‘The passionate moment’: Untranslated Quotation in Pound and Eliot

Abstract

This chapter examines in depth the deeply personal use of ‘talismanic’ fragments of non-translation in the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Viewed as a specialized branch of modernist allusion, examples are considered in detail, in particular, Eliot’s references to the Provençal of Arnaut Daniel in Ash-Wednesday and elsewhere, and Pound’s use of Cavalcanti in The Cantos, read as a complex double-gesture, highly personal and yet strange. The chapter closes by considering the development of Eliot’s poetic practices, including the deployment of allusion and relative absence of non-translation, in Four Quartets.