The Translator’s Invisibility

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 Martial:

Quod nulli calicem tuum propinas,
humane facis, Horme, non superbe.

You let no one drink from your personal cup, Hormus,

when the toasts go round the table.
Haughtiness?
                Hell, no.
Humanity.

(ibid.:25)

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: