TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

and transforms it into
Callimachi manes et Coi sacra Philetae
in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus
primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos
Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros
(4.1 in Mueller, 3.1 in Teubner, 3.2 in modern eds)
Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas,
It is in your grove I would walk,
I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy, and the dance into Italy
We see a living example of Pound's rejection of Browning's ―translationese‖: ―What
Browning had not got into his sometimes excellent top-knot was the patent, or what
should be the patent fact, that inversions of sentence order in an uninflected language like
English are not, simply and utterly are not any sort of equivalent for inversions and
perturbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected‖
(―Translators‖ 148). Pound's creative misprision of the last two lines depends upon his
interpretation of their central importance, their claim of originality in bringing tradition
into a new language. Miller argues that graios choros can become ―Grecian orgies,‖ and
that Pound‘s awkward phrase ―into Italy‖ is softened in its second mention such that ―[i]t
[is an] anatomizing of the process of bringing Propertius – as new idea – into English.
Propertius's creative accomplishment is effected by his manipulation, subtle twisting, of a
number of conventions – the restricted codes of Latin love elegy – that don't exist in
English verse‖ (38 my emphasis). What Pound has done, and here the element of deceit,
―verba dabam,‖ that lies tacit in the expanded context of the Ovidian reference that Pound
uses to code his volume of poetry, is to turn the man, Propertius, into his coded name for
poetic imitation that aims itself covertly as political criticism. Effectively, Pound buries
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