The Translator’s Invisibility

Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.

I do not see how that could be bettered. Like the Greek, it is stripped and hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth. Here is no trace of the “sweete slyding, fit for a verse” that one expects to find in renderings of Sappho. It is exact translation; but in its composition, the spacing, the arrangement of stresses, it is also high art. This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.

(Barnard 1958:ix)

Yet Barnard’s version was “exact,” not so much because she found a true equivalent to the Greek text—she herself later admitted that she used “padding,” making the fragments more continuous—but rather because she was influenced by Pound (Barnard 1984:280–284). She corresponded with Pound during the fifties while he was confined at St. Elizabeth’s, and she showed him her versions of Sappho, revising them in accordance with his recommendation that she use “the live language” instead of “poetik jarg” (ibid.:282). This recommendation dovetailed with Barnard’s reading of Sappho’s poetry, which was partly modernist (“It was spare but musical”), partly romantic (“and had, besides, the sound of the speaking voice making a simple but emotionally loaded statement”). Barnard finally developed a fluent strategy that produced the effect of transparency, seeking “a cadence that belongs to the speaking voice” (ibid.:284), and Fitts appreciated this illusionistic effect, taking the English for the Greek text, the poem for the poet: “This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.”

But even though both Fitts and Barnard joined in Pound’s valorization of linguistic precision, they were unable to share his interest in a more fragmentary and heterogeneous discourse—i.e., in a translation strategy that preempted transparency. Thus, Barnard ignored passages in Pound’s letters where he questioned her {213} adherence to standard English grammar (“utility of syntax? waaal the chink does without a damLot”) as well as her cultivation of a “homogene” language:

it is now more homogene/it is purrhapz a bit lax/
whether one emend that occurs wd/lax it still more ???
it still reads a bit like a translation/

what is the maximum abruptness you can get it TO?

       Fordie: “40 ways to say anything”
I spose real exercise would consist in trying them ALL.

(Barnard 1984:283)

Fitts, in turn, praised Barnard’s Sappho because it was “homogene,” because it used “exact,” current English without any “spurious poeticism, none of the once so fashionable Swinburne—Symonds erethism”: “What I chiefly admire in Miss Barnard’s translations and reconstructions is the direct purity of diction and versification” (Barnard 1958:ix).

By the 1950s, Fitts had already reviewed Pound’s writing on a few occasions, gradually distancing himself from his early approval.[4] His negative review of Pound’s translations typified the midcentury reaction against modernism: he attacked the most experimental versions for the distinctively modernist reason that they didn’t stand on their own as literary texts. “When he fails,” Fitts wrote, “he fails because he has chosen to invent a nolanguage, a bric-a-brac archaizing language, largely (in spite of his excellent ear) unsayable, and all but unreadable” (Fitts 1954:19). Fitts revealed his knowledge of Pound’s rationale for using archaism—namely, its usefulness in signifying the cultural and historical remoteness of foreign texts—but he rejected any translation discourse that did not assimilate them to prevailing English-language values, that was not sufficiently transparent to produce the illusion of originality: