SOURCE: Hoare, Sasha. “‘A Tricky Turn’: Basil Bunting and Kamo no Chōmei.” PN Review 24, no. 1 (1997): 39-42.

In the following essay, Hoare examines Basil Banting's translattion of Chōmei, commenting on how the experience enriched Banting's other translations.

Basil Bunting's translation of Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki was written in 1932, during the five-year period in which he lived in Rapallo, in close proximity to Ezra Pound. As is widely acknowledged, Pound's influence on Bunting was profound, and the older writer's theory and practice of translation played a significant part in shaping the ideas and experiments of his younger ‘disciple’ or ‘Poundling’. Pound believed that not only was translation ‘good training’ for a poet, providing lessons in style and structure (‘A Retrospect’, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 1954), but that it was essential to the health of a nation's literature: ‘English literature lives by translation, it is fed...