Prednisone

Sorry, this prednisone is making me angry. Here's one more thing:

Pound’s essay is filled with intriguing ideas, but it is the statement of a practitioner, not a theoretical formulation, and he does not make explicit exactly what the standards might be.

Venuti is condescending to Pound, one of the great theorists of translation. The idea that Pound did not make wholly explicit his aesthetic standards is risible. Surely the entire prose works of Pound do nothing but this. That is his entire aim in all his writing about poetry. To see him as some vague and impressionistic practitioner of "belles lettres" is just dumb.

There's another thing missing. Pound translated to get at specific elements in the source text that he wanted to us as / for his own poetry. He didn't just translate every text into some generic "Pound poetry." So Cathay is different from the Seafarer. He held translation to a higher standard than anyone else.