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course, Pound came to deny his earlier motives, to disavow the misty
pursuit of "Romance"-and to insist that he turned back to the twelfth
century for the sake of restoring music to verse, or redeeming free verse,
or destroying the spell of Milton, or opposing puritanical Christianity.
"All these are clean, all without the hell-obsession," he boasted absurdly
of Cavalcanti and his peers; but we see only the man rationalizing a
boy's post-Victorian predilections.
In
any case, his taste never changed; only the sermons were revised,
the exempla remaining the same. To be sure, the translations themselves
were metamorphosed in time; but the underlying, lisping sweetness al–
ways persisted, merely muddied over as Pound's resolve at all costs to
be mad and to find a poetic diction proper to hi s madness overwhelmed
him. Here are two versions of the opening of a
canso
by Arnaut Daniel.
The first translation belongs to Pound's earliest work; the second dates
from about 1920.
Only I know what over-anguish falls
Upon the love-worn heart through over-love.
Because of my desire so firm and whole
Toward her ] loved on sight and since alway,
Which turneth not aside nor wavereth.
So, far from her] speak for her mad speech,
Who near her, for o'er much to speak, am dumb.
] only, and who elrische pain support,
](now out lo ve's heart o'er borne by overlove,
For my desire that is so firm and straight
And unchanged since] found her in my sight
And unturned since she came within my glance,
That far from her my speech springs up aflame;
N ear her comes not. So press the words to arrest it.
The "elrische" is the real offense, capping the uncalled-for involvement
of the syntax and padding out of the sense-and destroying willfully
(without even the excuse of rhyme) the original balance of "over-an–
guish" with "over-love." What is the point except to impose an ironical
air of the archaic, to make a diction at once formal and irrational, to
woo incoherence? Dante Gabriel Rossetti gone off his rocker! This is the
image behind Pound's provenc;alizing, an image we especially honor
today.
Do not misunderstand. I do not despise the poet and his devices; I
want only to describe unequivocally what exists, what molds us, what
