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

CHAPTER THREE:
LONG SERIES OF TRANSLATIONS: ANTIQUARIAN-CRITICISM IN ―HOMAGE
TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS‖
It was the peculiar genius of Pound's Propertius and Cavalcanti to
use antique material, to treat it with verbal archaism, but to make
syntax and motion programmatic and modernist. Pound's versions
of Latin and Provencal are meant to exemplify new possibilities in
the stress-patterns, in the manners of address, in the segmentation
of English and American verse.
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- George Steiner. After Babel
I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of
poetry was ―indestructible‖, what part could not be lost by
translation, and – scarcely less important – what effects were
obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of
being translated.
- Pound, 1913, ―How I Began‖
List Seneca, Saint Jerome, Luther, Dryden. Holderlin, Novalis,
Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Valery, MacKenna, Franz
Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Quine – and you have nearly the
sum total of those who have said anything fundamental or new
about translation. The range of theoretic ideas, as distinct from the
wealth of pragmatic notation, remains very small.
- George Steiner. After Babel
If Pound‟s parley with Browning provides us with a hermeneutic model for
rethinking the way his poetic text can be viewed to critically entertain the title of his book