I was reading on the list about "Pound as linguistic".
As much as I know, a translator not neccesarily must be a
linguistic and know about Troubeskoy, Martinet and Chomsky.
He needs to know very well his own language and know as much
as he can the language from where he's translating. But in many
cases just a fair knowledge is enough. I think, for instance, on
the U.S. poet David Ferry's "Gilgamesh" (Farrar, Straus and Grioux, N
. York,1992) or the wonderful rendering that Spanish poet Jose Maria
Alvarez made to his language of Cavafis' poems. None of them know
Sumerian or Greek, but they worked on the basis of versions, as Pound
did with the Chinese notes by Fenollosa.
You can compare the versions made by schollars or proffesional
translators with those made by poets, and even if it is possible to find
errors on the latter, the poetry Qits essenceQ isn't on the linguistic's
side
Borges wrote about Pound saying that most than a normal translator
he was a translator of essencialities, the substance of which poetry
is made.
So, apart from the curiosity on personal aspects of Pound's life, who
cares if his Greeck, Latin, French, German or Italian were enough
good for the Goethe's Institut or Alliance Francaise' standards?
 
Jorge Fondebrider
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Buenos Aires - Argentina