The translation of accompaniment required bilingual publication. It signified the cultural difference of the foreign text by deviating from current English usage and thereby sending the reader across the page to confront the foreign language. “As to the atrocities of my translation,” Pound wrote in “Cavalcanti,” “all that can be said in excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and committed with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated” (Anderson 1983:221). In a 1927 “Postscript” to his variorum edition of Cavalcanti’s poems, Pound criticized his archaizing strategy, but felt it needed further refinement, not abandonment, in order to suggest the generic distinctions in the Italian texts: “the translator might, with profit, have accentuated the differences and used for the occasional pieces a lighter, a more Browningesque, and less heavy Swinburnian language” {193} (ibid.:5). A couple of years later, in “Guido’s Relations,” Pound crankily condemned his earlier use of archaism, arguing that he “was obfuscated by the Victorian language,” “the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary” (ibid.:243). But once again he didn’t decide to abandon it. On the contrary, his idea was that the discourses in English-language translation should be as heterogeneous as possible: “one can only learn a series of Englishes,” he insisted, and so “it is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they were fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons” (ibid.:244). When, in this 1929 essay, Pound offered his own translation of Cavalcanti as an example, he described his discourse as “pre-Elizabethan English” (ibid.:250).
Pound’s interpretive translations display this increasing heterogeneity, particularly since he revised them repeatedly over the course of several decades. His debt to Rossetti was announced early, in The Spirit of Romance (1910), where he quoted often and admiringly from the Victorian poet’s versions of the dolce stil novisti. When Pound wrote his own first versions of Cavalcanti’s poems, they sometimes echoed Rossetti’s. Cavalcanti’s evocation of the angelic lady—
—was translated fluently by Rossetti, who resorted to a relatively unobtrusive archaism in verse form (an Italianate sonnet) and in diction (“thereon,” “benison,” “ne’er”)—relatively unobtrusive, that is, in the context of Victorian poetry:
Some of Rossetti’s deviations from the Italian improve the fluency of the translation by simplifying the syntax. “At whose side is Love himself,” for instance, is a free rendering of “mena seco Amor” that reads much more easily than a closer version like “she leads Love with herself.” Rossetti also added different nuances to Cavalcanti’s idealization of the lady, making it more moral or spiritual, even theological, by using “benison” for “umiltà” (“humility,” “meekness,” “modesty”), “honour” for “piacenza” (“pleasantness”), and “redemption” for “salute” (“health,” “salvation”). Pound’s 1910 version quoted Rossetti’s, but it adhered more closely to the Italian text and noticeably increased the archaism. Next to Rossetti’s version, moreover, Pound’s offered a more human image of the lady by referring to her “modesty” and “charm” and suggesting that she commands the attention of an aristocratic elite (“noble powers”). The lover meanwhile possesses a knightly “daring” that “ne’er before did look so high,” spiritually or socially:
The version Pound published in his 1912 collection, Sonnets and Ballate, constituted a substantial revision, but it did not alter his basic archaizing strategy:
Pound retained some of his borrowings from Rossetti and used additional archaic forms (“adown,” “godhead,” “quest”) that introduced a romantic medievalism traced with misogyny. The opening characterized the lady as a Keatsian “belle dame sans merci,” implying that she exploits her commanding beauty (“drawing all men’s gaze”) to victimize her many admirers (“each sighs piteously”) with some frequency (“adown her trodden ways”). There was even a hint of moral imperfection, a potential for infidelity (“her glance strays”).
In 1932, Pound published Guido Cavalcanti Rime, a critical edition of the Italian texts along with several translations that included a final version {196} of this sonnet. Here the archaism was pushed to an extreme, apparent not just in Pound’s lexicon, syntax, and orthography, but also in pseudo-archaic neologism (“herward”). The lady underwent yet another metamorphosis, this time into a mystical image “that borders the visible”: