I appreciate the belated responses, even though I do not agree with them, and would have like them to be a bit more substantiated.

I want to suggest that the multilingual consciousness, found in Pound’s Cantos, as well as in all macaronic texts, offers researchers a unique environment to contest the so-called “crisis of referentiality” advanced by poststructuralists and deconstructionist, according to whom the gaps between signifiers, signified and referents render the truthfulness and reliability of language at best unstable and at worst undecidable. When two different signifiers belonging to two different semiotic systems (i.e. languages) are used to signify one and the same referent, I would argue that, to a certain extent, the relationship of language to reality—its truthfulness or reliability—is made, if not stable and decidable, then at least more so. While in agreement with so-called “discourse theorists,” such as Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, who explicitly trace the language of literature to its source in the spoken language of everyday life, and insist that literary language is uttered by embodied subjects situated historically in social spheres regulated by institutions, I would argue further that the displaced multilingual consciousness exhibited in individual macaronic texts such as The Cantos and, for that matter, the Rosetta Stone, suggests that a multilingual utterance, unlike its monolingual counterpart, can, thanks to its interlingual interplay, remain, to a certain extent, meaningful even if disembodied, de-historicized and taken out of its social context: in a sense, ‘peaceful’.

Any further thoughts?

tony.