The Translator’s Invisibility

He is sometimes clumsy, and often obscure, and has no fine tact about language, using such words and phrases as “Ballatet,” “ridded,” “to whomso runs,” and others of dubious or unhappy formation. A more serious fault still is that he frequently absolves himself altogether from the duty of rhyming, and if an English blank verse sonnet were ever an endurable thing it would not be when it pretends to represent an Italian original.

(ibid.:91)

Bailey praised Rossetti because he “preserves” a great deal “more of the original rhyme and movement” (ibid.:92). What constituted fluent translation for Bailey was not just univocal meaning, recognizable archaism, and prosodic smoothness, but a Victorian poetic discourse, pre-Raphaelite medievalism, only one among other archaic forms in Pound’s translations. The fact that Pound was violating a hegemonic cultural norm is clear at the beginning of Bailey’s review, where he allied himself with Matthew Arnold and claimed to speak for “any rich and public-spirited statesman of intellectual tastes to-day” (ibid.:89).

Other commentators were more appreciative of Pound’s work as a translator, but their evaluations differed according to which of his changing rationales they accepted. In a 1920 article for the North American Review, May Sinclair, the English novelist who was a friend of Pound’s, offered a favorable assessment of his publications to date. Following Pound’s sense of the cultural remoteness of Provençal poetry, Sinclair argued that the archaism in his translations signalled the absence of any true equivalence in modern English:

{202} By every possible device—the use of strange words like “gentrice” and “plasmatour”—he throws [Provençal poetry] seven centuries back in time. It is to sound as different from modern speech as he can make it, because it belongs to a world that by the very nature of its conventions is inconceivably remote, inconceivably different from our own, a world that we can no longer reconstruct in its reality.

(Homberger 1972:183)

In a 1932 review of Guido Cavalcanti Rime for Hound & Horn, A.Hyatt Mayor followed Pound’s modernist reading of the Italian texts, his positivist sense of their precise language, and therefore didn’t see the strangeness of the archaism, praising the translations instead for establishing a true equivalence to the “freshness” of the Italian:

The quaint language is not a pastiche of pre-Shakespearean sonnets, or an attempt to make Cavalcanti talk Elizabethan the way Andrew Lang made Homer try to talk King James. Ezra Pound is matching Cavalcanti’s early freshness with a color lifted from the early freshness of English poetry.

(Mayor 1932:471)

Sinclair saw that Pound’s translations were interpretive in their use of archaism, meant to indicate the historical distance of the foreign text, whereas Mayor took the translations as independent literary works that could be judged against others in the present or past, and whose value, therefore, was timeless. “The English seems to me as fine as the Italian,” he wrote, “In fact, the line Who were like nothing save her shadow cast is more beautifully definite than Ma simigliavan sol la sua ombria” (ibid.:470).