The “inherent character” of “the work,” “as pertinent and meaningful to the modern reader as” to the Greek “audiences”—the assumption is that appeals to the foreign text can insure a true equivalence in the translation, transcending cultural and historical differences and even the linguistic “liberties” taken by the translator. This anonymous, somewhat contradictory entry makes clear that Fitts’s authority as a translator rested on his advocacy of a free, domesticating method that rewrote the foreign text in recognizable terms, like “modern” English.
In the preface to his One Hundred Poems From the Palatine Anthology (1938), Fitts described his method in some detaiclass="underline"
I have not really undertaken translation at all—translation, that is to say, as it is understood in the schools. I have simply tried to restate in my own idiom what the Greek verses have meant to me. The disadvantages of this method are obvious: it has involved cutting, altering, expansion, revision—in short, all the devices of free paraphrase. […] In general, my purpose has been to compose, first of all, and as simply as possible, an English poem. To this end I have discarded poeticisms, even where (as in Meleagros, for instance) they could have been defended.
Except in certain Dedications and in similar pieces where the language is definitely liturgical, I have avoided such archaisms as ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ and all their train of attendant ghosts. Less defensibly, I have risked a spurious atmosphere of monotheism by writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’ (but Mr Leslie would have it {210} ‘Jupiter’!) whenever the context admitted it without too perilous a clash.
The first thing worth remarking is how much Fitts’s method was indebted to modernist translation, especially Pound’s work. The assertion of the aesthetic independence of the translation, the practice of “altering” the foreign text and using contemporary English, even the swipe at academic translations, presumably too literal and therefore not literary—all this characterized Pound’s translation theory and practice (but also earlier figures in the history of English-language translation: some of Pound’s views, like Bunting’s, date back to Denham and Dryden). Fitts knew and reviewed Pound’s work, corresponded with him during the thirties, and, at the Choate School, taught Pound’s poetry to James Laughlin, who launched New Directions and published Fitts’s Palatine Anthology as well as many of Pound’s books (Stock 1982:322–323; Carpenter 1988:527–528). Fitts’s most significant departure from Pound in this volume, a departure that was now determining Pound’s reception both in and out of the academy, was the refusal of different poetic discourses, including archaism. Preexisting cultural materials fade into “ghosts” with the claim of cultural autonomy for the translation, which can then carry out a thoroughgoing domestication that inscribes the foreign text with target-language values, both linguistic (fluency) and cultural (a Judeo-Christian monotheism—“writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’”).
When Fitts reprinted this translation in 1956, he added a “Note” that apologized for not revising the texts: “My theories of translation have changed so radically that any attempt to recast the work of fifteen or twenty years ago could end only in confusion and the stultification of whatever force the poems may have once had” (Fitts 1956:xiii). But a few years later, when he published an essay on translation entitled “The Poetic Nuance,” first as a “privately printed” volume produced by Harcourt “for the friends of the author and his publishers” (Fitts 1958), then in Reuben Brower’s Harvard University Press anthology On Translation (Brower 1959), it was clear that Fitts’s translation theory hadn’t changed at all. He argued the same basic ideas, which continued to be the canons of English-language poetry translation, made available by both trade and academic publishers and underwritten by Fitts’s prestige as a translator and reviewer. Thus, the point of “The Poetic Nuance” was that “The translation of {211} a poem should be a poem, viable as a poem, and, as a poem, weighable” (Fitts 1958:12). Yet the only kind of poem Fitts recognized was written in a fairly standard American English, punctuated by familiar and socially acceptable colloquialisms. To present his argument, Fitts first discussed a poem by the Mexican Enrique González Martínez that constituted an “attack upon the spurious elegance of poeticism” (ibid.:13); then he used his own modern version of an epigram by Martiaclass="underline"
Fitts read the Latin text as Martial’s “joke” about Hormus’ unsavory “hygiene,” concluding that “his fun depends largely upon the composure of his form, the apparent decorum of his words” (ibid.), particularly his use of the word humane (“Humanity”). In Fitts’s reading, “Hormus is personally so unclean that even he has enough hygienic sense not to press upon another a cup that he himself has been using”; hence, “his bad manners are really humanitarianism” (ibid.22). Fitts’s translation signified this reading by breaking the “decorum” of his English, shifting from an extremely prosaic, almost rhythmless colloquialism in the first two lines to a relatively formal, slightly British abstraction (“Haughtiness”) to a staccato slang expression (“Hell, no”). The shift from elite formality to popular slang inscribed the Latin text with a class hierarchy, making the joke depend on the reader’s acknowledgement that Hormus was violating class distinctions—and improperly so. Fitts’s translation, like his reading, constructed a socially superior position from which to laugh at the character, but the fluency of the English made this elitism seem natural.
Fitts evidently felt a deep ambivalence toward modernist translation. He shared Pound’s valorization of linguistic precision in reading and translating earlier poetries. Fitts’s enthusiastic foreward to {212} Mary Barnard’s 1958 version of Sappho praised her perception that the Greek texts were written in a “pungent downright plain style” requiring an appropriately “plain” English:
I do not see how that could be bettered. Like the Greek, it is stripped and hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth. Here is no trace of the “sweete slyding, fit for a verse” that one expects to find in renderings of Sappho. It is exact translation; but in its composition, the spacing, the arrangement of stresses, it is also high art. This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.
Yet Barnard’s version was “exact,” not so much because she found a true equivalent to the Greek text—she herself later admitted that she used “padding,” making the fragments more continuous—but rather because she was influenced by Pound (Barnard 1984:280–284). She corresponded with Pound during the fifties while he was confined at St. Elizabeth’s, and she showed him her versions of Sappho, revising them in accordance with his recommendation that she use “the live language” instead of “poetik jarg” (ibid.:282). This recommendation dovetailed with Barnard’s reading of Sappho’s poetry, which was partly modernist (“It was spare but musical”), partly romantic (“and had, besides, the sound of the speaking voice making a simple but emotionally loaded statement”). Barnard finally developed a fluent strategy that produced the effect of transparency, seeking “a cadence that belongs to the speaking voice” (ibid.:284), and Fitts appreciated this illusionistic effect, taking the English for the Greek text, the poem for the poet: “This, one thinks, is what Sappho must have been like.”