“Cantos” or “Cantares”?

Viorica Patea’s essay opens with an account of José Vasquez Amaral’s long struggle translating Pound’s Cantos into Spanish and the argument he and Pound had about the correct equivalent in Spanish of the term, “canto.” Pound refused to accept that the Spanish “cantar” was appropriate for the parts in El Poema del Cid, but never after that. Still after their debate, Pound insisted on using “cantares” for both Rock-Drill and Thrones because it tallied with his idea of The Cantos as the “tale of the tribe.” Patea then swivels to another revealing dimension of Pound’s work in translation: contrasting controversies involving translations of Pound’s poetry under communism. Whereas the authorities in Communist Romania suppressed the Pound translations of Nicolas Steinhardt and prosecuted him, in Nicaragua the poet and staunch Marxist Ernesto Cardenal openly celebrated Pound as a master. Patea’s investigation reveals that, while Pound is often read (and repudiated) as a political writer, more persistently, he is admired not for his politics, but for how his poetry resists ideological limits altogether.