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202 The Translator’s InvisibilityBy every possible device—the use of strange words like “gentrice”and “plasmatour”—he throws [Provençal poetry] seven centuriesback in time. It is to sound as different from modern speech as hecan make it, because it belongs to a world that by the very nature ofits conventions is inconceivably remote, inconceivably differentfrom our own, a world that we can no longer reconstruct in itsreality.(Homberger 1972:183)In a 1932 review of Guido Cavalcanti Rime for Hound & Horn, A. HyattMayor followed Pound’s modernist reading of the Italian texts, hispositivist sense of their precise language, and therefore didn’t see thestrangeness of the archaism, praising the translations instead forestablishing a true equivalence to the “freshness” of the Italian:The quaint language is not a pastiche of pre-Shakespearean sonnets,or an attempt to make Cavalcanti talk Elizabethan the way AndrewLang made Homer try to talk King James. Ezra Pound is matchingCavalcanti’s early freshness with a color lifted from the earlyfreshness of English poetry.(Mayor 1932:471)Sinclair saw that Pound’s translations were interpretive in their use ofarchaism, meant to indicate the historical distance of the foreign text,whereas Mayor took the translations as independent literary worksthat could be judged against others in the present or past, and whosevalue, therefore, was timeless. “The English seems to me as fine as theItalian,” he wrote, “In fact, the line Who were like nothing save her shadowcast is more beautifully definite than Ma simigliavan sol la sua ombria”(ibid.:470).Pound’s theory and practice of interpretive translation reversethe priorities set by modernist commentators on translation likeMayor, Bunting, Eliot, and Pound himself. Interpretive translationcontradicts the ideal of autonomy by pointing to the variousconditions of the translated text, foreign as well as domestic, andthus makes clear that translation can make a cultural difference athome only by signifying the difference of the foreign text. Thediscursive heterogeneity of Pound’s interpretive translations,especially his use of archaism, was both an innovation ofmodernist poetics and a deviation from current linguistic andliterary values, sufficiently noticeable to seem alien. Pound shows