Re-Connecting the Dissociated Eye to Writing through Translation

Abstract

Most literary critics examining Ezra Pound's translations focus on his creative techniques or on differences and similarities between the originals and his versions. Generally depreciating his original works and complimenting his translations, these critics overlook the fact that his translations have a different modality of writing from that of his original works. His original works become increasingly fragmented, elliptical, and illogical, but his translations do not show the expected disrupted and fragmented poetics, but rather retain the linear and harmonious poetics. Moreover, whereas his original poems become increasingly fragmented and illogical in his later years, Pound's early translations and later translations―although showing explicit stylistic differences―preserve the homogenous and linear logic. R. P. Blackmur attributes the homogeneity and linearity of his translation to Pound's effort to remain faithful to the original. However, this assumption is not wholly satisfactory, because even when the original is extremely fragmented, Pound succeeds in creatively producing a linear and harmonious translation. As is well known, Pound translated Cathay without any knowledge of Japanese and Chinese; thus, he had to have recourse solely to Ernest Fenellosa's fragmented notes and cribs of these poems. Yet Pound was able to produce a linear and logical poem from the fragmented notes. Thus, the question should be reformulated as: what induces or allows Pound to produce coherent poetry in translation, when the original itself was fragmented? In this paper, I will try, however tentatively, to answer this complicated question, on the basis of Walter J. Ong's and Marshall McLuhan's communication theory, through examining his writing tool, the typewriter.