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PARTISAN REVIEW
least has never been prepared to confess it. He has rather thought of
himself in his role of translator as a kind of eccentric schoolteacher, a
mad pedant expounding difficult and forgotten texts in a classroom
where he is not sure there are any students. :rvfany of the translations
included here appeared originally in critical, or more properly, pedagogic,
essays: all of the Daniel, for example, and the Canzone of Calvacanti,
the latter of which made its debut with the accompaniment of a most
formidable apparatus of notes, comments and glossary, punctuated with
unscholarly screams of annoyance and challenge. As a matter of fact, a
good deal of the fun of such englishings seems gone once they have been
detached (as they are in the present volume) from the half-cranky, half–
pretentious contexts in which they grew.
Astonishingly, Pound has turned out to be really a successful teacher,
though largely at second hand and through the good offices of T. S.
Eliot, who has lent to Pound's erudite nuttiness the proper magistcrial
air, and thus passed him on to the newer generations who never miss
a chance to gloss a joke or convert an outrage into an orthodoxy. The
name
of Arnaut Daniel, largely unread, of coursc, since the translations
of Pound are slightly more impenetrable than the original even to one
ignorant of Provencyal, has become almost as sacred as that of Donne;
and Cavalcanti is not without honor nor the
noh
play neglected. Some
of Pound's enthusiasms have failed to take, Leopardi remaining, though
respected, stubbornly unfashionable, and d'Annunzio, whom Pound
touted (because, by God, he captured a province!) but did not translate,
touching us not at
all.
Yet in the establishment of a ncw tradition, "The
Tradition" that Eliot has glorified, Pound is a cultural Founding Father,
a latter-day Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ransacking Europe for a
usable past, another unsuspected agent abroad for the Heiress of All
the Ages, which is to say, for that American public he affected to spurn
and abandon. Pound's is not, of course, the Europe dreamed from Heidel–
berg in the mild afterglow of German Romanticism; but it is a Europe
which seems at first glance scarcely more congenial to the contemporary
sensibility: the Europe of the pre-Raphaelites.
Pound's debt to Rossetti cannot be emphasized strongly enough, for
it is at once so important and so improbable. By the time of
The Spirit
of Romance,
his taste was set once and for all for that "century whose
center is 1200" and its "two perfect gifts," the poems of Arnaut Daniel
and the Church of San Zeno at Verona.
It
is all of a piece, the pre–
Raphaelite distrust of the Renaissance and love for a prettified
Vita
Nuova;
and the fashionable orientalizing that had survived from the
fin
de siecle
to those dull years before the First World War. Later, of
