The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 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.
(Davie 1953:264)
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