The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

192 The Translator’s Invisibility
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.”
(ibid.:12)
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”