Ezra Pound's Old English
Sir, – Charles Harrison Wallace’s demand (Letters, March 2) that every translator of poetry should, as it were, possess a certificate of advanced qualification in the source language seems unduly pedantic, to say the least. There is nothing either “astonishing” or merely “fashionable” in “the statement . . . that Robert Lowell knew no Russian but still translated Pasternak”. Besides admitting his ignorance of Russian, Lowell was able to cite the precedent of Pasternak himself, who similarly relied on cribs when making his Russian translations of Georgian poetry. Auden, too, did not allow his own lack of Russian to stand in the way of his producing fine versions of Voznesensky.
As for Pound’s alleged plagiarism in his Seafarer, I have just looked up Lola LaMotte Iddings’s earlier translation of the poem and find that, like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, it “presents / No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem”.
The similarities in wording between the two versions indeed appear too numerous to be a coincidence or attributable solely to the common source. But – leaving aside the ethical aspect of this – the fact remains that Pound’s Seafarer, with all its howlers, its gnarled neo-Gothic mannerism and its occasional wilful mangling of the sense of the original, is infinitely more compelling and memorable as poetry. On a personal note, I might add that it was what first got me interested in Old English verse – interested enough to learn Old English for myself; and I am surely not alone. A further measure of Pound’s outrageous success as a translator, or imitator, is that, while Arthur Waley was dismissive of his knowledge of Chinese, his own translations of Chinese poetry were patently indebted to the example of “Cathay”.
TIMOTHY STRAUSS
Trade Marks Directory Service, 1 Olivers Yard, London EC1.
Sir, – Again one reads that Ezra Pound translated The Seafarer despite having “virtually no understanding of Anglo-Saxon”. The facts, some of them marshalled a quarter of a century ago by Fred Robinson, prove otherwise.
Pound studied Old English intensively over three terms in the academic year 1904–05 at Hamilton College, New York, although he may have been introduced to the subject two years earlier at the University of Pennsylvania. Letters to his parents from Hamilton discuss several Old English texts and authors, and Pound asks his father to procure and send A. J. Wyatt’s edition of Beowulf – “no other edition wanted”. Pound was taught Old English by Professor Joseph Ibbotson, nicknamed “Bib”, whom alumni would remember as demanding rigour and commitment from his students. Pound’s photograph caption in the Hamilton yearbook 1905 refers to him as “Bib’s pride”, and fellow students also recalled Pound as Ibbotson’s star pupil. I have seen Pound’s academic transcript in the Hamilton College archives; Bib awarded Pound “A”s in Old English in the Fall and Summer terms, although Spring seems to have distracted him somewhat (it is when bosque taketh blossom, after all), for he dipped to a “C” in that middle term. The highest grade score for any course he took at Hamilton was, in fact, for Old English in Fall 1904. For readers interested in the academic failings of poets, his worst performances were in Analytics and the Book of Job (“E”s).
There is no evidence that Pound used, or knew, Lola LaMotte Iddings’s translation of the poem, although it is not impossible that he did. Similarities between his Seafarer and that of Iddings, however, are no more compelling than the occasional affinities one would expect to find when two translators work on the same poem with the same set of linguistic and editorial tools – in this case primarily Henry Sweet’s trusted text and glossary. There is some evidence that Pound knew Stopford Brooke’s translation, but, whatever else one thinks of Pound’s Seafarer – and it has been derided as much as it has been admired – it is not derivative, but stamped with peculiarity and idiosyncratic originality. One need not like Pound’s refraction of Old English (a term I prefer in this case to “translation”) but, regardless of taste, one must at least understand that his Seafarer sets sail from knowledge, not from ignorance.
CHRIS JONES
School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife.
Arts Council funding
Sir, – May I please clarify the Arts Council’s position on regular funding to arts organizations from April 2008 (in response to a letter in the TLS, March 9)? It is true that we have been advised by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to consider a range of funding scenarios from plus inflation to minus 5 per cent. It is also true that we have made clear to the organizations we support that this is an extremely tight Spending Review process and that they cannot assume that their funding beyond next March is guaranteed. However, these planning scenarios remain entirely hypothetical. Our investment plan cannot be confirmed until after the outcome of the Spending Review is known later this year; no decision on funding to individual organizations will be made until then. Comments from individuals at the London Magazine are both inaccurate and unhelpful at a time when positive messages about the impact of Government investment in the arts can only help to serve our case.
SARAH WEIR
Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London SW1.
Round Trajan’s Column
Sir, – Zadie Smith may be right that the libraries on either side of Trajan’s Column had viewing galleries – certainly this has been conjectured by some archaeologists (Letters, February 23). But what help would they be to anyone wanting to follow the tale of Trajan’s campaigns? The sculptors went out of their way to transform the stereotypical scenes of imperial art from frozen moments into a fluid narrative. But as this story winds its way in spirals up the Column, how could the viewer follow it from the galleries of two separate and opposite buildings? Then, as now, the Column defeated all attempts to read it fluently. Which suggests, maybe, that the ideal viewers were not the mortal visitors to the Eternal City, but the gods of Rome towards whom the Divine Trajan had gone spiralling at the moment of his funeral. Is the Column his ticket to heaven?
ANDREW WALLACE-HADRILL
British School at Rome, Piazzale Winston Churchill 5, Rome 00197.
Modern Wagner
Sir, – While I’m grateful, up to a point, to Lucy Beckett for her thoughtful response to my book Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (March 9), she unjustly chides me for an uncritical stance towards modern Wagner production. This is not so, and it is bizarre that she should suggest that both John Deathridge (whom I cite) and myself should regard “Wagner” “as an undifferentiated whole – in order . . . to justify the most destructive productions of the post-Wieland period”.
My citation of Professor Deathridge was simply in support of my argument that Wieland Wagner over-emphasized the Greek affinities of his grandfather’s operas in order to play down their palpably German ones. Certainly my (generalizing) point of departure is that Wieland approached the operas as though they were mystery plays. But I go on to describe and carefully discriminate between his greatly differing productions of the different operas, stressing for example (p267) that his strategies for staging Tristan, the Ring and Parsifal were quite unlike those for Der Fliegende Holländer, Tann- häuser, Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger.
My purpose is to try to explain the rationale of stagings which many still find problematic. I am not in the least concerned to “justify” anyone’s “destructive” productions, and certainly don’t believe that any of the productions discussed at any length in the book fall into that category.
PATRICK CARNEGY
5 The Causeway, Elsworth, Cambridge.
Won by Christmas
Sir, – It may or may not be true, as Victor Davis Hanson claims in his review of Walter Reid’s biography of Sir Douglas Haig (February 16), that the German army was “merciless” in its attack on Belgium and France in the fall of 1914, but it is not true that the British army which repelled it was “hastily deployed, less well-armed and under-trained”. The deployment of the British Expeditionary Force to positions in France and Belgium had been agreed on as early as 1906, after repeated consultations with Belgian and French military authorities. These consultations were kept secret but continued until the war began. The likely invasion route of the German army through Belgium had been made public by the Earl of Percy three years before the outbreak of war in an article in the National Review (“Military Policy and the War”, August 1911). Viscount Haldane, who was responsible for their training and equipment, called the six crack divisions of the British Expeditionary Force “the finest Army for its size on the earth”. They were said to be “ready down to the last gaiter button”. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that virtually all of the important political and military leaders in Britain were convinced that the war would be won by Christmas.
PETER FIRCHOW
Department of English, University of Minnesota, 207 Church Street SE,
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455.
Translating Cervantes
Sir, –In NB of February 9, J. C. chides me for calling my work “an up-to-date translation for today’s readers” (of Cervantes’s Don Quijote) in view of the following passages: “Flee not, ye cowardly, detestable creatures! It is but a single knight who opposes you” and “My word, Sancho! You would appear to be as crazy as I am”. There are at least five different levels of literary voice employed by Cervantes throughout Don Quijote. The knight frequently reverts to an anachronistic style found in those books of chivalry of which he is so enamoured, the perennial reading of which has finally driven him mad. How would J. C. have me translate the Spanish: “A fe, Sancho, que, a lo que parece, que no estás tú más cuerdo que yo”? (Literally, “In faith, Sancho, to all appearances, you are no saner than I”.)
J. C. also states that “both the Don and Sancho Panza are fond of the phrase ‘What the dickens’”. This expression occurs only once in the entire novel – which hardly justifies the phrase “fond of”. J. C. asserts that “the OED tells us that ‘What the dickens’ derives from Charles Dickens”. Not according to my OED (2nd ed), which says that “dickens” means “devil” and that the phrase “the dickens” goes back at least to 1598 in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and has nothing to do with Charles Dickens.
Finally, J. C. insinuates that my work is a mere vanity publication. He needs to inform himself that, just as in the recorded-music industry, the book industry is turning more and more to the practice of self-publishing. Finally, to rectify one omission justifiably pointed out, the book is priced at $19.95 in the US, and will soon be available from BookForce in the UK at www.bookforce.co.uk.
JAMES H. MONTGOMERY
11206 Hidden Bluff Drive, Austin, Texas 78754.
Rhode Island
Sir, – Paul Barker (February 9) places Brown University “on Rhode Island”; Diana Edwards (Letters, March 2) doubts that there is any such island. They are both wrong. Rhode Island (Aquidneck) is the island in Narragansett Bay on which Newport is located. The full name of the state is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations – Brown being on the mainland “plantations” portion, in Providence.
ANDRE MAYER
79 Pemberton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140.
