Moving slowly away from Pound, but hopefully close enough to hold the attention. How much of the Medieval desire to maintain exact transcription was motivated by numerological concerns -- word counts per verse or chapter, ratios, and so on into 'higher order' properties? Pound would perhaps not have been as interested in such questions as, say, Yeats or, better, Khlebnikov; I've just finished an excellent essay by Perloff on the role of numerology in Modernism, and the question of translating from a "sacred" text seems to merge theory and praxis in interesting ways. Any evidence that Pound concerned himself with such things? Even with as free a translation as his Seafarer, it would be possible to retain some numerological properties of the original text, although, the Seafarer being a secular work, he probably wouldn't have bothered in that particular case. -- Simon DeDeo http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sdedeo/localpapers.html [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]