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Margin 207when he translates Cavalcanti, he aspires to give an absolutetranslation—not, of course, in the sense that it is to reproduce inEnglish all the effects of the original, but in the sense that it is to beCavalcanti in English for good and all, not just for this generation orthe next few. Hence the archaic diction, sometimes with olde-Englysshe spelling, […] Pound believes that English came nearest toaccommodating the sort of effects Cavalcanti gets in Italian, in onespecific period, late-Chaucerian or early Tudor.(Davie 1953:264)But Pound never assumed an “absolute” equivalence betweenperiod styles. In fact, in “Guido’s Relations,” he pointed to theimpossibility of finding an exact English-language equivalent: atleast one quality of the Italian texts “simply does not occur inEnglish poetry,” so “there is no ready-made verbal pigment for itsobjectification”; using pre-Elizabethan English actually involved“the ‘misrepresentation’ not of the poem’s antiquity, but of theproportionate feel of that antiquity” for Italian readers (Anderson1983:250). What seemed too absolute for Davie was really Pound’srationale for using archaism: he didn’t like the translations becausehe didn’t accept the modernist readings of the foreign texts (“I stillask out of my ignorance if Cavalcanti is worth all the claims Poundhas made for him, and all the time he has given him” (Davie1953:264)). Yet Davie did accept the modernist ideal of aestheticindependence, erasing the distinction between interpretivetranslation and new poem by evaluating all Pound’s translationsas literary texts in their own right—and finding the mostexperimental ones mediocre performances. The Cavalcantiversions “give the impression of not a Wyatt but a Surrey, thegraceful virtuoso of a painfully limited and ultimately trivialconvention” (ibid.).George Whicher of Amherst College reviewed Pound’s translationstwice, and on both occasions the judgments were unfavorable, restingon an informed but critical appreciation of modernist poetics. In theacademic journal American Literature, Whicher felt that the “evidencecontained in this book” did not support Kenner’s claim of culturalautonomy: “far from making a new form, Pound was merelyproducing a clever approximation to an old one” (Whicher 1954:120).In the end, Pound’s work as a translator indicated his marginality inthe American literary canon, “somewhat apart from the tradition of thetruly creative American poets like Whitman, Melville, and Emily