Journal of Italian Translation

Daniela Caselli
into, uncharted regions; when he is trying to express things
not yet current, not yet worn into phrases; when he is ahead
of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might
be ahead of the colour sense) of his contemporaries. 19
In Pound avant-garde and translation are experimental activities
which ought to be ‘before their time’, and yet they are closely
connected to reactionary ideological positions. Through Dante’s
Latin (whose directio voluntatis is evoked more than once) and ancient
Greek, Pound claims that Mang Tsze, against Christian ethics,
is in favour of an economy of abundance; through a sinister
and violent anti-semitic attack, the author distinguishes between
such an economy and what he describes as ‘the semitic excess’.
This is exemplary of the very problematic role which translation
plays in Pound. What Pound describes as Mang Tsze’s ‘original’
text, which is praised as Confucian because ‘totalitarian’, 20 is opposed
to the ‘semitic insanity’ and to Socrates. It will have, according
to Pound, ‘a fresh impact on to more thoughtful minds.’ 21
Pound will go as far as claiming in 1941 in an article published
on the Meridiano di Roma that:
Confucio ed il suo più grande commentatore
Menzio, hanno un significato per noi oggi in Italia. Hanno
una funzione nel programma educativo del Fascismo anche
se non ce ne rendiamo pienamente conto. Mussolini e Hitler
per magnifico intuito seguono le dottrine di Confucio. Re
Vittorio Emanuele è un sovrano confuciano. Non basta
leggere una sola volta una sua versione, bisogna, come io
stesso continuo a fare, leggere e rileggere il testo originale e
ideogrammico col commento accanto.’ [Confucius and his
greatest commentator, Mang Tsze, are significant for us in
Italy. They have a role within the fascist educational
programme even though we might not fully realise this.
Mussolini and Hitler thanks to their magnificent intuition
follow Confucius’ doctrines. King Vittorio Emanuele is a
Confucian sovereign. It is not enough to read once his
translation, one must – as I do – read and reread the original
text written in ideograms with its facing commentary]. 22
Pound’s trajectory goes from the Chinese character’s dyna-
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