Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts.
With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.
Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.
He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.
The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.
His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times.
Here there are, summarized in a single phrase, the fundamental sources “excerned” by Pound in his poetry: the Greek-Latin antiquity (especially Homer and the melic Greek poets), the old Chinese poets (especially Li Tai-Pe), the Provençal troubadours (mainly Arnaut Daniel), the Germanic Minnesänger, the Tuscan poets of the dolce stil nuovo (mostly Cavalcanti), Dante, Chaucer, the Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare, and some of the French poets from the end of the nineteenth century (surprisingly not Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but rather Laforgue and Corbière). Surely, his enormous intertextuality agglomerates many other sources—he himself wrote thousands of pages of literary criticism about many other poets—but these are the fundamental, recurring and obsessive, sources of his poetry. He wrote accurate and detailed studies of poetic technique regarding all these writers listed above. He obstinately tried to learn or imagine the poetic technique of other cultures, some of which were long extinct (there are pages in which he imagines the technique of Babylonian or Hittite poetry!). He had, in general, an almost fanatical commitment to poetic technique—which he considered, as he says somewhere, a fundamental test of a writer’s sincerity, and was sure one could learn such major techniques even from certain prose writers—Flaubert and, especially, Henry James, for whom he held in great esteem. It is certain that for Pound, this excernment of beauty out of Tradition is unimaginable in the absence of technique. Beauty can not be made new without proper technique—that is Pound’s most essential credo, and this is why erudition is not the ballast for poetry; on the contrary, it is technique that helps the poet both recognize that Eleusine light which crosses all epochs of poetry and, subsequently, enclose it in the lens of their poems, where it survives, amplified and well-preserved, until the next enlightened eye sees it and takes it further.
When I translated the poetry written by Pound between 1908 and 1920, from Personae to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, it quite often led me in a pretty dance, sometimes because of the language; there are poems in which old Germanisms and Gallicisms coexist with neologisms, and I found myself at a loss trying to translate this linguistic mixture into Romanian while preserving its effect. Placing Turkish or Greek words transliterated into Romanian instead of these Germanisms or Gallicisms would have resulted in an involuntary but immediate comic effect, and thus I had to search word by word upon any such case, going through the entire dictionary of synonyms, improvising, then returning to the historical layers of the Romanian language until I got as close as I could to the original suggestion. A concrete example is, for instance, “Ancient Music,” a short poem that parodies an ancient English song, written in an also parodical medieval English, not entirely evolved from its Germanic source. Well, how does one translate this into Romanian? Dan Alexe managed to put forward an interesting version by completely replacing the Germanisms with Turkish words which entered the Romanian language three or four centuries ago, but it is a wholly new poem, detached from its Poundian referent. I, too, looked for old lexical forms that are still comprehensible to the Romanian reader (just as Germanisms are intuitively understandable to the English reader of Pound’s poems).
In other cases, I had to translate pseudo-medieval poems of over sixty lines built on two rhymes only, requiring the finding of two Romanian rhymes that would also build the poem on sixty lines and not appear randomly forced in their context, but as far as possible justified by it. I spent days in a row with such a poem, solving it like a chess problem, step by step, with sometimes maddening trials and errors.
In other cases, I had to bring into Romanian Pound’s oracular kalophilia, his excessive and hypnotic preciousness, his lack of inhibition which quite often comes to appear so natural and poetic. In poems such as those in Cathay, or in the pseudo-medieval verses, he more than once chooses to complicate language, to make it unnatural and twisted, as if to emphasize that what we read is a Chinese or Provençal translation, an artifact built with long elaborated, and yet insufficiently polished words; the effect in English is remarkable, and it was quite difficult to render it into Romanian, which does not have a tradition in this respect (and neither in that of medieval cultivated poetry, as a matter of fact).
But, despite and beyond all the difficulties, while translating Pound one always has the certainty that the text which excruciates you makes beauty out of words in a way that no other ever could. And when you have the feeling that something of this beauty passes into your Romanian (a beauty which is that light coming from Eleusis and Provence and Tuscany towards you)—well, that pure physical feeling justifies everything.
En fin, as a poet, Pound brings together in his poetic writing three fundamental but quite heterogeneous qualities: we can find each of them separately in other good poets, and in some exceptional cases we may find two of them combined in the writings of a very good writer, but we can hardly ever find all three germinating in the same poet, as in Pound’s case.
i. The first quality is that of an exemplary anarchic attitude. Although he avoided becoming a preacher of poetic anarchy (“As for preaching poetic anarchy or anything else: heaven forbid”), the truth is that a poet must possess a strong anarchist gene, not in order to preach anarchy, but simply to practice it in their writing.
ii. The second quality involves a recycling of tradition on a staggering scale. Pound recycles not only the tradition of all American poetry, but also that of European poetry (from antiquity to modernity), Chinese poetry (across several millennia), and so on.
iii. And thirdly, a major quality is his obsession with the image, the exquisite calligraphy of the poetic representation—the force of rendering any image alive and powerful.
Ergo: anarchy, tradition, and image. Pound has all three major qualities precisely because he asks the most from poetry, and it is due to this utmost exigency that, among all the poets of the last century, he certainly is the ultimate Maximalist. I think young Romanian poets can learn from a great master such as Pound the importance of commingling all three qualities in their own writing, which is why I have dedicate myself to translating the Cantos into Romanian; their sophisticated poetry, hybridising all the major poetic qualities, could be a decisive catalyst for the Romanian poetry of the future.
Radu Vancu (Sibiu, Romania, 1978) is a Romanian poet, scholar, and translator. He works as an associate professor at the Faculty of Letters and Arts at the Lucian Blaga University from Sibiu, and is editor-in-chief of the Transilvania magazine, an editor of Poesis Internațional magazine, and the national editor of Poetry International’s Romanian section. Since 2019, he has been the president of PEN Romania. Starting in 2002, he has published seven books of poems, for which he was awarded several prizes, both national and international. He has also published an award-winning novel, Transparența (2018), and a diary (2015). His scholarly publications include two book-length essays on Mihai Eminescu and Mircea Ivănescu, as well as a study on the anti-humanist poetics of modernity. Together with Claudiu Komartin, he is the co-editor of the anthologies Best Romanian Poems of the Year (2010, 2011, and 2012). He has translated novels and poetry, mainly from the works of John Berryman and W.B. Yeats; he is also the translator of the ongoing four-volume Ezra Pound edition published under the cure of Horia-Roman Patapievici. He is an organizer of the International Poetry Festival in Sibiu, Transylvania.
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