The translations by Ezra Pound below are discussed at length in Chapter VI of Donald Davie’s Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), parts of which ‘derive immediately from conversations with J.H. Prynne’ (p. vi). A lightly annotated version of Prynne’s own translation is provided at the bottom of this page.
Chi è questa, che vien, ch’ogni uom la mira,
E fa di clarità l’aer tremare,
E mena seco Amor, sicchè parlare
Null’uom ne puote, ma ciascun sospira?
Ahi Dio, che sembra, quando gli occhi gira?
Dicalo Amor, ch’io nol saprei contare;
Cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare,
Che ciascun’altra in ver di lei chiam’ira.
Non si porria contar la sua piacenza;
Ch’a lei s’inchina ogni gentil vertute,
E la beltate per sua Dea la mostra:
Non fu sì alta già la mente nostra,
E non s’è posta in noi tanta salute:
Che propriamente n’abbiam conoscenza.
Who is she coming, drawing all men’s gaze,
Who makes the air one trembling clarity
Till none can speak but each sighs piteously
Where she leads Love adown her trodden ways?
Ah God! The thing she’s like when her glance strays,
Let Amor tell. ’Tis no fit speech for me.
Mistress she seems of such great modesty
That every other woman were called “Wrath.”
No one could ever tell the charm she hath
For all the noble powers bend toward her
She being beauty’s godhead manifest.
Our daring ne’er before held such high quest;
But ye! There is not in you so much grace
That we can understand her rightfully.
From Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (London: Stephen Swift and Co., 1912), p. 29.
Who is she that comes, makyng turn every man’s eye
And makyng the air to tremble with a bright clearenesse
That leadeth with her Love, in such nearness
No man may proffer of speech more than a sigh?
Ah God, what she is like when her owne eye turneth, is
Fit for Amor to speak, for I cannot at all;
Such is her modesty, I would call
Every woman else but an useless uneasiness.
No one could ever tell all of her pleasauntness
In that every high noble vertu leaneth to herward,
So Beauty sheweth her forth as her Godhede;
Never before so high was our mind led,
Nor have we so much of heal as will afford
That our mind may take her immediate in its embrace.
From ‘Guido’s Relations’, The Dial, 86 (July 1929), 559–68 (p. 568).
Who is it, that
in coming thus is
so admired1
the air lucid2
with shaking
brightness
beside her
the very person3
of love?
No man may
speak, except
to sigh
the turning glance!4
love must say
that, not I
such containment5
makes those around6
her seem gestures, of rage
she gathers the
virtues to her
finest pleasing : no7
words show her
goddess
of beauty8
such height
the mind
has not known9
nor such favour
that ever, truly
we might10
From Prospect, 6 (Spring 1964), p. 35.
Prynne goes some way towards adopting the tripartite line form used by Pound in his presentation of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’, as discussed by Davie (p. 112). He avoids Pound’s ‘stepped’ typography, however, placing each line directly below the last.↩
The lack of the copula ‘is’ increases the sense of this phrase as dependent on what goes before it. It creates a sort of stanza-level enjambment, a quality whose absence in Pound’s versions of the poem is remarked on by Davie (p. 118).↩
This is an important addition given that Prynne’s version is significantly shorter than Cavalcanti’s and Pound’s.↩
Prynne here radically condenses his source material, distilling the apostrophe to God into a punctuation mark and completely ignoring the reference to semblance which forces Pound’s English into such unidiomatic contortions.↩
Taken for umiltà, ‘containment’ is an odd choice, the former deriving ultimately from the Latin humilitas, literally the quality of being close to the ground (humus). Umiltà’s development into omertà, with its connotations of organisational secrecy and exclusiveness, may provide one way back to Prynne’s usage. There is of course a sound link with the etymologically and semantically unrelated cotanto.↩
‘Those around’ goes some way to fulfilling the promise of ‘containment’, creating a properly spatial structure.↩
Prynne’s obtrusive ‘no’ seems deliberately ambiguous, carrying the possibility of a negation of the preceding three lines. It is also the translation’s most obvious instance of enjambment.↩
The order of Cavalcanti’s lines is switched here, downplaying the conventional expression of incommunicability in favour of the substantive content. This content, too, is modified: Prynne makes the subject of the poem (‘she’) an actual—if not a grammatical—subject. Whereas in Cavalcanti and Pound the virtues or ‘powers’ incline towards her naturally, in Prynne she actively ‘gathers’ them up. Pound provides both active and passive versions in his introduction to the initial translations—‘“she” acts as a magnet for every “gentil virtute,” that is, the noble spiritual power, the invigorating forces of life and beauty bend toward her’ (Sonnets and Ballate, p. 4)—but maintains the passive sense in both poetic renderings. For more on this line, see Davie, pp. 108–09.↩
‘Has not’ is a step down from non fu sì alta già or Pound’s ‘ne’er before’/‘never before’, losing the implication that whatever hasn’t been achieved in the past is in fact being achieved now. In Prynne’s text, the mind might simply never reach such height. This corresponds more strictly to the meaning of the stanza, as the following lines indicate.↩
The semantic change from ‘never before’ to ‘never’, described above, makes possible this final shift, the use of Pound’s ‘nor’ disguising a much cleaner transition than in the older poet’s version (though requiring some syntactical convolution). The mind has not (in the past) known such height, nor has it known such favour that we might ever (in the future) truly know such height. Prynne completely avoids the issue of address prompted by Pound’s vacillation between voi and noi in his reading of the penultimate line (see Davie, pp. 105–06)—the female subject is indeed absent from Prynne’s poem by this stage, allowing the focus to settle finally on ‘we’, the complex formed by the reader and speaker.↩