In modernist translation, these two kinds of difference get collapsed: the foreign text is inscribed with a modernist cultural agenda and then treated as the absolute value that exposes the inadequacy of translations informed by competing agendas. In a 1928 review of Arthur Symons’ translation of Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot acknowledged that a translation constitutes an “interpretation,” never entirely adequate to the source-language text because mediated by the target-language culture, tied to a historical moment: “the present volume should perhaps, even in fairness, be read as a document explicatory of the ’nineties, rather than as a current interpretation” (Eliot 1928:92). Eliot assumed the modernist view that translation is a fundamental domestication resulting in an autonomous text: “the work of translation is to make something foreign, or something remote in time, live with our own life” (ibid.:98). But the only “life” Eliot would allow in translation conformed to his peculiar brand of modernism. What made Symons’s version “wrong,” “a mistranslation,” “a smudgy botch” was precisely that he “enveloped Baudelaire in the Swinburnian violet-coloured London fog of the ’nineties,” turning the French poet into “a contemporary of Dowson and Wilde” (ibid.:91, 99–100, 102, 103). The “right” version was shaped by what Eliot announced as his “general point of view,” “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (ibid.:vii). Thus, “the important fact about Baudelaire is that he was essentially a Christian, {190} born out of his due time, and a classicist, born out of his due time” (ibid.:103), where the “time” that matters is Eliot’s present: “Dowson and Wilde have passed, and Baudelaire remains; he belonged to a generation that preceded them, and yet he is much more our contemporary than they” (ibid.:91).
Pound too privileged foreign texts that he could mobilize in a modernist cultural politics, but his ideological standpoint was different from Eliot’s and more than a little inconsistent. Certain medieval poetries, notably the Provençal troubadour lyric and the dolce stil nuovo, were to be recovered through interpretation, translation, and imitation because they contained values that had been lost in western culture, but that would now be restored by modernism. Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry was assimilated to modernist philosophical and poetic values like positivism and linguistic precision. In Pound’s essay “Cavalcanti” (1928), “the difference between Guido’s precise interpretive metaphor, and the Petrarchan fustian and ornament” is that Guido’s “phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone” (Anderson 1983:xx). This essay also made clear the peculiarly political nature of Pound’s cultural restoration, couching his modernist reading of Cavalcanti’s poetry in a rabid anticlericalism and racism:
We have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies “mezzo oscuro rade” “risplende in sé perpetuale effecto” magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s Paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting, “a lui si tiri” untouched by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease, fanaticisms and excess that produce Savonarola, asceticisms that produce fakirs, St. Clement of Alexandria, with his prohibition of bathing by women.
Elsewhere in the same essay Pound shifted this ideological standpoint by linking his interest in medieval poetry to an anti-commercialism with radical democratic leanings. Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone, “Donna mi prega,”
shows traces of a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, but that may have appeared about as soothing to the Florentine of {191} A.D. 1290 as conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and Bucharin would to-day in a Methodist bankers’ board meeting in Memphis, Term.
Pound, like Bunting and Eliot, concealed his modernist appropriation of foreign texts behind a claim of cultural autonomy for translation. He concluded his 1929 essay “Guido’s Relations” by briefly distinguishing between an “interpretive translation,” prepared as an “accompaniment” to the foreign text, and “the ‘other sort’” of translation, which possesses an aesthetic independence:
The “other sort,” I mean in cases where the “translator” is definitely making a new poem, falls simply in the domain of original writing, or if it does not it must be censured according to equal standards, and praised with some sort of just deduction, assessable only in the particular case.
Pound drew this distinction when he published his own translations. As David Anderson has observed, the 1920 collection Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound ended with a “Main outline of E.P.’s works to date,” in which Pound classified “The Seafarer,” “Exile’s Letter (and Cathay in general),” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” as “Major Personae,” whereas his versions of Cavalcanti and Provençal poets like Arnaut Daniel were labelled “Etudes,” study guides to the foreign texts (Anderson 1983:xviii–xix). Pound saw them all as his “poems,” but used the term “Major Personae” to single out translations that deserved to be judged according to the same standards as his “original writing.” The appeal to these (unnamed) standards means of course that Pound’s translations put foreign texts in the service of a modernist poetics, evident, for example, in his use of free verse and precise language, but also in the selection of foreign texts where a “persona” could be constructed, an independent voice or mask for the poet. Here it is possible to see that the values Pound’s autonomous translations inscribed in foreign texts included not only a modernist poetics, but an individualism that was at once romantic and patriarchal. He characterized the translation that is a “new poem” in the individualistic terms of romantic expressive theory (“the expression of the translator”). And what received expression in translations like “The Seafarer” and “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” was the {192} psychology of an aggressive male or a submissive female in a maledominated world.
Yet Pound’s translation theory and practice were various enough to qualify and redirect his modernist appropriation of foreign texts, often in contradictory ways. His concept of “interpretive translation,” or “translation of accompaniment,” shows that for him the ideal of cultural autonomy coincided with a kind of translation that made explicit its dependence on domestic values, not merely to make a cultural difference at home, but to signal the difference of the foreign text. In the introduction to his translation, Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912) , Pound admitted that “in the matter of these translations and of my knowledge of Tuscan poetry, Rossetti is my father and my mother, but no one man can see everything at once” (Anderson 1983:14). Pound saw Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ s versions as the resource for an archaic lexicon, which he developed to signify the different language and cultural context of Cavalcanti’s poetry:
It is conceivable the poetry of a far-off time or place requires a translation not only of word and of spirit, but of “accompaniment,” that is, that the modern audience must in some measure be made aware of the mental content of the older audience, and of what these others drew from certain fashions of thought and speech. Six centuries of derivative convention and loose usage have obscured the exact significance of such phrases as: “The death of the heart,” and “The departure of the soul.”