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Derivative Historicism in Literature
Alexander Pope - The Iliad
The art of translation is often synonymous with the art of derivative historicism. Each translator is faced with the daunting challenge of conveying accurately but vividly the ideas of another human being expressed in a tongue spoken in times and places sometimes seemingly far removed from the here and now.
Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad (1720), although it has been criticized as "more Augustan than Homeric in spirit and diction," was particularly lauded by Coleridge as "an astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity."1 With the publication of this work and his translation of its companion, The Odyssey, Pope achieved such a degree of financial independence that he was able to devote his remaining years almost entirely to cultural pursuits, lavishing particular attention on his garden at Twickenham, and the care of his aging mother (see chap. 14).
In his Preface to The Iliad, the poet describes the extraordinary satisfaction that he felt when fully engaged with the ancient world through the medium of his art:
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When we read Homer, we ought to reflect that we are reading the most ancient Author in the Heathen World; and those who consider him in this Light, will double their Pleasure in the Perusal of him. Let them think they are growing acquainted with Nations and People that are now no more; that they are stepping almost three thousand Years backward into the remotest Antiquity, and entertaining themselves with a clear and surprizing Vision of Things no where else to be found, and the only authentick Picture of that ancient World.2
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Edward Fitzgerald - The Rubáiyát
Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubáiyát from the Persian of Omar Khayyám (1859) is still widely regarded as the best. Taking care to retain the stanzaic structure of the original twelfth-century text, which consists of rubáis or quatrains, Fitzgerald achieved a remarkable degree of thematic continuity in a strikingly original paraphrastic style that retains its place not merely as a fine translation but as one of the outstanding love poems of the English language. A powerful sense of historical destiny and the transitory nature of human experience pervades Fitzgerald's seventy-five quatrains:
| When Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's Knead, |
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And then of the last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
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Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
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What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
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In addition to the Rubáiyát, Fitzgerald completed translations of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Calderón, and translations from the Persian of works by Attar and Jami.
Ezra Pound - "Winter is icumen in"
Translation is by no means the only vehicle whereby literary minds can practice the art of derivative historicism. Ezra Pound's "Winter is icumen in" demonstrates what ingenious mischief this "objectionably modern" and "objectionably antiquarian" poet (in the sympathetic words of T. S. Eliot) could wring from an anonymous thirteenth-century rota. First, the text of "Sumer is icumen in" (c. 1260):
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Sumer is icumen in, / Spring has come in,
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Lhude sing, cuccu! / Loudly sing, cuckoo!
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Groweth sed and bloweth med / Grows the seed and blooms the meadow
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And springth the wude nu. / And the woods springs now.
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Sing, cuccu! / Sing, cuckoo!
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Awe bleteth after lomb, / The ewe bleats after the lamb,
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Lhouth after calve cu / The calf lows after the cow
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Bulloc sterteth, bucke ferteth. / The bull leaps, the buck leaps, twisting.
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Murie sing, cuccu! / Merrily sing, cuckoo!
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Cuccu, cuccu, / Cuckoo, cuckoo,
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Wel singes thu, cuccu. / Well sing you, cuckoo.
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Ne swik thu naver nu! / Nor cease you ever now!
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Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu! / Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo!
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Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu! / Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo!3
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Pound's notorious parody goes thus:
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Winter is icumen in,
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Lhude sing Goddamm,
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Raineth drop and staineth slop,
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And how the wind doth ramm!
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Sing: Goddamm.
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Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
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An ague hath my ham.
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Freezeth river, turneth liver,
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Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
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| Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm, |
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So 'gainst the winter's balm.
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Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
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Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.4
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Perhaps even more than Eliot himself, Pound embodied the paradoxical essence of the "modern" artist, at once fiercely defiant of—and proudly devoted to—tradition. Pound's passion for history took the form of numerous adaptations of Provençal and early Italian poems, a version of The Seafarer (tenth century), and even translations of the Chinese author Li Po, which laid the foundation for the richly allusive language and culturally diverse imagery of the Cantos. Earlier in his career, he helped establish the Imagist school of poetry, whose emphasis on clarity, conciseness, stylistic economy, and the elimination of meter and rhyme was derived from his study of the classical poetry of Japan and China.5
T. S. Eliot credited Pound with having been "more responsible for the XXth century revolution in poetry than any other individual." That this revolution was founded on a profoundly learned historicism strangely contradicts the exaggeratedly iconoclastic pretensions of modernist theory and criticism.
