“Cries and cracks”: “animal” rhythms in Ezra Pound’s translations from Arnaut Daniel

Abstract

This article looks at Ezra Pound’s translation of the troubadour Arnaut Daniel’s canso “L’aura amara” as a way of studying what Pound’s practice of translation shows us about his conception and practice of rhythm. According to Pound, the interest in Daniel’s canso lies in its onomatopoeia, its imitation of birdsong; this view accords with suggestions in Pound’s writings that rhythm in language is a manifestation of physiology. But Pound also sees rhythm through the prism of translation, suggesting for example that foreign-language poems may be a source of rhythms for English verse. The article thus looks at the way Pound’s translation builds on the sound patterning of Arnaut’s canso to distort and specify the rhythms of English. The purpose of the article is to show that rhythm in Arnaut Daniel’s canso may be described as the interaction of phonemic composition, accentual prominence, and syntax; and that Pound’s translation works with several aspects of Arnaut’s writing—the use of short lines, enjambment, and the specific prosodic treatment of the pronoun mi—to make his translation a prosodic experiment, inseparable from contemporary work on the possibilities of free verse. In that it makes English speech rhythms “unnatural” and ambiguous, Pound’s “L’aura amara” invents a specific subject of self-estrangement refracted through the discourse of courtly love, a translating subject.