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208 The Translator’s InvisibilityDickinson” (ibid.:121). Whicher measured Pound’s translations againsthis call for linguistic precision and faulted their “pedantic diction”: “hehad not yet freed himself from the affectation of archaism which marksand mars his ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’” (ibid.:120). 3 In the New YorkHerald Tribune, Whicher joined Davie in questioning Pound’s choice offoreign texts, using the translations as an opportunity to treatmodernism as passé, perhaps once seen as “revolutionary,” but rather“dull” in 1953:It is almost impossible to realize […] how revolutionary was thepublication of “Cavalcanti Poems” in the year 1912. Here was a firstconscious blow in the campaign to deflate poetry to its bareessentials. […] Now, however, we wonder how so excellent acraftsman as Pound could have labored through so many dullpoems, even with the help of a minor Italian.(Whicher 1953:25)The negative reviews of these and other critics (Leslie Fiedler’s, ina glance at Pound’s hospital confinement, called his Danielversions “Dante Gabriel Rossetti gone off his rocker!” (Fiedler1962:120)) signalled a midcentury reaction against modernism thatbanished Pound’s translations to the fringes of Anglo-Americanliterary culture (Perkins 1987; von Hallberg, 1985), The center inEnglish-language poetry translation was held by fluent strategiesthat were modern, but not entirely modernist—domesticating intheir assimilation of foreign texts to the transparent discourse thatprevailed in every form of contemporary print culture; consistentin their refusal of the discursive heterogeneity by which modernisttranslation sought to signify linguistic and cultural differences.The review of Pound’s translations written by the influentialDudley Fitts exemplified this cultural situation in the sharpestterms.Fitts (1903–1968) was a poet and critic who from the late thirtiesonward gained a distinguished reputation as a translator of classicaltexts, for the most part drama by Sophocles and Aristophanes. Hetranslated Greek and Latin epigrams as well and edited a notedanthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. As translatorand editor of translations, he produced sixteen books, mainly withthe large commercial press Harcourt Brace. His reviews of poetryand translations were widely published in various magazines, massand small circulation, including some linked with modernism: