The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Notes 321
Pound’s modernist translation projects include Murphy 1953, Ferlinghetti
1953, and The New Yorker 1954.
2 Davie’s commentary on Pound’s writing includes two books, 1964 and
1976. Homberger discusses Davie’s “sustained and occasionally bitter
attack upon the intention behind the Cantos” (Homberger 1972:28–29).
3 See also Stern 1953:
What is peculiar in Pound’s translating shows up mostly in the famous
versions of Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel. Away from the didactic
context, Pound has tended to burden some of the translations with an
antique weight (perhaps in order to carry what has since become staple
or cliché or what has since vanished altogether from the tradition). […]
The finest English verse in The Translations comes in The Seafarer and in
the Chinese poems of Cathay. There whatever is sporty or cagy or
antique or labyrinthine in other sections of the book drops away and
we have the pure, emotionally subtle, lovely verse which most English
readers have Pound alone to thank for knowing.
(Stern 1953:266, 267)
Edwin Muir similarly praises “all the translations in the book except
those from Guido Cavalcanti,” adding, somewhat eccentrically, that “the
poems from the Provençal and the Chinese bring off the miracle” (Muir
1953:40).
4 Fitts’s changing attitude toward Pound’s writing is documented by the
two reviews printed in Homberger 1972, the first a very enthusiastic
assessment of A Draft of XXX Cantos from 1931, the second a curt
dismissal of Guide to Kulchur from 1939 (Homberger 1972:246–255, 335–
336). Carpenter 1988:507, 543 also notes Fitts’s negative reviews of Pound.
Pound, in turn, felt that even Fitts’s positive reviews were misguided
(Carpenter 1988:478). Laughlin seems to have indulged Fitts’s criticisms,
since he invited Fitts “to check and correct the classical allusions” in The
Cantos (ibid.:687).
5 The translation is reprinted, without the Latin texts, in Zukofsky 1991,
where the dates of composition, 1958–1969, are given in square brackets.
Cid Corman, who was in correspondence with Louis Zukofsky and
published some of the Catullus translation in his magazine Origin, notes
that it involved “at least 8 or 9 years’ labor” (Corman 1970:4). Celia
Zukofsky later made clear the division of labor (Hatlen 1978:539n.2).
Pound’s influence on the Zukofskys’ Catullus can be inferred from
Ahearn 1987:200, 203, 208, 218.
6 I have learned much about the language of the Zukofskys’ Catullus from
Guy Davenport’s brief but incisive essays, 1970 and 1979. See also Gordon
1979 and Mann 1986, who presents an astute discussion of the cultural
and political issues raised by the translation.
7 Not surprisingly, Raffel reviewed Apter’s study very favorably (Raffel
1985), and his own study of Pound’s writing (Raffel 1984) includes a
chapter on the translations, but entirely omits any discussion of the