Bombast and Sesquipedalian Words: Translation, Mistranslation, and the Epigraph to The Waste Land

Abstract

The epigraph to T. S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land (1922) is one of the most well-known paratexts of twentieth-century literature. However, as previous scholars have noted, the popularized English translation from the Ancient Greek of Petronius’ Satyricon contains a small but significant mistranslation: the Cumaean Sibyl is not actually hanging in a cage. This essay unearths another meaning in Ancient Greek of the ampulla in which the poet oracle is trapped: bombast. Using a Deleuzean new-materialist reading of text and paratext, this article proposes how the new meanings of the ampulla reconfigure both the significance of the original mistranslation and also the position of the poem itself, with its bombastic networks of allusions and paratextual complexities.