(A. Webster, ‘An Oriental Harbour’, National Trust for Scotland, Castle Fraser, Garden & Estate)
Walking back from the long round of the Victorian cemetery, still early, the Librarian remarks that this would be ‘a good Harry day’. As it would: the sun already high, little or no cloud, barely a breath of wind, soon to be around 26 degrees or so – as high as 30 (that’s 86 degrees in American money). The back garden will be warm and calm, idyllically so for animals that worship sun and sleep.
Not much later, I am aboard the Al Raza, not a classic dhow, locally known as ‘a launch’, some sixty feet long, ‘decidedly stubby, and her single mast was more like a twig than a tree and carried no sails.’ The craft is ‘a working launch of 100 tons and looked it.’ A crew of eight, including the nakhoda, the ship’s master, all Baluchis except one Indian-born and one Iranian. When engine trouble forces them to drop anchor off the coast of Iran, Gavin Young, whose earlier reading on the trip has included Ford Madox Ford’s Memories and Impressions, and who repeatedly cites Joseph Conrad, turns to his copy of Helen MacInnes’s Decision at Delphi.[1]
Just then, a white rabbit passed me, plucking a pocket watch from his waistcoat and audibly murmuring that he mustn’t be late, before popping down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. Naturally, having recently reread the Alice books for Fordian purposes, I followed.
Now, MacInnes. Surely Hammond? Scottish, 30-odd novels and other books. Had I not read one or two? The Wreck of the Mary Deare, perhaps? Levkas Man? The rabbit rolled its eyes. Of course – I was misremembering, actually thinking of Innes, Hammond Innes. Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), whom I then looked up, did an MA at Glasgow University in French and German and added a diploma in librarianship from University College, London. She married, translated from the German with her husband, travelled widely in 1930s Europe, taking copious notes along the way, and moved to the United States when her husband, a fellow of St John’s College, University of Oxford, was offered a chair at Columbia University, teaching Latin and Greek. She published more than 20 books, mainly espionage novels, and several were filmed. Decision at Delphi was her 11th published novel.
(Helen MacInnes in 1941)
Her husband was Gilbert Highet, classicist – and MI6 intelligence agent. That name rang a bell. Careful to avoid the white rabbit’s gaze, I leafed through various mental pages and turned up Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius.
Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius appeared in part in Poetry (March 1919) and in volume form seven months later, though he’d written to his parents as early as 1910: ‘I’ve taken to Propertius’.[2] And, decades later, it was Highet who wrote, in Horizon (January 1961), that Pound’s Homage was ‘an insult both to poetry and to scholarship and to common sense.’[3]
It’s true that, beginning with Professor William Gardner Hale of Chicago, against whose emphatic protests Harriet Monroe reluctantly published four of twelve sections in Poetry, a good many classical scholars have clutched their pearls in outrage at this iconoclastic American taking such liberties with a canonical writer—one of theirs.
Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations,
Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities
And expound the distensions of Empire,
But for something to read in normal circumstances?
For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?
I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it
The poet Charles Tomlinson headed his selection from the poem ‘A travesty of Propertius’ Latin’, but his grasp of what Pound was doing meant that there was no contradiction between that heading and his terming the poem a masterpiece.[4] In another Oxford anthology, Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule quote Pound’s ‘rampant defence’ of his poem in a letter to A. R. Orage on the first page of their introduction: ‘My job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure’ and begin their Part 7, ‘Propertius to Hadrian’, with Pound’s superb section VII.
Though you give all your kisses
you give but few.
Nor can I shift my pains to other,
Hers will I be dead,
If she confer such nights upon me,
long is my life, long in years,
If she give me many,
God am I for the time.
As Poole and Maule rightly say, ‘Translators must take liberties. They are in any case bound to be accused of having done so.’[5] Indeed, the history of translation and its reception is littered with the husks of those who knew the classical texts but had no sense of living English. George Steiner writes in his introduction: ‘A first look at nearly any translation in this anthology is enough to show whether it comes before or after’ the Homage, adding: ‘But the “making new” of translation had already occurred in Personae (1909) and Provença (1910). After “The River Merchant’s Wife” (1915) the art of translation had entered its modern phase.’[6]
The critic F. R. Leavis, highly influential in his time, wrote appreciatively of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley but Hugh Kenner, in ‘The Making of the Modernist Canon’ (1984), remarks on how Henry James’s ‘habits of diction were refracted throughout a poem Leavis nowhere mentions, Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius. That was a central modernist discovery, that distinctions between “prose” and “verse” vanish before distinctions between firm writing and loose’.[7] Kenner also touches there on Imaginary Letters (1917-18), a series in the Little Review, begun by Wyndham Lewis and continued by Pound when Lewis was transferred to France. One striking feature of Pound’s ‘Imaginary Letters’ is the extent to which their texts would not look out of place in the Homage. Much of this is to do with the varied registers of language, mixing contemporary diction, poeticisms, large-mouthed polysyllables and the careful use of plain often monosyllabic words for some of Propertius’ reflections on love, death or fate. To that extent, his poem’s real subject is language, the intimate relation between a country’s language and its cultural health, the differences between public and private pronouncements, the strategies of a ruling class entrenched behind fortifications of rhetoric and generality. The disorientation that a reading of the poem can produce results in part from the multiplicity of voices Pound employs: Propertius as conventionally heard and as Pound hears and presents him; Victorian or earlier translators; contemporary English poets (in that last year of the war). Perhaps unsurprisingly, not a few readers these days rate the Homage even above Mauberley. It was, and remains, an astonishing achievement, by turns provocative, moving and funny.
I have, of course, ordered a copy of MacInnes’s Decision at Delphi – and also a copy of Assignment in Brittany, her second book, which became, apparently, required reading for British agents joining forces with the French resistance.
Notes
[1] Gavin Young, Slow Boats to China (1981; London: Picador, 1995), 269, 278. His In Search of Conrad, published in 1991, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
[2] Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 239. His letter of 3 November 1918 has: ‘Also done a new oeuvre on Propertius’ (423).
[3] Quoted by J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), ix.
[4] The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, Chosen and Edited by Charles Tomlinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 443; Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 59. The book contains the four 1982 Clark Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge.
[5] The Oxford Book of Classical Verse, edited by Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxxv, 423.
[6] George Steiner, editor, The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 33. In his introduction to The Translations of Ezra Pound (enlarged edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1970), Hugh Kenner remarks: ‘Pound calls the Propertius sequence a Homage, largely in a futile attempt to keep it from being mistaken for an attempt at translation’ (12-13). He does not include the poem in that volume.
[7] Reprinted in Hugh Kenner, Mazes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 31. ‘Major snow job in western education is concealment of the hit & miss state of Graeco-Roman texts, all but a few’, Kenner wrote to Guy Davenport (8 June 1962). ‘Ez rearranged Propertius fragments in the spirit of the scholarship that gave us the standard texts by—arranging fragments’: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), I, 137.
Reconstructionary Tales 