The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 191
A.D. 1290 as conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and
Bucharin would to-day in a Methodist bankers’ board meeting in
Memphis, Term.
(ibid.:203)
Pound, like Bunting and Eliot, concealed his modernist appropriation
of foreign texts behind a claim of cultural autonomy for translation. He
concluded his 1929 essay “Guido’s Relations” by briefly distinguishing
between an “interpretive translation,” prepared as an
“accompaniment” to the foreign text, and “the ‘other sort’” of
translation, which possesses an aesthetic independence:
The “other sort,” I mean in cases where the “translator” is definitely
making a new poem, falls simply in the domain of original writing,
or if it does not it must be censured according to equal standards,
and praised with some sort of just deduction, assessable only in the
particular case.
(Anderson 1983:251)
Pound drew this distinction when he published his own translations.
As David Anderson has observed, the 1920 collection Umbra: The Early
Poems of Ezra Pound ended with a “Main outline of E.P.’s works to
date,” in which Pound classified “The Seafarer,” “Exile’s Letter (and
Cathay in general),” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” as “Major
Personae,” whereas his versions of Cavalcanti and Provençal poets like
Arnaut Daniel were labelled “Etudes,” study guides to the foreign texts
(Anderson 1983:xviii–xix). Pound saw them all as his “poems,” but
used the term “Major Personae” to single out translations that
deserved to be judged according to the same standards as his “original
writing.” The appeal to these (unnamed) standards means of course
that Pound’s translations put foreign texts in the service of a modernist
poetics, evident, for example, in his use of free verse and precise
language, but also in the selection of foreign texts where a “persona”
could be constructed, an independent voice or mask for the poet. Here
it is possible to see that the values Pound’s autonomous translations
inscribed in foreign texts included not only a modernist poetics, but an
individualism that was at once romantic and patriarchal. He
characterized the translation that is a “new poem” in the
individualistic terms of romantic expressive theory (“the expression of
the translator”). And what received expression in translations like
“The Seafarer” and “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” was the