Gained In Translation

This is an essay on poetry and the nature of translation from one of my undergrad classes. I happen to think that academic writing is the entertainment equivalent of eating rocks, but this is probably the best example of a more long-form formal piece.

Gained in Translation: Ezra Pound's Heuristic Revision of “The Seafarer”

     How important is the role of authorial intent? Many educators have downplayed the role of authorial intent, stating that as long as the text can support an idea, the authorial intent is irrelevant. The problem is that by downplaying authorial intent, the study of a text can often be broader than the text is meant to support. This especially true of translated works, a nature of text where authorial intent should be at the forefront. To fail to consider the author's relation to his text means that, in issues of language, word choice and theme, elements can be lost in translation. However, what if authorial intent is shoved into the spotlight? Would it be possible for elements to be gained in translation? Such is the question for “The Seafarer”, a prominent Old English piece of poetry that has been translated in many different ways, the most famous translation the fruit of prominent early 20^th century poet Ezra Pound. Just as Pound and his modernist contemporaries revolutionized the nature of poetry, Pound also changed the nature of translation in his interpretation of “The Seafarer”. “The Seafarer”'s themes of distance and exile, although prevalent in the original text, are enhanced by Pound's heuristic translation.

     By using a more direct translation, the expressions of exile and distance can be seen in the context of Old English poetic concepts. One such technique of expression is the use of diction by the poet. As noted by John Miles Foley, the poet of “The Seafarer” uses language chronologically removed from the intended audience of the poem in order to create an atmosphere of distance and exile. The poet's original intent is to, using archaic terms, create an atmosphere of what Jeff Opland calls “the joy of the hall” (Opland 442-467). According to Foley, lines 19b-21b represent an example of such diction: “Hwilum ylfete song/adyde ic me to gomene/ganotes hleoþor/aond huilpan swegand/fore hleahtor wera” (Miller 19b-21b). In this example, words such as 'song', ' gomene' and ' swegand', roughly translated as 'song', 'mirth' and 'music', contribute to this atmosphere while using antiquated terms to represent a sense of distance. In Foley's words, “our learned and non-traditional poet has returned to the word-hoard for his diction and has put its older, remembered contents and contexts to use in his relatively modern poem” (Foley 9). The poet also expresses distance through his diction in a different way: through his structure.

     Keeping in mind Foley's theory of creating a figurative distance though using antiquated language, the placement of such language also contributes to the themes of distance. In “The Seafarer”, the structure of the language holds equal importance to the diction. When reading “The Seafarer”, the structure of the Old English poem guides the reader's eye to the caesura which separates the poem into two distinct halves. In “The Seafarer”, the poet guides the reader in a right-oriented fashion, which is to say that the final conclusion of the poet can be found in the section following the caesura. “The Seafarer” is established as a presentation/reply dichotomy: the A section of the line serves to introduce a concept while the B section of the line serves as the speaker's response to the concept presented. For an example, consider line 75, “bravery in the world/against the enmity of devils” (Miller 75a-75b). In this instance, the poet uses the A section to introduce the concept of bravery and proceeds to place it in context to its opposition in the B section of the line. Affording this presumption, an examination of the aforementioned lines 19b-21b reveals how this technique is used to represent a feeling of distance: by placing a physical white space between images of the poet's longing and that which he longs for. This passage, in which I have include the caesuric breaks, “At times the swan's song/I took to myself as pleasure||the gannet's noise/the voice of the curlew||instead of the laughter of men/the singing gull||instead of the drinking of mead” (Miller 19b-21b), shows a particular instance of thematic separation within the work: the pleasurable song contrasted against “noise” (20b) or the “voice of the curlew” (21a) against “laughter of the men” (21b). With this type of structure, the caesura represents a physical distance within the poem as well as a textual distance for the reader.

     One interesting distinction to make for “The Seafarer” is one of the central thematic explorations of the poem: a strange mixture of the pagan and Christian elegy. This poetry of lamentation is wholly concerned with questions of distance, with the speaker remarking his differences with the world around him. As I.L. Gordon aptly described, a concept known as transience: renouncing the ills of the world in favor of a personal assertion. In typical Christian elegiac concepts of transience the moral is that “security is to be found in God and everlasting life” (Gordon 8) while more traditional pagan transience acts as “an incentive to bravery, a reminder of the futility of caution” (Gordon 8). What makes “The Seafarer” a unique poem is its dual structure: it approaches exile and distance through the Christian and traditional concepts of transience. The distinction within “The Seafarer” is not subtle by any means, there is a direct thematic break from a traditional concept of transience to a more Christian interpretation at lines 56a-65a: “This the man does not know/the warrior lucky in worldly/some endure then/who tread most widely/the paths of exile” (Miller 55b-57b) representing the culmination of the traditional transience while “Indeed hotter for me/the joys of the Lord/than this dead life/fleeting on the land” (Miller 64b-66a) begins an exploration of the Christian view of transience. Note that in the traditional view of transience, the poet seeks to once again embrace the land while eschewing the temporary nature of the same land within the Christian contextualization. Although both views discuss the nature of exile, the speaker seems to be directly contradicting himself: is the torture in relation to his physical distance from his land or a distance from the permanence that faith offers? This distinct contrast between the two views of the poetry has been a source of contention within those whose study it and this precise conflict is why Pound's method of translation is worth examining within a literary discussion of the work.

     Before discussing the relation between Pound's translation and the original text, the nature of Pound's heuristic translation must be defined. The logistics of translation do not heed themselves to a direct representation of the original text: there are too many cultural, linguistic and contextual barriers between languages for a direct translation to properly represent the careful manipulation of language that poetry requires. This is especially true for dead languages, such as Old English, for which there is only historical context to represent in the transcription of words. The distance between the reader and author is measured not only in years but in stages of linguistic development. Traditional translation methods attempt to create a modern gloss for a distinctly un-modern text. To Pound, this method of translation was the obstacle to understanding poetry such as “The Seafarer”: he states in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris”, “The drudgery and minutae of methods concern only the scholar” (I Gather 22). To Pound, we can only approach a work such as “The Seafarer” with our modern perception and attempt to adjust the original text into our modern world. Direct interpretation of the original text does not allow the modern reader to directly engage with the poem. To explain this thinking, he makes note that when somebody describes a piece of visual art, they take note of the differences to their modern world: the date and location of its conception, the author's historical significance, the relations to other works of art and other details. To Pound, this is a fruitless endeavor, “A few good days in a gallery are more illuminating than years would be if spent in reading a description of these pictures” (I Gather 23). This level of thought resulted in a new type of translation, where the translator eschews textual accuracy in order to focus on the literary qualities of the original text. Ming Xie, in her essay “Pound as Translator” dubs this “heuristic translation” (Xie 4) and outlines the concept as thus: “the new version is justified to the extent that it can direct the reader's attention to certain intrinsic qualities of the original, while at the same time bringing about the equivalent effects of these qualities in a new poem. Such translation is based not so much based on “The Seafarer” as a source-text of translation, as on “The Seafarer” as a poem,a poem that has been strongly made and can be re-made with a directly matching strength” (Xie 4). It is with this concept of translation which Pound approaches “The Seafarer”, attempting to enhance its themes of distance and exile.

     Pound's method of heuristic translation serves to further the themes of distance and exile found in the original version of “The Seafarer” by continuing the poet's use of alienating diction and structure. The poet of “The Seafarer” was interested in using word choice and poetic structure as a way to alienate the reader in the fashion as the speaker is being alienated within the poem. It is with this concept in mind that Pound recognizes the authorial intent of the poem and reinterprets this sense of exile in his modern version of “The Seafarer”. Although often accused of unintentionally bad translation, it should be noted that Pound's version of “The Seafarer” utilizes many linguistic elements of Old English in order to alienate the modern audience, much as “The Seafarer” poet utilized language from the past. For instance: consider lines 8-10 of Pound's translation: “coldly afflicted/my feet were by frost benumbed/chill its chain are;chafing sighs/hew my heart round and hunger begot/mere-worthy mood” (The Seafarer 8-10). As John Corbett points out, Pound's text is intentionally obtuse, “Pound here systematically disrupts present-day English sentence structure, going beyond the disruptions usually found even in poetry, to the extent that subject-verb relationships are obscured...the reader has to decide whether 'hunger' is the subject or the object of 'hunger begot'. Do 'chafing sighs' beget the hunger or does hunger beget the 'mere-worthy mood'?” (Corbett 2). Pound's distortion of modern language utilizes many Old English concepts which are now alien to the modern reader: the laissez-faire attitude towards sentence structure and word placement, the alliteration which had fallen out of favor and supplanted by rhyme and kennings, combinations of established lexemes, such as “lone-flyer” (The Seafarer 63) and “whale-path” (Seafarer 64) in substitute for a more complex modern terms. In translating as such, Pound has both created a new version of “The Seafarer” that is indelibly Pound's but also utilized the tools embraced by the original author to emulate the effects of the original poem. However, it is Pound's reconstruction of the poem which affords the right of a heuristic translation.

