Excerpt from Translations Translating does not, for him, differ in essence from any other poetic job; as the poet begins by seeing, so the translator by reading; but his reading must be a kind of seeing. Hence the miraculous accomplishment of Pound's translations sitting down before a text, he doesn't chafe at restrictions unusual to his lyric practice. A good translation seems like a miracle because one who can read the original can, so to speak, see the poem before the poet writes it, and marvel at the success of his wrestle to subdue his own language to the vision; but Pound has always written as if to meet a test of this kind, in a spirit of utter fidelity to his material, whether a document or an intuition. He has told of working six months to fix a complex instantaneous emotion in fourteen words. Translation is indeed for Pound somewhat easier than what is called 'original composition'; those six months were spent less on finding the words than in bringing the emotion into focus, and a text to be translated, once grasped, doesn't wobble. The technical difficulty is comparable, but the emotional discipline, if no less exacting, less exhausting. Pound has for this reason recommended translation as an exercise to young poets plagued by the tendency of what they are trying to express to undergo expedient transformations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.