Magin_Edward-thesis

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No version of poetry, however faithful, can be good which does not read
like poetry: to reproduce a poet’s precise wording is a very doubtful need,
and in any case an impossible one; to reproduce his effect may be done if
we approach the task in prayer and fasting, steadily set on forgetting his
actual words as soon as we have mastered their meaning and got the
massed sound of them tyrannously resonant in our ears. The best
translators of poetry are, indeed, those who are least scrupulous of fidelity
in detail; they slur over the untranslatable, and insinuate new words and
turnings of the original thought that are so perfectly in tune with their
originals as to render them far less haltingly than meticulous followers of
the text…The real task of a translator is that of re-creating, and unless he
can bring to his original as much as he takes from it, he had far better
leave it alone. To a strict scholar this definition of translation may appear
to be just what translation is not; but, though the makers of mere cribs
have their uses, they are not such as concern permanent literature, nor do
they help us at all to a relish of its savour. (italics my own)
2.2.4.1.4 Apter on Ezra Pound’s “creative” translations
Ezra Pound is considered one of the most influential and controversial poets of
the 20 th century. He is particularly known for his translations of classical poetry. In her
book Digging for the Treasure: Translation After Pound (1984), Ronnie Apter provides
some insights regarding some of the poetry nomenclature mentioned above.
According to Apter, the terms “creative,” “paraphrase” and “imitation” are not
synonymous but represent different types of poetry. Concerning Pound’s poem Sestina:
Altaforte, a translation of a 12 th century poem by Bertran de Born, Apter (1984:69)
writes:
I have called “Sestina: Altaforte” a creative translation, although there are
good arguments in favor of calling it an imitation. It is one of the works in
which Pound mingled his modes. However, since in my definition a poem
is a creative translation insofar as the changes it makes in the sense of the
original are criticisms of the original, the conclusions I draw from Pound’s
critical practice in “Sestina: Altaforte” are relevant to my argument
regardless of the category to which the translation is assigned.
While this identifies a creative translation as being different from an imitation, we do not
know how it relates to the idea of a metapoem. Apter (1984:4-5) summarizes Pound’s
philosophy in these words from her opening chapter: