The Translator’s Invisibility

E altresim platz de senhor
Quant es primiers a l’envazir
{234} En chaval armatz, sens temor,
Qu’aissi fai los seus enardir
Ab valen vassalatge,
E puois que l’estorns es mesclatz,
Chascus deu esser acesmatz
E segrel d’agradatge,
Que nuls om non es re prezatz
Tro qu’a maintz colps pres e donatz.
Massas e brans elms de color
E scutz trauchar e desgarnir
Veirem a l’intrar de l’estor
E maintz vassals ensems ferir,
Dont anaran aratge
Chaval dels mortz e dels nafratz;
E quant er en l’estorn entratz
Chascus om de paratge,
No pens mas d’asclar chaps e bratz,
Que mais val mortz que vius sobratz.

(Thomas 1971:132)

Thus that lord pleaseth me when he is first to attack, fearless, on his armed charger; and thus he emboldens his folk with valiant vassalge; and then when stour is mingled, each wight should be yare, and follow him exulting; for no man is worth a damn till he has taken and given many a blow.

We shall see battle axes and swords, a-battering colored haumes and a-hacking through shields at entering melee; and many vassals smiting together, whence there run free the horses of the dead and wrecked. And when each man of prowess shall be come into the fray he thinks no more of (merely) breaking heads and arms, for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive.

(Pound 1952:35)

Even though this is a fairly close version, Pound develops a heterogeneous English-language discourse to indicate the historical remoteness of the Provençal text—most obviously, an archaic lexicon. The word “stour” renders the Provençal estorn, estor, meaning “struggle,” “conflict” (Levy 1966). Pound’s choice is virtually a homophonic equivalent, a caique, but it is also an English-language archaism, meaning “armed combat,” initially in Anglo-Saxon, but {235} retained in Middle and Early Modern English as well. It appears in Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid, among many other literary texts, prose and poetry, “pre-Elizabethan” and Elizabethan. Pound’s curious use of “colored haumes” for the Provençal “elms de color” (“painted helmets”), effectively increases the archaism in the translation, but its etymology is uncertain, and it may not strictly be an archaic English word: it seems closer to a variant spelling of the modern French for “helmet,” heaume, than to any archaic English variants for “helm” (cf. OED, s.v. “helm”). What the archaism made seem foreign in this text was the militaristic theme, which Pound at once defined and valorized in a suggestive choice. He translated “chascus om de paratge” as “each man of prowess,” rejecting the possibilities of “paratge” that are more genealogical (“lineage,” “family,” “nobility”) and more indicative of class domination, in favor of a choice that stresses a key value of the feudal aristocracy and genders it male: “valour, bravery, gallantry, martial daring; manly courage, active fortitude” (OED, s.v. “prowess”).

In 1909, a year before the publication of The Spirit of Romance, Pound had published a free adaptation of Bertran’s text, “Sestina: Altaforte,” in which he used the same archaizing strategy. Here, however, Pound celebrated the mere act of aggression, characterized as distinctively aristocratic and masculinist, but devoid of any concept of bravery: