12.07.2015 Views

venuti

venuti

venuti

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

192 The Translator’s Invisibilitypsychology of an aggressive male or a submissive female in a maledominatedworld.Yet Pound’s translation theory and practice were various enough toqualify and redirect his modernist appropriation of foreign texts, oftenin contradictory ways. His concept of “interpretive translation,” or“translation of accompaniment,” shows that for him the ideal ofcultural autonomy coincided with a kind of translation that madeexplicit its dependence on domestic values, not merely to make acultural difference at home, but to signal the difference of the foreigntext. In the introduction to his translation, Sonnets and Ballate of GuidoCavalcanti (1912) , Pound admitted that “in the matter of thesetranslations and of my knowledge of Tuscan poetry, Rossetti is myfather and my mother, but no one man can see everything at once”(Anderson 1983:14). Pound saw Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ s versions asthe resource for an archaic lexicon, which he developed to signify thedifferent language and cultural context of Cavalcanti’s poetry:It is conceivable the poetry of a far-off time or place requires atranslation not only of word and of spirit, but of “accompaniment,”that is, that the modern audience must in some measure be madeaware of the mental content of the older audience, and of what theseothers drew from certain fashions of thought and speech. Sixcenturies of derivative convention and loose usage have obscuredthe 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. Itsignified the cultural difference of the foreign text by deviating fromcurrent English usage and thereby sending the reader across the pageto confront the foreign language. “As to the atrocities of mytranslation,” Pound wrote in “Cavalcanti,” “all that can be said inexcuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, andcommitted with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further intothe original than it would without them have penetrated” (Anderson1983:221). In a 1927 “Postscript” to his variorum edition of Cavalcanti’spoems, Pound criticized his archaizing strategy, but felt it neededfurther refinement, not abandonment, in order to suggest the genericdistinctions in the Italian texts: “the translator might, with profit, haveaccentuated the differences and used for the occasional pieces a lighter,a more Browningesque, and less heavy Swinburnian language”

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!