Ezra Pound as Translator: Between matter and form

There’s a tendency today to look on translation as a philological exercise, carried out in trepidation, with one eye on the dictionary. In the Middle Ages dictionaries did not exist, and the translator re-created the source text in his own way, with the sole intention of proving that the vernacular was as valuable as the original Latin. A literal translation in the thirteenth or fourteenth century ran the risk of appearing both clumsy and ridiculous. The notion of literal translation, I suspect, originated in the holy dread of modifying, even minutely, the syntax of the Holy Spirit. [When working outside the Bible], Chaucer, for example, translates very freely; the arid Hippocratic aphorism Ars longa, vita brevis inspires in him this melancholy music:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to learne.

I won’t say that Ezra Pound has taken up the medieval idea of translation; I will say that, indifferent to everything literal, he has attempted a curious experiment, which many do not begin to understand. Thus, for example, his translation of the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon elegy “The Seafarer”:

May I for my own sake song’s truth reckon Journey’s jargon.

R. K. Gordon [Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1926)] translates literally:

I can utter a true song about myself tell of my travels.

This is absolutely limpid and accurate, but the poem says:

Maeg ic be më sylfum sothgied wrecan Siehas secgan.

The line and hemistich quoted are enough to illustrate Pound’s method. Gordon’s prose is more natural and fluid than Pound’s poetic version, but it is clear that Pound, without for- going fidelity, wants to reproduce in modern English the harsh vigor of the ancient text, and also the same sounds. Walter Pater asserted that all arts aspire to the condition of music, whose matter [le fond] is identical with its form. Those who, like us, are devoted, with greater or lesser success, to the practice of poetry know that the essence of verse lies in its intonation, not in its abstract meaning.

The erudite accuse Pound of falling into crass errors, pointing to his ignorance of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, or Provençal; they refuse to acknowledge that his translations reflect not the matter of the original but its elusive forms.