Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Native Well Being: Henry James and the “Cosmopolite”
- 2 The Mother's Tongue: Seduction, Authenticity, and Interference in The Ambassadors
- 3 Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation
- 4 Pound and Translation: Ideogram and the Vulgar Tongue
- 5 Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and the American Language
- 6 Jack Spicer's After Lorca: Translation as Delocalization
- 7 Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Native Well Being: Henry James and the “Cosmopolite”
- 2 The Mother's Tongue: Seduction, Authenticity, and Interference in The Ambassadors
- 3 Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation
- 4 Pound and Translation: Ideogram and the Vulgar Tongue
- 5 Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and the American Language
- 6 Jack Spicer's After Lorca: Translation as Delocalization
- 7 Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Twenty-five years ago ‘one’ came to England to escape Ersatz;” Ezra Pound explained in 1933, precisely twenty-five years after having moved to England himself. He continued as follows: “that is to say, whenever a British half-wit expressed an opinion, some American quarter-wit rehashed it in one of the ‘respectable’ American organs” (Selected Prose, 227). The irony, if not particularly subtle, still bears examination. If America, in accordance with the oldest of new-world, expatriate tropes, lags behind England in terms of culture, still one goes to the latter not to shun imitation and obtain the authentic cultural value, but rather to encounter the authentic cultural idiocy. One goes to England not for the cure, but rather to treat the heart of the disease instead of a far-flung symptom. Indeed, the word “organs” above needs to be read in all its corporeal and corporatist connotations, as Pound's very next sentence is, “Disease is more contagious than health” (227). Still, Pound's equating of England with the thing itself, the original and authentic rather than the derivation, imitation, and repetition, is unequivocal. No less so is the recourse to a foreign language for a word that expresses the secondary. As is so often the case for Pound, terminological precision demands a term which, neologism or foreign loan word, implies nothing so much as catachresis. “Ersatz” is nothing but the ersatz of a missing English word, invoked in a discussion of English authenticity. Language, authenticity, the foreign, and the question of origins are all neatly woven together here.
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- American Modernism's Expatriate SceneThe Labour of Translation, pp. 53 - 70Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007