Reassessing Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius

Abstract

This paper is the first major attempt since J. P. Sullivan’s 1964 book Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius. A Study in Creative Translation to assess the precise translational methods, structural organization, and poetic success of Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius. The assessment is based on an exhaustive line-by-line collation of the twelve English poems in the Homage with their disparate and fragmented sources in Propertius’ Latin. Pound used Lucian Müller’s nineteenth-century Teubner edition of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius for his Latin text. Since that is not readily available outside a major research library, the Latin text in Goold’s Loeb Library edition of Propertius, the best now available, was collated against Müller and the Homage. An appended table summarizes the results in easily readable form. The paper first cites the ancient testimonia to correct widespread errors about Propertius’s style and then falls into two parts: the first provides a section-by-section analysis of the techniques used by Pound in translating Propertius, the second explores the claim that the poem is a great technical feat in structural organization, versification, and English poetry.