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

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.