Journal of Italian Translation

Daniela Caselli
lation can bring back an untainted idea of the original. For Eliot,
the original is matter an sich, unknowable by definition: thus, every
translation must be rethought as an interpretive exercise bound to
its own time, able to enrich and renew the existing poetic tradition.
28 Pound the ‘fabbro’ [forger] and the artifex, rather than the
theoretician, is rescued by the critical tradition: he is the artist who,
according to Hugh Kenner’s famous definition, ‘never translates
into something which already exists in English.’ 29
To avoid cleansing Pound’s reputation as a practitioner from
the debris of his anti-semitic theorisations and to redefine the link
between translation and totalitarianism, it is politically useful to
look at Arthur Waley (1889-1966). 30 Poet and translator at the margins
of the Bloomsbury group, Waley has often been fashioned in
literary histories as the anti-Pound: if Pound is the source of modern
poetic revolution thanks to his translations able to invent the
Orient, Waley is the learned translator from the Chinese and the
Japanese, laboriously and painstakingly constructing the first bridge
between modern East and West. Critics Ivan Morris and Jonathan
Spence have attempted to vindicate Waley’s importance in having
altered forever the way in which the twentieth century conceives
of the Orient by drawing attention to how twentieth century artists
from Bertold Brecht (Chinesische Gedichte, 1939) to Blair Fairchild
(Songs from the Chinese, 1922), Aaron Copland (Old Poems, 1923),
and Benjamin Britten (Songs from the Chinese, 1957), 31 had access to
the East exclusively through Waley’s translations.
Morris and Spence also underline how Waley remained a
marginal figure in Bloomsbury; he determinately shun from fame, 32
as can be observed in the interview Waley gave to the BBC in 1963,
which has led critics like Paz to claim that Waley is an important
figure but that his many talents were ‘less intense’ than those of
Pound. 33 Critic Wai-lim Yip follows the existing critical opposition
of Pound and Waley too when he describes Pound’s translating as
‘breaking through verbal barriers into the core of the poem’ 34 while
dismissing Waley as someone who ‘endorsed the theory of literal
translation’. 35 Precision, erudition, and care to detail quickly become
the attributes which damn Waley with faint praise: such qualities
are soon transformed into an academic limitation useful to prop
up the figure of a Pound able to move ‘beyond’ language, of ‘breaking
syntactical barriers’, and of reaching that mythical poetic centre
which in Yip seems to transcend language itself.
33