The Translator’s Invisibility

Who is she that comes, makying turn every man’s eye
And makyng the air to tremble with a bright clearnesse
That leadeth with her Love, in such nearness
No man may proffer of speech more than a sigh?

Ah God, what she is like when her owne eye turneth, is
Fit for Amor to speake, for I can not at all;
Such is her modesty, I would call
Every woman else but an useless uneasiness.

No one could ever tell all of her pleasauntness
In that every high noble vertu leaneth to herward,
So Beauty sheweth her forth as her Godhede;

Never before was our mind so high led,
Nor have we so much of heal as will afford
That our thought may take her immediate in its embrace.

(Anderson 1983:46)

The lady is portrayed as perceptible to the senses but unattainable in her spirituality, a neo-Platonic Idea that exceeds even the quasiphysical “embrace” of human “thought.” This representation certainly pinpoints a central theme in the dolce stil nuovo, but it is also recognizable as Pound’s modernist reading of the medieval poetries he celebrated: “The conception of the body as perfected instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades” (ibid.:206); “the central theme of the troubadours, is the dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption” (ibid.:205). Just as in “Philip Massinger” (1920) Eliot posited a unified “sensibility” in English literary culture before the late seventeenth century, “a period when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses” (Eliot 1950:185), Pound discovered a “harmony of the sentient” in Cavalcanti, “where the thought has its demarcation, the substance its virtù, where stupid men have not reduced all ‘energy’ to unbounded undistinguished abstraction” (Anderson 1983:209).

{197} On the thematic level, Pound’s translations inscribed Cavalcanti’s texts with values that differed from Rossetti’s in being both modernist and patriarchal, notably in the representation of the lady, transformed by his revisions from “the inferior thing ready for instant consumption” into “the fine thing held in the mind.” But Pound’s successive versions were also interrogative in their relation to the Italian texts and to Rossetti’s translations, showing how the female idealization of the dolce stil novisti and the pre-Raphaelites assumed a female degradation, a misogynist suspicion that the lady’s value is “inferior,” dependent on the male imagination. In fashioning himself as a poet-translator, Pound was competing against two poetic “fathers,” Cavalcanti and Rossetti, and this oedipal competition took the form of revising the image of the lady.

On the level of discourse, however, Pound’s translations don’t easily support the positivist concept of language in his modernist readings. The dense archaism hardly produces the illusionistic effect of transparency that he valued in the dolce stil novisti, what he described so rapturously as the virtual invisibility of literary form, “the glass under water” (Anderson 1983:208). The peculiarities of Pound’s archaic text preempt any illusionism by calling attention to the language as a specific kind of English, a poetic discourse linked to a specific historical moment that is neither Pound’s nor Cavalcanti’s nor Rossetti’s. The final version of the sonnet, “Who is she that comes,” was the text Pound quoted in “Guido’s Relations” to illustrate how “pre-Elizabethan English” can be used to translate Cavalcanti. Pound’s rationale for this discourse was distinctively modernist: he described the pre-Elizabethan as “a period when the writers were still intent on clarity and explicitness, still preferring them to magniloquence and the thundering phrase” (ibid.:250). But Pound also knew that his archaizing strategy resulted less in clarity and explicitness than in a sense of oddity or unfamiliarity: