Poetics in translation : ”make it new” by Ezra Pound and ”transcreation” by Haroldo de Campos

Part of Introduction

Translation became a quest to understand poetry(Poetics in translation )in the twentieth century. There is no preceding age when this labor provoked so many opinions and interests as a creative process. This study aims to explore the essential position translation occupied in the works of the American poet Ezra Pound and the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. In both cases, the number of translations and texts on translation exceeds the number of their original works as poets. Also, their original poems are permeated by translations and, in many cases, the authors incorporated foreign words in their poems, i.e., they were anticipating the act of translation in their poems.

Both poets followed different paths to develop their unique labor on translation and their results influenced their ideas on poetry and literature. Their discoveries changed not only approaches to the original texts but also contributed to creating a more extensive comprehension of poetry in a period when avant-garde movements were trying to annihilate the traditional understanding of this art. Pound’s importance and controversies in the literary world have produced an overwhelming amount of criticism, not only regarding his original poems but also his translations.

Part of Conclusion

3.1 Fenollosa’s Legacy Since the beginning of his career as a translator of poetry(Poetics in translation ), Ezra Pound became a polemic figure. His enthusiasm for poetry pushed his efforts beyond his skills; this titanic enterprise was only one step into a greater ambition, to become the man who knew the most about poetry. However, the risk of the enterprise proved to be unique, as J. P. Sullivan affirms in his book Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius:

It is worth stressing that it is in no small measure due to Pound’s own critical theories that
we see translation as an art in this way: that we can extricate ourselves from the naïve
view of what translation is – the reproduction in one’s own language of the exact sense
and the set number of poetic qualities of the original, whatever they are, or the
reproduction in mind of the present-day reader of the effect the original had upon its
audience. The object of such aims is a chimera. Traduttore traditore – all translation is
compromise. (Sullivan, 1964, 21)

To render a general look over Pound’s translations that were published as books, the following need to be listed: Sonnets and Ballads of Guido Cavalcanti and the poem “The Seafarer,” published in Ripostes(1912), Cathay (1915), Homage to Sextus Propertius(1919), Dialogues of Fontenelle (1917), Rémy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922), Edouard Estouniè’s The Call of the Road (1923), the Confucian texts, the Ta Hio (1928), later translated again and published as the Great Digest in 1945, The Unwobbling Pivot (1947), The Analects (1951) and The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954), Love Poems of Ancient Egypt and Women of Trachis (1962).

It is important to observe the impact of the Oriental culture on Pound’s evolution as a translator(Poetics in translation )and, in particular, to mention here the manuscript of Ernest Fenollosa that Pound received in 1914 and edited and published in 1919 as The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. This essay was essential not only to Pound’s self-development but to modern poetry in general. The merits of the comprehension of the ideogram by Fenollosa 240 and Pound lie in their ability to distinguish the pictographic etymology that evolved into an elaborate symbolic representation. This reveals the rapport that certain traditions of Chinese poetry kept with painting. Furthermore, this essay opened a material perspective for considering an aspect of Oriental languages that, by that time, linguists insisted on disregarding and looked at as a mere grammatical representation of the meaning.

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Bibliography

Authors:

Jose Luis Molina Robles

To cite this version:

Jose Luis Molina Robles. Poetics in translation: ”make it new” by Ezra Pound and ”transcreation”
by Haroldo de Campos. Literature. Université de Perpignan, 2017. English. find : 2017PERP0009ff.
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