venuti

Invisibility 35breostceare”/“bitter breast-cares”; “merewerges”/ “mere-weary”;“corna caldast”/“corn of the coldest”; “floodwegas”/“flood-ways”;“hægl scurum fleag”/“hail-scur flew”; “mæw singende foremedodrince”/“the mews’ singing all my mead-drink.” But Pound’sdepartures from modern English also include archaisms drawn fromlater periods of English literature.ne ænig hleomægafeasceaftig fer frefran meahte.Forpon him gelyfe lyt, se pe ah lifes wyngebiden in burgum, bealosipa hwon,wlonc ond wingal, hu ic werig oftin brimlade bidan sceolde.(Krapp and Dobbie 1936:144)Not any protectorMay make merry man faring needy.This he littles believes, who aye in winsome lifeAbides ’mid burghers some heavy business,Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oftMust bide above brine.(Pound 1954:207)The word “aye” (“always”) is a Middle English usage that laterappeared in Scottish and northern dialects, while “burghers” firstemerges in the Elizabethan period (OED). The words “’mid” (for“amid”) and “bide” are poeticisms used by such nineteenth-centurywriters as Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and Morris. Pound’slexicon in fact favors archaisms that have become poetical: “brine,”“o’er,” “pinion,” “laud,” “ado.”Such textual features indicate that a translation can beforeignizing only by putting to work cultural materials and agendasthat are domestic, specific to the target language, but also, in thiscase, anachronistic, specific to later periods. “The Seafarer” isinformed by Pound’s knowledge of English literature from itsbeginnings, but also by his modernist poetics, by his favoring,notably in The Cantos, an elliptical, fragmentary verse in whichsubjectivity is split and determinate, presented as a site ofheterogeneous cultural discourses (Easthope 1983:chap. 9). Thepeculiarities of Pound’s translation—the gnarled syntax, the