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Overview
Pound's first translations of Provençal poetry were a way of penetrating an alien sensibility and culture and making it his own; they were also important technical exercises. Confronted with the problem of finding a suitable form and language for the Provencal experience, he condensed, deleted, expanded—the results were highly original works.
Among Pound's early experiments were the studies of individual Provencal poets, each representing one of the qualities of Provençal culture that attracted him—Bertran is the man of action and Vidal is an example of the close connection between man and the "vital universe."
Implicit in Pound's treatment of the past is his belief in the contemporaneity of these medieval values. This belief remains constant in The Cantos, although as the work developed it became clear that no single cultural framework could encompass it. Nevertheless, the medieval world remained the cornerstone of Pound's paradise—a brilliantly unified, vibrant world against which he could contrast the chaos and sterility of contemporary civilization.
Originally published in 1973.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691619361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1404 |
| Pages: | 174 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition
By Stuart Y. McDougal
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06236-5
CHAPTER 1
THE SEARCH FOR A LANGUAGE: Early Translations
Ma qui la morta poesi risurga
Dante, Purgator to, 1, 7. Pound, Epigraph to "Canzoniere"
For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry ...
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
The act of translation has had a dual function for Pound: it has helped him develop technically as a poet and it has provided him with a series of "complete masks of the self" (GB, 85). The translations are thus important exercises by which Pound has enriched his resources in trying to find equivalents for other poems in his own language. "Poetic translation," George Steiner has noted, "plays a unique role inside the translator's own speech. It drives inward. Anyone translating a poem, or attempting to, is brought face to face, as by no other exercise, with the genius, bone-structure and limitations of his native tongue. ... Translation taxes and thus makes inventory of our resources." In his early translations Pound is seeking a suitable form of English for Provençal poetry, and, in the process, both developing as an American poet and altering our notions of what a translation should be. Moreover, translation is a way of penetrating an alien sensibility and culture and making it one's own: thus the poet dons a series of masks, as he becomes for a moment Arnaut de Mareuil and then Peire Vidal. It is, as we shall see, a very short step from this conception of translation and this type of imitation to the development of the persona in "Marvoil," "Na Audiart," or "Sestina: Altaforte."
Pound's entire corpus of translations also constitutes an act of criticism: his very choice of poems reveals a critical attitude. Pound defines this selection as "excernment: The general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions. The work analogous to that which a good hanging committee or a curator would perform in a National Gallery or in a biological museum" (LE, 75:1934).
The period from 1908-1910 is an extraordinarily rich one in translations from Provençal: during these two years Pound translated, in part or whole, nearly fifty poems representing the major works of all the important troubadour poets. Well over half of these were published in The Spirit of Romance (1910); they are mostly the results of Pound's teaching at The Polytechnic, a school in London, and are what he called "merely exegetic" translations (SR, 106). The others, published in Personae (1909) and Exultations (1909), show Pound "substituting verse in one language for verse in another" (SR, 106). These are Pound's first attempts at poetic translation, and he is groping towards a suitable English equivalent of Provencal, as well as trying to come to terms with the Provençal verse forms. Although these attempts are largely unsuccessful (Pound eliminated all but one of these poems from his Personae of 1926), they helped Pound to define his interest in Provençal culture, and greatly aided him in his growth as a poet forging a language for himself in English.
One of Pound's earliest published works is the translation of a Latin poem with a refrain in Provencal. The refrain was long considered the first known example of a Provençal poem. For Pound it was a pleasant coincidence that the first Provençal poem was a dawn song since he viewed the Middle Ages as a period of awakening, rather than as the "dark ages." Chapter I of The Spirit of Romance is called "The Phantom Dawn"; this title refers to the Latin literature that Pound considered "a foreboding of the spirit which was, in great part, to be characteristic of the literature of the Middle Ages" (SR, 12). The poem Pound translates represents the moment of transition between these two literatures: "The stanzas of the song have been written down in Latin, but the refrain remains in the tongue of the people" (SR, 11):
L alba par umet mar atras el poy
Pas abigil miraclar Tenebris.
[Dawn draws the sun over the humid sea
Then the vigil passes, the shadows brighten.]
Pound first published this poem in the May 1905 issue of the Hamilton Literary Magazine, under the title of "Belangal Alba":
Phoebus shineth e'er his glory flyeth,
Aurora drives faint light athwart the land,
And the drowsy watcher cryeth,
"Arise!"
Ref:
Dawn light, o'er sea and height, riseth bright,
Passeth vigil, clear shineth on the night.
They be careless of the gates, delaying,
Whom the ambush glides to hinder
Whom I warn and cry to, praying,
"Arise!"
Ref:
O'er cliff and ocean white dawn appeareth,
Passeth vigil, and the shadows cleareth.
Forth from our Arcturus, North Wind bloweth
Stars of heaven sheathe their glory
And, Sun-driven, forth-goeth
Settentrion.
Ref:
O'er sea-mist and mountain is dawn display'd,
It passeth watch and maketh night afraid.
Notice that the refrain, which is repeated without change in the original poem, is translated in three different ways. Even in his first translation, Pound felt free to modify the original text. The reader is aware of the way the refrain modulates a given theme, and the changes in each refrain are quite successful. By creating a speaker in the second stanza, Pound personalizes the poem, although the meaning is in no way clarified by this change. The archaic diction further obscures the sense of the translation, and makes the work a period piece. Because of textual problems it is virtually impossible to know whether to consider the poem a hymn or a secular song, although Pound's version favors the latter. The tension between religious and secular imagery becomes one of the characteristic features of the great Provençal albas that follow.
Pound republished this poem four years later in Personae, under the title "Alba Belingalis," with a few minor changes. A third version of the refrain appeared in The Spirit of Romance a year later, and although Pound dropped this poem from Personae (1926), it had an obvious importance — both historic and literary — for him. The alba, with its ambiguous treatment of the dawn as an end to the adulterous night of pleasure and the beginning of a new day, and its tension between secular and religious values, plays an important part in Pound's total interpretation of Provençal culture, especially in his "Homage à la Langue d'Oc." A Lume Spento (1908) contains "That Pass Between the False Dawn and the True," and "To the Dawn: Defiance," in which the night is not adulterous but associated with dream and unreality. A Quinzaine for This Yule (1908) is dedicated to "The Aube of the West Dawn," and includes "Aube of the West Dawn: Venetian June." Thus, from the very beginning of his career Pound was intrigued by the implications of this genre.
Exultations (1909) contains a translation of another famous alba, the anonymous "En un vergier sotz fuella d'albespi," which Pound entitled "Alba Innominata":
In a garden where the whitethorn spreads her
leaves
My lady hath her love lain close beside her,
Till the warder cries the dawn — Ah dawn that
grieves!
Ah God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!
"Please God that night, dear night should never
cease,
Nor that my love should parted be from me,
Nor watch cry 'Dawn'— Ah dawn that slayeth peace!
Ah God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!
"Fair friend and sweet, thy lips! Our lips again!
Lo, in the meadow there the birds give song!
Ours be the love and Jealousy's the pain!
Ah God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!
"Sweet friend and fair take we our joy again
Down in the garden, where the birds are loud,
Till the warder's reed astrain
Cry God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!
"Of that sweet wind that comes from Far-Away
Have I drunk deep of my Beloved's breath,
Yea! of my Love's that is so dear and gay.
Ah God! Ah God! That dawn should come so soon!"
Envoi
Fair is this damsel and right courteous,
And many watch her beauty's gracious way.
Her heart toward love is no wise traitorous.
Ah God! Ah God! That dawns should come so soon!
Pound has retained the outward form of the poem, with six stanzas, each containing four lines of ten syllables, the last line of each stanza being a refrain including the word alba, a distinctive feature of this genre. He has modified the aaaB rhyme scheme to abaC (the capital letter indicates that the same word is repeated from stanza to stanza), a form that is obviously less demanding. In terms of the content, Pound has made some significant alterations. In the Provençal version the first stanza is spoken by an anonymous speaker who narrates the scene from afar and summarizes the entire situation in three lines:
En un vergier sotz fuella d'albespi
tenc la dompna son amic costa si,
tro la gayta crida que l'alba vi.
[In a garden under the hawthorne's leaves
A lady held her love close to her
Until the look-out cries that he's seen
the dawn.]
By translating "la dompna" as "my lady," Pound has made the anonymous narrator the male participant, thus giving his poem an immediacy lacking in the original. But the effects of this change are even more far-reaching, because it alters the way in which we read the last stanza (and ultimately the entire poem). In the Provençal version, stanza 6, which Pound calls an "envoi," is also spoken by the narrator of stanza i. Having quoted the lady at some length (stanzas 2-5) as she chronicles in detail her adulterous night, the narrator speaks directly to her, and his words (translated quite literally by Pound) are a eulogy of the woman's beauty and virtue. This is striking precisely because the narrator is not involved in what he is describing, but is an impartial witness. Notice the terms of his praise. The lady's "beutat" is more than physical: it represents a sort of moral perfection, and thus her nocturnal liaison is viewed as a very natural and even positive thing. This, in effect, confirms the woman's description of her lover (stanza 5) as the epitome of certain courtly virtues. In the Provençal he is "handsome, courtly, and gay" ("belh e cortes e gay"): Pound's version is much weaker, for "dear and gay" lack the moral force of the original. Pound realizes the necessity of maintaining a distance between stanzas 5 and 6, and by calling stanza 6 an "envoi" he sees to it that we do not confuse this speaker with the speaker (identified by him as the lover) of stanza 1. In both versions the participants in stanzas 2-5 epitomize many of the best aspects of this society.
Pound also alters the nature of the experience related by the lady. In both poems the physical setting is idyllic, resembling in outward appearance a bountiful Garden of Eden. God is invoked, not only in the refrain, but in the lady's opening words. The physical aspect of love, treated rather delicately (although unequivocally) in the Provençal version, is emphasized in Pound's translation. For example, line 9 of the Provençal reads "Beautiful gentle friend, let us kiss, you and I," which Pound translates as "Fair friend and sweet, thy lips! Our lips again," which is reminiscent of one of Dowson's dying falls. In fact, one is struck here, as in Pound's translation of the earlier alba, by the mixture of Pre-Raphaelite and fin-de-siècle diction which abounds: this tone is supported by the languid expressions "Ah dawn that grieves!" (1. 3) and "Ah dawn that slayeth peace!" (1. 7), two interpolations that have no basis whatsoever in the Provençal text. Archaisms such as "damsel" for "dompna" ("lady") and "right courteous" for "agradans" ("agreeable") contribute to this tone.
Moreover, Pound de-emphasizes the theme of adultery, around which the Provençal poem (and the entire genre) turns. Line 12 of the Provencal reads "Let us do everything in spite of the jealous one (gilos)" who quite clearly is the woman's husband and even possibly, as James J. Wilhelm suggests, the " 'jealous God' (Deus zelotes) of the Old Testament." By making "jealousy" an abstraction, Pound lessens the dramatic conflict and minimizes the tension between the Christian and secular values noted above.
Pound was not content with the language of this version, and he dropped the poem from subsequent editions of his work, until he retranslated it in "Homage a la Langue d'Oc." However, neither of these albas is merely an exercise in translation; they illustrate Pound's fascination with this genre and his insistence upon its central position in Provençal culture.
Another translation that not only defines certain aspects of the culture but that also functions as a persona is "From Syria: The Song of Peire Bremon 'Lo Tort' that he made for his Lady in Provença: he being in Syria a crusader," first published in Personae (1909). Little is known of Peire Bremon; this is apparently his only extant work. His vida states simply: "Peire Bremon Io Tort [the twisted one] was a poor knight from Vianes. And he composed well, and was honored by all good men." In The Spirit of Romance, Pound rated this poem the equal of Bernart de Ventadorn's "Quant ieu vey la lauzeta mover" and Peire Vidal's "Ab l'alen tir vas me l'aire," two poems that he considers among "the finest songs of Provence" (SR, 48). Few critics or editors share Pound's enthusiasm. In a note following the poem he calls it "the only bit of Peire Bremon's work that has come down to us and through its being printed with the songs of Giraut of Bornelh he is like to lose credit for even this." Pound presents this translation with the zeal of a graduate student making an "original" discovery (he was twenty-five at the time). Yet, although he surely overvalued this poem (he dropped it from all further editions of his work), it is thematically important with regard to his other work of this period, for it depicts the poet in exile, addressing his loved one from across the sea, a variation on the amor de Ionh theme so common in Provençal poetry. His use of Bremon as a persona here is quite effective. Through him Pound "enter [s] an unfamiliar world, develop [s] ... the thoughts and feelings indigenous to that world, and articulate [s] them in English." Behind Pound's distinctive voice we hear the echo of Peire Bremon. This voice is also the voice of "In Durance," the voice of the poet who wrote from Europe, "This book is for Mary Moore of Trenton, if she wants it." Thus "From Syria," like Pound's other translations, has a thematic relevance to his total oeuvre that should not be overlooked:
In April when I see all through
Mead and garden new flowers blow,
And streams with ice-bands broken flow,
Eke hear the birds their singing do;
When spring's grass-perfume floateth by
Then 'tis sweet song and birdlet's cry
Do make mine old joy come anew.
Such time was wont my thought of old
To wander in the ways of love.
Burnishing arms and clang thereof,
And honour-services manifold
Be now my need. Whoso combine
Such works, love is his bread and wine,
Wherefore should his fight the more be bold.
Song bear I, who tears should bring
Sith ire of love mak'th me annoy,
With song think I to make me joy.
Yet ne'er have I heard said this thing:
"He sings who sorrow's guise should wear."
Natheless I will not despair
That sometime I'll have cause to sing.
I should not to despair give way
That somewhile I'll my lady see.
I trust well He that lowered me
Hath power again to make me gay.
But if e'er I come to my Love's land
And turn again to Syrian strand,
God keep me there for a fool, alway!
God for a miracle well should
Hold my coming from her away,
And hold me in His grace alway
That I left her, for holy-rood.
An I lose her, no joy for me.
Pardi, hath the wide world in fee.
Nor could he mend it, if He would.
Well did she know sweet wiles to take
My heart, when thence I took my way.
'Thout sighing, pass I ne'er a day
For that sweet semblance she did make
To me, saying all in sorrow:
"Sweet friend, and what of me to-morrow?"
"Love mine, why wilt me so forsake?"
Envoi
Beyond sea he thou sped, my song,
And, by God, to my Lady say
That in desirous, grief-filled way
My nights and my days are full long.
And command thou William the Long-Seer
To tell thee to my Lady dear,
That comfort be her thoughts among.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition by Stuart Y. McDougal. Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Acknowledgments, pg. vii
- Abbreviated Titles by Which Ezra Pound's Works Are Cited, pg. ix
- Table of Contents, pg. xi
- Introduction: The Possibilities of Provence, pg. 1
- I. The Search for a Language: Early Translations, pg. 8
- II. Resuscitation of the Past: The Provengal Personae, pg. 40
- III. Toward an Empyrean of Pure Light: The Radiant Medieval World, pg. 70
- IV. Exercises in the Mother Tongue: Versions of Daniel, pg. 102
- V. Provence Revisited: "Homage a la Langue d'Oc", pg. 121
- VI. The Permanence of Provence, pg. 140
- Index, pg. 153
- Princeton Essays in European and Comparative Literature, pg. 160