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

commitment to past modes of critical reception. This has broad implications for how we
may go about reading Pound‘s homage to Propertius. We need to adjust our
presuppositions about the supposedly depthless history we have been asked by
contemporary interpreters to see served in the Cantos. What follows is an argument for
the kind of protocol necessary to the assessment of Pound's project of rendering an
antique criticism in ―Homage to Sextus Propertius‖ that echoes the principles of archaic
verbalism and difficult syntax Benjamin once located in the baroque trauerspiel, and of
which was necessary for its ability to present fate as history‘s natural force. In order to
assess the stakes of Pound‘s homage it is necessary to disentangle Pound‘s efforts from
various recent commentators; these critics help both to draw out the stakes of his
translation habits as well as their seeming import, making the case that Pound‘s
translation was a knowing effort in modernist allegory.
1
J.P. Sullivan's reading of ―Homage to Sextus Propertius‖ has, as its unstated task,
the rescuing of Pound's work from the history of its critical reception as a botched
translation. Classicists contemporary with Pound chastised him for his errors. Their
criticisms are instructive for how they demonstrate a mode of analysis Pound was
intentionally making risible through his fragments of Propertius‘s elegies in translation.
William Gardner Hale may have thrown the heaviest stone. In a letter to Harriet Monroe's
Poetry, after its March 1919 printing of four of the poem's twelve sections, Hale writes:
―Mr. Pound is often undignified and flippant, which Propertius never is...such renderings
pervert the flavor of a consciously artistic, almost academic original.‖ An anonymous
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