The Translator’s Invisibility

The favorable judgments came, once again, from reviewers who shared a modernist cultural agenda. In England, the Poetry Review {206} praised the “clever versification” of the Daniel versions, while treating their discursive heterogeneity with the sort of elitism Pound sometimes voiced in his own celebrations of earlier poetries: “It is said that Arnaut was deliberately obscure, so that his songs should not be understood by the vulgar. Rather modern” (Graham 1953:472).[1] In the United States, John Edwards’ review for Poetry shared the basic assumption of his Berkeley doctoral dissertation on Pound—namely, that this was a canonical American writer—and so the review complained at length that the translations deserved much better editorial treatment than New Directions gave them (Edwards 1954:238). Edwards’ sympathy for modernism was apparent in his unacknowledged quotation from Kenner’s introduction to the translations (said to represent “an extension of the possibilities of poetic speech in our language” (ibid.:238)), but also in a remarkable description of the Cavalcanti versions that was blind to their dense archaism:

One need only read Cavalcanti’s Sonnet XVI in the Rossetti version (Early Italian Poets), then in the first Pound attempt (Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, 1912), and finally in the 1931 Pound translation given here, and one can watch the crust falling off and the line grow clean and firm, bringing the original over into English, not only the words but the poetry.

(ibid.:238)

Edwards accepted Pound’s modernist rationale for his translations: that Cavalcanti’s Italian texts were distinguished by linguistic precision, and that pre-Elizabethan English possessed sufficient “clarity and explicitness” to translate them (Anderson 1983:250). But Edwards lacked Pound’s contrary awareness that this strategy made the translations less “clean and firm” than odd or unfamiliar, likely to be taken as “a mere exercise in quaintness” (ibid.).

There were also reviewers who were more astute in understanding the modernist agenda of the translations, but who were nonetheless skeptical of its cultural value. In a review for the New Statesman and Nation, the English poet and critic Donald Davie, who has attacked the project of Pound’s poetry even while reinforcing its canonical status in academic literary criticism,[2] saw that the interpretive translations came with a peculiarly dogmatic claim of cultural autonomy, most evident in their archaism:

{207} when he translates Cavalcanti, he aspires to give an absolute translation—not, of course, in the sense that it is to reproduce in English all the effects of the original, but in the sense that it is to be Cavalcanti in English for good and all, not just for this generation or the next few. Hence the archaic diction, sometimes with olde-Englysshe spelling, […] Pound believes that English came nearest to accommodating the sort of effects Cavalcanti gets in Italian, in one specific period, late-Chaucerian or early Tudor.

(Davie 1953:264)