Reading the furor Pound’s early
translations caused it’s easy to be pulled up short by the brutality of the last paragraph in William Gardner
Hale’s review of Homage to Sextus Propertius in Poetry (Chicago):
If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin , there
would be nothing left for him but suicide. I do not counsel this. But I beg him
to lay aside the mask of erudition. And If he must deal with Latin, I suggest he paraphrase some accurate
translation. And then employ some respectable student of the language to save
him from the blunders which might still be possible.
And to feel that
Professor Hale, had not only overstepped the mark but had missed the point and
was wrong. As Michael Alexander (1979) wrote of Pound’s (in)famous version of the
Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer”:
It’s easy to imagine the examiner’s report:
’Grasp of language uncertain; identification of individual words in glossary unreliable;
understanding of accidence rudimentary. Grammar poor, syntax worse’. (72)
The critical responses
to Homage to Sextus Propertius sound
like the examiners had taken over the reviews. But reading it all I’m left wondering which of the two words
in “Pound’s translations ‘ is really the target.
Pound was consistently
“guilty” of writing in just as vitriolic a manner. He had preached the gospel of the professional poet and the
professional critic “down the public’s gullet”:
In a country in love with amateurs, in a
country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so
fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the
introduction of a competent criticism, it is well that one man should have a
vision of perfection and that he should be sick to the death and
disconsolate because he cannot
attain it.”(1914: The Prose Tradition in Verse.)
So he could not have been surprised when
the professionals responded to his arrogant dismissal of their understanding of
the Latin poets and, by pointing out his errors, showed conclusively that in their eyes, he
was the amateur. And a poor one at
that. Professor Hale, author of
the superbly titled : “The Cum-constructions: their History and Functions”
and “The Art of Reading Latin-How
to Teach it” took Pound to task:
Mr Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin. He
has of course a perfect right to be, but not if he translates from it. The result of his ignorance is that much
of what he makes his author say is unintelligible. I select a few out of about
three-score errors…(Hale p52)
What the arguments over his translations
remind me is that the history of Poetry is not the record of an inexorable
Darwinian progression of poetic forms towards a today which you somehow assume is the best that has
been. In Pound’s version of literary history, Poetry, with its capital P, is
something that can be objectively
discussed and analyzed, just as the flatness of the earth could be. For those who believe this version
(like Stead in “The New Poetic” or Kenner in “The Pound Era”) the literary battles of the past were
fought by heroic forbears whose victories moved the progression onwards. Just
as Galileo fought against ignorance to prove the world turns. Eliot and Pound waged their war against
the stultifying conventions of late 19th century verse and bought
poetry kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. (The metaphors are usually
equally physical, martial and heroic.)
In this version critics like Hale were
simply wrong. They stand in for the ultimately ineffectual opponents of a
Galileo or a Harvey.
Reading the reviews and articles from the
time, however, one is reminded that poems are written by people, and the
history of poetry is a history of back stabbing, back scratching,
infighting, an entertaining if
grubby record of squabbling for prestige and position. Or as K.K Ruthven put
it:
'The Feuds and the factions, the intrigues and the
infighting, the machinations of one upmanship, the economic and erotic
foundations of reputation mongering, the conspiratorial exclusions, the cult
figures and the camp-followers, the groupings and the groupies.' After detailing the back scratching and
log rolling and infighting Ruthven points out that 'The only people short
changed by these practices were readers naive enough to believe that criticism
is produced by impartial experts".
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Hale's review is in Poetry Chicago. The quote from Michael Alexander is from "The Poetic Achievement of Ezra pound" and K.K Ruthven's is from "Ezra Pound as Literary critic"
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