The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 213
adherence to standard English grammar (“utility of syntax? waaal the
chink does without a damLot”) as well as her cultivation of a
“homogene” language:
it is now more homogene/it is purrhapz a bit lax/
whether one emend that occurs wd/lax it still more ???
it still reads a bit like a translation/
what is the maximum abruptness you can get it TO?
Fordie: “40 ways to say anything”
I spose real exercise would consist in trying them ALL.
(Barnard 1984:283)
Fitts, in turn, praised Barnard’s Sappho because it was “homogene,”
because it used “exact,” current English without any “spurious
poeticism, none of the once so fashionable Swinburne—Symonds
erethism”: “What I chiefly admire in Miss Barnard’s translations and
reconstructions is the direct purity of diction and versification”
(Barnard 1958:ix).
By the 1950s, Fitts had already reviewed Pound’s writing on a
few occasions, gradually distancing himself from his early
approval. 4 His negative review of Pound’s translations typified the
midcentury reaction against modernism: he attacked the most
experimental versions for the distinctively modernist reason that
they didn’t stand on their own as literary texts. “When he fails,”
Fitts wrote, “he fails because he has chosen to invent a nolanguage,
a bric-a-brac archaizing language, largely (in spite of his
excellent ear) unsayable, and all but unreadable” (Fitts 1954:19).
Fitts revealed his knowledge of Pound’s rationale for using
archaism—namely, its usefulness in signifying the cultural and
historical remoteness of foreign texts—but he rejected any
translation discourse that did not assimilate them to prevailing
English-language values, that was not sufficiently transparent to
produce the illusion of originality:
True, Daniel wrote hundreds of years ago, and in Provençal. But he
was writing a living language, not something dragged out of the
remoter reaches of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. He said autra
gens, which is “other men,” not “other wight”; he said el bosc l’auzel,
not “birds quhitter in forest”; and so on. Pound […] may have