Ezra Pound's Poetics of Translation: principles, performances, implications (D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 2004) (2025)

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'Transportation is Civilisation': Ezra Pound's Poetics of Translation

Andrés Claro

The lecture presents Ezra Pound’s groundbreaking poetics of translation, which overlaps with his best legacy as a writer and consequent impact on Modernist and contemporary literature. In the understanding that there is no historic sustained translation performance without a conception of language and an idea of culture, beyond examining the creative versions Pound shaped from a variety of tongues (Provençal, Chinese, Latin, and others), I articulate the conception of language that defines his differential approach to literary translation (‘plain meaning’ charged by musical, imagistic or contextual effects), as well as the cultural impact he devised from the task: the ways in which translation, through its very donation of poetic forms of meaning and representation, is able to modify language and culture (strengthening perception, expanding a world-view, reviving voices of the past which criticise and shape the present).

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The Purloined Letter of "友": A Critique of Ezra Pound's Poetics of Translation

Jihee Han

English Language and Literature, 2019

Taking note of Pound’s “programmatically cosmopolitan” comparative criticism in The Spirit of Romance , this paper challenges Hugh Kenner’s argument that Cathay ’s achievement lies in Pound’s serious “effort to rethink the nature of an English poem.” In the discursive contexts of Foucault’s critique of truth and power and Martin Heiddeger’s notion of ‘being in the world,’ this paper suggests that Pound’s translated text does not constitute a second-order representation or a derivative, fake, potentially false copy of Li Bai’s original poetic texts, but rather a specimen of ‘another original’ created by a translator. For this purpose, this paper selects “Seeing Off Meng Haoran Leaving for Guanglin at Yellow Crane Pavilion,” “Seeing Off a Friend,” and “Seeing Off a Friend Heading for Shu Country.” For these three translated texts share a cryptic presence of “a friend” (“故人” or “友” in classical Chinese written characters), which may facilitate a novel understanding of Pound’s capability in the convergence of Eastern and Western poetic traditions that he had known of. Given the new approach, this paper attempts to reassess the real achievement of Cathay in the frontier of comparative poetics and makes an estimation of how Pound discloses Li’s world for readers to meditate on their ‘being in the world’ with his full-fledged vision of Vorticism. Ultimately, this paper aims to demonstrate that Pound’s editorial judgment, fashioned in the process of translating these three poems, constituted a critical preparatory stage for the refinement of his Vorticist vision.

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“The Translation Strategies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn.” Ezra Pound and Poetic Influence. Amsterdam: Rodopi, December 2000. 29-38.

Helen M Dennis

Pound's versions of Arnaut Daniel combine archaism, the Pre-Raphaelite diction of Rossetti's translations of The Early Italian Poets, and the innovative experimentation which is the signature of his modernist prosody. This paper will offer an indicative, comparative analysis of Rossetti's The Early Italian Poets, Pound's translations of Arnaut Daniel, and Paul Blackburn's Proensa. The aim of the paper will be to trace the continuities and differences in attitudes to poetic translation and textual strategies, as well as the cultural significance of the differing acts of interpretation implied by those strategies. Pound acknowledged that in the matter of translation Rossetti was " my father and my mother, " but later displayed Oedipal anxiety about the obfuscatory power of this influence. However, Rossetti offered him a model for re-inscribing foreign values into Anglo-American culture, as well as a poetic discourse, which registered the remoteness of the cultural artefact, which was lost to Anglo-American civilization. Pound's versions of Daniel and Cavalcanti deploy heterogeneous discourses to suggest both the remoteness and the potential modernity of these poets. In this respect he rewrites the medievalism of Rossetti, who inscribed a traditional symbolism in his translated texts — as in his paintings. While working in relation to traditional topoi, Pound rearranges and transforms their elements; hence he both retains traces of deeply conventional attitudes and modes of representation and also radically liberates both " music " and " matter. " Blackburn, as Poundian acolyte, continued to employ many of Pound's strategies: the use of chaotic archaisms, the adoption of modernist free verse forms, the harnessing of diverse discourses to retain an element of unfamiliarity or difference in the poetic text. In all three poet translators there is therefore a cultural agenda and a textual politics which perceive the act of translation of obscure medieval texts as an intervention and interrogation of the current cultural hegemony. In her perennially useful, Translation Studies (1980), Susan Bassnett outlines the main typologies of translation strategies in the long 19th century: The main currents of translation typology in the great age of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion up to the First World War can loosely be classified as follows: 1. Translation as a scholar's activity, where the pre-eminence of the source language text is assumed de facto over any target language version. Translation as a means of encouraging the intelligent reader to return to the source

