TRANSLATION Much of Anglophone modernism was constituted by translation.

Imagism was created in the wake of F.S. Flint’s 1912 accounts of French post-

symbolist poetry; Vorticism in reaction to Marinetti’s Italian Futurism; Ford’s

English Review and Eliot’s Criterion as calques of the Mercure de France. There is

the debt owed by T.S. Eliot’s criticism to Maurras and Gourmont; the depth of

Pound’s immersion in Italian history and culture; Mansfield’s and Woolf’s reading in

Bergson, Proust, Chekhov; Bloomsbury aesthetics and its debt to French post-

impressionism; D.H. Lawrence’s attachment to German expressionism; the role of

little magazines in forging a European and transatlantic avant-garde; Edward Gordon

Craig’s theatre and its relation to Italian Futurist drama, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold;

Joyce’s debt to Ibsen, Dujardin, Bérard and his experiences as European exile;

relations between Yeats and Maeterlinck and the French symbolistes; Mina Loy’s

experiments in Italian Futurist drama; the role of inter-war Paris in the development

and practice of American expatriate modernists such as Stein, Barnes and

Hemingway.

Stephen Dedalus is a creature of Joyce’s trip to Paris in 1903, the first step

made in the lifelong project to bypass English culture’s paralysing effect on Irish

consciousness. Mansfield developed many of her haunting short stories about

deracination from memories of her stay in the German pension at Bad Wörishofen in

1909. T.S. Eliot’s career was launched after his year in Paris in 1910-1911, absorbing

the influences of Maurras, Bergson, Charles-Louis Philippe. Pound’s travels in Spain,

France and Italy in 1907-1908 concretized his life as a translator, and lie behind A

Lume Spento and The Spirit of Romance. Wyndham Lewis’s travels in Holland,

Spain, Germany and life as a bohemian artist in Paris and Brittany between 1902 and

1908 were formative, exposure to Bergson, Sorel, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Picasso and
Matisse shaping Tarr and his cubist-vorticist paintings. Mina Loy’s poems and plays

are self-consciously futurist exercises in tourism, Lunar Baedecker based on

developing the expatriate experiences as art student in Europe, and her life in Florence

between 1907 and 1916.

Pound’s versions of Cavalcanti, Li Po, Propertius, translations and imitations

from Greek, Old English, Italian, Provençal, French, the translatory fragments

embedded in the Cantos, testify to a lifetime’s attempt to embody in English the

power of his source texts and cultures. Much of the output of the Woolf’s Hogarth

Press were original translations of foreign literature, notably their own versions of

Bunin and Dostoevsky. The Hogarth Press published the papers of the International

Psycho-Analytical Institute, edited by Ernest Jones, including Freud's Collected

Papers (1924-1925), Theodor Reik's The Unknown Murderer (1936), and Anna

Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937).

Eliot, aside from translating himself, notably St. John Perse, as editor of The

Egoist 1917-9, founder and editor of The Criterion 1922-39, and literary editor at

Faber and Faber 1925-65, commissioned translations of Cocteau, Valéry, Proust,

Hesse, Montale, as well as critical studies of Gourmont, Rimbaud, Maurras. Joyce

was primarily interested in translation of his own work into other languages, famously

supervising translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He helped Georg Goyert on

the 1927 German translation of Ulysses. He worked with Nino Frank on the Italian

translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’. One of Beckett’s early and most difficult jobs

was the translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ into French.

Other modernists were similarly caught up in the work of translation. Arthur

Symons translated Verhaeren, Maupassant, D'Annunzio, Von Hofmannstahl,

Baudelaire and Zola. Richard Aldington, as editor of the periodical Egoist,

translations from Greek and Latin in collaboration with H.D.. Yeats translated

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Robert Graves translated Homer, Lucan, Terence, Apuleius,

Manuel de Jesús Galván, Pedro de Alarcon. Louis and Celia Zukovsky did a

phonomic translation of Catullus; Roy Campbell did translations of Lorca and St John

of the Cross; Basil Bunting translated Persian and Horace’s Odes; John Cournos was

a prolific translator from Russian, mainly of Soviet writers; Gilbert Cannan published

translations of Aleksinskaya, Benda, Rolland, Larbaud, Heine’s Memoirs, Chekhov’s

short stories (with Koteliansky).

William Carlos Williams, following his trip to Paris in 1927-28, translated

Philippe Soupault, in collaboration with his mother. MacDiarmid translated Blok into

Scots as ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926), as well as a version of Brecht’s

The Threepenny Opera. Edwin and Willa Muir’s translations of Kafka between 1930

and 1948 were influential in the dissemination of his work. Louis MacNeice

translated Aeschylus, Euripides, and Goethe’s Faust. Among the many translations by

Auden are: poems by St-John Perse, Cavafy, Voznesensky, Cocteau, Brecht, Goldoni,

and Norse poetry. Beckett not only translated his own work, but undertook important

translating projects before the war, including Mexican Poetry, and nineteen of the

contributions to Henry Crowder’s and Nancy Cunard’s 1934 Negro: An Anthology.

The evolution of Anglophone modernism was punctuated and heavily

influenced by important translations: Symons’ translations of Symbolist poetry and

Baudelaire; Archer’s Ibsen; Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne; Arthur

Walley’s translations from Chinese and Japanese; Scott Montcrieff’s Proust;

Strachey’s Freud; Oscar Levy’s Nietzsche; translations of Bergson appearing in 1910

and 1911; Constance Garnett’s Dostoievsky and Chekhov; the Muirs’ Kafka; Dorothy
Bussy’s Gide; Helen Lowe-Porter’s Thomas Mann; Mannheim’s and Willett’s Brecht;

Mary Richards’ 1958 translation of Artaud’s Theatre and its Double.

Translation played a role in fostering differences between rival schools. The

spur to the reactionary modernism of Eliot and Pound was undoubtedly T.E. Hulme’s

polemical articles about art and culture which veered away from early advocacy of

Bergson (and translation of Introduction to Metaphysics in 1913) towards a rhetoric of

hard ‘clarity’ of representation. Similarly, Wyndham Lewis’s anti-Bloomsbury

campaign is nurtured through satirical imitation of Proust in Apes of God. Mina Loy’s

radical feminism is defined in parodic opposition to Marinetti’s mysogynistic

Futurism. T.S. Eliot’s adoption of satirical free verse in his early years was indebted

to readings (through translation) of the Baudelairean symbolists, Laforgue, Corbière,

Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.

Further Reading:

Benjamin, Walter (1923) ‘The Translator’s Task’, Illuminations, translated by Steven

Rendall, (1998), TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 10.2, 151-165.

Caneda Cabrera, M. Teresa (2008) ‘Polyglot Voices, Hybrid Selves and Foreign

Identities: Translation as a Paradigm of Thought for Modernism’, Atlantis

30.1, 53-67.

Clej, Alina (19997) The Debt of the Translator: An Essay on Translation and

Modernism, symploke, 5.1-2, 7-26.

O'Neill, Patrick (2005) Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation, Toronto: University

of Toronto Press.
Patterson, Ian (2011) ‘Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism’, in Tradition,

Translation, Trauma:  The Classic and the Modern, edited by Jan Parker and Timothy

Mathews, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Piette, Adam (2003) Introduction to Special Issue on Modernism and Translation,

Translation and Literature, 12.1, 1-17.

Venuti, Lawrence (2008) The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation,

London: Routledge.

Yao, Steven (2002) Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics,

Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Xie, Ming (1999) Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay,

Translation, and Imagism, London: Routledge.