The Translator’s Invisibility

Pound saw these as interpretive translations that highlighted the elaborate stanzaic forms of the Provençal texts, mimicking their rhythms and sound effects. But he also knew that by doing so his translations ran counter to literary values that prevailed in modern European languages like English and French. In the essay on Daniel, he apologized for his deviations:

in extenuation of the language of my verses, I would point out that the Provençals were not constrained by the modern literary sense. Their restraints were the tune and rhymescheme, they were not constrained by a need for certain qualities of writing, without which no modern poem is {200} complete or satisfactory. They were not competing with De Maupassant’s prose.

(Pound 1954:115)

The mention of De Maupassant indicates that Pound’s translations could signify the difference of Daniel’s musical prosody only by challenging the transparent discourse that dominates “the modern literary sense,” most conspicuously in realistic fiction. To mimic an archaic verse form, Pound developed a discursive heterogeneity that refused fluency, privileging the signifier over the signified, risking not just the unidiomatic, but the unintelligible. In a 1922 letter to Felix Schelling, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who taught Pound English literature and unfavorably reviewed his Daniel translations, Pound cited the cultural remoteness of troubadour poetry as “the reason for the archaic dialect”: “the Provençal feeling is archaic, we are ages away from it” (Pound 1950:179). And Pound measured this remoteness on a scale of current English-language values:

I have proved that the Provençal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisable. The troubadour was not worried by our sense of style, our “literary values,” so he could shovel in words in any order he liked. […] The troubadour, fortunately perhaps, was not worried about English order; he got certain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music without bothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which we no longer have.

(ibid.)

Pound’s translations signified the foreignness of the foreign text, not because they were faithful or accurate—he admitted that “if I have succeeded in indicating some of the properties […] I have also let [others] go by the board” (Pound 1954:116)—but because they deviated from domestic literary canons in English.

Pound’s first versions of Cavalcanti’s poetry did in fact look alien to his contemporaries. In a review of the Sonnets and Ballate that appeared in the English Poetry Review (1912), professor of Italian Arundel del Re found the translation defective and not entirely comprehensible, including the bilingual title: “The translation of the ‘Sonnets and Ballate’—why not Sonetti e Ballate or Sonnets and Ballads?—show the author to be earnestly striving after a vital idea of which one sometimes catches a glimpse amidst the general tangle and disorder” {201} (Homberger 1972:88). Yet Del Re recognized the historicizing effect of Pound’s archaism, quoting phrases from Pound’s own introduction to describe it: “Notwithstanding its almost overpowering defects this is a sincere if slip-shod attempt to translate into English the ‘accompaniment’ and ‘the mental content of what the contemporaries of Guido Cavalcanti drew forth from certain forms of thought and speech’” (ibid.). In John Bailey’s review for the Times Literary Supplement, the “strangeness” of Pound’s translation also began with the choice of foreign text: he felt that “though not belonging to the high universal order,” Cavalcanti’s poetry does possess the “peculiar charm” of “an escape from all that is contemporary or even actual into [the] hortus conclusus of art” (Homberger 1972:88). But what Bailey found unpleasantly strange about Pound’s translation was that, compared to Rossetti’s, it was utterly lacking in fluency: