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

modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry to read Propertius and Catullus for their dexterous
tonalities, not their subject matter. Noting that there were no good translations of
Propertius's work in English, Pound writes, ―I shall have to rig up something‖ (Letters
142). The homage was meant to be a didactic tool used to exemplify Pound's estimate of
Propertius's metrical ear and the kinds of connections that Propertius could engineer with
interior-rhyme and parallelism. Pound's homage, once an idiomatic sea change was
decided, made risible the kind of classical education that had made rival translations
inadequate and misleading.
According to Arkins, Pound needed only Books Two and Three of Propertius‘s
Monobiblion for the task. In fact he focuses exclusively on three clusters of poems in the
two books – Poems 10-15 of Book Two, Poems 28-34 of Book Two, and Poems 1-6 of
Book Three. In addition, Pound incorporates the closing and opening poems from the two
books he uses to exemplify Propertius: ―Thematically, this means, in the main, poems
about Cynthia in Book Two and poems about poetry in Book Three, with the closing
poem of Book Two, 34, which deals with poets who write of love, like Propertius, linking
the two groups‖ (Arkins 33). Pound took the germ from which his translation would grow
from a poem that he did not in fact translate, 4.8, – the so-called ―Ride to Lanuvium‖. It
is this that was the source of what appeared to be his own interpretation of Propertius'
sardonic tone.
Pound's mistakes are plausibly explained as stemming from his pedagogical
impulse. Rejecting the Loeb edition for its musty Victorian translationese, Pound chose
the 1892 Mueller translation as his source. Mueller divided the poems differently than
Loeb. ―[T]his means that he sometimes thought he was referring to entire poems when
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