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eye on "riches" alone, but "earthen" for "earthly" involves a more dis–
turbing mistake, suggesting that Pound's trouble is with modern English
as much as with the older form of the language. As a matter of fact,
Pound is, contrary to widespread opinion, one of the most approximate
exploiters of the mother tongue; and the diffuseness which contributes
to his special appeal as well as his characteristic weaknesses, is as much
a function of his imprecise vocabulary as of his famous wit.
I am not suggesting that the final word is said about Pound's trans–
lations when one has remarked that they are howlingly inaccurate, but
unless one starts with such a confession, he cannot go forward at all;
and there is no sense in implying that such an initial demurrer is point–
less pedantry. To speak largely of "interchanges of voice and personality
with the dead" without indicating that one is aware, for instance, of the
mad hash Pound has made of the second stanza of Arnaut Daniel's
((L'
aura amara"
is to substitute homage for criticism.
Certainly, Pound has made good poems incidentally in the course
of making bad translations. The versions of Li Po, for example, strike
me as charming pieces with a structure far more coherent than anything
Pound has invented without a borrowed Muse. This has little to do with
the question of faithfulness to the original-it is all worked-up
chinoi–
serie;
for Pound apparently took off from Fenollosa's rough translations
of Japanese versions of the Chinese poet, whose original name Pound
never even recovered from its Japanese rendering as Rihaku.
Here is a clue to the inner, perhaps the essential function of trans–
lation for Pound, translation as the endless search of a centerless poet
for pseudo-centers. To distill more than an epigram, unaided, from his
inner chaos has always been for Pound a matter of extraordinary effort,
even real suffering; and he has more and more tended to abandon the
effort-in favor of rendering the chaos itself in the guise of an ideally
unfinished long poem, all middle and no definition. Had he lived in a
happier time (the Renaissance which he so despises, for instance), when
the distinction between translation and creation was not so rigidly
drawn, he might have found fit employment for his wonderful facility
inside of line and phrase in rendering other poets' work. But an impulse
to make a monumental whole of his own, hopelessly confused with an
infatuation with incoherence, has driven Pound beyond mere translation,
beyond even the variations on a borrowed theme as in "Homage to Sex–
tus Propertius," beyond the chanting through a borrowed persona or
mask as in the pseudo-Proven<;al poems-on to the
Cantos,
in which the
reworked verses of others echo like ghostly reproaches.
Pound has, however, never been conscious of this inner quest, or at
