incapacities as a
translator). Of course, Pound’s “Bringing the Grecian Orgies into Italy” breaks the
Latin syntax, inverts the significance of the words, and gives orgia –(DionysianDemeterian) ‘mysteries’– a strong sexual bias. But this local distortion with a
sexual slant is not only justified by many other of Propertius’ passages, but
emphasizes precisely the kind of material Propertius’ dissimulatio is here opposing
to Augustan ideals as embodied in Horace’s Ode, who, as “priest of the Muses, /
sing for virgins and boys” (Ode. 3.1).
Having got a taste of Pound’s renderings at the beginning of the Homage, let
us move on to its closing section, which translates the last poem or signature to
Propertius’ Second Book of elegies (2.34). Many Latinists still consider the original
‘unsatisfactory’ –full of inconsistencies, lacunae and discontinuities, including
changes of address, subject and style– and often divide it into two or more poems,
effecting many transpositions. But the fact is that if many of Propertius’ concerns –
allegiance to (unfaithful) love, considerations about friendship, the relative power
of epic and love poetry– are intermingled here in a sophisticated programmatic
progression, the attentive reader discerns an ironic rejection of Augustan national
poetry –this time through a very subtle dissimulatio involving an apparent
celebration of Virgil’s Aeneid– which Pound renders in an emphatic way.
The first moment of Homage XII (translating most of Propertius 2.34.1-22),
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follows the original from its general considerations about the infidelity of friends –
“Who, who would be the next man to entrust his girl to a friend? / Love interferes
with fidelities”–, passing through mythological exempla, including Jason and Paris
which prove such infidelities –“The gods have brought shame on their relatives /...
A Trojan and adulterous person came to Menelaus under the rites of hospitium”–,
to a close-up which reveals that a certain Lynceus, a mature man and minor epic
poet of correct behaviour, has violated his friendship with Propertius and become
Cynthia’s latest lover. Pound introduces this last revelation as an effective punchline (modelled on 2.34.22): “And besides, Lynceus, / You were drunk.”
In what follows, after some recriminations –“Could you endure such
promiscuity? / She was not renowned for fidelity; / But to jab a knife in my vitals”–
Pound’s tone becomes increasingly humorous and liberal, with its histrionic syntax
and obsessive repetitions: “Preferable, my dear boy, my dear Lynceus, / Comrade,
comrade of my life, of my purse, of my person. / But in one bed, in one bed alone,
my dear Lynceus, I deprecate your attendance.” Just as the subversive potential of
Propertius’ original comes from a quite humorous approach to libertine love, using
expressions of double meaning such as socium vitae (‘partner of life’) and socium
corporis (‘partner of body’), that clearly mock Augustan moral standards, Pound
adds suggestions of a ménage à trois more apt to scandalise his contemporary
English audience.
In a second movement of the elegy (2.34.23-54, partially translated in
Homage II, 18-30) Propertius tells Lynceus that now he has finally fallen in love
(i.e. tasted true life and existence), he might realise that his austere life, his studies
of philosophy and natural science, as well as the most elevated literary forms –
tragedy and epic– will be of no avail to him, since women are not interested in such
things. Pound begins: “You think you are going to do Homer. / And still a girl
scorns the gods, / Of all these young women, / not one has enquired the cause of the
world, / Nor the modus of lunar eclipses,” and ends with an ellipsis –“Nor anything
else of importance”–, thus cutting the original’s much longer enumeration, after
which Propertius instructs Lynceus that he must now, via imitation of the
Hellenistic works of Callimachus and Philitas, turn to elegy, just as Propertius
himself has done with great success among the ladies.
It is at this point (2.34.59 ff.) that Propertius sets off in a strange new
direction, suddenly referring to Virgil with words which have traditionally been
interpreted as paying homage to the Aeneid, but which Pound understands as
dissimulated mockery, and renders:
Upon the Actian marshes Virgil is Phoebus’ chief of police,
He can tabulate Caesar’s great ships.
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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,
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)
Pound’s renderings, especially at the beginning and the end of this excerpt, depart
radically not only from the Latin words, abandoning the literal surface of the
original as at few other points in the Homage, but even from the mildly ironic
(Laforguean) intonation he usually employs to unfold Propertius’ irreverence, as if
Pound now wants to make clear that he definitely ‘knows better’.
As on other occasions in the Homage, one must note here Pound’s contrast
between two ways of rendering the original and the corresponding two forms of
English. In the first part of the passage, Pound renders Propertius’ ostensible praise
of the Aeneid as ironic disdain. Virgil is upgraded –well, rather degraded– to chief
of police or bureaucrat tabulating Caesar’s ships while entertaining himself with
old Trojan arms. Moreover, an interpolated dramatic aside in the form of a
scholarly annotation –“(and to Imperial order)”– makes clear that Virgil’s epic in
progress is no spontaneous fruit of inspiration, but literature both obeying imperial
orders and contributing to imperial ‘order’. In the second part of Pound’s passage,
however, the quality of the English becomes suddenly compressed and depurated.
Pound constructs a series of compact bucolic images where one grasps a positive
tenor opposed to the ironic presentation of the previous moment. And then comes a
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conclusive gesture which summarises the whole progression. Pound alternates a
moment of irony of the past –‘respected, Wordsworthian’– in which Propertius’
presumed mockery of the Augustan vates becomes a mockery of an official poet of
the English establishment, with a promise of poetic redemption –“A flat field for
rushes, grapes grow on the slope”–, where the vowel modulation, imagist force and
staccato effect of his last line amalgamates all that Pound had learned from
Provence, China and Old Anglo-Saxon to announce a poetry of the future.
All this might sound very well from a twentieth century poet who was
starting his own Cantos. But the question now is what can one say of Pound’s
passage as a ‘translation’ of Propertius’ Latin? Well, once again, there is no
alternative but to insist that Pound’s version is far from a “free fantasy,” as some
have called it, but reveals a strong critical penetration of what Propertius is really
doing in his elegies. Let us examine the original in the most recent scholarly
translation, which acknowledges its debt to Pound himself:
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.
(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)).
This compliment paid by Propertius to the Aeneid worked so well among the
simpleminded that the distich (2.34.65-66) has been quoted since Antiquity as a
testimony of the greatness of Virgil’s epic. But these most famous (and ambiguous)
lines of Propertius must be counted in fact among his greatest moments of
dissimulatio, requiring from his audience not only a general literary knowledge, but
also a grasp of the specific context (structure) Propertius creates in the elegy as a
whole.
To begin with, although in literal terms Propertius gives the impression of
applauding the Aeneid, he introduces his praise after a provocative contrast between
himself and Virgil, whose ability (posse) to glorify Octavian’s victory at Actium is
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far from desirable in Propertian terms. Then comes the praise itself, where the first
major sign of his ironic intentions is the hyperbolic overpraise. For whatever one
concludes about Propertius’ appreciation of Homer, to say that the Aeneid, the
Roman imitatio which was still a work in progress, was to be ‘greater’ than the
Iliad, the Greek model, would have been not just quite ‘strange’ in the context of
Augustan literary conventions, but completely ridiculous.
Now, this evident overpraise apart, it is above all the broader literary context
Propertius constructs for the passage which makes his ironic intentions clear. For
one must realise that Propertius’ strong praise of Virgil’s Aeneid appears in an
elegy which had just stated the power of love against epic, treating the pretensions
of epic and of other high literary genres as illusions which men’s real passions
destroy in an instant. Moreover, if Propertius had previously urged Lynceus to
abandon epic, philosophy and natural science, and to turn instead to Callimachean
elegy, the informed reader who has in mind Propertius’ previous recusationes will
be further puzzled by the fact that Propertius deviates here from his usual path, now
also abusing philosophy and science as well in what seems a completely
disproportionate and tedious enumeration of aspects of astronomy, meteorology,
geology and seismology (after all, no one had asked Propertius to start a treatise on
the universe or disclose the reasons for lunar eclipses, only to write epic in honour
of Augustus). Well, such ‘irregularities’ are once more symptomatic. For if epic is
what Virgil was writing for the time being, philosophy is what he was credited with
already having studied to a certain extent, and, above all, what Virgil wished and
planned to dedicate his life to in old age (“We are told that if Virgil had lived to
finish the Aeneid he intended to devote the rest of his life to philosophy”. Vit.
