The Translator’s Invisibility

The objections to such a method are: the doubt as to whether one has the right to take a serious poem and turn it into a mere exercise in quaintness; the “misrepresentation” not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity, by which I mean that Guido’s thirteenth-century language is to twentieth-century Italian sense much less archaic than any fourteenth-, fifteenth-, or early sixteenth-century English is for us.

(ibid.:250)

{198} The archaism did not achieve any greater fidelity to the Italian texts, nor did it establish an analogy between two past cultures, one Italian, the other English. Despite Pound’s modernist pronouncements, the archaism could not overcome “six centuries of derivative convention and loose usage” to communicate “the exact significances of such phrases as: ‘The death of the heart,’ and ‘The departure of the soul’” because it pointed to a different literary culture in a different language at a different historical moment (Anderson 1983:12). Pound’s pre-Elizabethan English could do no more than signify the remoteness of Cavalcanti’s poetry, along with the impossibility of finding any exact linguistic and literary equivalent. And the archaism did this only because it radically departed from cultural norms that currently prevailed in English. This is perhaps most noticeable in Pound’s archaic prosody: as Anderson has observed, he wanted “to free the cadence of his English versions from the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan iambic pentameter,” still the standard for English-language verse at the beginning of the twentieth century (Anderson 1982:13; Easthope 1983).

Pound’s comments on his versions of Arnaut Daniel revealed his acute awareness that current cultural norms constrained his work as a translator. These were his most experimental translations, texts where he developed the most heterogeneous discourses. Like the later Cavalcanti translations, they mixed various archaic forms, mainly “Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism” (Pound’s notation for “Rossetti: Italian poets” in The ABC of Reading (Pound 1960:133)) and pre-Elizabethan English, culled mainly from Gavin Douglas’s 1531 version of the Aeneid, but also from such early Tudor poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt (McDougal 1972:114; Anderson 1982:13). And there were occasional traces of twentieth-century American colloquialism and foreign languages, particularly French and Provençal. The following exemplary passages are excerpts from the translations Pound published in his essay, “Arnaut Daniel” (1920):

When I see leaf, and flower and fruit
Come forth upon light lynd and bough,
And hear the frogs in rillet bruit,
And birds quhitter in forest now,
Love inkirlie doth leaf and flower and bear,
And trick my night from me, and stealing waste it,
Whilst other wight in rest and sleep sojourneth.

(Pound 1953:177)

{199} So clear the flare
That first lit me
To seize
Her whom my soul believes;
If cad
Sneaks,
Blabs, slanders, my joy
Counts little fee
Baits
And their hates.
   I scorn their perk
   And preen, at ease.
Disburse
Can she, and wake
Such firm delights, that I
Am hers, froth, lees
Bigod! from toe to earring.

(ibid.:161, 163)

Flimsy another’s joy, false and distort,
No paregale that she springs not above. […]
Her love-touch by none other mensurate.
To have it not? Alas! Though the pains bite
Deep, torture is but galzeardy and dance,
For in my thought my lust hath touched his aim.
God! Shall I get no more! No fact to best it!

(ibid.:179, 181)