Influence and Intertextuality: A Reappraisal

ABSTRACT

This essay considers shifts of approach in comparative literature, from early endeavours to trace direct influences of one author upon another to a more holistic model that sees the study of literature as the study of intertextual connections. Starting with Matthew Arnold's statement about the impossibility of comprehending any single literature adequately without taking into account other literatures, the essay considers three cases: the relationship between James Joyce and Italo Svevo is discussed as an example of the difficulties of proving direct influence; Seamus Heaney's use of Dante offers an example of the creative way in which a writer can incorporate the work of another writer into his own poetry, and finally the reception of Ezra Pound's Cathay shows how the context in which a work appears and the reaction of readers can radically alter the fortunes of a literary text. The role of translation is seen as crucially important as a force for innovation and change in a literature.

Connection and literature

Matthew Arnold's famous statement in his 1857 Oxford Inaugural Lecture, much cited by comparative literature scholars for decades, declares that

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration, no single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.¹

This declaration draws attention to something that all literature scholars instinctively comprehend: that all writing is somehow, in different ways, connected, and that the way to arrive at an understanding of literature is to acknowledge that there are relationships between writers and the texts which they produce, relationships which cross temporal, linguistic and cultural boundaries.

It may seem surprising that such a statement needs to be repeated in this age of interconnectedness, where dominant popular images are those of endlessly connected threads, of DNA models and the World Wide Web. Interdisciplinarity has become a buzz word in academic circles, and metaphors of bridge-building, boundary-transcendence, contact zones and inter-cultural mediation abound. But we still need to be reminded that single events and single literatures cannot be understood without reference to other events and other literatures, because the way in which we approach the subjects that we study and teach still tends towards isolationism. The structure of academic institutions promotes separation between subjects, rather than interconnectedness; specialist journals publish material relevant to specialist fields, hence many scholars have difficulty finding journals where they might place an article that does not quite fit into a narrowly defined specialised mould. Nor have interdisciplinary journals proliferated in recent years either, for whilst there may have been an increase in the discourse of interdisciplinarity, there has been a falling-away of academic publishing generally, with fewer monographs appearing and, given the cost-effectiveness of journal publication, a decline in regular journal subscribers that makes commercial publishers wary of taking on anything new.

The difficulties of organising interdisciplinarity

But despite this gloomy picture, Arnold's dictum prevails: there is connection everywhere, and what is more, today's generation of students is well-placed to see connections, trained as they are in a broader range of skills than my generation was, in particular being more visually literate and much more sophisticated in terms of reading complex narrative. The writer Terry Pratchett told me that since he first started writing his Discworld stories back in the early 1970s, his readers, mostly teenagers and with a high percentage of males (i.e. the group most often described as giving educationalists cause for concern regarding their levels of literacy), had shown themselves able to deal with increasingly complex plot structuring and narrative shifts. His novels move around between narrators, across time-zones, in and out of different perspectives, and often there are as many plot lines as in a well-made nineteenth century novel, though without the naturalist links. It could be argued that Pratchett's books are a genre in their own right, a sort of popular post-modernism, and they are certainly international bestsellers, which suggests that his young readers have acquired quite sophisticated reading skills in their spare time.

What we have today, then, is an uncomfortable dilemma: on the one hand, students and those of us engaged in the study and teaching of languages and literatures are drawn to making connections, while on the other hand the economics of curriculum design, competition between universities, Research Assessment Exercises and commercial publishing all combine to maintain the invisible walls between disciplines that make interconnectedness more difficult. In such a climate, interdisciplinarity becomes a radical concept rather than something self-evidently obvious. When Matthew Arnold was delivering his lecture, disciplinary boundaries had not hardened and students had not learned that they had to make choices between studying x or y. A well-rounded university student in Arnold's day would have had excellent Greek and Latin and a good grasp of several European languages and literatures. Intellectuals who did not have the advantage of university education, such as George Eliot, for example, also read extensively in different languages and different disciplines. George Eliot actually began her literary career as a translator of philosophical treatises from Latin and German. She translated Spinoza, Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others. The kind of thinking that drew a line between European literatures and English literature had not yet come into being, but when it did, the shape of the curriculum in schools and universities enforced the separate study of literatures uncompromisingly.

When I was a student, that kind of thinking had fossilised into sharp divisions between subjects, reinforced by the existence of a great many single-subject departments. One went up to university to work in a specialised field: general degrees were viewed with contempt and there was a genuine concern about breadth happening at the expense of in-depth subject knowledge. Where comparative degrees happened, they were viewed as radical and experimental, rarely underpinned by any coherent structured thought.