Donat. 35). The first part of Propertius’ elegy 2.34, then, parodies Virgil’s
pretensions by subverting them in advance, by presenting to us his ironically
reversed or negative image in Lynceus. The development of Virgil, who had started
with Hellenistic bucolic poetry before undertaking a politico-historical epic while
affirming his desire to dedicate himself to philosophy in old age, is parodied by that
of his alter ego Lynceus, a mature epic poet acquainted with philosophy who finds
himself compelled by love to turn towards elegy.
Propertius’ mockery and disapproval of Virgil’s poetic development is
confirmed through equally subtle logopoeia in the lines immediately following the
overpraise of the Aeneid, where, instead of disclosing the reasons for such a
disproportionate overpraise, as one would have expected, Propertius shifts towards
an allusive review of Virgil’s previous Alexandrian poetry –the Eclogues and the
Georgics– making his preferences quite apparent. Since the allusions to these early
works are not only sustained through several distichs (68-76), but also all refer to
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erotic situations in them.
This last is precisely the passage in which Pound shifts towards an imagist
style, leaving behind his sophisticated diction to make clear Propertius’ positive
tenor. Propertius’ ‘allusive’ summary of Virgil’s early work, which emphasises
precisely the kind of love poetry Propertius had previously recommended to
Lynceus as preparation for elegy itself, thus stressing the kinship between bucolic
and elegy, becomes an imagistic positive language.
What is remarkable in Pound’s version, then, is the way it makes Propertius’
preferences clear in a performative manner, i.e. not only through what his language
says (and it does say it), but also through what it does, by its shifts of tone, diction
and form of poetic presentation. Propertius’ disguised contrast between a
condemnation of the Aeneid through overpraise and a praise of the Eclogues
through sophisticated allusion is staged as a contrast between the use of
ridiculously sophisticated language to address Virgil as a representative of the
imperial ethos, additionally mocking those designated as his modern counterparts,
aesthetes and philologists included, and imagist forms of poetic presentation, this
being the language that Pound himself was defending as the future of English
poetry: as a necessary corrective to the imprecision of public speech, as a way of
developing an effective perception and synthesis of reality rather than being taken
in by imperial claptrap. The result is an ironic attack on vague grandiloquence and
cliché, on the vocabulary of the empire as well as on the attitudes of official
Victorian literature and scholarship.
In the end, Pound’s misce en scene of Propertius’ old dissimulatio in modern
terms was able to forge what would be his most lucid and enduring criticism of
what he considered the causes of imperialism in general and the disasters of the
Great War in particular. What comes through most immediately is perhaps his
denunciation of the ambition for economic power, where external imperialism had
its counterpart in the internal practices of the consumer society, all disguised by the
phantasmagoria of novelty and progress. But then, more fundamentally, the most
accurate denunciation was of a linguistic situation that forestalled a proper
perception and critical rejection of the imperial mentality, with Pound discerning a
threefold alliance which opposes the basic ideal of the humanities: (i) the
confiscation of public language by the media of propaganda in mass culture; (ii) the
confiscation of literary language by elitist aestheticism; and (iii) the confiscation of
academic language by the sterile methods of positivist philology. If the decadent
aesthete and the academic philologist had withdrawn to their ivory towers and cut
themselves off from life and society, they had in turn allowed the mass media to
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take control of public discourse, to become the tools of the political claptrap that
imperial warmongering promoted.
It is precisely against these methods of reading and translation of the past
that Pound introduces a humanistic and stylistic approach to Propertius’ elegies in
the Homage, forging a visionary translation in which two authors and two times are
vitally superimposed to transmit and reactivate the whole literary meaning of the
forms of the past, which acquire their critical impact in the present. As Pound
himself asks: “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?’”. The answer is yes: Pound
makes Propertius come alive again. Even considering his many ‘errors’, even if his
translation is not a uniform achievement (as he would have agreed), it is precisely
through his emphatic renderings that he is able to sustain the real literary and
political force of the originals. If the Homage brings Propertius back to life more
effectively than any other modern translation up to that time (and perhaps up to the
present), this is due precisely to his strategies of ironic translation, to the
displacement of Propertius’ dissimulatio on to the very event of translation, where
the first victims are the philologists themselves, whose expectations are frustrated.
For in the Homage Pound’s own erudition regarding Propertius’ work (which was
considerable) is placed at the service of a literary and, more broadly, an ideological
passion, not of ‘philological accuracy’, recovering and giving new life to a text
from the past, and to the past as such, as a criticism of the present. In a gesture that
is the complete opposite of philological pedantry, Pound does not give a scholarly
exposition of his knowledge of the Latin text, but places this knowledge at the
service of the text’s potential to act as effective literature in the present, the
potential for Propertius’ elegies to develop all their literary, social, and historical
afterlife.
Today, now that many scholars have modified their critical views on
Propertius’ poetry, Pound’s selection and translation strategies in the Homage
might seem a bit too emphatic. But his intention all along was for his ‘homage’ to
be precisely an ‘emphatic’ rendering of those ironic moments in the originals, of
the logopoeia to be found in the opening elegies of Book III and others, which
deploy Propertius’ most inventive ways of charging meaning into language. If
Pound’s translation does not account for every quality in Propertius’ elegies, yet, it
deploys an effective intensification of the previously unnoticed ironic uses of
language by shaping local and non-local equivalents and derivatives for them, by
constructing a contemporary urbane tone and logopoeic events wherever the
English language allows it (including in its relation to the Latin original), so as to
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affect the contemporary English audience in the way Propertius affected his Roman
one. The result in both cases was a highly conscious, ironic, and subversive attack
against the banality, the vagueness and the grandiloquence of literary discourse,
and against the prosaic rhetoric of political and academic propaganda, carried out
by means of extremely reflexive uses of the poet’s own language.
Thus, while many have said and still say that Pound appropriated Propertius
for his own ends, one can actually see that it is rather the other way around. For
beyond all the critical and translation achievements –the lucid insights into the
poetic values of the original and the best way to convey them in English–, the
Homage manages to make the voice of a poet of the past speak once again through
the voice of the present, Propertius’ literature through Pound’s, an encounter from
which both emerge altered. From one perspective, the encounter was to change
Pound for good, since in the Homage he achieved a poetic originality, maturity and
mastery that would have been difficult to anticipate from his earlier work, where
there is nothing comparable to this insolent flow of words, or to the rhythmic
vitality and the plasticity he gives to English-language poetry, far less to his
denunciation of and attack upon the contemporary imperial context. From another
perspective, the Homage to Sextus Propertius permanently modified the views on
the old elegist poet, on the Latin language and on the best ways to translate them
into English. Above all, the Homage brought back in an emphatic manner
something in the originals which had been lost, intensifying silenced and unnoticed
ironic qualities while downplaying the love façade that had been overemphasised
by the romantic tradition.
It is in this sense that A Homage, inspired by exasperation against war and
by a more general dissatisfaction with imperial policies, is ultimately a historical
vehicle whereby the voice of the past becomes a heightened voice that effectively
criticises the present. For Pound’s effective assimilation of the Latin elegies,
unfolding all their contemporary relevance, is achieved through an encounter that
depends not only or ultimately on Pound’s own efforts as a translator or Propertius’
original genius, but on an objective meeting in history between two works and two
times. In Pound’s own conclusion: “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”.44
44
EPPP, V: 265; 1931.
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