Pound saw these as interpretive translations that highlighted the elaborate stanzaic forms of the Provençal texts, mimicking their rhythms and sound effects. But he also knew that by doing so his translations ran counter to literary values that prevailed in modern European languages like English and French. In the essay on Daniel, he apologized for his deviations:
in extenuation of the language of my verses, I would point out that the Provençals were not constrained by the modern literary sense. Their restraints were the tune and rhymescheme, they were not constrained by a need for certain qualities of writing, without which no modern poem is {200} complete or satisfactory. They were not competing with De Maupassant’s prose.
The mention of De Maupassant indicates that Pound’s translations could signify the difference of Daniel’s musical prosody only by challenging the transparent discourse that dominates “the modern literary sense,” most conspicuously in realistic fiction. To mimic an archaic verse form, Pound developed a discursive heterogeneity that refused fluency, privileging the signifier over the signified, risking not just the unidiomatic, but the unintelligible. In a 1922 letter to Felix Schelling, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who taught Pound English literature and unfavorably reviewed his Daniel translations, Pound cited the cultural remoteness of troubadour poetry as “the reason for the archaic dialect”: “the Provençal feeling is archaic, we are ages away from it” (Pound 1950:179). And Pound measured this remoteness on a scale of current English-language values:
I have proved that the Provençal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisable. The troubadour was not worried by our sense of style, our “literary values,” so he could shovel in words in any order he liked. […] The troubadour, fortunately perhaps, was not worried about English order; he got certain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music without bothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which we no longer have.
Pound’s translations signified the foreignness of the foreign text, not because they were faithful or accurate—he admitted that “if I have succeeded in indicating some of the properties […] I have also let [others] go by the board” (Pound 1954:116)—but because they deviated from domestic literary canons in English.
Pound’s first versions of Cavalcanti’s poetry did in fact look alien to his contemporaries. In a review of the Sonnets and Ballate that appeared in the English Poetry Review (1912), professor of Italian Arundel del Re found the translation defective and not entirely comprehensible, including the bilingual title: “The translation of the ‘Sonnets and Ballate’—why not Sonetti e Ballate or Sonnets and Ballads?—show the author to be earnestly striving after a vital idea of which one sometimes catches a glimpse amidst the general tangle and disorder” {201} (Homberger 1972:88). Yet Del Re recognized the historicizing effect of Pound’s archaism, quoting phrases from Pound’s own introduction to describe it: “Notwithstanding its almost overpowering defects this is a sincere if slip-shod attempt to translate into English the ‘accompaniment’ and ‘the mental content of what the contemporaries of Guido Cavalcanti drew forth from certain forms of thought and speech’” (ibid.). In John Bailey’s review for the Times Literary Supplement, the “strangeness” of Pound’s translation also began with the choice of foreign text: he felt that “though not belonging to the high universal order,” Cavalcanti’s poetry does possess the “peculiar charm” of “an escape from all that is contemporary or even actual into [the] hortus conclusus of art” (Homberger 1972:88). But what Bailey found unpleasantly strange about Pound’s translation was that, compared to Rossetti’s, it was utterly lacking in fluency:
He is sometimes clumsy, and often obscure, and has no fine tact about language, using such words and phrases as “Ballatet,” “ridded,” “to whomso runs,” and others of dubious or unhappy formation. A more serious fault still is that he frequently absolves himself altogether from the duty of rhyming, and if an English blank verse sonnet were ever an endurable thing it would not be when it pretends to represent an Italian original.
Bailey praised Rossetti because he “preserves” a great deal “more of the original rhyme and movement” (ibid.:92). What constituted fluent translation for Bailey was not just univocal meaning, recognizable archaism, and prosodic smoothness, but a Victorian poetic discourse, pre-Raphaelite medievalism, only one among other archaic forms in Pound’s translations. The fact that Pound was violating a hegemonic cultural norm is clear at the beginning of Bailey’s review, where he allied himself with Matthew Arnold and claimed to speak for “any rich and public-spirited statesman of intellectual tastes to-day” (ibid.:89).
Other commentators were more appreciative of Pound’s work as a translator, but their evaluations differed according to which of his changing rationales they accepted. In a 1920 article for the North American Review, May Sinclair, the English novelist who was a friend of Pound’s, offered a favorable assessment of his publications to date. Following Pound’s sense of the cultural remoteness of Provençal poetry, Sinclair argued that the archaism in his translations signalled the absence of any true equivalence in modern English:
{202} By every possible device—the use of strange words like “gentrice” and “plasmatour”—he throws [Provençal poetry] seven centuries back in time. It is to sound as different from modern speech as he can make it, because it belongs to a world that by the very nature of its conventions is inconceivably remote, inconceivably different from our own, a world that we can no longer reconstruct in its reality.
In a 1932 review of Guido Cavalcanti Rime for Hound & Horn, A.Hyatt Mayor followed Pound’s modernist reading of the Italian texts, his positivist sense of their precise language, and therefore didn’t see the strangeness of the archaism, praising the translations instead for establishing a true equivalence to the “freshness” of the Italian:
The quaint language is not a pastiche of pre-Shakespearean sonnets, or an attempt to make Cavalcanti talk Elizabethan the way Andrew Lang made Homer try to talk King James. Ezra Pound is matching Cavalcanti’s early freshness with a color lifted from the early freshness of English poetry.
Sinclair saw that Pound’s translations were interpretive in their use of archaism, meant to indicate the historical distance of the foreign text, whereas Mayor took the translations as independent literary works that could be judged against others in the present or past, and whose value, therefore, was timeless. “The English seems to me as fine as the Italian,” he wrote, “In fact, the line Who were like nothing save her shadow cast is more beautifully definite than Ma simigliavan sol la sua ombria” (ibid.:470).
Pound’s theory and practice of interpretive translation reverse the priorities set by modernist commentators on translation like Mayor, Bunting, Eliot, and Pound himself. Interpretive translation contradicts the ideal of autonomy by pointing to the various conditions of the translated text, foreign as well as domestic, and thus makes clear that translation can make a cultural difference at home only by signifying the difference of the foreign text. The discursive heterogeneity of Pound’s interpretive translations, especially his use of archaism, was both an innovation of modernist poetics and a deviation from current linguistic and literary values, sufficiently noticeable to seem alien. Pound shows {203} that in translation, the foreignness of the foreign text is available only in cultural forms that already circulate in the target language, some with greater cultural capital than others. In translation, the foreignness of the foreign text can only be what currently appears “foreign” in the target-language culture, in relation to dominant domestic values, and therefore only as values that are marginal in various degrees, whether because they are residual, survivals of previous cultural forms in the target language, or because they are emergent, transformations of previous forms that are recognizably different, or because they are specialized or nonstandard, forms linked to specific groups with varying degrees of social power and prestige. The foreign can only be a disruption of the current hierarchy of values in the target-language culture, an estrangement of them that seeks to establish a cultural difference by drawing on the marginal. Translation, then, always involves a process of domestication, an exchange of source-language intelligibilities for target-language ones. But domestication need not mean assimilation, i.e., a conservative reduction of the foreign text to dominant domestic values. It can also mean resistance, through a recovery of the residual or an affiliation with the emergent or the dominated—choosing to translate a foreign text, for instance, that is excluded by prevalent English-language translation methods or by the current canon of foreign literature in English and thus forcing a methodological revision and a canon reformation.