bassnet influence and intertextuality a reappraisal

INFLUENCE AND INTERTEXTUALITY:A REAPPRAISAL

ABSTRACT

This essay considers shifts of approach in comparative literature, from earlyendeavours to trace direct influences of one author upon another to a moreholistic model that sees the study of literature as the study of intertextual con-nections. Starting with Matthew Arnold’s statement about the impossibility ofcomprehending any single literature adequately without taking into accountother literatures, the essay considers three cases: the relationship betweenJames Joyce and Italo Svevo is discussed as an example of the difficulties ofproving direct influence; Seamus Heaney’s use of Dante offers an example ofthe creative way in which a writer can incorporate the work of another writerinto his own poetry, and finally the reception of Ezra Pound’s Cathay showshow the context in which a work appears and the reaction of readers can rad-ically alter the fortunes of a literary text. The role of translation is seen ascrucially important as a force for innovation and change in a literature.

Keywords: connections; intertextuality; influence studies; translation; web

Connection and literature

Matthew Arnold’s famous statement in his 1857 Oxford Inaugural Lecture,much cited by comparative literature scholars for decades, declares that

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration, no single event, nosingle literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to otherliteratures.1

This declaration draws attention to something that all literature scholars instinc-tively comprehend: that all writing is somehow, in different ways, connected,and that the way to arrive at an understanding of literature is to acknowledgethat there are relationships between writers and the texts which they produce,relationships which cross temporal, linguistic and cultural boundaries.

It may seem surprising that such a statement needs to be repeated in thisage of interconnectedness, where dominant popular images are those ofendlessly connected threads, of DNA models and the World Wide Web.Interdisciplinarity has become a buzz word in academic circles, and metaphorsof bridge-building, boundary-transcendence, contact zones and inter-culturalmediation abound. But we still need to be reminded that single events andsingle literatures cannot be understood without reference to other events andother literatures, because the way in which we approach the subjects that westudy and teach still tends towards isolationism. The structure of academic

Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 43 No. 2 doi:10.1093/fmls/cqm004# The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.All rights reserved.

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institutions promotes separation between subjects, rather than interconnected-ness; specialist journals publish material relevant to specialist fields, hence manyscholars have difficulty finding journals where they might place an article thatdoes not quite fit into a narrowly defined specialised mould. Nor have interdis-ciplinary journals proliferated in recent years either, for whilst there may havebeen an increase in the discourse of interdisciplinarity, there has been a falling-away of academic publishing generally, with fewer monographs appearing and,given the cost-effectiveness of journal publication, a decline in regular journalsubscribers that makes commercial publishers wary of taking on anything new.

The difficulties of organising interdisciplinarity

But despite this gloomy picture, Arnold’s dictum prevails: there is connectioneverywhere, and what is more, today’s generation of students is well-placed to seeconnections, trained as they are in a broader range of skills than my generationwas, in particular being more visually literate and much more sophisticated interms of reading complex narrative. The writer Terry Pratchett told me that sincehe first started writing his Discworld stories back in the early 1970s, his readers,mostly teenagers and with a high percentage of males (i.e. the group most oftendescribed as giving educationalists cause for concern regarding their levels ofliteracy), had shown themselves able to deal with increasingly complex plot struc-turing and narrative shifts. His novels move around between narrators, acrosstime-zones, in and out of different perspectives, and often there are as many plotlines as in a well-made nineteenth century novel, though without the naturalistlinks. It could be argued that Pratchett’s books are a genre in their own right, asort of popular post-modernism, and they are certainly international bestsellers,which suggests that his young readers have acquired quite sophisticated readingskills in their spare time.What we have today, then, is an uncomfortable dilemma: on the one hand,

students and those of us engaged in the study and teaching of languages andliteratures are drawn to making connections, while on the other hand theeconomics of curriculum design, competition between universities, ResearchAssessment Exercises and commercial publishing all combine to maintain theinvisible walls between disciplines that make interconnectedness more difficult.In such a climate, interdisciplinarity becomes a radical concept rather thansomething self-evidently obvious. When Matthew Arnold was delivering hislecture, disciplinary boundaries had not hardened and students had not learnedthat they had to make choices between studying x or y. A well-rounded univer-sity student in Arnold’s day would have had excellent Greek and Latin and agood grasp of several European languages and literatures. Intellectuals who didnot have the advantage of university education, such as George Eliot, forexample, also read extensively in different languages and different disciplines.George Eliot actually began her literary career as a translator of philosophicaltreatises from Latin and German. She translated Spinoza, Friedrich Strauss andLudwig Feuerbach, among others. The kind of thinking that drew a line

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between European literatures and English literature had not yet come intobeing, but when it did, the shape of the curriculum in schools and universitiesenforced the separate study of literatures uncompromisingly.

