EZRA POUND'S CAVALCANTI: Fidelity and the Masculine Spirit

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a close, rigorous and systematic analysis of Ezra Pound's various English versions of the sonnet 'Chi è questa che vèn' by Guido Cavalcati. Pound's interest in Cavalcanti began as early as 1909 when he started working on translations of the Italian poet during a period in which his own verse was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, including the first English translator of Cavalcanti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1912 he published The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti. Pound sought a balance between a desire to capture the spirit of Cavalcanti and a desire to achieve accuracy on a semantic level. This proved to be a difficult dichotomy to overcome, and he returned to the translations, publishing rewritten versions of five sonnets in 1932. In this paper I intend to examine revisions Pound made to his verse translations of Cavalcanti. Scholars examining these versions have identified a radical archaizing technique and attention to mimicking the original cadences of Cavalcanti, and associated these with Pound's modernist agenda. Yet the motivation for these archaisms may be linked strongly to Pound's debt to Wardour Street language, and to the traditional metrical constraints he imposed on the translations. The sonnet 'Chi è questa che vèn' is an excellent case study because Pound wrote four distinct versions, the earliest in 1910, the last in 1932.