ABSTRACT
The dominance of transparent discourse in English-language translation was decisively challenged at the start of the twentieth century, when modernism emerged in British and American literary cultures. The dominance of transparent discourse has remained so secure in English that even though modernist poetry and prose have long been canonized in British and American literary cultures, both in and out of the academy, the innovations that distinguish modernist translation practices continue to be marginal, seldom actually implemented in an English-language translation, seldom recommended in theoretical statements by translators or other commentators, seldom even given a coherent and incisive formulation by modernist translators themselves. Modernism seeks to establish the aesthetic autonomy of the translated text by effacing its manifold conditions and exclusions, especially the process of domestication by which the foreign text is rewritten to serve modernist cultural agendas. On the level of discourse, however, Pound's translations do not easily support the positivist concept of language in his modernist readings.
