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
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