Ezra Pound’s Rimbaud (1957): Translation and the art of the sketch

This article is the first detailed study of the 1957 book of translations Rimbaud (1957) by U.S. American poet and translator Ezra Pound. As the original book form in which Pound’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud were published by the independent Italian editor Vanni Scheiwiller, Rimbaud sheds new light on Pound’s poetics of translation, his poetic dialogue with Rimbaud, and, most importantly, the ways in which the material form of a text shapes interpretative possibilities. The various drawings and sketches reproduced on the cover and throughout the small book disclose surprising affinities between the act of translating and the act of sketching, affinities that are borne out in Pound’s renderings.