Nikolai Nikiforov. Guide to "Guide"

Guide to "Guide"
Ezra Pound. Guide to culture / Transl. from English; preface K.K. Chukhrukidze. - M.: Logos, 2000

Nikolay Nikiforov

Date of publication: September 26, 2000

And the book, written for scientific purposes, has a completely convincing preface, from which it is immediately clear that its author is not a random person . It begins in the style of Pound himself, that is, with an objective description of a significant gesture - here: the gesture of the American state, which placed its citizen sentenced to death for high treason in a death cell in Pisa, open to the heat and dust. Further, the main ideas needed to interpret Pound are clearly and briefly given, plus a not very well understood conversation about Pound’s musical views (which, however, is a reason to be ashamed). The preface ends with such clever words that one becomes confident that Pound, who directed so many curses at the “parasite philologists,” would also certainly call the author of the preface a parasite. Pound argued that the majority of philologists are busy doing their best to spoil the taste of readers with tedious books that actually contain hidden complaints about their, philologists, unsuccessful lives. It seems that the examples of such giants of philology as Shklovsky or Harald Bloom clearly confirm this theory. (I probably won’t name any other names, since I’m not very familiar with this science; but, to be honest, I can’t remember almost a single philological book about which one could certainly say that it did not come from envy or vanity; as Mandelstam said, “ they just don’t like poetry”; which does not at all detract from the possible benefits, since the creators of almost any texts are driven by not entirely pure thoughts; the only question is the reader’s freedom from the demands of “science”; “science” often plays the role of a funnel, a hell, that drags into the sewer all weak and pliable souls fall into hell, the contemplation of which is useful as a memento mori.) Pound swore not just like that, but because he saw that philology produces a lot of rubbish, and books that are needed almost as much for a person engaged in the art of the English word Shakespeare are not published because their meaning is not generally recognized. By the way, about Shakespeare. Quote from the preface: “Therefore, he could not stand Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Shakespeare, filled with rhetorical delights. His dislike extended especially to the 19th century.” To put it mildly, this statement is unfounded; although there is some truth in it. But this style - the conversation of dwarfs who penetrated into the thoughts of giants, whom they, in truth, never saw - is completely indecent. Does anyone who has read Russian translations know who Shakespeare is? Or Marlo? Or maybe someone got an impression of Browning or Landor from Russian translations? This is exactly the same inflated ignorance that Pound hated among all kinds of men (& women) of letters.

Pound did not recognize “smart thoughts” at all, especially “smart thoughts” that were not placed in a cultural context. There is no context here, that is, it seems that the preface was written by a person living in no country and in no time - and therefore very calm and deeply thinking. However, how many people can now say where and when he lives? A heap of broken images. According to Pound, such attempts are always dangerous for private human life. After all, it’s probably easier to remember: who is the great man who first introduced the rite of birth of the reader through the death of the author? Or: who went down in history with the correct emphasis on the word “discourse”?

Now about the texts of Pound himself. Of the 58 chapters of the Guide to Kulchur, 6 are taken. The English book begins with an image of the seal of Sigismundo Malatesto, the man who, according to Pound, did more for art than any other person in history; XV century, ruler of the city of Rimini [?]; then words about the dangers of reading a book, then about the need to distinguish between errors (deserving hatred) and their carriers. The first chapter is dedicated to Confucius and a conversation about the importance of the exact word, the benefits of private knowledge and common sense. Now let's leaf through the book under review. The first chapter, "Zweck, or the Goal", comes third in the original. The second, "Guide to Culture", is the twenty-ninth. The third, "New Learning", is the second. This is called manipulation.

Pound begins by talking about means; here the Goal is pulled out at the beginning. Serious people, why do we need funds ? In general, the chapters seem to have been chosen in such a way that it is clear that Pound knew how to make noise, but what he made a fuss about was not.

About translation. Pound has a complex style. He writes down every thought in such a way that it can only be understood by careful reading - it is impossible to read him fluently. He avoids any kind of inertial rhetoric, while deforming the language wherever the avoidance of rhetoric requires it. The words would and should are almost always shortened to wd. and sd. In grammar, he also allows himself complete freedom (more precisely, he uses all the techniques that have ever existed in the history of the English language). In short, it is difficult to translate, and it cannot be done without understanding that not a single word is written by chance.

As far as I compared, the translation is a shame. For example. Pound talks about different kinds of philosophers:

The point for my purposes is that the man in the street in England and the USA 1938 lumps 'em all in with highbrows... I mean as distinct from roast beef and the facts of life, as distinct from the things that come natural, ideas he drinks in with his "mother milk" or from the synthetic feeding bottle of the occident as we know it.

“The essence of my idea is that a man on the street in England and the USA in 1938 throws them all into one pile as highbrows... he throws everything here except roast beef and the little things of life, except the notorious product of the West - a plastic bottle - things, that come naturally, ideas that he absorbs with “mother's milk” .

Pound planned to throw a man into a heap, no one will understand what happened next. Perhaps the disgusting intercourse of a man with a computer gave birth to these letters?

In short, some of Pound's ideas are retained in the translation, but the style is turned into complete indecency. There is no desire to understand it deeply.

One, for example, paragraph of the chapter “New Learning” ends with these words: The present writer like a dog turns three times round in making his bed? Very well, he turns three times round. In translation, this is simply released, since the translator can still cope with the “ideas”, but the “images” are completely inaccessible to him. Meanwhile, this image concentrates all previous thoughts, and those who cannot cope with it are like a priest who can do everything except say Amen (considers this unnecessary).

This is probably the most blatant example. Pound writes that "a man should be able, by looking at a poem by Sam Johnson, to see how the adjectives are rightly weighed." Below are two lines with translation:

And pause a while from letters to be wise
Deign on the passing world to turn thin eyes

And look away from your books for a moment to be wise
Descend to the transitory world to avert your eyes

The man who gave this translation is not able to see how adjectives are weighted. Not to mention the lines from Hollow Men that pop into my head:

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost...

As for the comments, some of them are probably useful. For example, you can find out that Guido Cavalcanti, about whom an article is given in the collection, is a poet “whose work was admired by many modern poets, including ... Ezra Pound.” It is strange, of course, that Pound, in commentaries to his own text, appears as one of “many modern poets,” but reading the article in the electronic Encyclopedia Britannica says that the text of the commentary certainly goes back to the “proto-text” from the encyclopedia, although the existence of others is also felt ancestral texts. You probably shouldn’t find fault with such little things as Gower’s Latin poem Confessio Amantis. This "scholarly edition" is published in a second, revised version, and still features the famous Roman elegiac poet Sextus Propertius (1130-1115 BC). Homer had not yet been born, and among the Romans elegiac poets already wrote that “the virgin put reason into us.”

I wouldn’t like to blame strangers for anything, but why, really, was this book created? Maybe this is the “fight against fascism”? Are they fighting fascism with the help of forgery and fraud?

...never failed to destroy all records, memorials, all histories which it did not like, and to corrupt those it was cunning enough to preserve...
(Canto 33)