Reassessing Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius

Abstract

This paper is the first major attempt since J. P. Sullivan’s 1964 book Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius. A Study in Creative Translation to assess the precise translational methods, structural organization, and poetic success of Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius . The assessment is based on an exhaustive line-by-line collation of the twelve English poems in the Homage with their disparate and fragmented sources in Propertius’ Latin. Pound used Lucian Müller’s nineteenth-century Teubner edition of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius for his Latin text. Since that is not readily available outside a major research library, the Latin text in Goold’s Loeb Library edition of Propertius, the best now available, was collated against Müller and the Homage . An appended table summarizes the results in easily readable form. The paper first cites the ancient testimonia to correct widespread errors about Propertius’s style and then falls into two parts: the first provides a section-by-section analysis of the techniques used by Pound in translating Propertius, the second explores the claim that the poem is a great technical feat in structural organization, versification, and English poetry.