When I was a student, that kind of thinking had fossilised into sharp divisionsbetween subjects, reinforced by the existence of a great many single-subjectdepartments. One went up to university to work in a specialised field: generaldegrees were viewed with contempt and there was a genuine concern aboutbreadth happening at the expense of in-depth subject knowledge. Where com-parative degrees happened, they were viewed as radical and experimental,rarely underpinned by any coherent structured thought.

I read English and Italian and was a guinea pig in that this degree was com-pletely new. I went up to university full of enthusiasm, but rapidly discovered amore depressing reality. The organisation of the degree was shambolic, if notnon-existent. Neither department appeared to have thought for a second abouthow students might combine what were effectively two complete degree pro-grammes minus some four courses only. In my fourth year, I sat fifteen finalspapers across both subjects and wrote a dissertation. There was no question ofstudent choice, no flexibility in the system. In the first year, Latin to what wascalled Intermediate level was compulsory, as was History of Art to General levelin the second year. Yet the potential for linkages was immense: both degreesplaced a great deal of emphasis on the medieval period, which I really enjoyed,but no connection was ever made between Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and theworld of Langland and the Pearl poet and Chaucer. Compulsory authorsincluded Spenser and Milton, alongside Tasso and Ariosto, but no referencewas ever made to the possibility that English writers might have been familiarwith the Italians or vice versa. A course on Shelley and Wordsworth could haverun alongside a course on Parini, Foscolo and Alfieri, but of course it did not.The Latin and History of Art courses were taught in isolation, without referenceto the other subjects at all, though as the degree progressed they provedextremely useful. I complained endlessly about the lack of linkage, and was toldendlessly that if there were connections to be made, I should be making themby myself. It was very frustrating, not least because essays and examinationsensured that the two degrees remained distinct.

But the connections were so powerfully there that it was impossible to ignorethem, and with those connections came endless questions: how well didChaucer know Boccaccio? Could Milton have written Paradise Lost if he had nothad any knowledge of Italian writing? Why had Gray’s Elegy touched such achord in the Italian eighteenth-century consciousness? Was it possible, I keptasking, that these writers had influenced one another? And what, in that case,did such influence consist of, and how could we trace it? I discovered The Road

to Xanadu, the highly entertaining account of what Coleridge might have readon the basis of the contents of his personal library and works referred to inletters. Though amusing to read, in terms of methodological usefulness for com-parative study such tracking of influences was more historical, archive research

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than literary, and ultimately turned the search for influences into a kind oftreasure hunt. It did not seem to be a very useful approach to pursue, thoughnevertheless it did offer the idea of influence-tracking as a research possibility.

An attempt at tracing influence

Influence studies of this kind were briefly popular as a way of bridging theyawning gaps between subjects, but inevitably led to all kinds of textual difficul-ties. The problem was, of course, that the basis of such comparative study wasthe idea that there existed, in some demonstrable way, a direct link betweenwriters, which presupposed incontrovertible evidence and the trustworthiness ofwriters to acknowledge their sources. This seems ludicrously naıve today, in thetwenty-first century post-post-modern world, but to those of us who saw our-selves as students of comparative literature forty years ago, the idea of tracinginfluences seemed like a radical means of breaking out of the confines of single-subject constraint.I resolved to pursue a case study in my dissertation, despite the warning

issued by Rene Wellek in Discriminations when he said

Nobody has ever been able to show that a work of art was “caused” by another work ofart, even though parallels and similarities can be accumulated. A later work of art maynot have been possible without a preceding one, but it cannot have been caused by it.2

The case study selected was the literary and biographical relationship betweenJames Joyce and Italo Svevo. On the surface, this seemed like a clear enoughexample, a case of literary influence supported by irrefutable biographical evi-dence. After leaving Ireland in 1904, Joyce had finally settled in Trieste, wherehe met the Italian writer Italo Svevo (real name Ettore Schmitz), who was livingthrough a period of depression following the neglect of his novel Senilita thathad appeared in 1898. A friendship of sorts developed between the two men,who read one another’s work and met socially until Joyce’s departure for Zurichin 1915. In 1910, Svevo lent Joyce some money for what turned out to be anabortive venture into cinema, and remained grateful to Joyce for his help infinding a publisher for La coscienza di Zeno in 1923. In 1924, Joyce wrote toSvevo asking permission to use a reference to his wife, Anna Livia, in the novelhe was writing, Finnegan’s Wake, in which he played with the idea of SignoraSchmitz’s name, Anna Livia, and her long blonde hair, both of which wouldrecur in his novel in the figure of Anna Livia Plurabella.But despite these connections, demonstrating the influence of one writer

upon another proved incredibly difficult, if not downright impossible. What wasvery clear were affinities, similarities in the writing of both men that keptrecurring. I tried to suggest on the basis of detailed close reading and carefulinvestigation of the correspondence and biographies that Svevo’s influencecould be discerned in “A Painful Case”, written and revised somewhere around1906–07, maybe in “Giacomo Joyce”, written during the Trieste years, and inhis play Exiles, which has striking similarities with Svevo’s Ibsen-inspired play,


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Un marito. Anna Livia Schmitz seemed to have been a model of sorts for AnnaLivia Plurabella, and it appeared not totally absurd to suggest that Svevo mighthave even been a model in some way for Leopold Bloom, given his Jewish back-ground, the age difference between the two men and the nature of the Svevo–Joyce relationship.

But ultimately, the case rested on speculation. Probably the friendship withJoyce did inspire Svevo to start writing again, and Joyce certainly encouragedhim to publish. But Rene Wellek is right when he says that this kind of researchis a hopeless endeavour. Writers draw their inspiration from all kinds of sources,some conscious, some unconscious, some acknowledged, some vehementlydenied. All that we, as readers, can do is to see parallels, connections, affinities,and this is a more fruitful approach than one which seeks to prove certaintywhere certainty is a chimera. Linda Hutcheon points out the complexity whenshe says that the writing of both history and what she terms historiographicmetafiction “becomes a form of cross-referencing that operates within (and doesnot deny) its unavoidably discursive context”.3

The role of the reader

The creative role of the reader in making connections takes us from influencestudies in the old-fashioned sense to intertextuality, to the idea that texts exist inan endlessly interwoven relationship with one another. Here, of course, the con-nectivity is more random, and depends as much on what a reader may or maynot bring to the reading as what a writer inserts into the text in the first place.A banal example may illustrate this point: whilst ill, I was given light reading bymembers of my family. One of the books was Daphne du Maurier’s classic1930s pot-boiler, Jamaica Inn; the other, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The DaVinci Code. Both are formula novels: the one is in the gothic romantic storygenre, with a put-upon heroine, a broodingly handsome hero, strange goings-onin an old coaching inn, a wicked uncle and a band of evil-doers. The other is acomputer-game novel: solve one layer and you move on to the next, a novelpeopled with pasteboard characters, crudely obvious plotting and banal narra-tive links. Du Maurier owes a huge debt to the Brontes: her protagonist is aJane Eyre figure, the man she loves a Heathcliffe/Rochester type. There is alsoa clergyman, a St John Rivers figure who turns out in the end to be mad andbad. We know there is something odd about him from the start: he is an albino,with pale eyes and white hair. So, too, is the mad monk Silas in The Da Vinci

Code. Two novels, read back to back, with mad albino clergy: what acoincidence!

Though it is not a coincidence at all if we think in terms of historical continu-ity in genre stereotypes. The only coincidence is that the same reader happenedto read them one after the other. The presence of stereotypical figures in a lit-erary system is something we are all familiar with, just as we are all familiarwith the formalist work on plot structures that showed just how narrow the

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range of plot variants actually is. There is indeed connection everywhere. Everytext, as Roland Barthes reminds us, has meaning in relation to other texts.4

Heaney’s “Purgatorio”

Much more useful than endeavouring to prove the unprovable existence ofdirect influence is to engage more playfully in following traces and patterns ofconnection. Sometimes writers involve their readers directly in this process,and may signal overtly the sources upon which they have drawn. SeamusHeaney’s “The Strand at Lough Beg” is prefaced by three lines from Dante’sPurgatorio:

All round this little island on the strandFar down below there, where the breakers striveGrow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

These three descriptive lines of location serve as a key to the reader in whatfollows. Heaney describes the slow drive out past the glow of filling stations intothe countryside, where streetlights give way to stars. There is a hint of menacein a reference to Sweeney fleeing before a demon pack of hounds, “blazing outof the ground, snapping and squealing”. Then suddenly comes the road block,the armed men and brutal murder:

What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?The red lamp swing, the sudden brakes and stallingEngine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlightsThat pulled out suddenly and flagged you downWhere you weren’t known and far from what you knew:The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,Church island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.5

Heaney’s use of Dante here goes much further than parallels in terms of thedescription of place. In the lines Heaney quotes from the first canto of Purgatorio,Dante has just emerged from the depths of Hell into the pale light of earlymorning, and finds himself on the shores of Mount Purgatory. The poet is cleansedand prepared for his upward journey, given a rope girdle made of reeds that growback instantly, as soon as they are plucked. In Heaney’s poem, the speakerplucks rushes for his murdered cousin, to whose memory the poem is dedicated,and performs a ritual cleansing of the corpse. The start of the journey for the deadsoul, for Dante and for Heaney the poet, is symbolised in the ritual of purification.Reading the Heaney poem, with its deliberate reference to Purgatorio, we have anentwining of two texts that deepens the resonances of grief and loss, but which also,by the choice of Dante as a point of reference, offers a hint of hope in the lifehereafter.Heaney returned to the same subject in “Station Island”, a few years later.

This time, though, there is a reference to Purgatorio inside the poem. The dead


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cousin accuses the poet of failing him through the way he wrote his earlierpoem about the shores of Lough Beg where he met his death:

You whitewashed ugliness and drewThe lovely blinds of the PurgatorioAnd saccharined my death with morning dew.6

The beauty of the description in “The Strand at Lough Beg” is challenged nowas “saccharine”, the reference to Dante dismissed as a drawing-down of blindsupon the brutal reality of a man’s murder. In this poem, there is a double set ofreferences – to Dante and to Heaney’s own earlier use of Dante. The themeremains constant – the poet is seeking to come to terms with his cousin’sviolent death, but the use of Dante’s poem becomes a way of engaging with aninternal debate, shared with a succession of readers.

The very structure of “Station Island” draws upon the idea of the journey thatforms the basis of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both poems offer accounts of a poet’sjourney towards greater self-understanding through a series of encounters withthe dead. Heaney, like Dante, learns about himself and about the possibility ofsalvation through such encounters. Heaney’s reading of Dante in “StationIsland” is therefore a fundamental element in the structure of the poem.

Weaving connections

The web of connectedness takes on another dimension when we consider thatDante, of course, took his inspiration for a journey to the underworld fromVirgil, the poet whom he recreates in The Divine Comedy as his guide. Dante, apoet of the Middle Ages, created a Christian afterworld, with clear divisionsbetween the realm of the saved or potentially saved and the realm of thedamned, but the theme of a living man’s journey to the world of the dead is thesame as that of the Latin poet. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted withthe accusing dead, the forgotten dead and the beloved dead in the Underworld,and the darkness and sadness of the place are recreated in the retellings of laterpoets.

In 2000, Philip Pullman used the same imagery in the third book in his DarkMaterials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, only now the protagonists, Will and Lyra,free the dead from eternal darkness:

The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple overthe long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and aheadwith delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through intotheir poor starved eyes.7

Here Pullman reverses the image of horror in The Aeneid Book VI, ll.425–9(“Continuo auditae voces vagitus . . .”):

At once are heard voices and wailing sore – the souls of infants weeping, whom, on thevery threshold of the sweet life they shared not, torn from the breast, the black day sweptoff and plunged into bitter death.8

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The powerful image of the dead babies, placed at the entrance to the under-world because they have barely known life, serves as a source of inspiration fora novelist writing for teenagers two thousand years after Virgil conceived hisvision of the realm of the dead.Once we begin to sketch connectedness, a kind of energy field opens up. In

this example, we have moved from Seamus Heaney to Dante to Virgil and onto Phillip Pullman through a series of links that are both overt and intrinsic toeach text, for in every case the writers have drawn upon other sources but uti-lised them in a powerfully unique way. There is clearly some form of influencein that, diachronically, each text follows the other, but utilisation of themes andmotifs by individual writers in different genres produced for very differentreaders leads us away from formulating any kind of direct influence hypothesis,and reminds us again of Arnold’s point about there being connections every-where in the literary polysystem.

The significance of translation

Crucial to the flow of themes, images, forms and ideas across boundaries is, ofcourse, translation. Writers gain access to texts written in other languages and atother times through the skill of translators. When readers who have no AncientGreek claim to know Homer, they are saying that they have read Homer intranslation, perhaps in a variety of different translations. John Keats, in hissonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, conveys some of the excite-ment that can be experienced by a reader who is enabled, through translation,to encounter a great writer from another culture. Keats compares his meetingwith Homer through Chapman’s translation to the feelings of an astronomerwho sees for the first time a new planet in the heavens, or, more provocatively,to the moment when Cortes and his men stood looking out over the PacificOcean.9 The translator has enabled the poet to discover a new world, andKeats’s sonnet is still one of the most powerful statements about the importanceof translation, conceived of as a moment of revelation, the culmination of ajourney beyond the confines of the familiar.One of the most important contributions to literary studies by translation

scholars has been the systematic investigation of the history of translating andthe role of translations in literary innovation and renewal. We have begun toinvestigate not only how translators work, the strategies they employ, but alsohow they select their texts for translation and, most crucially, what then happensto their translations. It is surprising that the history of the impact of translationshould have been neglected for so long, for it is clearly of fundamental import-ance in understanding the shaping forces of any literature. It is also fascinatingto discover how certain writers at certain moments in time have been hugelysuccessful in other cultures, thanks to translation, often more successful than intheir own cultures.


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Canon formation has been heavily influenced by translation. So, for example,today children in the former Soviet state that is now the republic of Uzbekistanwho study English literature are given the work of those writers who haveentered the canon: Shakespeare, of course; Charles Dickens, who has alwaysenjoyed enormous success in Russia as a realist writer who exposed the horrorsof capitalism; Byron, the rebel poet whose impact on writers in Central, Easternand Southern Europe was enormous, inspiring such diverse men as Pushkin,Macha and Lermontov, to name but three; then, perhaps more surprisingly,Jack London, another canonical figure in the former communist block, andfinally, Robert Burns. Uzbek children are taught the poetry of Burns, who theyread as an English [sic] poet of major importance, a man of the people whoused the language of ordinary folk.

There are, of course, logical explanations as to how this canon has emergedand why. What is interesting, though, is that it is a canon constructed throughtranslation and one that diverges considerably from the established canon ofEnglish literature over here. If we add that Eastern European students, like somany other students of English literature in Europe, also read Macpherson’sOssian, a fundamental text in the study of Romanticism, then we can see thatunderlying this concept of canon are vastly different notions of whatRomanticism might be.

In some contexts the evolution of a canon has been based on aesthetic cri-teria principally, whereas in others there have been powerful ideological factorsdetermining the selection processes. The role of translation, however, is ofcentral importance here.

When studying connections and relationships, it is important not only to lookat what may be traceable but also at what was not translated, at those writerswho, for whatever reason, failed to be translated at all, or failed in anothercontext when they were translated. Here the systemic approach to literaryhistory can be useful, for if we consider literatures as systems, the transfer or notof texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries can shed light on how a systemis shaped and how it functions. This offers a much more dynamic way of think-ing about influence than the old method of seeking to prove whether writer Awas directly influenced by writer B.

The study of literature is, necessarily, comparative. We read an author and,consciously or unconsciously, we make comparisons with other texts that wehave read. We also, if we are literary scholars, find ourselves reading hermeneu-tically, in that we uncover relationships with other writers embedded in texts.Sometimes, as with the Heaney example quoted earlier, the relationship is anintrinsic element in the construction of the work, designed to ensure that wewill read on several different levels, moving between texts and between times.Or, as with Pound’s Cathay, the moment when the work is published and what ishappening in the world lead readers to respond to the text in ways that theauthor cannot have anticipated. This, of course, is the explanation for thesuccess of Ossian outside the United Kingdom: emergent nationalist movements

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across Europe, connected as they so often were to a politics of language,seized upon the Scottish work as a model for recovering the glories of theirown past. Whether Macpherson’s work was a forgery or not is irrelevantin such a context. In Finland, for example, Lonrot created his Kalevala with thedeliberate intention of forging a national epic that might rise to the status ofHomer. In Bohemia, the discovery of texts in ancient Czech led to a resurgenceof national pride and, most probably, to the creation of a thriving national lit-erature (the influences of Byron and Shakespeare were pretty powerful here,too). When that early epic was discovered to be a forgery, the creative processwas already so well in train that it mattered little: Czech literature had by thentaken up a place on the European stage.The arrival of Buddhism in China from India, the diffusion of literature from

the Hellenic world, the transition from epic to romance, the emergence of theRenaissance and the Reformation – all testify to the role of translation as amajor shaping force in world literature. David Damrosch, whilst recognising thepitfalls of translation, nevertheless argues that “World literature is writing that gains

in translation [sic].”10 No discussion of influence or intertextuality can take placewithout recognition of the role played by translators, and the context in whichthose translations were produced.

Time and readings

Writing in 1918 in “A Retrospect”, Ezra Pound advised poets to “be influencedby as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledgethe debt outright, or to try to conceal it”.11 Pound’s witty advice is, of course, atthe heart of all writing: writers are influenced by what they read, but the valuefor critics of trying to track such influences is limited. For the role of reader isalso crucial, and here the notion of intertextuality, the idea of all writingcoexisting in some kind of network of relationships, is so much more helpfulthan the idea of trying to track influences, particularly given the translationdimension. Readers bring with them their several experiences, histories andhorizons of expectation which inevitably affect how they read, while writersmay consciously or quite unconsciously use the work of writers they may haveread decades earlier in their own or in another language in their ownsubsequent work.Ezra Pound was a writer who deliberately opted to make manifest in his

poetry those writers who had had an impact on him. His Cantos are extraord-inary works, poems that draw upon dozens of different sources, presented to thereader in dramatic and exciting new forms. Pound’s vision of poetry involvedendless links and connections with writers from other times and cultures,reshaped and rethought through his own individualistic creative process.Working with Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Gaudier Brzeska in the yearsjust before the outbreak of the First World War, Pound devised the idea of thevortex as a creative source, “a radiant node or cluster [. . .] a vortex from which


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and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing”.12 The rush ofideas came from different sources, effectively dissolving fixed notions of origin-ality and derivation, something that Pound would challenge explicitly in hiswritings about translation.

Charles Tomlinson praises Pound as a great translator and argues thatPound’s ideas of the vortex struck a particularly resonant chord in 1914. “Themoment was of an era of cultural translation,” Tomlinson points out, a form ofcultural translation that was happening on many different levels: visually, asimages from outside Europe dominated the fine art world; in literary terms withthe publication of major works such as Pound’s Cathay in 1915, and socially, ofcourse, because the horrors of the trenches were transforming theiconography of the age.13 Pound sent a copy of Cathay to Gaudier Brzeska inthe trenches, and Brzeska wrote to a friend that he used the book “to putcourage into my fellows. I speak now of the ‘Bowmen’ and [. . .] ‘Lament of theFrontier Guard’ which are so appropriate to our case.”14 Brzeska was usingpoetry produced by an American derived from ancient Chinese texts to encour-age his men to stay resolute in the face of daily hardship and horror. In thevortex that Pound saw as his melting pot, his translations had acquired a con-temporary feel that made them accessible to a wide range of readers, throughhis use of language and strong images and the elegiac tone he created.Moreover, the date of their publication coincided with the traumatic events ofthe European war arena, hence readers read into the poems their own tragedy.Indeed, Hugh Kenner, author of an important book, The Pound Era, says ofCathay that it was seen by Pound’s contemporaries as a collection of poemsprimarily about war:

Cathay is largely a war book using Fenellosa’s cribs much as Pope used Horace orJohnson Juvenal, to supply a system of parallels and a structure of discourse [. . .].Perfectly vital after half a century, they are among the most durable of all poeticresponses to World War I.15

Pound, of course, was not consciously producing poems about the war. Hisobjective was primarily aesthetic, and as he tells us in his ABC of Reading histranslation endeavours were intended to give English readers some sense of aworld-wide history of the art of poetry. He translated from ancient languages(from Latin, Greek, Provencal and Anglo-Saxon), and from French, Italian,Chinese and Japanese – a huge range of different languages. He has often beenaccused of producing “unfaithful” translations, an accusation that is both point-less and silly, since Pound never sought to produce anything like a literal or“faithful” translation of anything and made his views explicit and often chal-lenged people who attacked his so-called inaccuracy. His Homage to Sextus

Propertius, which was attacked for its incorrect rendering of the Latin, effectivelycreates a new genre that blurs the boundaries between ideas of translation, imi-tation and borrowing and adopts the term “homage” for a poem that usesanother’s work as a starting point for creative rewriting. But crucial to how we

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today approach Pound’s Cathay is not so much what he may have thought hewas doing with the poems he translated, as what has happened to them sincetheir appearance. Small wonder, when we come across lines like these from“Lament of the Frontier Guard”, that Gaudier Brzeska read them to hiscompanions in the trenches:

Bones white with a thousand frosts.High heaps, covered with trees and grass:Who brought this to pass?Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?Barbarous kings.A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,Three hundred and sixty thousand,And sorrow, sorrow like rain.Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.Desolate, desolate fields.16

The visual impact of these images transcends time and distance, creating apicture of the desolation wrought by war that proved immensely moving toreaders who were in daily receipt of news from the trenches in Flanders. Thetiming of the publication of Pound’s work assured its success not so much as anesoteric collection of translations from classical Chinese but as a powerful con-temporary statement.

Studying connections

There is immense value in studying literatures in terms of connections. As indi-cated earlier, today’s students are not only trained in making connections, but arehighly responsive to a methodology that emphasises connectivity. Post-colonialstudies, alongside translation studies, have highlighted links, exchanges, bordercrossings in exciting new ways, drawing attention to the power relationships thatunderpin textual practices. The role of the reader is, of course, vitally important,for the web of connections woven by a writer will be enhanced by the web wovenby a reader, resulting in a far more dynamic model of literary study than old-styleinfluence-tracking.Octavio Paz famously distinguishes between the task of the poet and that

of the translator. The poet, he argues, fixes verbal signs into an idealimmutable form, whereas the translator frees those fixed signs intocirculation through another linguistic medium.17 This view of translation estab-lishes a clear distinction between the different roles but avoids anysuggestion that the one literary activity is superior to the other. Paz acknowl-edges also that translation involves reading as a first stage in the process ofrewriting, for a translator has to be fully aware of the ways in which the source


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text works. His witty interpretation of the parallel yet dissimilar tasks of writerand translator can also be helpfully applied to the tasks of writer and reader,inextricably joined and mutually dependent, coexisting in an ever-enlargingweb of words.

SUSAN BASSNETT

Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies

University of Warwick

Coventry CV4 7AL

United Kingdom

NOTE S

This paper is a written version of the keynote lecture delivered at the University of St Andrews inMarch 2005, at a conference entitled Bridging the Gap: Teaching Foreign Language Literary and CulturalStudies.

1 M. Arnold, On the Modern Element in Literature (Inaugural Lecture delivered in the University ofOxford, 14 November, 1857).

2 R. Wellek, “The Name and Nature of Comparative Literature”, in Discriminations (New Haven& London, 1970) p. 35.

3 L. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London & New York, 1989), p. 89.4 R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London, 1977).5 S. Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, in Field Work (London, 1979), ll. 9–16 (p. 17).6 S. Heaney, Station Island (London, 1984), viii, ll.74–6 (p. 83).7 P. Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London, 2000), p. 382.8 Virgil, The Aeneid (London & Cambridge MA, 1959).9 J. Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”, in Poems (London, 1967), p. 291.10 D. Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton & Oxford, 2003) p. 288.11 E. Pound, “A Retrospect”, in: Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954),

pp. 3–14 (p. 5).12 E. Pound, Gaudier Brzeska (London, 1970), cited in G. Kearns, Pound: The Cantos (Cambridge,

1989), p. 34.13 C. Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge, 1983), p. 96.14 Cited in Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis, p. 91.15 H. Kenner, The Pound Era (London 1971), p. 202.16 E. Pound, “The Lament of the Frontier Guard”, in Translations (New York, 1963), pp. 194–5

(ll. 8–19).17 O. Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters”, in: Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from

Dryden to Derrida, ed. R. Schulte & J. Biguenet (Chicago & London, 1992), pp. 152–62.

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bassnet influence and intertextuality a reappraisal

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