“‘The news in the Odyssey is still news’: Ezra Pound, W. H. D. Rouse, and a Modern Odyssey” (original) (raw)

Translating the Odyssey: Andreas Divus, Old English and Ezra Pound’s Canto I

The Classics in Modernist Translation, ed. M. Hickman and L. Kozak, 2019

This book chapter argues that Ezra Pound’s verse translation of the Odyssey in Canto I is significantly mediated through the Renaissance Latin prose translation of the epic by Andreas Divus and does not, as is commonly assumed, draw directly on Homer’s Greek for its lexical, syntactical, and metrical choices. Far from a simple aid to understanding the Greek (a so-called “crib”), Divus’ Odyssea instead becomes a programmatic model of epic secondariness for Pound, who both invokes and deploys the Renaissance scholar-translator as a template for his own poetic persona. Moreover, by extending this focus on mediating texts to Pound’s reworking of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer in the same poem, I demonstrate the important role that prior translations play in Pound’s epic project overall. Consequently, my research is able to show that the concept of retranslation, long central to scholarly discussions of ancient epic poetry, also applies to the modern reception of the genre.

Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth-Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing

Modern Book History, ed. Kate Longworth, spec. ed. of Literature Compass 4.4 (July 2007): 1158-1168, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x. Reprinted in Virtual Issue: Modern Book History, Literature Compass 4 (Dec 2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.

Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.

The Literary Continuum of Modernism: Tiresias in Eliot and Pound

In this essay, I find contention with Abram's claim that modernism constitutes a break with tradition, instead arguing that modernism relies fundamentally on its reception of Ancient texts, therefore creating a literary thread throughout history. I argue this by taking from Martindale's theory of the transhistorical and focusing particularly on the figure of Tiresias in Eliot's The Wasteland and Pound's Cantos.