      Pound omits religious references within “The Seafarer” to strengthen the themes of exile and distance by eliminating what he has as thematic inconsistencies. Pound's omission in part of his goal to represent the poem with a singular theme of exile and distance. To Pound, “his main interest in the poem is its essential music and its prosodic movement which he believed to be the embodiment of the poem's secular heroism in the face of physical harshness, solitary exile and spiritual anguish” (Xie 3). His interpretation heighten elements of the secular heroism while omitting the themes of Christian transience. In fact, his version of “The Seafarer” ends at line 99a, omitting over 20 lines of poetry. However, Pound's version of “The Seafarer”, although an inaccurate translation, is more concise in its thematic expression. It has been argued that Pound's translation eliminates many issues in the original poem: “In the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the overtly Christian ending of the poem...was an evangelical accretion to an essential secular beginning...finally, almost as a non-sequiter that is further isolated by a metrical shift, the speaker exhorts his listeners to praise God” (Corbett 3). The poem has a very uneasy relationship with itself: it shifts wildly without intent or purpose from secular longing to Christian longing to Christian proselytizing. The speaker can “...sing us 'a true song' about himself and his travels, but whether this is ultimately to inspire our sympathy, awe, or religious devotion is unclear” (Corbett 4). What is clear is the effect of Pound's translation: the reading of the speaker's secular heroic notions have inspired poets such as Edwin Morgan, Tom Scott and Alexander Scott to create their own reinterpretation of The Seafarer's tenuous balance between secular and Christian. However, in doing so, it must be kept in mind, that Pound eliminates some level of significance from the original poem: it's conflict between Christian forms of exile and a more secular view are part of what has fascinated scholars since its inception. In fact, A.D. Horgan suggests that it is the Christian elements that “[provide] the contours of the work” (Horgan 1). However, making an argument that a literal translation is somehow more ethical than a heuristic translation can be debunked. After all, most pieces of art are an extension of some literal quality: an emotion, a happening, an action. As Corbett states, “...just as we do not really expect claims to veracity from novels or films...we should not expect an acknowledgment of 'otherness' from a self-evidently 'literal' translation” (Corbett 11). Or perhaps in plainer terms, “May I for my own self's song truth reckon” (The Seafarer).

     Pound's translation of “The Seafarer” both modifies and heightens themes of exile and distance within The Seafarer by reinterpreting the text for a modern audience. Poetry is a display of sorts, a physical representation of our fascination with language. However, language changes at a rate untenable for direct translation. With the layers of historic, linguistic and thematic distance between the modern reader and the original “Seafarer”, it would difficult to experience the poem without a level of heuristic translation. Pound's old axiom to 'Make it New' is associated with the beauty of innovation, but perhaps we should be using it to look backwards. “The Seafarer” is an extension of man's desires and dreams, lain dormant obscured by layers of age and distance. Pound's revelation? Make it new.

Works Cited

Corbett, John. ‘The Seafarer: Visibility and the Translation of a West Saxon Elegy into English and Scots’ Translation and Literature, Vol. 10, Part 2. Edinburgh University Press, 2001.

Foley, John Miles. “Genre(s) in the Making: Diction, Audience and Text in the Old English Seafarer.” Poetics Today, Vol. 4, No. 4. (1983). Jstor. Grand Valley State University Lib., Allendale. 10

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Gordon, I.L. “Traditional Themes in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.” The Review of English Studies,

New Series, Vol. 5, No. 17 (1954). Jstor. Grand Valley State University Lib., Allendale. 10

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Horgan, A.D. “The Structure of The Seafarer.” The Review of English Studies,

New Series, Vol. 30, No. 117 (1979). Jstor. Grand Valley State University Lib., Allendale. 10

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Miller, Sean. “The Seafarer”. Anglo-Saxons.net. <http://www.anglo- saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Sfr&numbering=1>.

Pound, Ezra. “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris”. Selected Prose 1909-1965. New Directions Publishing, 1975. 19-45.

Pound, Ezra. “The Seafarer”. Ripostes. LION. Grand Valley State Univeristy Lib., Allendale. 11 October 2007. <http://gateway.proquest.com.ezproxy.gvsu.edu:2048/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88- 2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion-us&rft_id=xri:lion:ft:po:Z300226863:3>.

Xie, Min. “Pound as Translator”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. Grand Valley State University Lib., Allendale. 10 October 2007. <http://cco.cambridge.org.ezproxy.gvsu.edu:2048/extract

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