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

which I paid no conscious attention to the grammar of the Latin text; and of which all my
revisions were made away from and not toward literal rendering‖ (70 my emphasis).
Pound‘s method was meant to deter one from the surface of his work‘s details and
fragments for their exemplary status as indicators of a lost historical reality – here, both
the relationship between Propertius‘s musical syntax and that of his Alexandrian
predecessors as well as the political protest Propertius encoded in his love poetry against
―ineffectual empire.‖
Pound's intention to translate the life of the poet rather than his poetry leaves
room for a query about the accidental basis for his assumptions about that historical
reality. Pound bases his findings on a handful of close readings that suggested themselves
easily to the kind of ironic rendering he prefers. The most famous being the ludic
paranomasia of the word ―puella‖ as it becomes ―devirginated young ladies.‖ Most
translators would use either of the terms ―mistress‖ or ―young girl‖. Pound, though, was
an accomplished Latin comparativist, familiar with Propertius long before he set about to
write the homage as a primer for Iris Barry. Barry gives Pound the opportunity to include
and emphasize the love theme in a stylized mode, free from the maudlin expansiveness it
holds in Propertius‘s Monobiblion: ―The Barry catalyst provided the poet with an
opportunity not only to ―modernize‖ this Latin author, recreating him as more consistent
with the Imagist movement, but more importantly to summarize the basic love theme
content of all the Propertian elegies into a condensed form‖ (Mages 70).
There are two techniques structuring the personae Pound constructs. The first
insures a limited kind of verisimilitude with Propertius' text, or at least a fidelity to that
aspect of Propertius that Pound found it important to portray: ―It would be inaccurate to
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