I read English and Italian and was a guinea pig in that this degree was completely new. I went up to university full of enthusiasm, but rapidly discovered a more depressing reality. The organisation of the degree was shambolic, if not non-existent. Neither department appeared to have thought for a second about how students might combine what were effectively two complete degree programmes minus some four courses only. In my fourth year, I sat fifteen finals papers across both subjects and wrote a dissertation. There was no question of student choice, no flexibility in the system. In the first year, Latin to what was called Intermediate level was compulsory, as was History of Art to General level in the second year. Yet the potential for linkages was immense: both degrees placed a great deal of emphasis on the medieval period, which I really enjoyed, but no connection was ever made between Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and the world of Langland and the Pearl poet and Chaucer. Compulsory authors included Spenser and Milton, alongside Tasso and Ariosto, but no reference was ever made to the possibility that English writers might have been familiar with the Italians or vice versa. A course on Shelley and Wordsworth could have run alongside a course on Parini, Foscolo and Alfieri, but of course it did not. The Latin and History of Art courses were taught in isolation, without reference to the other subjects at all, though as the degree progressed they proved extremely useful. I complained endlessly about the lack of linkage, and was told endlessly that if there were connections to be made, I should be making them by myself. It was very frustrating, not least because essays and examinations ensured that the two degrees remained distinct.

But the connections were so powerfully there that it was impossible to ignore them, and with those connections came endless questions: how well did Chaucer know Boccaccio? Could Milton have written Paradise Lost if he had not had any knowledge of Italian writing? Why had Gray's Elegy touched such a chord in the Italian eighteenth-century consciousness? Was it possible, I kept asking, that these writers had influenced one another? And what, in that case, did such influence consist of, and how could we trace it? I discovered The Road to Xanadu, the highly entertaining account of what Coleridge might have read on the basis of the contents of his personal library and works referred to in letters. Though amusing to read, in terms of methodological usefulness for comparative study such tracking of influences was more historical, archive research than literary, and ultimately turned the search for influences into a kind of treasure hunt. It did not seem to be a very useful approach to pursue, though nevertheless it did offer the idea of influence-tracking as a research possibility.

An attempt at tracing influence

Influence studies of this kind were briefly popular as a way of bridging the yawning gaps between subjects, but inevitably led to all kinds of textual difficulties. The problem was, of course, that the basis of such comparative study was the idea that there existed, in some demonstrable way, a direct link between writers, which presupposed incontrovertible evidence and the trustworthiness of writers to acknowledge their sources. This seems ludicrously naïve today, in the twenty-first century post-post-modern world, but to those of us who saw ourselves as students of comparative literature forty years ago, the idea of tracing influences seemed like a radical means of breaking out of the confines of single-subject constraint.

I resolved to pursue a case study in my dissertation, despite the warning issued by Rene Wellek in Discriminations when he said

Nobody has ever been able to show that a work of art was “caused” by another work of art, even though parallels and similarities can be accumulated. A later work of art may not have been possible without a preceding one, but it cannot have been caused by it.²

The case study selected was the literary and biographical relationship between James Joyce and Italo Svevo. On the surface, this seemed like a clear enough example, a case of literary influence supported by irrefutable biographical evidence. After leaving Ireland in 1904, Joyce had finally settled in Trieste, where he met the Italian writer Italo Svevo (real name Ettore Schmitz), who was living through a period of depression following the neglect of his novel Senilità that had appeared in 1898. A friendship of sorts developed between the two men, who read one another's work and met socially until Joyce's departure for Zurich in 1915. In 1910, Svevo lent Joyce some money for what turned out to be an abortive venture into cinema, and remained grateful to Joyce for his help in finding a publisher for La coscienza di Zeno in 1923. In 1924, Joyce wrote to Svevo asking permission to use a reference to his wife, Anna Livia, in the novel he was writing, Finnegan's Wake, in which he played with the idea of Signora Schmitz's name, Anna Livia, and her long blonde hair, both of which would recur in his novel in the figure of Anna Livia Plurabella.

But despite these connections, demonstrating the influence of one writer upon another proved incredibly difficult, if not downright impossible. What was very clear were affinities, similarities in the writing of both men that kept recurring. I tried to suggest on the basis of detailed close reading and careful investigation of the correspondence and biographies that Svevo's influence could be discerned in “A Painful Case”, written and revised somewhere around 1906–07, maybe in “Giacomo Joyce”, written during the Trieste years, and in his play Exiles, which has striking similarities with Svevo's Ibsen-inspired play, Un marito. Anna Livia Schmitz seemed to have been a model of sorts for Anna Livia Plurabella, and it appeared not totally absurd to suggest that Svevo might have even been a model in some way for Leopold Bloom, given his Jewish background, the age difference between the two men and the nature of the Svevo–Joyce relationship.

But ultimately, the case rested on speculation. Probably the friendship with Joyce did inspire Svevo to start writing again, and Joyce certainly encouraged him to publish. But Rene Wellek is right when he says that this kind of research is a hopeless endeavour. Writers draw their inspiration from all kinds of sources, some conscious, some unconscious, some acknowledged, some vehemently denied. All that we, as readers, can do is to see parallels, connections, affinities, and this is a more fruitful approach than one which seeks to prove certainty where certainty is a chimera. Linda Hutcheon points out the complexity when she says that the writing of both history and what she terms historiographic metafiction “becomes a form of cross-referencing that operates within (and does not deny) its unavoidably discursive context”.³

The role of the reader

The creative role of the reader in making connections takes us from influence studies in the old-fashioned sense to intertextuality, to the idea that texts exist in an endlessly interwoven relationship with one another. Here, of course, the connectivity is more random, and depends as much on what a reader may or may not bring to the reading as what a writer inserts into the text in the first place. A banal example may illustrate this point: whilst ill, I was given light reading by members of my family. One of the books was Daphne du Maurier's classic 1930s pot-boiler, Jamaica Inn; the other, Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Both are formula novels: the one is in the gothic romantic story genre, with a put-upon heroine, a broodingly handsome hero, strange goings-on in an old coaching inn, a wicked uncle and a band of evil-doers. The other is a computer-game novel: solve one layer and you move on to the next, a novel peopled with pasteboard characters, crudely obvious plotting and banal narrative links. Du Maurier owes a huge debt to the Brontes: her protagonist is a Jane Eyre figure, the man she loves a Heathcliffe/Rochester type. There is also a clergyman, a St John Rivers figure who turns out in the end to be mad and bad. We know there is something odd about him from the start: he is an albino, with pale eyes and white hair. So, too, is the mad monk Silas in The Da Vinci Code. Two novels, read back to back, with mad albino clergy: what a coincidence!

Though it is not a coincidence at all if we think in terms of historical continuity in genre stereotypes. The only coincidence is that the same reader happened to read them one after the other. The presence of stereotypical figures in a literary system is something we are all familiar with, just as we are all familiar with the formalist work on plot structures that showed just how narrow the range of plot variants actually is. There is indeed connection everywhere. Every text, as Roland Barthes reminds us, has meaning in relation to other texts.⁴

Heaney's “Purgatorio”

Much more useful than endeavouring to prove the unprovable existence of direct influence is to engage more playfully in following traces and patterns of connection. Sometimes writers involve their readers directly in this process, and may signal overtly the sources upon which they have drawn. Seamus Heaney's “The Strand at Lough Beg” is prefaced by three lines from Dante's Purgatorio:

All round this little island on the strand

Far down below there, where the breakers strive

Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

These three descriptive lines of location serve as a key to the reader in what follows. Heaney describes the slow drive out past the glow of filling stations into the countryside, where streetlights give way to stars. There is a hint of menace in a reference to Sweeney fleeing before a demon pack of hounds, “blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing”. Then suddenly comes the road block, the armed men and brutal murder:

What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?

The red lamp swing, the sudden brakes and stalling

Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights

That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:

The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,

Church island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.⁵

Heaney's use of Dante here goes much further than parallels in terms of the description of place. In the lines Heaney quotes from the first canto of Purgatorio, Dante has just emerged from the depths of Hell into the pale light of early morning, and finds himself on the shores of Mount Purgatory. The poet is cleansed and prepared for his upward journey, given a rope girdle made of reeds that grow back instantly, as soon as they are plucked. In Heaney's poem, the speaker plucks rushes for his murdered cousin, to whose memory the poem is dedicated, and performs a ritual cleansing of the corpse. The start of the journey for the dead soul, for Dante and for Heaney the poet, is symbolised in the ritual of purification. Reading the Heaney poem, with its deliberate reference to Purgatorio, we have an entwining of two texts that deepens the resonances of grief and loss, but which also, by the choice of Dante as a point of reference, offers a hint of hope in the life hereafter.

