| the seafarer
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For closer
comparison of these, or any other two versions, in side-by-side frames, click [here].
Forty-eight samples, and rising
The congruence of vocabulary alone indicates that Pound had Iddings'
translation right in front of his nose, if not at his elbow. To name only nineteen
instances: sing/song, night-watch, tossed, chains, sighs, ice-cold sea, wretchedness/wretched, kinsmen, mead-drink, cliffs,
beat/beaten, pinions/pinion, wine-flushed, tumultuous/tumult, heart for the
harp/heart for harping, tracts/tracks, disease, malice, grey-haired, as well
as the three little words: mid, oft, ere, are sufficient proof, to me at any
rate, that Pound's poem
is largely an ingenious re-moulding of Iddings' original text. Quite apart
from the parallel sequences of image and concept, and other similarities of
phrasing, a number of the words just mentioned, from all the versions
examined, occur only in these two texts; and Pound, pace a
spirited apologia by F.C.Robinson, The Might of the North, in The
Tomb of Beowulf, Blackwell, 1993, was evidently following Iddings with
particularly close, but closely concealed, not to say disguised, attention. In
A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste Pound advises: "Be
influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to
acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it." (My italics).
The debt of one writer to another, whether lesser (ignored) or greater
(concealed), is, naturally, diverting. As a diversion, for example, consider what
has been done by and to A.E.Housman [here].
Robinson's assertion in a second essay from the collection
already mentioned, Ezra Pound and the Old English
Translational Tradition, that Pound's Seafarer
"succeeds in suggesting the quality of Old English verse without seeming
quirky or bizarre", appears to me a bizarre opinion from an eminent scholar.
The innocent fact is that Pound's poem is both bizarre and grotesque, and his "translation" even more so.
A man who reads "angels" as "Angles", "tern" as "stern", and "dwellings" as
"berries", would not, presumably, seriously defend his claim to the title of
translator. But what can be said for:
or
For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst, or
My lord deems to me this dead life or
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth, The "brilliant paraphrases" and "breathtaking magnificence"
(see Dr Syntax and Mr Pound, Robert Graves,
The Crowning Privilege, 1955 ---- the words were used of Pound's Seafarer by
G.S.Fraser, anonymously, in the TLS, 18th September, 1953) of the new
flęschoma stitched up by Pound for his marks were,
and remain, invisible to more than one wide-eyed observer. Several of these
are named by Fraser in Ezra Pound, Oliver &
Boyd 1960, Chapter III, Pound and His Critics.
Graves, the unmemorable poet, whose verse output seems to have had no impact
at all, harboured an almost physical antipathy ("plump, hunched, soft-spoken,
and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes" --- These Be Your Gods, O
Israel!) for the prophet of modernism. Graves refused to sign the petition
protesting against the "treatment accorded to U.S. Traitor Pound when the G.I.'s
caught up with him", less, one suspects, because of Pound's support for the
Axis, than because of his "sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom
metrical" verse. Poetry and politics make queasy fellows, but some sort of
vortex encourages their bent to mesh. Most art is entangled in politics: but
perhaps the mark of true art is that it scorns the greasy pole. The earnest
student might care to trawl the net to see what Ezra really said, cast a
cold eye on what s/he fishes up, and then press on.
Graves also comments that, to follow Pound, a "source of poetic
inspiration would, I suppose, be the litter left behind by foreign students in
a Bloomsbury hostel". The touch of chauvinistic irritation is a bit of a
giveaway. "Collage", the term used by Graves to describe the technique
employed by Eliot in The Waste Land, and "litter" are now the everyday
currencies of contemporary art.
Pound's Alps still tower
over the poetic landscape, in the distance, and are unlikely to crumble
without further honest excavation. The day of Graves and his objections
has yet to come, and maybe never will. Points in favour of the case for Pound, as "translator",
are put by Murat Nemet-Nejat here [go to mnn.htm, and return].
"What is modernity?", asked J.Isaacs, in The Background of
Modern Poetry (Bell & Son 1951, p.15). "Is it obscurity, is it private
reference, is it cacophony, is it the immediate and not the eternal, the
particular and not the general? Is it the personal and satiric note? Is it the
anti-heroic and debunking? Is it all or some of these?" Impenetrability. (H.Dumpty.)
John Livingston Lowes, in January 1918, at the Lowell
Institute in Boston, delivered a lecture on The Diction of Poetry versus
Poetic Diction (contained in Convention and Revolt in English
Poetry, Constable, 1938) in which he quoted Stevenson: "My two aims may be
described as: 1st. War to the adjective. 2nd. Death to the optic nerve."
Lowes goes on to remark "Well, the two battle cries of the
New Poetry, as I catch their echoes, are: 1st. War on the eloquent. 2nd. Death
to the cliché." In these early comments on modernism, Lowes goes on to
say that "the movement is positive ... in its attitude towards the diction of
poetry. It proposes to use, in the words of the Imagist pronouncements, 'the
language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word
.....'..... That has been authoritatively interpreted as meaning 'the exact
word which conveys the writer's impression to the reader.'"
Pause. These remarks by Lowes and Isaacs were originally
inserted here as an exploratory prologue to a detailed study of what Pound was about, why his
performance was thought so effective (in certain quarters) and why his
influence is undeniable. But the post-modern era is with us now; the interest
palls in old hats, and it's simply easier to say that Pound translated the
seafarer's message (if he grasped it) into his personal medium. He used the
words which conveyed his subjective impression of The Seafarer:
this had almost nothing to do with what the Anglo-Saxon was actually saying,
or intending to say. The door to the 20th century was kicked down, the centre
of the Zeitgeist fell apart, and sound and fury, signifying nothing,
slouched into being. Check E.J.Barton, The McLuhan-Pound Correspondence [here].
So what if the world's disjointed axle crack? The melancholy madman, whether gloomy, dolorous, Danish or Spanish, still takes up arms against the sea of troubles, still single fights forsaken virtue's cause, seeks wretched good,
arraigns successful crimes. "I confess that I am seldom interested in what he is saying, but only in the way he says it." T.S.Eliot on Pound, quoted by F.R.Leavis, in New Bearings in English Poetry, Chatto 1959, p.136. November 2006. An essay by Lee Garver, Assistant Professor of English at Butler University, has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Summer 2006, entitled Seafarer Socialism: Pound, the New Age and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism. This raises a number of interesting issues in connection with Pound's mangling of Lola's honest endeavour, so it seems I find myself prompted to carry on sounding off on Pound. Next Page. January 2007. Another essay, by Chris Jones, Lecturer in English Poetry at St Andrews, has been noted. This is entitled 'Ear for the sea-surge': Pound's Uses of Old English. Next Page. It is curious, possibly interesting, but more likely irrelevant, that "Lolita" was the pet name used of Lola LaMotte Iddings by her brother; and that Vladimir Nabokov, in a 1967 Paris Review interview, referred to her exploiter and his works as ''the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake." One could say that humbugs of a feather flock together. In The Art of Translating Poetry, 1988, the industrious scholar B.Raffel has much to say about Pound's (and his own) Seafarer. Here is a sample (p 25): "Notice in particular how ingeniously Pound has balanced a very deliberate aping of the Old English with just as deliberate approximations. His 'journey's jargon,' for example. stems from sithas secgan ('to tell/speak of journeys/voyages'). His phrase alliterates, but not (not?) according to the pattern used in the original." However, sižas secgan, in my unhumble opinion, does not primarily mean "tell of voyages". It means "explain the ways": cf Sw. sätten säga; [see annotation]. Pound's 'journey's jargon', of course, while remarkably ugly, means nothing at all. Is 'jargon' an exemplary instance of Imagiste exactness? Later on (p 165) Raffel remarks: "...do not go to Ezra Pound's translation for an accurate portrayal of the Old English soul or of the Old English mind. The heart probably beats harder in his translation. I think it beats more complexly, as well as rather more accurately, in mine." Inaccurate though Raffel's version is, it would be extremely difficult to be more inaccurate than Ezra. Raffel makes some
interesting points in his remarkable book, which is only marred, perhaps, by his excessive modesty when discussing his own work. Still, other interpreters are no less modest, no doubt. dómr um daušan for the summing up. [Back to commentary]. In Translation & Literature, Volume 3, 1994, M.J. Alexander has an article entitled Old English Poetry into Modern English Verse. On page 70 of this periodical, Alexander writes: "It was Ezra Pound's translation of The Seafarer which prompted me to translate other Old English poems into verse. When I asked Pound in 1961 if I could dedicate my book The Earliest English Poems to him, he replied: 'If you think ..... it can be done ..... without irony', a warning which I did not heed." Was this remark by Pound actually some sort of shame-faced, inexplicit acknowledgement that his mastery of Anglo-Saxon was possibly not all that it had been taken to be? When he described his Seafarer as his "heave to overthrow the iambic" it can only have been the iambic of Lola Lamotte Iddings that he was referring to. Ezra Pound pound note two back to judge not top © Charles Harrison Wallace 2000/2006/2007
May make merry man faring needy,
This he little
believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business?
Not though he be
given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the
daring, nor his king to the faithful?
On loan and on land, I believe
not
That on earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat
calamitous?
Nor eat the sweet
nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he
strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an
unlikely treasure hoard?
Expounded sound
At the expense
Of sense.
pound note three
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the seafarer in modern english
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