The Translator’s Invisibility

But Pound never assumed an “absolute” equivalence between period styles. In fact, in “Guido’s Relations,” he pointed to the impossibility of finding an exact English-language equivalent: at least one quality of the Italian texts “simply does not occur in English poetry,” so “there is no ready-made verbal pigment for its objectification”; using pre-Elizabethan English actually involved “the ‘misrepresentation’ not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity” for Italian readers (Anderson 1983:250). What seemed too absolute for Davie was really Pound’s rationale for using archaism: he didn’t like the translations because he didn’t accept the modernist readings of the foreign texts (“I still ask out of my ignorance if Cavalcanti is worth all the claims Pound has made for him, and all the time he has given him” (Davie 1953:264)). Yet Davie did accept the modernist ideal of aesthetic independence, erasing the distinction between interpretive translation and new poem by evaluating all Pound’s translations as literary texts in their own right—and finding the most experimental ones mediocre performances. The Cavalcanti versions “give the impression of not a Wyatt but a Surrey, the graceful virtuoso of a painfully limited and ultimately trivial convention” (ibid.).

George Whicher of Amherst College reviewed Pound’s translations twice, and on both occasions the judgments were unfavorable, resting on an informed but critical appreciation of modernist poetics. In the academic journal American Literature, Whicher felt that the “evidence contained in this book” did not support Kenner’s claim of cultural autonomy: “far from making a new form, Pound was merely producing a clever approximation to an old one” (Whicher 1954:120). In the end, Pound’s work as a translator indicated his marginality in the American literary canon, “somewhat apart from the tradition of the truly creative American poets like Whitman, Melville, and Emily {208} Dickinson” (ibid.:121). Whicher measured Pound’s translations against his call for linguistic precision and faulted their “pedantic diction”: “he had not yet freed himself from the affectation of archaism which marks and mars his ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’” (ibid.:120).[3] In the New York Herald Tribune, Whicher joined Davie in questioning Pound’s choice of foreign texts, using the translations as an opportunity to treat modernism as passé, perhaps once seen as “revolutionary,” but rather “dull” in 1953:

It is almost impossible to realize […] how revolutionary was the publication of “Cavalcanti Poems” in the year 1912. Here was a first conscious blow in the campaign to deflate poetry to its bare essentials. […] Now, however, we wonder how so excellent a craftsman as Pound could have labored through so many dull poems, even with the help of a minor Italian.

(Whicher 1953:25)

The negative reviews of these and other critics (Leslie Fiedler’s, in a glance at Pound’s hospital confinement, called his Daniel versions “Dante Gabriel Rossetti gone off his rocker!” (Fiedler 1962:120)) signalled a midcentury reaction against modernism that banished Pound’s translations to the fringes of Anglo-American literary culture (Perkins 1987; von Hallberg, 1985), The center in English-language poetry translation was held by fluent strategies that were modern, but not entirely modernist—domesticating in their assimilation of foreign texts to the transparent discourse that prevailed in every form of contemporary print culture; consistent in their refusal of the discursive heterogeneity by which modernist translation sought to signify linguistic and cultural differences. The review of Pound’s translations written by the influential Dudley Fitts exemplified this cultural situation in the sharpest terms.