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

George Steiner uncovers the ramifications of this method in his discussion of
Pound's translation habits, noting that it is often true that the most persuasive translations
have been made by writers ignorant of the language they translate, reworking and
adapting prior translations where the question of mimetic correspondence to an original is
inarguably absent. Steiner discusses Pound's successful adaptations of Ernest Fenollosa's
manuscripts published in Cathay (1915). Pound's translations, he notes, fail when those
manuscripts are unavoidably misleading, while inexplicably accurate given the often
meager suggestions they work from. The line, ―At fourteen I married My Lord you‖ from
―Lament of the Frontier Guard,‖ ―communicates precisely the nuance of ceremonious
innocence, of special address from child to adult, which constitutes the charm of the
original and which Waley misses‖ (Steiner 377).
Steiner's explanation is crucial for how it helps to debunk readings of Pound‘s
poetry that only wish to see in it a commitment to certain kinds of ephemeral
observations and uses of historical archives. That species of Pound‘s more durable set of
concerns located in his discussion of the ―Method of the Luminous Detail,‖ Imagism, is
credited for the emotional concentration it creates through the collage of different planes
of allusion. The ability to find the corresponding emotion is credited to Pound's knack for
mimicry. He can ―enter into alien guise, to assume the mask and gait of other cultures‖
(Steiner 378). That insinuation into otherness is intentionally curtailed, however. Pound
does not actually penetrate across remoteness and uncertainty but relies entirely on that
hermeneutic of trust (mentioned in the prior chapter) that he forms with his reader. This
trust can be mobilized to defend effete readings of Pound's treatment of his sources; it
explains how he used those sources to point out syntactical potentials in modern English
72