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206 The Translator’s InvisibilityReview praised the “clever versification” of the Daniel versions,while treating their discursive heterogeneity with the sort ofelitism Pound sometimes voiced in his own celebrations of earlierpoetries: “It is said that Arnaut was deliberately obscure, sothat his songs should not be understood by the vulgar. Rathermodern” (Graham 1953:472). 1 In the United States, John Edwards’review for Poetry shared the basic assumption of his Berkeleydoctoral dissertation on Pound—namely, that this was a canonicalAmerican writer—and so the review complained at length thatthe translations deserved much better editorial treatment thanNew Directions gave them (Edwards 1954:238). Edwards’ sympathyfor modernism was apparent in his unacknowledged quotationfrom Kenner’s introduction to the translations (said to represent“an extension of the possibilities of poetic speech in our language”(ibid.:238)), but also in a remarkable description of the Cavalcantiversions that was blind to their dense archaism:One need only read Cavalcanti’s Sonnet XVI in the Rossetti version(Early Italian Poets), then in the first Pound attempt (Sonnets andBallate of Guido Cavalcanti, 1912), and finally in the 1931 Poundtranslation given here, and one can watch the crust falling off andthe line grow clean and firm, bringing the original over into English,not only the words but the poetry.(ibid.:238)Edwards accepted Pound’s modernist rationale for histranslations: that Cavalcanti’s Italian texts were distinguishedby linguistic precision, and that pre-Elizabethan Englishpossessed sufficient “clarity and explicitness” to translate them(Anderson 1983:250). But Edwards lacked Pound’s contraryawareness that this strategy made the translations less “cleanand firm” than odd or unfamiliar, likely to be taken as “a mereexercise in quaintness” (ibid.).There were also reviewers who were more astute in understandingthe modernist agenda of the translations, but who were nonethelessskeptical of its cultural value. In a review for the New Statesman andNation, the English poet and critic Donald Davie, who has attacked theproject of Pound’s poetry even while reinforcing its canonical status inacademic literary criticism, 2 saw that the interpretive translations camewith a peculiarly dogmatic claim of cultural autonomy, most evident intheir archaism: