The Translator’s Invisibility

In modernist translation, these two kinds of difference get collapsed: the foreign text is inscribed with a modernist cultural agenda and then treated as the absolute value that exposes the inadequacy of translations informed by competing agendas. In a 1928 review of Arthur Symons’ translation of Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot acknowledged that a translation constitutes an “interpretation,” never entirely adequate to the source-language text because mediated by the target-language culture, tied to a historical moment: “the present volume should perhaps, even in fairness, be read as a document explicatory of the ’nineties, rather than as a current interpretation” (Eliot 1928:92). Eliot assumed the modernist view that translation is a fundamental domestication resulting in an autonomous text: “the work of translation is to make something foreign, or something remote in time, live with our own life” (ibid.:98). But the only “life” Eliot would allow in translation conformed to his peculiar brand of modernism. What made Symons’s version “wrong,” “a mistranslation,” “a smudgy botch” was precisely that he “enveloped Baudelaire in the Swinburnian violet-coloured London fog of the ’nineties,” turning the French poet into “a contemporary of Dowson and Wilde” (ibid.:91, 99–100, 102, 103). The “right” version was shaped by what Eliot announced as his “general point of view,” “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (ibid.:vii). Thus, “the important fact about Baudelaire is that he was essentially a Christian, {190} born out of his due time, and a classicist, born out of his due time” (ibid.:103), where the “time” that matters is Eliot’s present: “Dowson and Wilde have passed, and Baudelaire remains; he belonged to a generation that preceded them, and yet he is much more our contemporary than they” (ibid.:91).

Pound too privileged foreign texts that he could mobilize in a modernist cultural politics, but his ideological standpoint was different from Eliot’s and more than a little inconsistent. Certain medieval poetries, notably the Provençal troubadour lyric and the dolce stil nuovo, were to be recovered through interpretation, translation, and imitation because they contained values that had been lost in western culture, but that would now be restored by modernism. Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry was assimilated to modernist philosophical and poetic values like positivism and linguistic precision. In Pound’s essay “Cavalcanti” (1928), “the difference between Guido’s precise interpretive metaphor, and the Petrarchan fustian and ornament” is that Guido’s “phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone” (Anderson 1983:xx). This essay also made clear the peculiarly political nature of Pound’s cultural restoration, couching his modernist reading of Cavalcanti’s poetry in a rabid anticlericalism and racism:

We have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies “mezzo oscuro rade” “risplende in sé perpetuale effecto” magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s Paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting, “a lui si tiri” untouched by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease, fanaticisms and excess that produce Savonarola, asceticisms that produce fakirs, St. Clement of Alexandria, with his prohibition of bathing by women.

(Anderson 1983:208)

Elsewhere in the same essay Pound shifted this ideological standpoint by linking his interest in medieval poetry to an anti-commercialism with radical democratic leanings. Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone, “Donna mi prega,”

shows traces of a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, but that may have appeared about as soothing to the Florentine of {191} A.D. 1290 as conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and Bucharin would to-day in a Methodist bankers’ board meeting in Memphis, Term.

(ibid.:203)