venuti

210 The Translator’s Invisibility‘Jupiter’!) whenever the context admitted it without tooperilous a clash.(Fitts 1956:xvii–xviii)The first thing worth remarking is how much Fitts’s method wasindebted to modernist translation, especially Pound’s work. Theassertion of the aesthetic independence of the translation, thepractice of “altering” the foreign text and using contemporaryEnglish, even the swipe at academic translations, presumably tooliteral and therefore not literary—all this characterized Pound’stranslation theory and practice (but also earlier figures in the historyof English-language translation: some of Pound’s views, likeBunting’s, date back to Denham and Dryden). Fitts knew andreviewed Pound’s work, corresponded with him during the thirties,and, at the Choate School, taught Pound’s poetry to James Laughlin,who launched New Directions and published Fitts’s PalatineAnthology as well as many of Pound’s books (Stock 1982:322–323;Carpenter 1988:527–528). Fitts’s most significant departure fromPound in this volume, a departure that was now determiningPound’s reception both in and out of the academy, was the refusalof different poetic discourses, including archaism. Preexistingcultural materials fade into “ghosts” with the claim of culturalautonomy for the translation, which can then carry out athoroughgoing domestication that inscribes the foreign text withtarget-language values, both linguistic (fluency) and cultural (aJudeo-Christian monotheism—“writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’”).When Fitts reprinted this translation in 1956, he added a “Note”that apologized for not revising the texts: “My theories of translationhave changed so radically that any attempt to recast the work offifteen or twenty years ago could end only in confusion and thestultification of whatever force the poems may have once had” (Fitts1956:xiii). But a few years later, when he published an essay ontranslation entitled “The Poetic Nuance,” first as a “privately printed”volume produced by Harcourt “for the friends of the author and hispublishers” (Fitts 1958), then in Reuben Brower’s Harvard UniversityPress anthology On Translation (Brower 1959), it was clear that Fitts’stranslation theory hadn’t changed at all. He argued the same basicideas, which continued to be the canons of English-language poetrytranslation, made available by both trade and academic publishersand underwritten by Fitts’s prestige as a translator and reviewer.Thus, the point of “The Poetic Nuance” was that “The translation of