The lady is portrayed as perceptible to the senses but unattainable in her spirituality, a neo-Platonic Idea that exceeds even the quasiphysical “embrace” of human “thought.” This representation certainly pinpoints a central theme in the dolce stil nuovo, but it is also recognizable as Pound’s modernist reading of the medieval poetries he celebrated: “The conception of the body as perfected instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades” (ibid.:206); “the central theme of the troubadours, is the dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption” (ibid.:205). Just as in “Philip Massinger” (1920) Eliot posited a unified “sensibility” in English literary culture before the late seventeenth century, “a period when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses” (Eliot 1950:185), Pound discovered a “harmony of the sentient” in Cavalcanti, “where the thought has its demarcation, the substance its virtù, where stupid men have not reduced all ‘energy’ to unbounded undistinguished abstraction” (Anderson 1983:209).
{197} On the thematic level, Pound’s translations inscribed Cavalcanti’s texts with values that differed from Rossetti’s in being both modernist and patriarchal, notably in the representation of the lady, transformed by his revisions from “the inferior thing ready for instant consumption” into “the fine thing held in the mind.” But Pound’s successive versions were also interrogative in their relation to the Italian texts and to Rossetti’s translations, showing how the female idealization of the dolce stil novisti and the pre-Raphaelites assumed a female degradation, a misogynist suspicion that the lady’s value is “inferior,” dependent on the male imagination. In fashioning himself as a poet-translator, Pound was competing against two poetic “fathers,” Cavalcanti and Rossetti, and this oedipal competition took the form of revising the image of the lady.
On the level of discourse, however, Pound’s translations don’t easily support the positivist concept of language in his modernist readings. The dense archaism hardly produces the illusionistic effect of transparency that he valued in the dolce stil novisti, what he described so rapturously as the virtual invisibility of literary form, “the glass under water” (Anderson 1983:208). The peculiarities of Pound’s archaic text preempt any illusionism by calling attention to the language as a specific kind of English, a poetic discourse linked to a specific historical moment that is neither Pound’s nor Cavalcanti’s nor Rossetti’s. The final version of the sonnet, “Who is she that comes,” was the text Pound quoted in “Guido’s Relations” to illustrate how “pre-Elizabethan English” can be used to translate Cavalcanti. Pound’s rationale for this discourse was distinctively modernist: he described the pre-Elizabethan as “a period when the writers were still intent on clarity and explicitness, still preferring them to magniloquence and the thundering phrase” (ibid.:250). But Pound also knew that his archaizing strategy resulted less in clarity and explicitness than in a sense of oddity or unfamiliarity:
The objections to such a method are: the doubt as to whether one has the right to take a serious poem and turn it into a mere exercise in quaintness; the “misrepresentation” not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity, by which I mean that Guido’s thirteenth-century language is to twentieth-century Italian sense much less archaic than any fourteenth-, fifteenth-, or early sixteenth-century English is for us.
{198} The archaism did not achieve any greater fidelity to the Italian texts, nor did it establish an analogy between two past cultures, one Italian, the other English. Despite Pound’s modernist pronouncements, the archaism could not overcome “six centuries of derivative convention and loose usage” to communicate “the exact significances of such phrases as: ‘The death of the heart,’ and ‘The departure of the soul’” because it pointed to a different literary culture in a different language at a different historical moment (Anderson 1983:12). Pound’s pre-Elizabethan English could do no more than signify the remoteness of Cavalcanti’s poetry, along with the impossibility of finding any exact linguistic and literary equivalent. And the archaism did this only because it radically departed from cultural norms that currently prevailed in English. This is perhaps most noticeable in Pound’s archaic prosody: as Anderson has observed, he wanted “to free the cadence of his English versions from the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan iambic pentameter,” still the standard for English-language verse at the beginning of the twentieth century (Anderson 1982:13; Easthope 1983).
Pound’s comments on his versions of Arnaut Daniel revealed his acute awareness that current cultural norms constrained his work as a translator. These were his most experimental translations, texts where he developed the most heterogeneous discourses. Like the later Cavalcanti translations, they mixed various archaic forms, mainly “Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism” (Pound’s notation for “Rossetti: Italian poets” in The ABC of Reading (Pound 1960:133)) and pre-Elizabethan English, culled mainly from Gavin Douglas’s 1531 version of the Aeneid, but also from such early Tudor poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt (McDougal 1972:114; Anderson 1982:13). And there were occasional traces of twentieth-century American colloquialism and foreign languages, particularly French and Provençal. The following exemplary passages are excerpts from the translations Pound published in his essay, “Arnaut Daniel” (1920):