venuti

200 The Translator’s Invisibilitycomplete or satisfactory. They were not competing with DeMaupassant’s prose.(Pound 1954:115)The mention of De Maupassant indicates that Pound’s translationscould signify the difference of Daniel’s musical prosody only bychallenging the transparent discourse that dominates “the modernliterary sense,” most conspicuously in realistic fiction. To mimic anarchaic verse form, Pound developed a discursive heterogeneity thatrefused fluency, privileging the signifier over the signified, risking notjust the unidiomatic, but the unintelligible. In a 1922 letter to FelixSchelling, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who taughtPound English literature and unfavorably reviewed his Danieltranslations, Pound cited the cultural remoteness of troubadour poetryas “the reason for the archaic dialect”: “the Provençal feeling is archaic,we are ages away from it” (Pound 1950:179). And Pound measured thisremoteness on a scale of current English-language values:I have proved that the Provençal rhyme schemes are not impossiblein English. They are probably inadvisable. The troubadour was notworried by our sense of style, our “literary values,” so he couldshovel in words in any order he liked. […] The troubadour,fortunately perhaps, was not worried about English order; he gotcertain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music withoutbothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which weno longer have.(ibid.)Pound’s translations signified the foreignness of the foreign text, notbecause they were faithful or accurate—he admitted that “if I havesucceeded in indicating some of the properties […] I have also let[others] go by the board” (Pound 1954:116)—but because they deviatedfrom domestic literary canons in English.Pound’s first versions of Cavalcanti’s poetry did in fact look alien tohis contemporaries. In a review of the Sonnets and Ballate that appearedin the English Poetry Review (1912), professor of Italian Arundel del Refound the translation defective and not entirely comprehensible,including the bilingual title: “The translation of the ‘Sonnets andBallate’—why not Sonetti e Ballate or Sonnets and Ballads?—show theauthor to be earnestly striving after a vital idea of which onesometimes catches a glimpse amidst the general tangle and disorder”