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Margin 193(ibid.:5). A couple of years later, in “Guido’s Relations,” Pound crankilycondemned his earlier use of archaism, arguing that he “wasobfuscated by the Victorian language,” “the crust of dead English, thesediment present in my own available vocabulary” (ibid.:243). Butonce again he didn’t decide to abandon it. On the contrary, his idea wasthat the discourses in English-language translation should be asheterogeneous as possible: “one can only learn a series of Englishes,”he insisted, and so “it is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions ofprecurrent authors, even when they were fools or flapdoodles orTennysons” (ibid.:244). When, in this 1929 essay, Pound offered hisown translation of Cavalcanti as an example, he described hisdiscourse as “pre-Elizabethan English” (ibid.:250).Pound’s interpretive translations display this increasingheterogeneity, particularly since he revised them repeatedly over thecourse of several decades. His debt to Rossetti was announced early, inThe Spirit of Romance (1910), where he quoted often and admiringlyfrom the Victorian poet’s versions of the dolce stil novisti. When Poundwrote his own first versions of Cavalcanti’s poems, they sometimesechoed 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 parlareNull’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 relativelyunobtrusive archaism in verse form (an Italianate sonnet) and indiction (“thereon,” “benison,” “ne’er”)—relatively unobtrusive, that is,in the context of Victorian poetry:

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