venuti

Chapter 5MarginThe translation of a poem having any depth ends by being one of twothings: Either it is the expression of the translator, virtually a new poem,or it is as it were a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of thestatue.Ezra PoundThe dominance of transparent discourse in English-languagetranslation was decisively challenged at the turn of the twentiethcentury, when modernism emerged in Anglo-American literaryculture. The experimentation that characterized the literature of thisperiod brought with it new translation strategies that avoided fluencyby cultivating extremely heterogeneous discourses, principally inpoetry translations, but also more widely in poetic composition.Translation now became a key practice in modernist poetics,motivating appropriations of various archaic and foreign poetries toserve modernist cultural agendas in English (see, for example, Hooley1988). At the same time, English-language translation theory attaineda new level of critical sophistication, summoned as it was torationalize specific modernist texts, poems that were translations aswell as translations of poems.But translation today seems to bear little sign of thesedevelopments. The dominance of transparent discourse has remainedso secure in English that even though modernist poetry and prosehave long been canonized in Anglo-American literary cultures, bothin and out of the academy, the innovations that distinguish modernisttranslation continue to be marginal, seldom actually implemented inan English-language translation, seldom recommended in theoreticalstatements by translators or others. In the search for exits from thedominance of transparency, it is important to assess the innovations