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198 The Translator’s InvisibilityThe archaism did not achieve any greater fidelity to the Italian texts,nor did it establish an analogy between two past cultures, one Italian,the other English. Despite Pound’s modernist pronouncements, thearchaism could not overcome “six centuries of derivative conventionand loose usage” to communicate “the exact significances of suchphrases as: ‘The death of the heart,’ and ‘The departure of the soul’”because it pointed to a different literary culture in a different languageat a different historical moment (Anderson 1983:12). Pound’s pre-Elizabethan English could do no more than signify the remoteness ofCavalcanti’s poetry, along with the impossibility of finding any exactlinguistic and literary equivalent. And the archaism did this onlybecause it radically departed from cultural norms that currentlyprevailed in English. This is perhaps most noticeable in Pound’sarchaic prosody: as Anderson has observed, he wanted “to free thecadence of his English versions from the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan iambic pentameter,” still the standard for Englishlanguageverse at the beginning of the twentieth century (Anderson1982:13; Easthope 1983).Pound’s comments on his versions of Arnaut Daniel revealed hisacute awareness that current cultural norms constrained his work as atranslator. These were his most experimental translations, texts wherehe developed the most heterogeneous discourses. Like the laterCavalcanti translations, they mixed various archaic forms, mainly“Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism” (Pound’s notation for “Rossetti: Italianpoets” in The ABC of Reading (Pound 1960:133)) and pre-ElizabethanEnglish, culled mainly from Gavin Douglas’s 1531 version of theAeneid, but also from such early Tudor poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt(McDougal 1972:114; Anderson 1982:13). And there were occasionaltraces of twentieth-century American colloquialism and foreignlanguages, particularly French and Provençal. The followingexemplary passages are excerpts from the translations Poundpublished in his essay, “Arnaut Daniel” (1920):When I see leaf, and flower and fruitCome forth upon light lynd and bough,And hear the frogs in rillet bruit,And birds quhitter in forest now,Love inkirlie doth leaf and flower and bear,And trick my night from me, and stealing waste it,Whilst other wight in rest and sleep sojourneth.(Pound 1953:177)