ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6741-7298
Date of Award
12-17-2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
How much nuance can we lose, capture, or sustain in translation and transnational poetry, especially translation into English and transnational poetry in English? How does one make oneself or the other speak English but at the same time account for or even communicate the untranslatable? Modern poet/translators address a crisis of nuance in global connection through not only engaging with poetic translation but also engaging with the question of untranslatability. Because nuance is difficult to capture, engaging with poetic translation and accounting for the question of untranslatability in original poetry allow poet/translators to trace the transnational fate of nuance: the ease of its loss, the burden of feeling it and not being able to carry it over, the burden of not quite feeling it but sensing its existence, the shock of its significance, the mourning of its impossibility in another language, the hope of coding it and decoding it, and the ambition of creating or recreating something that can account for it and maybe even more—its contemporaneity. In this dissertation, the word “Anglophone” is mobilized to account for how extensively Ezra Pound explored the transnational capacity and limits of the English language, and how some of his detours and mistakes along the way can easily be our own detours and mistakes in other forms. I re-narrate Pound’s making of modernist poetry as a history of literature’s most ambitious, creative, and violent struggle with the question of untranslatability. Concerned with transnational circulation, Pound developed his own theories regarding which aspects of the poetic language are the most secure in translation and which aspects circulate more difficultly, tend to disappear, or get out of or under control. Previous scholarship has focused on Pound’s active engagements with translation and has presented translation as a positive source of inspiration for poetry-making; I challenge that optimistic and impressionistic evaluation of modernist translation by tracing Pound’s longer and more convoluted engagements with the question of untranslatability. I argue that only through the question of untranslatability can we discern the real connection between translation and innovations in poetic language. Translation does not directly feed into experimentation—translation exposes the question of untranslatability, which exposes the limits and ethical implications of both poetry-making and transnational interpretive experimentation. Only through this arduous back-and-forth feedback loop between poetry-making and translation can we understand the restless development of modernist poetics.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Vincent Sherry
Committee Members
Anca Parvulescu; Ignacio Infante; Matthias Goeritz; Steven Meyer
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Xuela, "Transnational Poetics and Its Discontents: The Question of Untranslatability and Ezra Pound’s Making of Anglophone Modernist Poetry" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3375.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3375