Queering Modernist Translation

The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness

Christian Bancroft

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000078114
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Crítica literaria

Queering Modernist Translation explores translations by Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and H.D. through the concept of queering translation. As Bancroft argues, queering translation is an intersectional lens for gleaning identity and socio-cultural issues in translation, such as gender, sexuality, diaspora, and race. Using theories espoused by Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, Sara Ahmed, and Rinaldo Walcott as foundations for his arguments, Bancroft demonstrates that queering translation offers more expansive ways of imagining the relationship between translation and the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them. Intervening in new Modernist studies and translation studies, Queering Modernist Translation furthers contemporary conversations regarding Modernism and its lasting importance in the twenty-first century.

1 “In the Meantime, My Songs Will Travel”

Ezra Pound’s Elektra and Cathay

In a 2013 introduction to the Journal of Modern Literature, Jean-Michel Rabaté advocates for a “broader hospitality to verbal, linguistic, ethnic and conceptual otherness [as it] corresponds to a new perception of the modern.”¹ He continues by claiming that

the modern appears then as more internationalist than Anglo-American—thus, we have here a strong cluster on Joyce, Eliot, Aragon, James and a few other “usual suspects” of high or later Modernism. Accordingly, Modernism has expanded; it has crossed new conceptual and geographical borders in order to turn into today’s diasporic and dialogic modernity. Such modernity relies on more than one language, more than one accent, more than one skin color. It is founded on a renewed sense of the marginalized, be it called the exotic or the exilic, which includes several “inner exiles,” as the Harlem Renaissance embodied one for mainstream American culture in the twenties; a Modernist hospitality to the other will push forward the practice of translation, turning it into a creative and disorienting tool.²

For over two decades, Modernist studies has expanded beyond Anglo-centric tendencies, as Rabaté indicates. Modernism qua multilingual movement pushed “forward the practice of translation, turning it into a creative and disorienting tool.” Rabaté refers to the practice of translation during Modernism as “a creative and disorienting tool,” and certainly, as in the case of Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), the poem enacts both a creative and disorienting translation style. Additionally, Ignacio Infante’s After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (2013) stresses that the very function of translation was embedded in Modernism.

Others have remarked that contemporary analysis of Pound’s translations lacks engagement with current trends in translation studies. For example, Alan Golding, citing Bob Perelman, argues that it is “‘time to translate Modernism into a contemporary idiom’…that translation must involve the question of what it means to read Pound now.”³ There is little doubt among contemporary scholars that discussions of Pound’s translations need to be rendered “into a contemporary idiom.” Placing this contemporary idiom in conversation with Modernist translation means looking beyond antiquated conversations about the binary nature of the text—that is, a formally equivalent or dynamically equivalent translation. Adam Piette, in his 2008 essay, “Pound’s ‘The Garden’ as Modernist Imitation: Samain, Lowell, H.D.,” agrees with me:

Translation theory has too often assumed that a binary simplicity governs the relations between source and target culture in the transactions of translation. To paraphrase Pound, we can argue that modernist translation has no simple model for the cultural work it is doing on both source and target cultures: the translation may augment, diminish, multiply, or divide the source text’s verbal energies; or use the source text to augment, diminish, multiply, and divide the target culture’s power of tradition.⁴

Pound himself claimed that language should not be categorized as “merely positive and negative; but let us say +, −, ×, ÷, +a, −a, ×a, ÷a, etc.”⁵ Roland Végső’s 2010 essay, “The Mother Tongues of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation,” advances exactly this idea: that Pound’s “controversial ‘creative translations’ [show] us that translations can aspire to become poems in their own right.”⁶ When discussing Pound’s translation of Elektra, it is ineffective to try and label it a formally or dynamically equivalent translation. For one, his Elektra defies any easy classification; secondly, such binary arguments tend to overwhelm what could be a much more productive conversation without resorting to hotly debated issues of what constitutes formally and dynamically equivalent translations.⁷

This chapter is divided into two sections: the first half is devoted to Pound’s translation of Elektra and the second half explores Pound’s collection Cathay. With Elektra, I first unpack the inherent sonic and semantic complexities of Pound’s translation before utilizing Jack Halberstam’s concepts of “low theory” and “shadow feminism” to examine Elektra’s agency throughout the play. My discussion of Cathay first requires a detailed survey regarding the production of the collection in light of recent research on the poems. Theories by both Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz provide valuable insight into the collection, specifically in regards to the following topics: models of success and failure, gendered power dynamics, futurity and queer utopias, modes of becoming, and performativity. The issues I consider thus seek to expand conversations about Pound’s work not just in relation to translation, but also that of gender and sexuality.

Elektra

Elektra offered Pound an opportunity to innovate his translation practices just as much as it afforded him the chance to identify with a character like Elektra during his own unraveling at the hands of the U.S. legal system and his psychiatric care under Dr. Winfred Overholser.⁸ The play functions as a radical way for Pound to address issues of mental health, gender roles and expectations, as well as power structures. By channeling his experiences in what David A. Moody refers to as Pound’s “tragic years,” Pound focuses on how failure and unbecoming may, in fact, catalyze new sites of knowledge and artistic originality.⁹ Despite his tragic circumstances, Pound’s confinement at St. Elizabeths was a productive period for the poet, during which he translated Sophocles’s plays, Elektra (1949) and Women of Trachis (1956); a number of works by Confucius, including Confucius: The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot (1951), The Confucian Analects (1951), The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius; translations from poems by Rimbaud, Montanari, Tailhade, Horace; Pavannes and Divagations (1958); and two new sections for The Cantos: “Rock-Drill De Los Cantares” (1955) and “Thrones de los Cantares” (1959).

Pound’s renewed interest in translating Greek emerged during his work on the Pisan Cantos while he was imprisoned at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp’s six-by-six feet steel outdoor cages, otherwise known as a “death cell.” Pound’s cage in particular was reinforced with heavier steel to prevent fascists from attempting to break him out. He spent three weeks isolated in this cage, sleeping on the concrete without any access to communication or exercise. The circumstances put immense physical and mental strain on Pound, and after two-and-a-half weeks, he began to have a breakdown. By the third week, medical staff removed him from the cage and on June 14 and 15, he was examined by psychiatrists, who determined that Pound had suffered symptoms of a mental breakdown. He was then relocated to his own tent, where he was allowed reading material. It was during this time that he began to draft what became to be known as The Pisan Cantos (later published in 1948). Extant sheets of toilet paper displaying the beginning of Canto LXXIV implies that he started writing it while imprisoned in the cage.¹⁰ On November 15, 1945, Pound was transferred to the United States with an arraignment in Washington, D.C., on November 25 for charges of treason. During the trial, Pound was defended by Julien Cornell, a New York attorney and special counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, who advised Pound to take a plea of insanity, which ultimately condemned Pound to spend the next twelve years at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was admitted after the trial.

Because of this insanity plea, Pound was advised not to demonstrate any evidence of sanity while he translated Elektra with the classicist, Rudd Fleming (“Pound did not wish it to appear that he was ‘sane’ enough to translate Greek,” informs Richard Reid),¹¹ who was supposed to publish the work in his own name in order...