Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Explorations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 246 (on Ezra Pound):

Most readers seem to believe that Pound is a truly scholarly writer. How deeply, how accurately, and how sensitively he knows other languages I cannot tell; but although he shows off his Greek and his Latin, his Latin is poor and his Greek is contemptible.

Id., p. 247

Pound never had more than a smattering of Greek, scarcely enough to enable him to spell Greek words correctly, either in the Greek alphabet or in our own. In Latin he knew enough to let him follow the general sense of a simple sentence, and to grasp some of the more obvious effects of sound and rhythm, but not nearly enough to permit him to understand or even to approach the greatest Roman poets, or to save him from making coarse and degrading blunders in interpreting Roman poetry. Worse than that, he would not learn. He would not admit his deficiencies and cure them through humility and industry. Nor would he shun those areas where a display of ignorance might be damaging. Where others would turn their eyes away from the sanctuary, or else enter with quiet step and bowed head, Ezra Pound charged in, shouting and singing and hiccuping, on roller skates, and rollicked around breaking the decorations and scrawling his name on the walls.

Id., pp. 249-250:

Now, if a more modest or more dedicated poet did not know Greek and yet wished to use a passage from Homer in his poetry, he would take five or six versions of Homer in languages which he did understand—English and French and Italian, for example—and by combining them and extracting their essence, he might get fairly close to the original. Or—reflecting that art is long—he would set out to learn Greek. Pound did neither. He used a line-for-line word-for-word translation from Homer’s poetic Greek into flat literal Latin prose which was published in 1538 by a hack named Andrea Divo. Whether he thought this was the best available translation, it is difficult to tell. If he did, he was quite wrong. And in any case the affectation of using a Renaissance Latin pony to help him understand a Greek poem caused him far more trouble than it was worth. Not only did Andrea Divo sometimes get Homer’s meaning wrong, but Ezra Pound sometimes got Andrea Divo’s meaning wrong. The result was a double layer of misunderstanding spread, like Cimmerian mist, between the radiant sun of Homer and Pound’s wretched readers, benighted beneath.