Omar Pound was a gifted poet and an internationally recognised translator of Persian and Arabic poetry. To these two crafts he brought verbal dexterity, historical sense and sensibility, a keen eye for cultural detail, and an impish play of song. A teacher for many years, Pound turned, relatively late in life, to editing the letters of his father, the American poet and translator Ezra Pound, and produced three annotated volumes of Pound’s correspondence.
As a translator, Omar Pound did not follow the path blazed by Ezra. The elder Pound had made his mark through sometimes controversial “englishings” of Latin, medieval Italian and Provençal poets, and vivid renderings of Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh plays. Omar, by contrast, chose two wholly different languages and worlds: Arabic poetry from AD500 to 1200, and Persian poetry from AD850 to 1900. In 1970 he published his translations as Arabic and Persian Poems, with a preface by the poet Basil Bunting. In 1986 he reissued an enlarged edition of this volume. He once observed that his aim as a translator was “a readable poem and a rediscovery”.
Pound’s most celebrated translation is Gorby and the Rats (first published in 1972), a buoyant rendering of the 14th-century Persian satirical fable Mùsh-o-gurbeh by Obeyd-i-Zàkànì. A witty commentary on the Mongol occupation of Iran in the 13th and 14th centuries, Mùsh-o-gurbeh has been familiar to generations of Iranian children. Omar tested the whimsical felicities of his translation by reading scraps-in-progress to his young daughters. Later Gorby and the Rats, which has been compared with Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, became a centrepiece of Pound’s many public readings. These readings brought out the essential songlike qualities of his work and enabled him — a lifelong devotee of music and choral singing — to revel in the rhythmic and sonic delights of the spoken word. Basil Bunting, who believed that poetry should be read aloud, was an important influence on Pound, and introduced him to the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull, with whom Pound developed a close friendship and collaboration.
Omar Shakespear Pound’s journey to translation and poetry-writing began in childhood. Born in 1926 in Paris, he grew up in England and attended Charterhouse School, Surrey, an experience he recalled with the acerbity of George Orwell in his essay Such, Such Were the Joys. As war approached in the late 1930s, Pound came to detest the reflexive patriotism of school life, and his pacifist stance was all the more unpopular when it was learnt that Ezra Pound was broadcasting diatribes against England over Mussolini’s Radio Rome — activities that later earned Ezra an indictment for treason against the United States. During the Second World War Omar Pound survived bombing during the Blitz in London and in 1945 joined the US Army, serving in France and Germany before being demobilised in the United States.
He enrolled at Hamilton College in upstate New York with the class of 1951, but before completing his studies he spent time in France, England and Iran. He studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at the University of Tehran, returning to the US by way of Pakistan, India and Japan. Graduating from Hamilton in 1954, he went on to earn his MA at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. In 1955 he was married to Elizabeth Parkin of Montreal. He taught at the Roxbury Latin School in Boston for five years before becoming director of the American School of Tangier in Morocco in 1962. With their two daughters, the Pounds moved to Dorset in 1965 and then settled in Cambridge, where Pound taught at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts & Technology. In 1980 they moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Pound focused on writing and editing as well as teaching English composition at Princeton University.
Pound’s own poetry was published in various volumes, including The Dying Sorcerer (1985), Pissle and the Holy Grail (1987), Poems Inside and Out (1999), and Watching the Worlds Go By (2001), and many small magazines. Strongly influenced by the translator’s craft, his poetry is multicultural, often political, and lyrical, with an ironic, mystical streak that borrows from Persian poetry. His love of storytelling combines frequently with a fascination with history, moving easily from the Indian Rebellion (Siege Lucknow 1857) to a 10th-century Nigerian kingdom (Kano), to a medieval miracle tale (Saint Erkenwald). Pound did not fear lyricism, and his poems are marked by well-shaped rhythms and a controlled use of assonance and off-rhymes. His love of the English countryside produced crisply recollected natural scenes, as in The Dying Expatriate in which the poem’s speaker pleads:
Tell me of silver birch in dusk’s long alert, pink chestnut, foxgloves and yarrow, bells and starlings across an English lawn and sparrows stealing from the thatch.
Pound co-edited three volumes of Ezra’s letters. Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1909-1914 (1984) provides a detailed account of Ezra’s early career in London and his relationship with the artist Dorothy Shakespear — Omar’s mother — whom Ezra was married to in 1914. Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910-1912 (1988) tells the story of Ezra’s friendship with Cravens, an expatriate American musician in Paris who became the poet’s first patron. Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946 (1999) begins with Ezra’s arrest on treason charges after the collapse of Fascist Italy and follows him to his confinement in a mental institution in Washington. During this period Ezra wrote his celebrated Pisan Cantos. Omar also co-wrote a bibliography of the writer and artist Percy Wyndham Lewis — who with Ezra founded Blast!, the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement — and was a founding trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. For his creative and scholarly achievements Pound received an honorary doctorate from Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
Pound is survived by his wife Elizabeth and their two daughters.
Omar Pound, poet and translator, was born on September 10, 1926. He died on March 2, 2010, aged 83
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