The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 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—
Chi è questa che vien, ch’ogni uom la mira,
Che fa di clarità l’aer tremare!
E mena seco Amor, sì che parlare
Null’uom ne puote, ma ciascun sospira?
Ahi Dio, che sembra quando gli occhi gira!
Dicalo Amor, ch’io nol saprei contare;
Cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare,
Che ciascun’altra in vêr di lei chiam’ira.
Non si potria contar la sua piacenza,
Ch’a lei s’inchina ogni gentil virtute,
E la beltate per sue Dea la mostra.
Non fu sì alta gia la mente nostra,
E non si è posta in noi tanta salute,
Che propriamente n’abbiam conoscenza.
(Anderson 1983:42)
—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: