Pounding Pound: Translation and the Cinematic Qualities of Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Abstract

This is a creative research doctoral dissertation consisting of an experimental film and an exegesis. The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the cinematic qualities of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I argue that not only is Pound’s Cantos a cinematic text because of poetic innovations like paratactical syntax and presentative language, but also because of Pound’s commitment to a poetics of translation undergirding his work that encapsulates the spirit of the poem. In the process, this project also queries the transformative potential of intersemiotic translation when dealing with historically influential but ideologically compromised works of art. Pound and the Cantos require such an approach because both poet and poem are shrouded in controversy. Pound was lauded throughout the twentieth century for his contributions to poetry. Simultaneously, he was tied up in the most horrific affairs wrought on the century itself: the historic wreck of fascism and anti-semitism. The Cantos, an eight-hundred-page open-form poem, is his most important testament to poetic innovation. As he defines it, it is “a poem containing history” (Pound, "Interviews: Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5."); a modernist, unfinished epic dealing with everything from light to love, usury to economics. I argue that the poetic innovations of the text—particularly its use of montage and shifting personae—attest to the profound influence of early cinematic electromagnetic technologies on artistic expression at the turn of the twentieth century. Further, it is these cinematic innovations that unveil a translation methodology that can critique the poem’s ideological commitments. My written exploration of the Cantos' cinematic qualities cross-textually analyzes canto I, XLV, and LXXIV in relation to the cinematic apparatus. It also foregrounds Pound’s approach to translation and the translative capacity of the cinema. The tryptic I created attempts to address the content and structure of these three poem sections by testing Pound’s translative approach while engaging my creative sensibilities as an experimental poet and filmmaker. This multimodal translation methodology used Pound’s own translation process to “make new” and carry forward the text while at the same time interrogating its controversial content. This amounts to “Pounding Pound:” a reflective reversal of Pound’s poetics of cinematic translation. In a world-now-inundated by the electromagnetic technologies that first impacted Pound, the intersemiotic translation of texts like the Cantos is crucial for understanding these new technologies' communicative abilities and cultural weight. Intersemiotic translation also sustains the cultural tradition of evolving and adapting texts to ensure their survival. The cinematic translation methodology of Ezra Pound’s Cantos mirrors this intersemiotic translation practice, revealing a methodology that can assess historically problematic content. This comes at a prescient time in the cultural landscape, where one can both honour and interrogate an artist from a critical distance without redacting or censoring their work.