The Classics in Modernist Translation

Lynn Kozak, Miranda Hickman, Lynn Kozak, Miranda Hickman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350177468
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350040977
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation,' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception – from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.'

As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume.

The volume's essays address work significantly informed by Classical materials, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Ovid, and Propertius, and approach a range of modernist writers: Pound and H.D., among the modernists best known for work engaging the Classics, as well as Cummings, Eliot, Joyce, Laura Riding, and Yeats.

CHAPTER 1

‘SEEKING … BURIED BEAUTY’: THE POETS’ TRANSLATION SERIES

Elizabeth Vandiver

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The principle of the ‘literal-literary’ translation will be kept to as before, the idea being not to produce a work of ‘scholarship’ but to give the ordinary man (like ourselves) an opportunity of reading some of the lesser-known but yet exquisite classics in simple English prose. The translators make no claim to philological scholarship; the title of the series implies that we are interested in these authors for their poetry and for nothing else.

[Aldington] 1919b: [2]¹

seeking … buried beauty

Pound, Canto 7

Thus the Poets’ Translation Series (PTS) announced its forthcoming ‘second set’ in July 1919, after a hiatus of three years. Begun in 1915 by Richard Aldington and H.D., the PTS had been surprisingly successful; the first set’s six pamphlets sold over 3,000 copies and made a modest profit. As Zilboorg (1991a) has shown, the PTS was crucially interwoven into H.D.’s and Aldington’s development as poets and into their personal relationship.² From its beginnings, the PTS reflected these two writers’ ideas and ideals concerning poetry and the importance of the classical (especially Hellenic) world. They saw the series as more than merely a set of translations; it was, in addition, a poetic manifesto. But the exact nature of this manifesto is complicated by the apparent tension between the PTS’s stated goals and methods and its actual achievements. In this series, Aldington and H.D. pioneered modernist translation as a process of remaking and refashioning texts; yet their stated aims for the series espoused traditional goals of lexical and semantic fidelity to the original, while simultaneously discounting formal scholarship. This essay explores some aspects of this tension between actual practice and stated goals. Modernist translation would become ‘not a staged literary museum, but an act of cultural renewal’ (Brinkman and Brinkman 2016: 45), but when they inaugurated the PTS, H.D. and Aldington were in fact enacting a translational practice that neither they nor anyone else had yet theorized. Thus, the PTS is a Janus-figure, looking back to traditional assumptions about translation and forward into modernism’s unmooring of translation from formal knowledge of the source language.

The Series’ original 1915 announcement had laid out its goals in some detail:

The object of the editors of this series is to present a number of translations of Greek and Latin poetry and prose, especially of those authors who are less frequently given in English.

This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead.

But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered too long at the hands of clumsy metrists. We do not deny that there are many good translations in English of classical writers—Lang’s ‘Homer’ and ‘Theokritos,’ Mackail’s ‘Anthology’ or Adlington’s ‘Apuleius,’ for instance; but too often such works are lonely and austerely expensive.

The Poets’ Translation Series will appear first in ‘The Egoist’ (starting September 1st) and will then be reprinted and issued as small pamphlets, simple and inexpensive, so that none will buy except to read. The translations will be by poets whose interest in their authors will be neither conventional nor frigid. The translators will take no concern with glosses, notes, or any of the apparatus with which learning smothers beauty. They will endeavour to give the words of these Greek and Latin authors as simply and as clearly as may be. Where the text is confused, they will use the most characteristic version; where obscure, they will interpret.

The first six pamphlets, when bound together, will form a small collection of unhackneyed poetry, too long buried under the dust of pedantic scholarship. They range over a period of two thousand years of literature—a proof of the amazing vitality of the Hellenic tradition.

If this venture has the success its promoters look for, other similar and possibly larger pamphlets will be issued.

[Aldington] 1915a

The 1915 claim to ‘give the words … as simply and as clearly as may be’ and the 1919 avowal of the ‘literal-literary principle’ conceal several unstated but crucial assumptions, presented as self-evident truths but in fact highly contestable. Among these are that ‘scholarship’ and ‘poetry’ are somehow incompatible; that poetry always and everywhere consists in ‘simple’ words, never in elaborate artificiality; that lexical and semantic accuracy (the ‘clear words’ of the original) are necessary to translation, and are easily achievable without formal philological training; and that form, including meter, is incidental to poetry, not essential to it. Aldington made similar assertions in his review of Bryher’s ‘Lament for Adonis,’ published some months before the 1919 prospectus:

It is a pleasure to note that the principles of translating laid down in … the Poets’ Translation Series are being followed by other translators. That this ‘literary-literal’ method has a distinct advantage over all others is proved by a very sensitive version of Bion’s Lament for Adonis, recently published by Miss Winifred Bryher. The ideal of such translations comes, of course, from France … And whether Miss Bryher evolved independently her ideas of translation, or derived them from the French and the Poets’ Translation Series, is not important. The great thing is that she is on the right track; and with all the discouraging mass of the Loeb classics, the ‘copious’ pedantry of almost every extant version of Hellenic poetry, it is really a delightful surprise to find some one who cares more for literature than for philology, who has the swift spirit to kindle at the poetry rather than the dull brain to plod after it.

