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Margin 201(Homberger 1972:88). Yet Del Re recognized the historicizing effect ofPound’s archaism, quoting phrases from Pound’s own introduction todescribe it: “Notwithstanding its almost overpowering defects this is asincere if slip-shod attempt to translate into English the‘accompaniment’ and ‘the mental content of what the contemporariesof Guido Cavalcanti drew forth from certain forms of thought andspeech’” (ibid.). In John Bailey’s review for the Times LiterarySupplement, the “strangeness” of Pound’s translation also began withthe choice of foreign text: he felt that “though not belonging to the highuniversal order,” Cavalcanti’s poetry does possess the “peculiarcharm” of “an escape from all that is contemporary or even actual into[the] hortus conclusus of art” (Homberger 1972:88). But what Baileyfound unpleasantly strange about Pound’s translation was that,compared to Rossetti’s, it was utterly lacking in fluency:He is sometimes clumsy, and often obscure, and has no fine tactabout language, using such words and phrases as “Ballatet,”“ridded,” “to whomso runs,” and others of dubious or unhappyformation. A more serious fault still is that he frequently absolveshimself altogether from the duty of rhyming, and if an English blankverse sonnet were ever an endurable thing it would not be when itpretends to represent an Italian original.(ibid.:91)Bailey praised Rossetti because he “preserves” a great deal “more ofthe original rhyme and movement” (ibid.:92). What constituted fluenttranslation for Bailey was not just univocal meaning, recognizablearchaism, and prosodic smoothness, but a Victorian poetic discourse,pre-Raphaelite medievalism, only one among other archaic forms inPound’s translations. The fact that Pound was violating a hegemoniccultural norm is clear at the beginning of Bailey’s review, where heallied himself with Matthew Arnold and claimed to speak for “any richand public-spirited statesman of intellectual tastes to-day” (ibid.:89).Other commentators were more appreciative of Pound’s work as atranslator, but their evaluations differed according to which of hischanging rationales they accepted. In a 1920 article for the NorthAmerican Review, May Sinclair, the English novelist who was a friend ofPound’s, offered a favorable assessment of his publications to date.Following Pound’s sense of the cultural remoteness of Provençalpoetry, Sinclair argued that the archaism in his translations signalledthe absence of any true equivalence in modern English: