venuti

Margin 205and strategically useful, a culturally variable category that needs to beconstructed to guide the translator’s intervention into the currenttarget-language scene.IIBy the start of the 1950s, modernist translation had achievedwidespread acceptance in Anglo-American literary culture—but onlyin part, notably the claim of cultural autonomy for the translated textand formal choices that were now familiar enough to insure adomestication of the foreign text, i.e., free verse and precise currentlanguage. The most decisive innovations of modernism inspired fewtranslators, no doubt because the translations, essays, and reviews thatcontained these innovations were difficult to locate, available only inobscure periodicals and rare limited editions, but also because they rancounter to the fluent strategies that continued to dominate Englishlanguagepoetry translation. The first sign of this marginalization wasthe reception given to the selected edition of Pound’s translationspublished by the American press New Directions in 1953. This bookoffered a substantial retrospective, reprinting his latest versions ofCavalcanti and Daniel in bilingual format, as well as “The Seafarer,”Cathay, Noh plays, a prose text by Rémy de Gourmont, and amiscellany of poetry translations from Latin, Provençal, French, andItalian.At the time of this publication, Pound was an extremelycontroversial figure (Stock 1982:423–424, 426–427; Homberger1972:24–27). His wartime radio broadcasts under Mussolini’sgovernment got him tried for treason in the United States andultimately committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the CriminallyInsane in Washington DC (1946). But he was also recognized as aleading contemporary American poet with the award of the BollingenPrize for The Pisan Cantos (1948), an event that prompted fierce attacksand debates in The New York Times, Partisan Review, and the SaturdayReview of Literature, among other newspapers and magazines. In thiscultural climate, it was inevitable, not just that the translations wouldbe widely reviewed, but that they would provoke a range ofconflicting responses. Some recognized the innovative nature ofPound’s work, even if they were unsure of its value; others dismissedit as a failed experiment that was now dated, void of cultural power.The favorable judgments came, once again, from reviewerswho shared a modernist cultural agenda. In England, the Poetry