Aldington 1919a: 10–11³

Aldington is being disingenuous here; in September 1918, in his first letter to Bryher, he had encouraged her to translate for the PTS and had described its translational method.⁴ Furthermore, Bryher had introduced H.D. to the publisher Clement Shorter, whom Aldington hoped to enlist as the publisher of the renewed PTS (Gates 1992: 46; Zilboorg 2003: 152).⁵ More to the point here, Aldington’s review reiterates the underlying assumptions that a translator who is a scholar inevitably misses the poetry, and conversely that someone with a ‘swift spirit’ does not need exact training in philology in order to capture and convey the crucial essence of a poem written in another language.

Selection of translators

In their original conception of the PTS, Aldington and H.D. envisaged the series as a chance ‘to forge principles of translation … as the act of bringing the past into the present, the Hellenic into modernist poetry’ (Zilboorg 1991a: 74). In addition, they hoped that the serious work of translation would increase the Imagists’ name recognition and gain wider acceptance for Imagism and its standards. Aldington wrote to Amy Lowell in 1919 that the PTS ‘seems to me a useful bit of propaganda for us all’ (Gates 1992: 46), and he wrote to Bryher that he wanted the renewed series ‘to establish a canon of taste, our taste, against a mob of clergymen & schoolmasters & professional critics; that will give us a point d’appui for our own work. Then I want it also for almost educational motives, to rescue exquisite personalities from oblivion or the pedants’ (Zilboorg 1991a: 82). For all these reasons, H.D. and Aldington recruited translators from their circle of literary acquaintances, and evaluated them first for their adherence to Imagist principles and only secondly for their skill in Latin and Greek.⁶ Indeed, Aldington and H.D. themselves were not fully adept in the ancient languages.⁷ They began translating Greek poetry together almost as soon as they met, concentrating on the Greek Anthology and (perhaps) Sappho, and Aldington published his first translations almost immediately. These early translations contain many errors on the level of vocabulary and syntax, often suggesting that Aldington mistook similar words and forms for one another. In Bid Me to Live, H.D. implies that they recognized the limitations of their skill, and found Pindar too difficult: ‘They … barricaded themselves with yellow-backed French novels, Pindar in the original which they could not read (she picked out a word here, there, with a dictionary, he manipulated a telling phrase now and again), the Greek Anthology’ (H.D. 1960: 11).⁸

For the PTS, Aldington had no hesitation about recruiting translators whose acquaintance with the source languages was less than thorough. In December 1918, he described to Bryher what she would need to translate for the series:

You will need Jacobs’ Anthologia … and the latest edition of Liddle [sic] & Scott’s Lexicon (containing all the special anthology words) and a good Greek g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: The Classics, Modernism and Translation: A Conflicted History Steven Yao
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Miranda Hickman
• 1 ‘Seeking Buried Beauty’: The Poets’ Translation Series Elizabeth Vandiver 7
• Part I Ezra Pound on Translation
• 2 Out of Homer: Greek in Pound’s Cantos George Varsos
• 3 Translating the Odyssey: Andreas Divus, Old English, and Ezra Pound’s Canto I Massimo Cè
• 4 To Translate or Not to Translate? Pound’s Prosodic Provocations in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Sara Dunton
• Respondent Essay 1
• Part II H.D.’s Translations of Euripides: Genre, Form, Lexicon
• 5 Translation as Mythopoesis: H.D.’s Helen in Egypt as Meta-palinode Anna Fyta
• 6 Repression, Renewal and ‘The Race of Women’ in H.D.’s Ion Jeffrey Westover
• 7 Braving the Elements: H.D. and Jeffers Catherine Theis
• 8 Reinventing Eros: H.D.’s Translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak
• Respondent Essay 2
• Part III Modernist Translation and Political Attunements
• 9 ‘Untranslatable’ Women: Laura Riding’s Classical Modernist Fiction Anett K. Jessop
• 10 Lost and Found in Translation: The Genesis of Modernism’s Siren Songs Leah Flack
• 11 ‘Trying to Read Aristophane’: Sweeney Agonistes, Reception and Ritual Matthias Somers
• 12 ‘Straight Talk, Straight as the Greek!’: Ireland’s Oedipus and the Modernism of W.B. Yeats Gregory Baker
• Respondent Essay 3
• 13 Modernist Migrations, Pedagogical Arenas: Translating Modernist Reception in the Classroom and Gallery Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly
• Afterword: Modernism Going Forward J. Alison Rosenblitt
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright