venuti

Margin 235retained in Middle and Early Modern English as well. It appears inGavin Douglas’s Aeneid, among many other literary texts, prose andpoetry, “pre-Elizabethan” and Elizabethan. Pound’s curious use of“colored haumes” for the Provençal “elms de color” (“paintedhelmets”), effectively increases the archaism in the translation, but itsetymology is uncertain, and it may not strictly be an archaic Englishword: it seems closer to a variant spelling of the modern French for“helmet,” heaume, than to any archaic English variants for “helm” (cf.OED, s.v. “helm”). What the archaism made seem foreign in this textwas the militaristic theme, which Pound at once defined andvalorized in a suggestive choice. He translated “chascus om deparatge” as “each man of prowess,” rejecting the possibilities of“paratge” that are more genealogical (“lineage,” “family,” “nobility”)and more indicative of class domination, in favor of a choice thatstresses a key value of the feudal aristocracy and genders it male:“valour, bravery, gallantry, martial daring; manly courage, activefortitude” (OED , s.v. “prowess”).In 1909, a year before the publication of The Spirit of Romance,Pound had published a free adaptation of Bertran’s text, “Sestina:Altaforte,” in which he used the same archaizing strategy. Here,however, Pound celebrated the mere act of aggression, characterizedas distinctively aristocratic and masculinist, but devoid of any conceptof bravery:The man who fears war and squats opposingMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimsonBut is fit only to rot in womanish peaceFar from where worth’s won and the swords clashFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;Yea, I fill all the air with my music.(Pound 1956:8)As Peter Makin has argued, Pound’s appropriations of earlier poetslike Bertran serve “as an exemplum, a demonstration of a possible wayof living,” and they are laden with various cultural and ideologicaldeterminations (Makin 1978:42). Makin links the “phallicaggressiveness” of “Sestina: Altaforte” to Pound’s esteem for “the‘medieval clean line’” in architecture, as well as to his eulogies ofdictators past and present, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta ofRenaissance Rimini and Benito Mussolini, “a male of the species”(Makin 1978:29–35; Pound 1954:83).