The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

208 The Translator’s Invisibility
Dickinson” (ibid.:121). Whicher measured Pound’s translations against
his call for linguistic precision and faulted their “pedantic diction”: “he
had not yet freed himself from the affectation of archaism which marks
and mars his ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’” (ibid.:120). 3 In the New York
Herald Tribune, Whicher joined Davie in questioning Pound’s choice of
foreign texts, using the translations as an opportunity to treat
modernism as passé, perhaps once seen as “revolutionary,” but rather
“dull” in 1953:
It is almost impossible to realize […] how revolutionary was the
publication of “Cavalcanti Poems” in the year 1912. Here was a first
conscious blow in the campaign to deflate poetry to its bare
essentials. […] Now, however, we wonder how so excellent a
craftsman as Pound could have labored through so many dull
poems, even with the help of a minor Italian.
(Whicher 1953:25)
The negative reviews of these and other critics (Leslie Fiedler’s, in
a glance at Pound’s hospital confinement, called his Daniel
versions “Dante Gabriel Rossetti gone off his rocker!” (Fiedler
1962:120)) signalled a midcentury reaction against modernism that
banished Pound’s translations to the fringes of Anglo-American
literary culture (Perkins 1987; von Hallberg, 1985), The center in
English-language poetry translation was held by fluent strategies
that were modern, but not entirely modernist—domesticating in
their assimilation of foreign texts to the transparent discourse that
prevailed in every form of contemporary print culture; consistent
in their refusal of the discursive heterogeneity by which modernist
translation sought to signify linguistic and cultural differences.
The review of Pound’s translations written by the influential
Dudley Fitts exemplified this cultural situation in the sharpest
terms.
Fitts (1903–1968) was a poet and critic who from the late thirties
onward gained a distinguished reputation as a translator of classical
texts, for the most part drama by Sophocles and Aristophanes. He
translated Greek and Latin epigrams as well and edited a noted
anthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. As translator
and editor of translations, he produced sixteen books, mainly with
the large commercial press Harcourt Brace. His reviews of poetry
and translations were widely published in various magazines, mass
and small circulation, including some linked with modernism: