In issue 13.6 (April 1919) of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse there appeared some poems by Ezra Pound, under the title Poems from the Propertius Series. These plus others were later published as Homage to Sextus Propertius.
In issue 14.1 (April 1919) of the same magazine, in the Correspondence section (pp. 52-55), W.G. Hale criticized Pound's handling of Propertius, under the title Pegasus Impounded. Pegasus was the winged horse who caused Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon, to spring forth by stamping his hoof. The adjective impounded means "confined in or as if in a pound," with a play on the proper name Pound. Hale thus implied that Pound hobbled Pegasus and dishonored the Muses by translating Propertius so ineptly. Since Hale's witty letter has not, so far as I can tell, yet appeared on the World Wide Web, I have decided to reproduce it here in full.
Pound's defenders are legion. They essentially argue, as he himself did elsewhere, that what he was doing was not translating in the traditional sense.
Dear Madam Editor: A Latinist must naturally be interested when a modern poet translates a Latin poet. Hence my concern with Mr. Pound's experiment with Propertius in POETRY for March. I offer certain impressions.
Mr. Pound is often undignified or flippant, which Propertius never is. For example, "I shall have my dog's day," "I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral," "There will be a crowd of young women doing homage to my palaver," "There is no hurry about it." Such renderings pervert the flavor of a consciously artistic, almost academic, original. And what, if Mr. Pound is aiming at the colloquial, is the justification of the stilted "Her hands have no kindness me-ward"?
Mr. Pound often drags, because he pads. Thus the second line is pure addition, and pure delay, in
Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian columnsThese three Baedekeresque explanations seem to have been gathered, with a modicum of labor, from Harper's Latin Lexicon, under the word Taenarus.
From Laconia (associated with Neptune and Cerberus).
Mr. Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin. He has of course a perfect right to be, but not if he translates from it. The result of his ignorance is that much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible. I select a few out of about three-score errors.
In II of the translations, Propertius makes Calliope bid him to refrain from writing epic poetry, and to sing only of love. Mr. Pound mistakes the verb canes, "thou shalt sing," for the noun canes (in the nominative plural masculine) and translates by "dogs." Looking around then for something to tack this to, he fixes upon nocturnae (genitive singular feminine) and gives us "night dogs"! I allow myself an exclamation point. For sheer magnificence of blundering this is unsurpassable. But other blunders are not without interest.
Where Propertius speaks of the "purple beaks" (punica rostra) of the doves of Venus, Mr. Pound renders by the nonsensical phrase "their Punic faces" -- as if one were to translate "crockery" by "China." He confuses the two Latin words fugantes and fugientes, and so represents the tutelary gods of Rome as fleeing from Hannibal instead of putting him to flight. Where Propertius says "I dreamed I lay ... on Helicon," he makes him say "I had been seen ... recumbent on ... Helicon." Where Propertius says, "The Muses are my companions, and my songs are dear to the reader," Mr. Pound translates, "Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books." Where Propertius says, "The trophies of kings, borne in the bark of Aemilius" (the Roman conqueror), Mr. Pound makes him say "Royal Aemilia, drawn on the memorial raft." "Raft" is the school-boy stock-translation of ratis (a general word corresponding to our "craft"). As for "royal Aemilia," had there ever been such a lady, Propertius could not have meant her, since the two Latin words are in different cases. These little differences have significance in an inflected language.
Twice Mr. Pound blunders over the word rigat, "moistens" or "sprinkles." evidently connecting it with English "rigid," instead of with English "irrigation." Thus where Propertius says, "Calliope moistened my lips with water from the springs of Philetas" (a poet who influenced him), Mr. Pound gives us the monstrous rendering, "Stiffened our face with the backwash of Philetas." In another passage Propertius says, "I have no artificial grottoes watered from the Marcian flow" (Marcius liquor). The Marcian aqueduct was Rome's best water supply, recently renovated by Agrippa. Mr. Pound seems to have taken liquor as spiritous. He must then have thought of age as appropriate, and so have interpreted Marcius as referring to the legendary King Ancus Marcius; after which it was easy to add another legendary king, Numa Pompilius. The result is three lines, all wrong, and the last two pure padding:
Nor are my caverns stuffed stiff with a Marcian vintage (my cellar does not date from Numa Pompilius,
Nor bristle with wine jars).
Of one particularly unpleasant passage in Mr. Pound's translation, there is no suggestion in the original. Mr. Pound writes:
And in the meantime my songs will travel,What Propertius says is, "Meanwhile let me resume the wonted round of my singing; let my lady, touched (by my words), find pleasure in the familiar music." That is all. (Gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono). Just possibly, though not probably, Propertius meant "young ladies" rather than "my lady." But there is no hint of the decadent meaning which Mr. Pound read into the passage by misunderstanding tacta, and taking the preposition in as if it were a negativing part of an adjective insolito. His own context should have shown him the absurdity of his version.
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness.
If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide. I do not counsel this. But I beg him to lay aside the mask of erudition. And, if he must deal with Latin, I suggest that he paraphrase some accurate translation, and then employ some respectable student of the language to save him from blunders which might still be possible. If he does not owe this to himself, he owes it to his author, of whose fate otherwise one must think, in Browning's words from Sordello, as that of
Some captured creature in a pound,
Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress.
Wm. Gardner Hale