The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 205
and strategically useful, a culturally variable category that needs to be
constructed to guide the translator’s intervention into the current
target-language scene.
II
By the start of the 1950s, modernist translation had achieved
widespread acceptance in Anglo-American literary culture—but only
in part, notably the claim of cultural autonomy for the translated text
and formal choices that were now familiar enough to insure a
domestication of the foreign text, i.e., free verse and precise current
language. The most decisive innovations of modernism inspired few
translators, no doubt because the translations, essays, and reviews that
contained these innovations were difficult to locate, available only in
obscure periodicals and rare limited editions, but also because they ran
counter to the fluent strategies that continued to dominate Englishlanguage
poetry translation. The first sign of this marginalization was
the reception given to the selected edition of Pound’s translations
published by the American press New Directions in 1953. This book
offered a substantial retrospective, reprinting his latest versions of
Cavalcanti and Daniel in bilingual format, as well as “The Seafarer,”
Cathay, Noh plays, a prose text by Rémy de Gourmont, and a
miscellany of poetry translations from Latin, Provençal, French, and
Italian.
At the time of this publication, Pound was an extremely
controversial figure (Stock 1982:423–424, 426–427; Homberger
1972:24–27). His wartime radio broadcasts under Mussolini’s
government got him tried for treason in the United States and
ultimately committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally
Insane in Washington DC (1946). But he was also recognized as a
leading contemporary American poet with the award of the Bollingen
Prize for The Pisan Cantos (1948), an event that prompted fierce attacks
and debates in The New York Times, Partisan Review, and the Saturday
Review of Literature, among other newspapers and magazines. In this
cultural climate, it was inevitable, not just that the translations would
be widely reviewed, but that they would provoke a range of
conflicting responses. Some recognized the innovative nature of
Pound’s work, even if they were unsure of its value; others dismissed
it as a failed experiment that was now dated, void of cultural power.
The favorable judgments came, once again, from reviewers
who shared a modernist cultural agenda. In England, the Poetry