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CLASSICSIM IN THE POST-AGE

attend the effort of translation, but because it helps to defamiliarise further certain lingering assumptions about the aura of classical material as the distillation of a pure essence. It may be argued, in fact, that Pound’s or Yeats’s Greek translations are inconceivable without their non-Anglophone and non-European addressees and interlocutors, such as Kitasono Katue, the avant-garde Japanese poet to whom Pound dedicated The Women of Trachis (in the hope that in turn he might interest an ancient family of Noh actors in it), or Michio Ito, the Japanese dancer who inspired the ‘aristocratic form’ of Yeats’s ‘halfGreek, half-Asiatic’ Cuchulain plays (W.B. Yeats, ‘Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan by Pound & Fenollosa’, in E. Pound and E. Fenollosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan [1959], p. 151). In this broader sense, classical translation is the necessary syncretism of any attempt to access a world ‘on the far side of language’, as Woolf put it in the famous essay on the impossibility of translation (V. Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, A Woman’s Essays. Selected Essays: Volume One, ed. R. Bowlby [1992], p. 99). Given that difficulty of access, and the demands of a ‘pushing world’, as Yeats put it (‘Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan by Pound & Fenollosa’, p. 153), a strong modernist strategy might involve translation across eras and genres, languages and cultures; for Yeats in 1916 Europe’s time had come ‘to copy the East and live deliberately’ (Yeats, ‘Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan by Pound & Fenollosa’, p. 156). The programmatic uses of translation to foster cultural, political, national as well as literary renewal should by rights be at the heart of any critical overview of its relation to modernism, and the particular programme of translating the classics has a distinctive ideological and institutional value, addressed here directly and indirectly by the essays that bookend the volume. E. Vandiver’s fascinating chapter on the Poets’ Translation Series (edited by Richard Aldington and H.D. in 1915–16 and 1919–20), M. Bryant and M.A. Eaverly’s generous sharing of innovative approaches to teaching modernism and the classics and the afterword by J.A. Rosenblitt speak to very different historical moments and approaches to modernism’s classical agenda, but they help underline its unresolved problem: endlessly new creative access to the classical world (and word) may be both a necessary illusion, product of an institutionally mediated process of transmission, and that space of productive contestation and radical possibility through which, as H.D. put it, ‘we are all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass’ (cited by Vandiver, p. 17).