Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Using The Cantos as a lens to understand modernism's ambition to revolutionize literature through mythical and scientific methods, this book looks at how Homer's Odyssey plays a unique methodological and structural role in The Cantos and, more broadly, recalibrates the reader's sense of Pound's deployment of classical sources in them.
The Cantos translates, interprets, abridges, adapts, critiques, parodies, trivializes, allegorizes, and "ritualizes" the Odyssey. Partly inspired by Joyce's use of different forms or "technics" in Ulysses, Pound uses different literary styles to translate Homer. The method of The Cantos is also informed by medieval classicism and 19th century philology. Pound's unique understanding of medieval literature and The Cantos is, in fact, Pound's own modernist vision of the Matter of Troy, a term used by medieval authors to designate the cycle of texts based on the Trojan war and its aftereffects, including the nostoi (returns) of the Greek heroes. Specifically, The Cantos presents itself as a modernist translatio of Homer's Odyssey.
This is the first book both to explore how medieval classicism and translatio informs Pound's mythical method and to explore systematically the variety and evolution of Pound's Odyssey translations in The Cantos.