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

presence of a continuous patina of sincerity in their liberal discussions of those
mythological parallels against and upon which Cynthia's behaviors are being drawn.
Propertius uses the mythological overlay as a homeopathic remedy to his pain and loss.
Pound‘s response to this, and this is where his first and too earnest critics make their
categorical blunder, is to intentionally ignore Propertius' mythological treatment of
Cynthia; in esse, Pound‘s translation strategically gives up trying to represent the element
of poetic rivalry and critique that was advanced through Propertius‘s mythological
Alexandrian overlay.
At the very same time, Pound's translation has little to do with recovering the
putative sincerity of Propertius‘s romantic feelings for Cynthia, displaced in the original
through that mythological ornament. Pound‘s actual recovery of Propertius‘s allusiveness
demanded that he find a way to translate its mythopoetics in a manner that would reveal
itself as being of Propertius‘s while also not being a facile transliteration. Pound‘s
seeming belief that that signature of mythical allusiveness would be lost on a modern
audience can be better explained as stemming from his antiquarian disposition. That is,
Pound recognizes that the criticism of Propertius‘s modern reception that he wishes to
launch – that it ignores Propertius‘s self-conscious use of the stylistic opportunities
afforded by his Alexandrian precursors and their referential universe of myth – would fail
were he to naturalize it as ornament in a modern language. Allusion needs to be used
sparingly and with purpose if it was to draw attention to itself as a poetic overlay,
commentary, and poetic skewer as it had once for Propertius himself. The formal element
of mythologocal counterpoint in Propertius‘s metier needed to be resurrected through the
invention of an entirely different kind of ironic timbre:
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