venuti

36 The Translator’s Invisibilityreverberating alliteration, the densely allusive archaism—slow themovement of the monologue, resisting assimilation, howevermomentarily, to a coherent subject (whether “author” or “seafarer”)and foregrounding the various English dialects and literarydiscourses that get elided beneath the illusion of a speaking voice.This translation strategy is foreignizing in its resistance to valuesthat prevail in contemporary Anglo-American culture—the canonof fluency in translation, the dominance of transparent discourse,the individualistic effect of authorial presence.And yet Pound’s translation reinscribes its own modernist brandof individualism by editing the Anglo-Saxon text. As the medievalistChristine Fell has remarked, this text contains “two traditions, theheroic, if we may so define it, preoccupation with survival of honourafter loss of life—and the Christian hope for security of tenure inHeaven” (Fell 1991:176). However these conflicting values enteredthe text, whether present in some initial oral version or introducedduring a later monastic transcription, they project two contradictoryconcepts of subjectivity, one individualistic (the seafarer as his ownperson alienated from mead-hall as well as town), the othercollective (the seafarer as a soul in a metaphysical hierarchycomposed of other souls and dominated by God). Pound’stranslation resolves this contradiction by omitting the Christianreferences entirely, highlighting the strain of heroism in the Anglo-Saxon text, making the seafarer’s “mind’s lust” to “seek out foreignfastness” an example of “daring ado,/So that all men shall honourhim after.” In Susan Bassnett’s words, Pound’s translation represents“the suffering of a great individual rather than the commonsuffering of everyman […] a grief-stricken exile, broken but neverbowed” (Bassnett 1980:97). The archaizing translation strategyinterferes with the individualistic illusion of transparency, but therevisions intensify the theme of heroic individualism, and hence therecurrent gibes at the “burgher” who complacently pursues hisfinancial interests and “knows not […] what some perform/Wherewandering them widest draweth” (Pound 1954:208). The revisionsare symptomatic of the domestic agenda that animates Pound’sforeignizing translation, a peculiar ideological contradiction thatdistinguishes modernist literary experiments: the development oftextual strategies that decenter the transcendental subject coincideswith a recuperation of it through certain individualistic motifs likethe “strong personality.” Ultimately, this contradiction constitutes aresponse to the crisis of human subjectivity that modernists