The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Invisibility 35
breostceare”/“bitter breast-cares”; “merewerges”/ “mere-weary”;
“corna caldast”/“corn of the coldest”; “floodwegas”/“flood-ways”;
“hægl scurum fleag”/“hail-scur flew”; “mæw singende fore
medodrince”/“the mews’ singing all my mead-drink.” But Pound’s
departures from modern English also include archaisms drawn from
later periods of English literature.
ne ænig hleomæga
feasceaftig fer frefran meahte.
Forpon him gelyfe lyt, se pe ah lifes wyn
gebiden in burgum, bealosipa hwon,
wlonc ond wingal, hu ic werig oft
in brimlade bidan sceolde.
(Krapp and Dobbie 1936:144)
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he littles believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
(Pound 1954:207)
The word “aye” (“always”) is a Middle English usage that later
appeared in Scottish and northern dialects, while “burghers” first
emerges in the Elizabethan period (OED). The words “’mid” (for
“amid”) and “bide” are poeticisms used by such nineteenth-century
writers as Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and Morris. Pound’s
lexicon in fact favors archaisms that have become poetical: “brine,”
“o’er,” “pinion,” “laud,” “ado.”
Such textual features indicate that a translation can be
foreignizing only by putting to work cultural materials and agendas
that are domestic, specific to the target language, but also, in this
case, anachronistic, specific to later periods. “The Seafarer” is
informed by Pound’s knowledge of English literature from its
beginnings, but also by his modernist poetics, by his favoring,
notably in The Cantos, an elliptical, fragmentary verse in which
subjectivity is split and determinate, presented as a site of
heterogeneous cultural discourses (Easthope 1983:chap. 9). The
peculiarities of Pound’s translation—the gnarled syntax, the