The Translator’s Invisibility

The translation of accompaniment required bilingual publication. It signified the cultural difference of the foreign text by deviating from current English usage and thereby sending the reader across the page to confront the foreign language. “As to the atrocities of my translation,” Pound wrote in “Cavalcanti,” “all that can be said in excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and committed with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated” (Anderson 1983:221). In a 1927 “Postscript” to his variorum edition of Cavalcanti’s poems, Pound criticized his archaizing strategy, but felt it needed further refinement, not abandonment, in order to suggest the generic distinctions in the Italian texts: “the translator might, with profit, have accentuated the differences and used for the occasional pieces a lighter, a more Browningesque, and less heavy Swinburnian language” {193} (ibid.:5). A couple of years later, in “Guido’s Relations,” Pound crankily condemned his earlier use of archaism, arguing that he “was obfuscated by the Victorian language,” “the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary” (ibid.:243). But once again he didn’t decide to abandon it. On the contrary, his idea was that the discourses in English-language translation should be as heterogeneous as possible: “one can only learn a series of Englishes,” he insisted, and so “it is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they were fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons” (ibid.:244). When, in this 1929 essay, Pound offered his own translation of Cavalcanti as an example, he described his discourse as “pre-Elizabethan English” (ibid.:250).

Pound’s interpretive translations display this increasing heterogeneity, particularly since he revised them repeatedly over the course of several decades. His debt to Rossetti was announced early, in The Spirit of Romance (1910), where he quoted often and admiringly from the Victorian poet’s versions of the dolce stil novisti. When Pound wrote his own first versions of Cavalcanti’s poems, they sometimes echoed Rossetti’s. Cavalcanti’s evocation of the angelic lady—

Chi è questa che vien, ch’ogni uom la mira,
Che fa di clarità l’aer tremare!
E mena seco Amor, sì che parlare
Null’uom ne puote, ma ciascun sospira?
Ahi Dio, che sembra quando gli occhi gira!
Dicalo Amor, ch’io nol saprei contare;
Cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare,
Che ciascun’altra in vêr di lei chiam’ira.
Non si potria contar la sua piacenza,
Ch’a lei s’inchina ogni gentil virtute,
E la beltate per sue Dea la mostra.
Non fu sì alta gia la mente nostra,
E non si è posta in noi tanta salute,
Che propriamente n’abbiam conoscenza.

(Anderson 1983:42)

—was translated fluently by Rossetti, who resorted to a relatively unobtrusive archaism in verse form (an Italianate sonnet) and in diction (“thereon,” “benison,” “ne’er”)—relatively unobtrusive, that is, in the context of Victorian poetry:

{194} Who is she coming, whom all gaze upon,
Who makes the air all tremulous with light,
And at whose side is Love himself? that none
Dare speak, but each man’s sighs are infinite.
Ah me! how she looks round from left to right,
Let Love discourse: I may not speak thereon.
Lady she seems of such high benison
As makes all others graceless in men’s sight.
The honour which is hers cannot be said;
To whom are subject all things virtuous,
While all things beauteous own her deity.
Ne’er was the mind of man so nobly led,
Nor yet was such redemption granted us
That we should ever know her perfectly.

(Rossetti 1981:223)