Translation As Art

...Scholarly opinion on these translations has been, for the most part, adverse...

...While Pound's versions from Provencal, French and Italian may have a reasonable accuracy, those from the Latin (see, particularly, the Homage to Sextus Propertins, not included in this volume) are said to distort wilfully and to colloquialize harshly the originals...

...The poetry Pound chose to translate is all of a fresh, often naive, but monotonous sort...

...a distinct challenge to present modes of poetic interpretation...

...It is Pound's failure that an esthetic which purports to permit the poet to speak without impediment actually serves to close off his words in a mask of the translator's subjectivism...

...Further, he excuses himself that wherever the sense is completely misrepresented the "sound" of the original is conveyed...

...but even renewed in this partial form...

...And, looking closer, we see that Pound has done more than just take liberties with texts...

...No doubt, the recent work of French dramatists with the Greek plots, like Gide, Jean Anouilh (Antigone) and Sartre, is partial...

...Pound takes a peculiarly holistic attitude toward poetry: He conceives of translation (and, by the analogy of craft, the writing of original poetry) as the construction of a spiritual Gestalt...

...To be sure, failure is easy...

...He neither translates nor writes "words," but attempts to render a certain world, a mode of sensibility...

...The melodramatic and impoverished Medea of Robinson Jeffers is hardly closer to the Greek original than were the more faithful but flowery or pedestrian Victoriana of Gilbert Murray and R. C. Jebb...

...as exemplified in Pound's own poetry of the last twenty years, which has still to find an adequate explanatory apparatus...

...While many of these translations are beautiful poems in themselves, needing no gloss to be appreciated, the esthetic they embody is a larger and less satisfying presence...

...Revieived by Susan Sontag Department of English, University of Connecticut Even more than the wonderful Letters published several years ago, the Translations of Ezra Pound provide an excellent introduction to his poetry...

...Pound's translations may be compared perhaps to the modern rewriting of the Greek classical drama...

...For better or for worse, it is in Pound's versions or not at all that we read the Noh plays, Rihaku and Arnaut Daniel, and the great tenth-century Saxon poem, The Seafarer...

...and, especially when the language is exotic, there seems a precedent (viz., Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat) for a "free" version of the original...

...Mallarme's translations of Poe, to take another example of art masked as translation, are much better than the original...

...Considering such indirection, one marvels that Pound has achieved the accuracy he has...

...It is in contrast to this standard that Pound's translations are unscholarly and prodigal...

...In the preface to his translations (1910) from the thirteenthcentury Italian sonneteer, Cavalcanti, Pound declares that he has "tried to bring over the qualities of Guido's rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of the power which implies the man...

...and by translating not words but an emotion, the Latin Propertius must sound like the Chinese Rihaku...

...psychological and intuitive rather than textual and objective...

...Yet, a sense of the usability and violability of a text seems necessary for its transmission...

...This may seem to us an odd theory of translation...

...But in this there is more than the natural expectation that every poet who turns his hand to translation will recreate carelessly (cf...

...But the analogy with music is one that is dangerous to meaning...

...the work continues to live, and that is all to the good...

...Learned objections lose some effect if we recognize that these are not cribs but imitations of their originals...

...His translations from the Chinese (1915) were executed, without really "knowing" either language, from the prose notes for a Japanese version made by a European scholar who lived in Japan...

...Pound imports into the poems he translates an irreverence and casualness which is usually not there...

...Pound contradicts almost all of modern criticism, which defines poetry as a kind of language and is concerned with the analysis of concrete textural facets...

...At least in all but the translations from Chinese and Japanese, we can presume that Pound understood the sense of the originals and that radical deviations were legitimate if he felt them to be true to the larger spirit of the poem...

...for there is no doubt that Cathay is entirely successful as poetry (perhaps the most successful of his translations) and not to be displaced even by the scholarly and poetical translations of Arthur Waley...

...As we might expect, he has recourse to the identity of poetry and music: Both are pure rhythm, the rhythm of any poetic line corresponding to "emotion...

...particular phrases and images, word by word...

...We also have a clue in the Translations to the monotony of Pound's own poetry, a monotony hard to pinpoint and broken throughout by brilliant and moving lines, but unmistakable nonetheless...

...Another reason for being interested in these translations, aside from the pleasure of the poems themselves, is that we are presented here with the best statement and exemplification of Pound's esthetic...

...That esthetic involves a disturbing indifference to the sense and order of words themselves, and...

...Pound's translations thus give a clue to the quality of his own work which makes him, among modern poets, one whose reputation is to an unusual degree independent of frequent reading and critical interpreting and quoting of his poetry...

...all art may aspire after the condition of music, but woe to the poetry which achieves its aim...

...The Letters exhibited Pound our poetic father and contemporary...

...Marlowe's versions of Ovid) and/or in his own image...

...Pound has frequently used his translations as an occasion for projecting a mood of his own rather than for drawing out a mood implicit in the poet...

...The Translations show us Pound's own intellectual heritage: They are a work-book of his taste and art...

...with the minor ironic notes throughout stressed in place of larger formalities...