One need only read Cavalcanti’s Sonnet XVI in the Rossetti version (Early Italian Poets), then in the first Pound attempt (Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, 1912), and finally in the 1931 Pound translation given here, and one can watch the crust falling off and the line grow clean and firm, bringing the original over into English, not only the words but the poetry.
Edwards accepted Pound’s modernist rationale for his translations: that Cavalcanti’s Italian texts were distinguished by linguistic precision, and that pre-Elizabethan English possessed sufficient “clarity and explicitness” to translate them (Anderson 1983:250). But Edwards lacked Pound’s contrary awareness that this strategy made the translations less “clean and firm” than odd or unfamiliar, likely to be taken as “a mere exercise in quaintness” (ibid.).
There were also reviewers who were more astute in understanding the modernist agenda of the translations, but who were nonetheless skeptical of its cultural value. In a review for the New Statesman and Nation, the English poet and critic Donald Davie, who has attacked the project of Pound’s poetry even while reinforcing its canonical status in academic literary criticism,[2] saw that the interpretive translations came with a peculiarly dogmatic claim of cultural autonomy, most evident in their archaism:
{207} when he translates Cavalcanti, he aspires to give an absolute translation—not, of course, in the sense that it is to reproduce in English all the effects of the original, but in the sense that it is to be Cavalcanti in English for good and all, not just for this generation or the next few. Hence the archaic diction, sometimes with olde-Englysshe spelling, […] Pound believes that English came nearest to accommodating the sort of effects Cavalcanti gets in Italian, in one specific period, late-Chaucerian or early Tudor.
But Pound never assumed an “absolute” equivalence between period styles. In fact, in “Guido’s Relations,” he pointed to the impossibility of finding an exact English-language equivalent: at least one quality of the Italian texts “simply does not occur in English poetry,” so “there is no ready-made verbal pigment for its objectification”; using pre-Elizabethan English actually involved “the ‘misrepresentation’ not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity” for Italian readers (Anderson 1983:250). What seemed too absolute for Davie was really Pound’s rationale for using archaism: he didn’t like the translations because he didn’t accept the modernist readings of the foreign texts (“I still ask out of my ignorance if Cavalcanti is worth all the claims Pound has made for him, and all the time he has given him” (Davie 1953:264)). Yet Davie did accept the modernist ideal of aesthetic independence, erasing the distinction between interpretive translation and new poem by evaluating all Pound’s translations as literary texts in their own right—and finding the most experimental ones mediocre performances. The Cavalcanti versions “give the impression of not a Wyatt but a Surrey, the graceful virtuoso of a painfully limited and ultimately trivial convention” (ibid.).
George Whicher of Amherst College reviewed Pound’s translations twice, and on both occasions the judgments were unfavorable, resting on an informed but critical appreciation of modernist poetics. In the academic journal American Literature, Whicher felt that the “evidence contained in this book” did not support Kenner’s claim of cultural autonomy: “far from making a new form, Pound was merely producing a clever approximation to an old one” (Whicher 1954:120). In the end, Pound’s work as a translator indicated his marginality in the American literary canon, “somewhat apart from the tradition of the truly creative American poets like Whitman, Melville, and Emily {208} Dickinson” (ibid.:121). Whicher measured Pound’s translations against his call for linguistic precision and faulted their “pedantic diction”: “he had not yet freed himself from the affectation of archaism which marks and mars his ‘Ballad of the Goodly Frere’” (ibid.:120).[3] In the New York Herald Tribune, Whicher joined Davie in questioning Pound’s choice of foreign texts, using the translations as an opportunity to treat modernism as passé, perhaps once seen as “revolutionary,” but rather “dull” in 1953:
It is almost impossible to realize […] how revolutionary was the publication of “Cavalcanti Poems” in the year 1912. Here was a first conscious blow in the campaign to deflate poetry to its bare essentials. […] Now, however, we wonder how so excellent a craftsman as Pound could have labored through so many dull poems, even with the help of a minor Italian.
The negative reviews of these and other critics (Leslie Fiedler’s, in a glance at Pound’s hospital confinement, called his Daniel versions “Dante Gabriel Rossetti gone off his rocker!” (Fiedler 1962:120)) signalled a midcentury reaction against modernism that banished Pound’s translations to the fringes of Anglo-American literary culture (Perkins 1987; von Hallberg, 1985), The center in English-language poetry translation was held by fluent strategies that were modern, but not entirely modernist—domesticating in their assimilation of foreign texts to the transparent discourse that prevailed in every form of contemporary print culture; consistent in their refusal of the discursive heterogeneity by which modernist translation sought to signify linguistic and cultural differences. The review of Pound’s translations written by the influential Dudley Fitts exemplified this cultural situation in the sharpest terms.
Fitts (1903–1968) was a poet and critic who from the late thirties onward gained a distinguished reputation as a translator of classical texts, for the most part drama by Sophocles and Aristophanes. He translated Greek and Latin epigrams as well and edited a noted anthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry. As translator and editor of translations, he produced sixteen books, mainly with the large commercial press Harcourt Brace. His reviews of poetry and translations were widely published in various magazines, mass and small circulation, including some linked with modernism: {209} Atlantic Monthly, The Criterion, Hound & Horn, Poetry, Transition. The entry on Fitts in Contemporary Authors concisely indicates the cultural authority he wielded during the fifties and sixties, while offering a glimpse of the canonical translation strategy his work represented:
Dudley Fitts was one of the foremost translators from the ancient Greek in this century. Differing from the procedure many scholars follow, Fitts attempted to evoke the inherent character from the work by taking certain liberties with the text. The result, most reviewers agreed, was a version as pertinent and meaningful to the modern reader as it was to the audiences of Sophocles and Aristophanes.
[2]
Davie’s commentary on Pound’s writing includes two books, 1964 and 1976. Homberger discusses Davie’s “sustained and occasionally bitter attack upon the intention behind the Cantos” (Homberger 1972:28–29).
[3]
See also Stern 1953:
What is peculiar in Pound’s translating shows up mostly in the famous versions of Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel. Away from the didactic context, Pound has tended to burden some of the translations with an antique weight (perhaps in order to carry what has since become staple or cliché or what has since vanished altogether from the tradition). […] The finest English verse in
Edwin Muir similarly praises “all the translations in the book except those from Guido Cavalcanti,” adding, somewhat eccentrically, that “the poems from the Provençal and the Chinese bring off the miracle” (Muir 1953:40).