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212 The Translator’s InvisibilityMary Barnard’s 1958 version of Sappho praised her perception that theGreek texts were written in a “pungent downright plain style”requiring an appropriately “plain” English:Some say a cavalry corps,some infantry, some, again,will maintain that the swift oarsof our fleet are the finestsight on dark earth; but I saythat whatever one loves, is.I do not see how that could be bettered. Like the Greek, it is strippedand hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth. Here is notrace of the “sweete slyding, fit for a verse” that one expects to findin renderings of Sappho. It is exact translation; but in itscomposition, the spacing, the arrangement of stresses, it is also highart. This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.(Barnard 1958:ix)Yet Barnard’s version was “exact,” not so much because she found atrue equivalent to the Greek text—she herself later admitted that sheused “padding,” making the fragments more continuous—but ratherbecause she was influenced by Pound (Barnard 1984:280–284). Shecorresponded with Pound during the fifties while he was confined atSt. Elizabeth’s, and she showed him her versions of Sappho, revisingthem in accordance with his recommendation that she use “the LIVElanguage” instead of “poetik jarg” (ibid.:282). This recommendationdovetailed with Barnard’s reading of Sappho’s poetry, which waspartly modernist (“It was spare but musical”), partly romantic (“andhad, besides, the sound of the speaking voice making a simple butemotionally loaded statement”). Barnard finally developed a fluentstrategy that produced the effect of transparency, seeking “a cadencethat belongs to the speaking voice” (ibid.:284), and Fitts appreciatedthis illusionistic effect, taking the English for the Greek text, the poemfor the poet: “This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.”But even though both Fitts and Barnard joined in Pound’svalorization of linguistic precision, they were unable to share hisinterest in a more fragmentary and heterogeneous discourse—i.e., in atranslation strategy that preempted transparency. Thus, Barnardignored passages in Pound’s letters where he questioned her