The Translator’s Invisibility

This is not a concept of translation that modernism theorized with any consistency, but rather one that its translation theories and practices make possible. It won’t be found in a modernist critic of modernism like Bunting, Eliot, or Hugh Kenner, because such critics accept the claim of cultural autonomy for the translated text. “Ezra Pound never translates ‘into’ something already existing in English,” wrote Kenner, “only Pound has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original” (Pound 1953:9). Yet what can now be seen is that a translation is unable to produce an effect equivalent to that of the foreign text because translation is domestication, the inscription of cultural values that differ fundamentally from those in the source language. Pound’s effects were aimed only at English-language culture, and so he always translated into preexisting English cultural forms—Anglo-Saxon patterns of accent and alliteration, pre-Elizabethan English, pre-Raphaelite medievalism, modernist precision, American colloquialism. In fact, Pound’s reliance on preexisting forms erases his distinction between two kinds of translation: both interpretive translations and translations that are new poems resort to the innovations of modernist poetics, and so both can be said to offer “a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue” (Anderson 1983:5)—the side selected and framed by English-language modernism. The discursive heterogeneity Pound created may have made the translated texts look “new”—to modernists—but it was also a technique that signalled their difference, both from dominant English values and from those that shaped the foreign text. Modernism enables a postmodernist concept of translation that assumes the impossibility of any autonomous cultural value and views the foreign as at once irredeemably mediated {205} and strategically useful, a culturally variable category that needs to be constructed to guide the translator’s intervention into the current target-language scene.

II

By the start of the 1950s, modernist translation had achieved widespread acceptance in Anglo-American literary culture—but only in part, notably the claim of cultural autonomy for the translated text and formal choices that were now familiar enough to insure a domestication of the foreign text, i.e., free verse and precise current language. The most decisive innovations of modernism inspired few translators, no doubt because the translations, essays, and reviews that contained these innovations were difficult to locate, available only in obscure periodicals and rare limited editions, but also because they ran counter to the fluent strategies that continued to dominate English-language poetry translation. The first sign of this marginalization was the reception given to the selected edition of Pound’s translations published by the American press New Directions in 1953. This book offered a substantial retrospective, reprinting his latest versions of Cavalcanti and Daniel in bilingual format, as well as “The Seafarer,” Cathay, Noh plays, a prose text by Rémy de Gourmont, and a miscellany of poetry translations from Latin, Provençal, French, and Italian.

At the time of this publication, Pound was an extremely controversial figure (Stock 1982:423–424, 426–427; Homberger 1972:24–27). His wartime radio broadcasts under Mussolini’s government got him tried for treason in the United States and ultimately committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington DC (1946). But he was also recognized as a leading contemporary American poet with the award of the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos (1948), an event that prompted fierce attacks and debates in The New York Times, Partisan Review, and the Saturday Review of Literature, among other newspapers and magazines. In this cultural climate, it was inevitable, not just that the translations would be widely reviewed, but that they would provoke a range of conflicting responses. Some recognized the innovative nature of Pound’s work, even if they were unsure of its value; others dismissed it as a failed experiment that was now dated, void of cultural power.