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Translation in Transition: Ezra Pound's Poetic Variation on Sextus Propertius

Rachel Turner

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“And as for text we have taken it...”: Retranslating Ezra Pound’s Renaissance Cantos

Massimo Bacigalupo

Lingue e linguaggi, 2014

Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a Modernist classic, present many challenges for the translator, who has to follow in Pound’s footsteps and often divine the intention and context of the fragments that compose his historic and lyric collage. A new Italian translation of the first extensive installment of the poem, XXX Cantos (1930), appeared in 2012; a previous Italian rendering of the same work, by the poet’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, was published in 1961. By comparing representative excerpts of the two translations, this paper discusses different approaches to one source text. While the 1961 target text aimed at concision at the expense of fluency, the 2012 text employs a more colloquial style, attempting to make an arduous and complex work more reader-friendly. However, the two translations adopt the same strategy when rendering the many passages Pound paraphrased from medieval and renaissance Italian writings. Rather than retranslating Pound’s English, they print excerpts from the Italian originals he worked from, with their quaint spellings and often obscure wording. Just as Pound asks his readers and translators to work with him on the texts he presents in the poem, so the translators presuppose a reader who is also a collaborator, and who will be intrigued by the old documents appearing opposite Pound’s modernist paraphrases. Translation is always a work in progress, but this is particularly the case when approaching the uniquely intricate and collaborative project of Pound's Cantos.

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Ezra Pound: 'Culture Planning' through translation

lorna kirkby

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Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth-Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing

Mark Byron

Modern Book History, ed. Kate Longworth, spec. ed. of Literature Compass 4.4 (July 2007): 1158-1168, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x. Reprinted in Virtual Issue: Modern Book History, Literature Compass 4 (Dec 2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.

Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.

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‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’

Andrew Houwen

Review of English Studies, Oxford University Press, 2014

In 1917, Ezra Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe that The Cantos was based ‘roughly on the theme of Takasago’, a Japanese Noh play. Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era referred to this letter but did not elaborate on it, commenting that Pound ‘never got round to’ the translation of Takasago. It has more recently been discovered, however, that Pound did translate Takasago. In light of this discovery, I wish to contend that Takasago is an important structuring device for The Cantos from the latter’s beginnings in 1915 into the 1920s; and, furthermore, that the foregrounding of benevolent imperial rule in Pound’s Takasago translation anticipates his turn in the 1920s from the apparently apolitical poetics of the ‘Unity of Image’ to a more explicitly political ‘symbolism of the center’.

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Review of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ISBN: 9781501307713, xv + 251pp., HB $121.50

Mark Byron

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The Image of the Other in Ezra Pound's Translations

Roxana Bîrsanu

2009

The main drive behind Ezra Pound’s translating efforts was to present the American readership with literary experiences that were remote both in time and in place. The purpose was, on the one hand, to make readers aware of the existence of distinct and distant literatures, and, on the other hand, to revitalize the American literature with the help of the infusion of such foreign and sometimes exotic literary manifestations. An innovator in the field of translation, Pound drew away from the domesticating strategies of the time, which had a tendency to efface and appropriate the difference presented by other literatures, and, acting as a true visible translator, strived to emphasize Otherness with all its mystery and exotic flavour.

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Ezra Pound's Poetics of Translation: principles, performances, implications (D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 2004) (2025)

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