I take the epigraph of this chapter from a moment in the first of Ezra Pound's Cantos when Odysseus, having gone to Hades so that he may learn from the dead how he is to find his way home, is greeted by Tiresias, the Theban seer who will show him his future: 'A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?' (I/4). Tiresias's question makes no literal sense (Odysseus has not been to Hades before) but springs instead from a set of textual errors, mistakes deriving from small but significant slips in transcription and translation, and it usefully focuses our attention on crucial characteristics of modern epics. Pound is not speaking or singing this beginning of his epic poem; like all modern epics, the Cantos is pre-eminently a textual production, fundamentally and ostentatiously a product of the library rather than the battlefield, the mead hall, or the court. 'A second time' is Pound's translation of a phrase he found in a Renaissance translation of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus, whose version confuses two similar Greek adjectives: Odysseus's identity shifts, over the course of time, from 'noble' to 'twice-born' or 'double', and Pound turns this epithet into the opening query from the dead seer. But Pound's phrase introduces an idea of more consequence and complexity than any mere characterological insight about Odysseus's birth. Seven lines later in the same canto, interrupting Pound's version of one of the most vividly realized scenes from Homer's Odyssey (Book 11), when Odysseus sees his mother, Anticlea, among the dead, Andreas Divus breaks into Pound's poem.