The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 235
retained in Middle and Early Modern English as well. It appears in
Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid, among many other literary texts, prose and
poetry, “pre-Elizabethan” and Elizabethan. Pound’s curious use of
“colored haumes” for the Provençal “elms de color” (“painted
helmets”), effectively increases the archaism in the translation, but its
etymology is uncertain, and it may not strictly be an archaic English
word: it seems closer to a variant spelling of the modern French for
“helmet,” heaume, than to any archaic English variants for “helm” (cf.
OED, s.v. “helm”). What the archaism made seem foreign in this text
was the militaristic theme, which Pound at once defined and
valorized in a suggestive choice. He translated “chascus om de
paratge” as “each man of prowess,” rejecting the possibilities of
“paratge” that are more genealogical (“lineage,” “family,” “nobility”)
and more indicative of class domination, in favor of a choice that
stresses a key value of the feudal aristocracy and genders it male:
“valour, bravery, gallantry, martial daring; manly courage, active
fortitude” (OED , s.v. “prowess”).
In 1909, a year before the publication of The Spirit of Romance,
Pound had published a free adaptation of Bertran’s text, “Sestina:
Altaforte,” in which he used the same archaizing strategy. Here,
however, Pound celebrated the mere act of aggression, characterized
as distinctively aristocratic and masculinist, but devoid of any concept
of bravery:
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.
(Pound 1956:8)
As Peter Makin has argued, Pound’s appropriations of earlier poets
like Bertran serve “as an exemplum, a demonstration of a possible way
of living,” and they are laden with various cultural and ideological
determinations (Makin 1978:42). Makin links the “phallic
aggressiveness” of “Sestina: Altaforte” to Pound’s esteem for “the
‘medieval clean line’” in architecture, as well as to his eulogies of
dictators past and present, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of
Renaissance Rimini and Benito Mussolini, “a male of the species”
(Makin 1978:29–35; Pound 1954:83).