The link is to three translations of the same ancient poem: one by Pound, one by a Chinese poet, and the critics. Pound, who did not read Chinese at the time (we was working on notes from a dead friend, with the encouragement of the friend’s family) has more inaccuracies.

And it loses the form of the Chinese. But as a poem, it stands.

SONG OF THE BOWMAN OF SHU

Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots
And saying: When shall we get back to our country?
Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen,
We have no comfort because of these Mongols.

We grub the soft fern-shoots,
When anyone says “Return,” the others are full of sorrow.
Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.
Our defense is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return.

We grub the old fern-stalks.
We say: Will we be let to go back in October?
There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.
Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.

What flower has come into blossom?
Whose chariot? The General’s.
Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.
We have no rest, three battles a month.

By heaven, his horses are tired.
The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.
The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fish-skin.
The enemy is swift, we must be careful.

When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring,
We come back in the snow,
We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,
Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?

To my mind, a translation is a new poem. The original is bound in the language: poetry is in part the language used. One has the same problem with Latin: if you can read it (and if you have any Romance Languages, Latin is not a great stretch: I took Latin at school and romance languages are not that difficult to read as a result) you miss something when you translate it to a Germanic Language.

And English is of the North. The best translations of poetry are done by poets. As Clive James — who changed the structure of his Inferno to Quatrains because the Italian structure does not work in English — notes.

James’ Dante is worth owning and reading. Out loud. To teenagers. And to yourself.

Ever since, in Florence in the mid-1960s, my wife introduced me to the miracle of Dante’s versification in the Divine Comedy, I wondered how an English translation might get near transmitting the momentum of the original. There were hundreds of different translations that transmitted the historical details, but the way the verse danced inexorably forward was, in my view, part of the subject. Decades went by and finally I thought I had found a way. The actual work took me several years before I fell ill in early 2010, and then afterwards it took several more years to prepare the manuscript for the presses both in New York and London. During that second, long period of reading proofs and fiddling with punctuation, I can remember thinking that it would be a pity to vanish before the book came out. So Dante joined a whole raft of pills and treatments in the task of keeping me alive.

Then, in 2013, the book was published in the US, Australia and the UK. On the whole I can’t complain about its critical reception. I thought one or two of the critics were too keen to demonstrate that they, too, knew something about Dante, but I couldn’t blame them for feeling proprietorial. Dante is a gigantically great poet but everyone who reads him feels that he is writing for them alone. My only real problem with the book’s reception was that I felt anxious about whether or not my publishers would make a return on their investment. Nobody knows how many copies a book consisting of more than fourteen thousand lines of English verse is supposed to sell. One’s best hope, surely, was to catch the next generation of students. Failing that,however, there was still the satisfaction of having done one’s utmost. I can only hope that my translation has some of Dante’s best writing in it, but I am fairly sure that it has some of the best of mine.

A translation needs to stand on its own. As a poem. Pound’s work does. The scholarly translators do not. This is why the old book of common prayer used the Psalms of Coverdale, predating the Authorized Version. And it is why pedantic translation never sings.

And both Pound and James have some of their best work in their translations.