The Translator’s Invisibility

Pound’s theory and practice of interpretive translation reverse the priorities set by modernist commentators on translation like Mayor, Bunting, Eliot, and Pound himself. Interpretive translation contradicts the ideal of autonomy by pointing to the various conditions of the translated text, foreign as well as domestic, and thus makes clear that translation can make a cultural difference at home only by signifying the difference of the foreign text. The discursive heterogeneity of Pound’s interpretive translations, especially his use of archaism, was both an innovation of modernist poetics and a deviation from current linguistic and literary values, sufficiently noticeable to seem alien. Pound shows {203} that in translation, the foreignness of the foreign text is available only in cultural forms that already circulate in the target language, some with greater cultural capital than others. In translation, the foreignness of the foreign text can only be what currently appears “foreign” in the target-language culture, in relation to dominant domestic values, and therefore only as values that are marginal in various degrees, whether because they are residual, survivals of previous cultural forms in the target language, or because they are emergent, transformations of previous forms that are recognizably different, or because they are specialized or nonstandard, forms linked to specific groups with varying degrees of social power and prestige. The foreign can only be a disruption of the current hierarchy of values in the target-language culture, an estrangement of them that seeks to establish a cultural difference by drawing on the marginal. Translation, then, always involves a process of domestication, an exchange of source-language intelligibilities for target-language ones. But domestication need not mean assimilation, i.e., a conservative reduction of the foreign text to dominant domestic values. It can also mean resistance, through a recovery of the residual or an affiliation with the emergent or the dominated—choosing to translate a foreign text, for instance, that is excluded by prevalent English-language translation methods or by the current canon of foreign literature in English and thus forcing a methodological revision and a canon reformation.

The remarkable thing about modernist translation is that, even though in theoretical statements it insists on the cultural autonomy of the translated text, it still led to the development of translation practices that drew on a broad range of domestic discourses and repeatedly recovered the excluded and the marginal to challenge the dominant. Pound’s translations avoided the transparent discourse that has dominated English-language translation since the seventeenth century. Instead of translating fluently, foregrounding the signified and minimizing any play of the signifier that impeded communication, pursuing linear syntax, univocal meaning, current usage, standard dialects, prosodic smoothness, Pound increased the play of the signifier, cultivating inverted or convoluted syntax, polysemy, archaism, nonstandard dialects, elaborate stanzaic forms and sound effects—textual features that frustrate immediate intelligibility, empathic response, interpretive mastery. And by doing this Pound addressed the problem of domestication that nags not just his own claim of {204} cultural autonomy, but also the transparent discourse dominating English-language translation. Transparency inscribes the foreign text with dominant English values (like transparency) and simultaneously conceals that domestication under the illusion that the translated text is not a translation, but the “original,” reflecting the foreign author’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text; whereas modernist translation, by deviating from transparency and inscribing the foreign text with marginal English values, initiates a foreignizing movement that points to the linguistic and cultural differences between the two texts (admitting, of course, that some of the values inscribed by modernists like Pound are neither marginal nor especially democratic—e.g. patriarchy).