Collaborator: Ezra Pound, Translation, and Appropriation

Abstract

This article discusses a number of Pound's poetic works, including Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and selected cantos, in relation to the practice of collaborative translation undertaken by numerous modernist authors. In Pound's case, such collaboration takes the form, in the main, of a creative partnership with poets central to his conception of the ‘Tradition’, for example, Homer and Propertius. In Pound's hands, the source text is ‘made new’ for a modernist target culture by means of strategies allied to his development of a poetics of appropriation, beginning with his composition of the Malatesta Cantos, in 1922–23. Pound's collaborative engagement with pre-existing texts, or ‘found materials’, is compared in detail to the notion of ‘translation as displacement’ developed in the recent conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, in particular, his multi-lingual Against Translation. This comparative reading, it is argued, assists in an appraisal of aspects of the politics of The Cantos, specifically the growing anti-capitalism of Pound's epic in the inter-war years.