The Poetics of Queering Translation in Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius

Christian Bancroft adopts the approach of “queering translation” to Pound’s controversial renderings of the Latin poetry of Sextus Propertius in Homage to Sextus Propertius. Based on the work of William Spurlin and others, Bancroft clarifies that, as a methodology, queering translation does not merely concern the translation of a queer writer from one language to another but, more pointedly, involves “the heterogeneity that exists between languages: a space of indeterminacy that includes the untranslatable,” as it “emphasizes the nebulous, the ambiguous, multiplicities, heterogeneities, femininities, masculinities, as well as the sexual, gendered, cultural, and historical differences between languages.” Bancroft’s application of queer theory provides a new reading of Homage, a sequence discussed less often than Mauberley, by way of addressing ongoing issues in both modernist studies and Pound’s methods of “translation.” He examines Pound’s specific choices of translated terms, such as Pound rendering Graios orgia as “Grecian  orgies” (instead of the more accurate phrase, “mysteries or sacred rites”), in order to substitute modern idioms and convey Propertius’s humor. For Bancroft, such wordplay “foreignizes the text, disengaging the power relations that would otherwise threaten to domesticate the linguistic and cultural difference of the source text.”