Heaney returned to the same subject in “Station Island”, a few years later. This time, though, there is a reference to Purgatorio inside the poem. The dead cousin accuses the poet of failing him through the way he wrote his earlier poem about the shores of Lough Beg where he met his death:

You whitewashed ugliness and drew

The lovely blinds of the Purgatorio

And saccharined my death with morning dew.⁶

The beauty of the description in “The Strand at Lough Beg” is challenged now as “saccharine”, the reference to Dante dismissed as a drawing-down of blinds upon the brutal reality of a man's murder. In this poem, there is a double set of references – to Dante and to Heaney's own earlier use of Dante. The theme remains constant – the poet is seeking to come to terms with his cousin's violent death, but the use of Dante's poem becomes a way of engaging with an internal debate, shared with a succession of readers.

The very structure of “Station Island” draws upon the idea of the journey that forms the basis of Dante's Divine Comedy. Both poems offer accounts of a poet's journey towards greater self-understanding through a series of encounters with the dead. Heaney, like Dante, learns about himself and about the possibility of salvation through such encounters. Heaney's reading of Dante in “Station Island” is therefore a fundamental element in the structure of the poem.

Weaving connections

The web of connectedness takes on another dimension when we consider that Dante, of course, took his inspiration for a journey to the underworld from Virgil, the poet whom he recreates in The Divine Comedy as his guide. Dante, a poet of the Middle Ages, created a Christian afterworld, with clear divisions between the realm of the saved or potentially saved and the realm of the damned, but the theme of a living man's journey to the world of the dead is the same as that of the Latin poet. In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas is confronted with the accusing dead, the forgotten dead and the beloved dead in the Underworld, and the darkness and sadness of the place are recreated in the retellings of later poets.

In 2000, Philip Pullman used the same imagery in the third book in his Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, only now the protagonists, Will and Lyra, free the dead from eternal darkness:

The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and ahead with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.⁷

Here Pullman reverses the image of horror in The Aeneid Book VI, ll.425–9 (“Continuo auditae voces vagitus …”):

At once are heard voices and wailing sore – the souls of infants weeping, whom, on the very threshold of the sweet life they shared not, torn from the breast, the black day swept off and plunged into bitter death.⁸

The powerful image of the dead babies, placed at the entrance to the underworld because they have barely known life, serves as a source of inspiration for a novelist writing for teenagers two thousand years after Virgil conceived his vision of the realm of the dead.

Once we begin to sketch connectedness, a kind of energy field opens up. In this example, we have moved from Seamus Heaney to Dante to Virgil and on to Phillip Pullman through a series of links that are both overt and intrinsic to each text, for in every case the writers have drawn upon other sources but utilised them in a powerfully unique way. There is clearly some form of influence in that, diachronically, each text follows the other, but utilisation of themes and motifs by individual writers in different genres produced for very different readers leads us away from formulating any kind of direct influence hypothesis, and reminds us again of Arnold's point about there being connections everywhere in the literary polysystem.

The significance of translation

Crucial to the flow of themes, images, forms and ideas across boundaries is, of course, translation. Writers gain access to texts written in other languages and at other times through the skill of translators. When readers who have no Ancient Greek claim to know Homer, they are saying that they have read Homer in translation, perhaps in a variety of different translations. John Keats, in his sonnet “On first looking into Chapman's Homer”, conveys some of the excitement that can be experienced by a reader who is enabled, through translation, to encounter a great writer from another culture. Keats compares his meeting with Homer through Chapman's translation to the feelings of an astronomer who sees for the first time a new planet in the heavens, or, more provocatively, to the moment when Cortes and his men stood looking out over the Pacific Ocean.⁹ The translator has enabled the poet to discover a new world, and Keats's sonnet is still one of the most powerful statements about the importance of translation, conceived of as a moment of revelation, the culmination of a journey beyond the confines of the familiar.

One of the most important contributions to literary studies by translation scholars has been the systematic investigation of the history of translating and the role of translations in literary innovation and renewal. We have begun to investigate not only how translators work, the strategies they employ, but also how they select their texts for translation and, most crucially, what then happens to their translations. It is surprising that the history of the impact of translation should have been neglected for so long, for it is clearly of fundamental importance in understanding the shaping forces of any literature. It is also fascinating to discover how certain writers at certain moments in time have been hugely successful in other cultures, thanks to translation, often more successful than in their own cultures.

Canon formation has been heavily influenced by translation. So, for example, today children in the former Soviet state that is now the republic of Uzbekistan who study English literature are given the work of those writers who have entered the canon: Shakespeare, of course; Charles Dickens, who has always enjoyed enormous success in Russia as a realist writer who exposed the horrors of capitalism; Byron, the rebel poet whose impact on writers in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe was enormous, inspiring such diverse men as Pushkin, Macha and Lermontov, to name but three; then, perhaps more surprisingly, Jack London, another canonical figure in the former communist block, and finally, Robert Burns. Uzbek children are taught the poetry of Burns, who they read as an English [sic] poet of major importance, a man of the people who used the language of ordinary folk.

There are, of course, logical explanations as to how this canon has emerged and why. What is interesting, though, is that it is a canon constructed through translation and one that diverges considerably from the established canon of English literature over here. If we add that Eastern European students, like so many other students of English literature in Europe, also read Macpherson's Ossian, a fundamental text in the study of Romanticism, then we can see that underlying this concept of canon are vastly different notions of what Romanticism might be.

In some contexts the evolution of a canon has been based on aesthetic criteria principally, whereas in others there have been powerful ideological factors determining the selection processes. The role of translation, however, is of central importance here.

When studying connections and relationships, it is important not only to look at what may be traceable but also at what was not translated, at those writers who, for whatever reason, failed to be translated at all, or failed in another context when they were translated. Here the systemic approach to literary history can be useful, for if we consider literatures as systems, the transfer or not of texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries can shed light on how a system is shaped and how it functions. This offers a much more dynamic way of thinking about influence than the old method of seeking to prove whether writer A was directly influenced by writer B.

The study of literature is, necessarily, comparative. We read an author and, consciously or unconsciously, we make comparisons with other texts that we have read. We also, if we are literary scholars, find ourselves reading hermeneutically, in that we uncover relationships with other writers embedded in texts. Sometimes, as with the Heaney example quoted earlier, the relationship is an intrinsic element in the construction of the work, designed to ensure that we will read on several different levels, moving between texts and between times. Or, as with Pound's Cathay, the moment when the work is published and what is happening in the world lead readers to respond to the text in ways that the author cannot have anticipated. This, of course, is the explanation for the success of Ossian outside the United Kingdom: emergent nationalist movements across Europe, connected as they so often were to a politics of language, seized upon the Scottish work as a model for recovering the glories of their own past. Whether Macpherson's work was a forgery or not is irrelevant in such a context. In Finland, for example, Lönrot created his Kalevala with the deliberate intention of forging a national epic that might rise to the status of Homer. In Bohemia, the discovery of texts in ancient Czech led to a resurgence of national pride and, most probably, to the creation of a thriving national literature (the influences of Byron and Shakespeare were pretty powerful here, too). When that early epic was discovered to be a forgery, the creative process was already so well in train that it mattered little: Czech literature had by then taken up a place on the European stage.

The arrival of Buddhism in China from India, the diffusion of literature from the Hellenic world, the transition from epic to romance, the emergence of the Renaissance and the Reformation – all testify to the role of translation as a major shaping force in world literature. David Damrosch, whilst recognising the pitfalls of translation, nevertheless argues that “World literature is writing that gains in translation [sic].”¹⁰ No discussion of influence or intertextuality can take place without recognition of the role played by translators, and the context in which those translations were produced.

Time and readings

Writing in 1918 in “A Retrospect”, Ezra Pound advised poets to “be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it”.¹¹ Pound's witty advice is, of course, at the heart of all writing: writers are influenced by what they read, but the value for critics of trying to track such influences is limited. For the role of reader is also crucial, and here the notion of intertextuality, the idea of all writing coexisting in some kind of network of relationships, is so much more helpful than the idea of trying to track influences, particularly given the translation dimension. Readers bring with them their several experiences, histories and horizons of expectation which inevitably affect how they read, while writers may consciously or quite unconsciously use the work of writers they may have read decades earlier in their own or in another language in their own subsequent work.

Ezra Pound was a writer who deliberately opted to make manifest in his poetry those writers who had had an impact on him. His Cantos are extraordinary works, poems that draw upon dozens of different sources, presented to the reader in dramatic and exciting new forms. Pound's vision of poetry involved endless links and connections with writers from other times and cultures, reshaped and rethought through his own individualistic creative process. Working with Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Gaudier Brzeska in the years just before the outbreak of the First World War, Pound devised the idea of the vortex as a creative source, “a radiant node or cluster […] a vortex from which and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing”.¹² The rush of ideas came from different sources, effectively dissolving fixed notions of originality and derivation, something that Pound would challenge explicitly in his writings about translation.

Charles Tomlinson praises Pound as a great translator and argues that Pound's ideas of the vortex struck a particularly resonant chord in 1914. “The moment was of an era of cultural translation,” Tomlinson points out, a form of cultural translation that was happening on many different levels: visually, as images from outside Europe dominated the fine art world; in literary terms with the publication of major works such as Pound's Cathay in 1915, and socially, of course, because the horrors of the trenches were transforming the iconography of the age.¹³ Pound sent a copy of Cathay to Gaudier Brzeska in the trenches, and Brzeska wrote to a friend that he used the book “to put courage into my fellows. I speak now of the ‘Bowmen’ and […] ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’ which are so appropriate to our case.”¹⁴ Brzeska was using poetry produced by an American derived from ancient Chinese texts to encourage his men to stay resolute in the face of daily hardship and horror. In the vortex that Pound saw as his melting pot, his translations had acquired a contemporary feel that made them accessible to a wide range of readers, through his use of language and strong images and the elegiac tone he created. Moreover, the date of their publication coincided with the traumatic events of the European war arena, hence readers read into the poems their own tragedy. Indeed, Hugh Kenner, author of an important book, The Pound Era, says of Cathay that it was seen by Pound's contemporaries as a collection of poems primarily about war:

Cathay is largely a war book using Fenellosa's cribs much as Pope used Horace or Johnson Juvenal, to supply a system of parallels and a structure of discourse […]. Perfectly vital after half a century, they are among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I.¹⁵

Pound, of course, was not consciously producing poems about the war. His objective was primarily aesthetic, and as he tells us in his ABC of Reading his translation endeavours were intended to give English readers some sense of a world-wide history of the art of poetry. He translated from ancient languages (from Latin, Greek, Provençal and Anglo-Saxon), and from French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese – a huge range of different languages. He has often been accused of producing “unfaithful” translations, an accusation that is both pointless and silly, since Pound never sought to produce anything like a literal or “faithful” translation of anything and made his views explicit and often challenged people who attacked his so-called inaccuracy. His Homage to Sextus Propertius, which was attacked for its incorrect rendering of the Latin, effectively creates a new genre that blurs the boundaries between ideas of translation, imitation and borrowing and adopts the term “homage” for a poem that uses another's work as a starting point for creative rewriting. But crucial to how we today approach Pound's Cathay is not so much what he may have thought he was doing with the poems he translated, as what has happened to them since their appearance. Small wonder, when we come across lines like these from “Lament of the Frontier Guard”, that Gaudier Brzeska read them to his companions in the trenches:

Bones white with a thousand frosts.

High heaps, covered with trees and grass:

Who brought this to pass?

Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?

Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

Barbarous kings.

A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,

A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,

Three hundred and sixty thousand,

And sorrow, sorrow like rain.

Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.

Desolate, desolate fields.¹⁶

The visual impact of these images transcends time and distance, creating a picture of the desolation wrought by war that proved immensely moving to readers who were in daily receipt of news from the trenches in Flanders. The timing of the publication of Pound's work assured its success not so much as an esoteric collection of translations from classical Chinese but as a powerful contemporary statement.

Studying connections

There is immense value in studying literatures in terms of connections. As indicated earlier, today's students are not only trained in making connections, but are highly responsive to a methodology that emphasises connectivity. Post-colonial studies, alongside translation studies, have highlighted links, exchanges, border crossings in exciting new ways, drawing attention to the power relationships that underpin textual practices. The role of the reader is, of course, vitally important, for the web of connections woven by a writer will be enhanced by the web woven by a reader, resulting in a far more dynamic model of literary study than old-style influence-tracking.

Octavio Paz famously distinguishes between the task of the poet and that of the translator. The poet, he argues, fixes verbal signs into an ideal immutable form, whereas the translator frees those fixed signs into circulation through another linguistic medium.¹⁷ This view of translation establishes a clear distinction between the different roles but avoids any suggestion that the one literary activity is superior to the other. Paz acknowledges also that translation involves reading as a first stage in the process of rewriting, for a translator has to be fully aware of the ways in which the source text works. His witty interpretation of the parallel yet dissimilar tasks of writer and translator can also be helpfully applied to the tasks of writer and reader, inextricably joined and mutually dependent, coexisting in an ever-enlarging web of words.

NOTES

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