Modern poets and foreign tongues: Philology, translation and the genius of language.

摘要

This dissertation demonstrates that foreign languages played an equally important role in the reflections Stephane Mallarme and Ezra Pound led on the future of literature; indeed, they proved vital to the growth of modern poetry in France and America. Through close readings of the poets' poems, essays and letters, I demonstrate the relation between writers' varying uses of foreign languages and their poetics. Against the critical grain, I first examine Mallarme and Pound as poet-philologists. I show that Mallarme's philological undertakings accompanied his literary creations and provided the foundations for his Grand OEuvre. Likewise, Pound's fierce battle against the sterilizing tendencies of German philology is motivated by his desire to reform a system that, at its best, has proven to serve literature admirably; chief among European philologists, Gaston Paris and Emil Levy contributed to keeping literature alive. I then examine the monolingual and multilingual tropisms of Mallarme and Pound as poet-translators. By embracing an increasingly literal model of translation, Mallarme strives to capture in French a poetic sense that precedes Poe's originals and thus asserts his trust in the power of verse to atone for the multiplicity of languages. For Pound, by contrast, translation becomes the locus of a tension between his belief that literary renewal depends on the digestion of foreign riches and his realization that his poetic undertaking cannot be in one language. I show that he solves this tension in two ways: first by composing "palimpsistic" translations in which the foreign appears just below the surface of the text and second by resisting the translator's duty to translate everything. I close on the poets' respective roles as guardians and inventors of language. Mallarme elects to shake the dust off of the French poetic language by reviving ancient words found at the very source of the French language, thanks to brief travels through modern English. As for Pound, he renounces the norm of linguistic homogeneity established by his illustrious models and chooses to weave together many tongues and keep the linguistically foreign visible.