The Translator’s Invisibility

Such textual features indicate that a translation can be foreignizing only by putting to work cultural materials and agendas that are domestic, specific to the target language, but also, in this case, anachronistic, specific to later periods. “The Seafarer” is informed by Pound’s knowledge of English literature from its beginnings, but also by his modernist poetics, by his favoring, notably in The Cantos, an elliptical, fragmentary verse in which subjectivity is split and determinate, presented as a site of heterogeneous cultural discourses (Easthope 1983:chap. 9). The peculiarities of Pound’s translation—the gnarled syntax, the {36} reverberating alliteration, the densely allusive archaism—slow the movement of the monologue, resisting assimilation, however momentarily, to a coherent subject (whether “author” or “seafarer”) and foregrounding the various English dialects and literary discourses that get elided beneath the illusion of a speaking voice. This translation strategy is foreignizing in its resistance to values that prevail in contemporary Anglo-American culture—the canon of fluency in translation, the dominance of transparent discourse, the individualistic effect of authorial presence.

And yet Pound’s translation reinscribes its own modernist brand of individualism by editing the Anglo-Saxon text. As the medievalist Christine Fell has remarked, this text contains “two traditions, the heroic, if we may so define it, preoccupation with survival of honour after loss of life—and the Christian hope for security of tenure in Heaven” (Fell 1991:176). However these conflicting values entered the text, whether present in some initial oral version or introduced during a later monastic transcription, they project two contradictory concepts of subjectivity, one individualistic (the seafarer as his own person alienated from mead-hall as well as town), the other collective (the seafarer as a soul in a metaphysical hierarchy composed of other souls and dominated by God). Pound’s translation resolves this contradiction by omitting the Christian references entirely, highlighting the strain of heroism in the Anglo-Saxon text, making the seafarer’s “mind’s lust” to “seek out foreign fastness” an example of “daring ado,/So that all men shall honour him after.” In Susan Bassnett’s words, Pound’s translation represents “the suffering of a great individual rather than the common suffering of everyman […] a grief-stricken exile, broken but never bowed” (Bassnett 1980:97). The archaizing translation strategy interferes with the individualistic illusion of transparency, but the revisions intensify the theme of heroic individualism, and hence the recurrent gibes at the “burgher” who complacently pursues his financial interests and “knows not […] what some perform/Where wandering them widest draweth” (Pound 1954:208). The revisions are symptomatic of the domestic agenda that animates Pound’s foreignizing translation, a peculiar ideological contradiction that distinguishes modernist literary experiments: the development of textual strategies that decenter the transcendental subject coincides with a recuperation of it through certain individualistic motifs like the “strong personality.” Ultimately, this contradiction constitutes a response to the crisis of human subjectivity that modernists {37} perceived in social developments like monopoly capitalism, particularly the creation of a mass work force and the standardization of the work process (Jameson 1979:110–114).

The examples from Graves and Pound show that the aim of a symptomatic reading is not to assess the “freedom” or “fidelity” of a translation, but rather to uncover the canons of accuracy by which it is produced and judged. Fidelity cannot be construed as mere semantic equivalence: on the one hand, the foreign text is susceptible to many different interpretations, even at the level of the individual word; on the other hand, the translator’s interpretive choices answer to a domestic cultural situation and so always exceed the foreign text. This does not mean that translation is forever banished to the realm of freedom or error, but that canons of accuracy are culturally specific and historically variable. Although Graves produced a free translation by his own admission, it has nonetheless been judged faithful and accepted as the standard English-language rendering by academic specialists like Grant. In 1979, Grant published an edited version of Graves’s translation that pronounced it accurate, if not “precise”: