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
4 - Pound and Translation: Ideogram and the Vulgar Tongue
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
Recent criticism on Ezra Pound has, quite rightly, been placing an increased emphasis on the importance of translation within both his poetry and poetics—more than ever, translation is being viewed as a fundamental element of Pound's work and thought, and not just as an ancillary activity. However, what particular status to attribute to Pound's work as translator remains as intractable a question as ever. Clearly, we are moving away from an inadequate view of Pound's interest in translation as being mostly a matter of poetic hygiene and calisthenics, undertaken in view of the creation of superior “original” work. The tendency now is more to see the translations as a form of original work, as “English poems in their own right,” as Ming Xie has said of Cathay (“Pound as Translator,” 210). If such a view is welcome, however, it still remains problematic, as such an assertion can paradoxically and all too easily efface the status of the translations as such, which then simply become more Pound poems. Thus, one “solves” the problem of Pound's translations not by simply occluding them, but by denying that they remain in essence the translations which they are. Even a study as sophisticated as Yao's moves in this direction, when in discussing Cathay he stresses what he sees as Pound's concern not to “mark the poem as unmistakably foreign” (43) to an English reader and in the context of the First World War.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Modernism's Expatriate SceneThe Labour of Translation, pp. 71 - 94Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007