POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS. By Ezra Pound. Selected by Richard Sieburth.
1,365pp. Library of America. $45. - 1 931082 41 3
THE PISAN CANTOS. Edited by Richard Sieburth. 159pp. New Directions.
Paperback, $13.95. - 0 8112 1558 X
CANTI POSTUMI. Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo. 308pp. Milan: Mondadori.
Paperback, 9.40euros. - 88 04 51031 5
I believe in an ultimate and absolute rhythm . . . . The perception of the
intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. It is
only .
. . in perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word that the two-fold vision
can be recorded." This is Ezra Pound in the introduction to his 1912
translations of Cavalcanti. At the time he was twenty-seven, and still under
the sway of the first English translator of early Italian poetry. "In the
matter of these translations", he says in the same essay, "Rossetti is my
father and mother, but no one man can see everything at once." It is where
"the perfect word" is concerned that he consciously departs from his
master's non- historical approach: Rossetti's choice of "gentle" rather than
"noble" for gentile, for example, or "virtue" rather than "power" for virtu.
This was a view of language and translation that Pound was to develop in the
course of his career and one that can be examined by comparing his repeated
attempts at individual poems of Cavalcanti's. It is an attempt to conflate a
historicist relativism with his sense of a timeless, concrete reality
beneath the word: his conviction that words, as Justinian says, are the
consequences of things. Less consciously, he is beginning to see the
shortcomings of the Aesthete's view of rhythm, or more broadly of verbal
music.
The year 1912 was also one in which Pound published "The Return", the first
poem which shows him as unambiguously Modernist. W. B. Yeats was to describe
it as "the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one
of the few in which I find real organic rhythm". "Organic" is the operative
word. Pound had already abandoned Swinburnian incantation and was
recognizing the limitations, for his purposes, of Rossetti's packed iambic
line with its slow, entranced movement and mellifluous, Keatsian vowels.
From both poets he had learnt how feeling is carried on the movement, while
in Browning and the early William Morris he had seen the musical
possibilities of a harsher, more broken rhythm, closer to speech. But he was
now looking for a movement that would defamiliarize - that would be, in
particular, free of English associations.
In "The Return", the reader without much knowledge of Greek or Latin can
nonetheless hear the shadow of a classical lyric through metrical elements
which, as Eliot remarked, are quantitative rather than accentual:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
The careful punctuation obliges the reader to notice a pattern determined by
long syllables with the result that we seem to be hearing a metre not heard
in our language before. Moreover, as has often been noticed, the words refer
not only to the poem's mysterious subject - who exactly is returning? - but
to their own movement, which is indeed, with its troubled pace and slow
feet, tentative. It is a device that Pound must have noticed in Swinburne's
"Sapphics":
and I too, Full of the vision, Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the
hair unbound and the feet unsandalled Shine as fire of sunset on western
waters;
Saw the reluctant Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted, Back to Lesbos . . . .
"The tentative / Movement" and "the reluctant / Feet" are akin, but where
Swinburne's evocation of the Sapphic measure, loaded with rhetoric, smells
somewhat of the lamp, Pound's movement haunts us by its brokenness, as if we
were reading a fragmentary text. The effect is to bypass the neo-classical
and bring together the modern and the archaic, an effect he was triumphantly
to repeat in the version of Homer with which The Cantos opens.
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