Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (review)

Over the last decade or so, the star of translation studies has risen steadily. Much of this work has involved a reconsideration of translation as not just a linguistic operation to be evaluated in terms of accuracy or lack thereof, but a cultural activity whose motives, effects, and importance to, for example, literary historiography and theory might be as great as those of the works we call original. The specific implications of this work for modernism as an object of study and for modernist studies as a discipline, however, are only beginning to emerge.

Steve Yao's Translation and the Languages of Modernism takes up the considerable task of forcing a substantive confrontation between modernism and translation studies, seeking not simply to discuss instances of translation within the modernist canon, but to explore ways in which this confrontation leaves both parties changed. On the one hand, Yao proposes that an analysis of specifically modernist translation practices can contribute to understanding "translation" as an activity marked in every way by what he calls "historical contingency." On the other hand, he contends that a serious consideration of translation and translations reveals a "specific compositional practice by which different writers sought solutions to the various problems and issues that have come to be understood as the primary thematic concerns of Modernism" (7). No list of such thematic concerns will be complete for everyone, but the book's subtitle (Gender, Politics, Language) indicates where the author has placed his bets.

Perhaps because one of the book's central theses is that translation provided modernist writers with both new forms of self-expression and strategies for reinventing English, the focus is on poetry, though there is a chapter apiece on theater (Yeats) and, for lack of a better word, the novel (Finnegans Wake). Not surprisingly, then, Ezra Pound is in some ways the hero of the work. Three of the seven chapters focus on Pound, one on H. D., one on Lowell and Zukofsky. While the second and third Pound chapters, on Homage to Sextus Propertius and The Cantos, respectively, contribute important developments to the book's argument, the opening chapter on Cathay in many ways provides the template for Yao's conception of modernist translation as a whole, in three important, closely related ways. First, Cathay signals the advent of a translation practice that does not feel obliged to have any conventional knowledge of the source language; indeed, in many cases modernist translators seem to find such knowledge an absolute hindrance. Second, by working from manuscript notes of "the late Ernest Fenollosa"—themselves based on "the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga" (title page of Cathay, cited in Yao, 31)—Cathay inaugurates the practice of collaborative translation so common today. Thirdly, Pound's near-total ignorance of Chinese helps redefine translation as not an essentially imitative activity, but a compelling and powerful means of literary expression, a "mode."

In the case of Cathay, Yao's bracketing the issues of "authenticity" and "accuracy" allows him to focus on the historical significance of Pound's conception of translation and—this will surprise some readers—the extent to which his translations participated in the development of his views on gender. Through a carefully triangulated reading of the original Chinese text, Fenollosa's manuscript notes, and Cathay itself, Yao demonstrates how Pound consistently increases the presence and emotional complexity of women's voices in the poems. Such a demonstration simultaneously reminds us how impoverished a fidelity-based model of translation can be and, conversely, that an author's translations are part of, and can therefore contribute to our understanding of, their work.

Similarly, Yao's chapter on H. D. brings precision and subsequently insight into the poet's broadly acknowledged but often vaguely expressed relationship to ancient Greek, specifically bringing out the self-consciousness with which H. D. engaged in translation "not merely as a procedural artifact of her interest in classics [ . . . ] but rather as a critically important compositional...