I don’t care if you’re sick of me talking about Ez. Here you can HEAR him reading the Cantos. I doubt you would expect what his voice sounds like, and the intended tone of the poem.

I’m looking at a 1934 book of essays of his, and one is on the translation of ancient writers. He says in our century they’re mostly translations for schoolboys.

He recommends Chapman’s Homer. Here’s what’s startling about that- Chapman was born in 1559.

As for Virgil’s Aeneid he recommends the translation of someone born in 1474- Gavin Douglas.

As for the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses he recommends someone born in 1536- Arthur Golding. (I’ve talked about this translation before [it’s the one Shakespeare read]).

Maybe you’ve seen recent translations that appear to be “diversified up” and soften the language you find in older ones, from like the 1950s? Pound is arguing that those ones from the 1950s are similarly distorted.

What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens?

You’ve been tricked haven’t you. Handed Homer by a sneaky Jesuit.

Owned

Pound’s Greek and Latin in the Cantos is not gibberish, he knows what he’s talking about

That’s why he speaks Greek and Latin in it, because there’s no English equivalent.

Pound wasn’t an ordinary person- he wrote music too. You can listen to some of it here. He said he structured the Cantos as a fugue (which I wrote about here). The Greek and Latin are like notes in that fugue, sounds that aren’t possible in English.

The Pounds’ apartment windows opened up to the Mediterranean sea, so he probably contemplated Odysseus’s ship sailing upon it as he gazed out.

This is what a lecture from neech at Basel was like

The passage is splendid, but splendidly unhomeric

In his letters to Dorothy you can see he strove to be this exact with the Chinese characters too

Even through our botched translations of the ancients we acquire an immunity to the rat menace’s brainworms, that’s how powerful they can be. I have a hunch that ol Sheriff Ez can make them even more powerful.

You might have read Robert Fagles’ translations of Homer? Did you ever wonder what Fagles’ politics were? Imagine if he was a redblooded liberal. He was a professor at Princeton after all. Pound was always ranting about the academy being a subsidized racket.

Yes yes yes

A search for Aeschylus in English is deadly, accursed, mind-rending.

I want ALL the advice about this.

He first brings up Browning’s Agamemnon (which I didn’t know existed). Ez thought very highly of Browning, seeing him as one of his precursors.

Ez himself translated the Agamemnon, as well as Sophocles’ Elektra and Women of Trachis.

Further translations of his-

The Troubadours were especially important for him. He thought modern poetry derived from two streams, the ancients and the Troubadours. So I might write about them in the future.

And everyone knows his translations of the Chinese classics. His Confucius is still my favorite, despite all the criticism against them.

This is why in his letters he talks like a cowboy and “doesn’t give a fuck”, because he knows who he’s talking to knows who he is, i.e. someone who thinks Browning isn’t good enough and seeks to out-do him. He knows English better than you, so he’s allowed to talk like he’s stupid.

eg

Whoa cool, I want to find a study on this about painters

when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the colour-sense) of his contemporaries.

Last night on the phone I was joking with someone about Eliot’s nice suits, shiny shoes, and well-combed hair. Ez was way ahead of Eliot. Eliot trying to larp as a British SIR.

I spose Pound had something of that way about him too

He looks real happy to be around Ginsboyg here doesn’t he?

The “manchild generation”.

You probably thought all that Greek in the Cantos was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo

the complete explanation of why Browning’s Aeschylus, to say nothing of forty other translations of Aeschylus, is unreadable

Would they let me write academic publications that incorporated images? I find them instructive.

Ah man, this 34 page essay was so good it felt like I read it in 5 minutes. Well I got lots of translations to check out now.