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Guido Cavalcanti as a Mask for Ezra Pound

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

James J. Wilhelm
James J. Wilhelm*
Affiliation:
Livingston College of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
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Abstract

A study of Ezra Pound's translations of Guido Cavalcanti's Rime shows Pound's lifelong interest in the work of the Italian poet. A further tracing of Cavalcanti's rhetoric in the Cantos shows that Pound employed Cavalcanti in a twofold way: he related him to Neoplatonic philosophers through his use of light imagery, and he also treated him as an Aristotelian empiricist. He thus made Cavalcanti serve two apparently divergent aims, just as Pound's own work may do. Although the modern poet's philosophic understanding of Cavalcanti is open to controversy, his poetic uses have accounted for some of the finest passages of the twentieth-century epic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , March 1974 , pp. 332 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 340 Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (London: Swift, 1912); essays in Dial, 84 (1928), 231–37, 85 (1928), 1–20, and 86 (1929), 559–68; Guido Cavalcanti: Rime (Genoa: Marsano, 1931); Make It New (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 345–407; Tre canzoni di Guido Cavalcanti, introd. O[lga] R[udge], Quaderni dell' Ac-cademia Musicale Chigiana, 19 (Siena: Ticci, 1949); Ezra Pound's Cavalcanti Poems (New York : New Directions, 1966). All Pound's citations reprinted with permission of New Directions, Faber, and Peter Owen.

Note 2 in page 340 Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, 1950), pp. 88, 109, 181, 218, 304–05, et passim.

Note 3 in page 340 Rev. ed. (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, n.d.), p. 110.

Note 4 in page 340 Translations, introd. Hugh Kenner, 2nd ed. (New York : New Directions, 1963), p. 18.

Note 5 in page 340 Rime di Guido Cavalcanti . . . with Comento di Ditto del Garbo, ed. Antonio Cicciaporci (Florence: Carli, 1813), pp. 60–64.

Note 6 in page 340 Rime, ed. Cattaneo (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), based on ed. of Guido Favati (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957).

Note 7 in page 340 All Cantos citations from The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970).

Note 8 in page 340 See also Canto lii, p. 258.

Note 9 in page 340 See Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), pp. 180–82; p. 182: “The ‘tondo sesto’ may be the ‘tondo di Sesto’ (‘Empirico‘).” Cf. Cattaneo, who follows Ercole in arguing for “a quarter of Florence” (p. 69, n. 6), and rejects the translation “sixth heaven.”

Note 10 in page 340 For a critical assessment, see Anne Paolucci, “Ezra Pound and D. G. Rossetti as Translators of Guido Cavalcanti,” Romanic Review, 51 (1960), 256–67; Trans., p. 24.

Note 11 in page 340 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. in Viking Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 436.

Note 12 in page 340 Ed. Otto Bird, Mediaeval Studies, 2 (1940), 150–203, and 3 (1941), 117–60. For comparisons I prefer the Italian translation made shortly after the composition of the original, appended to Rime, ed. Cicciaporci. On the two texts, see J. E. Shaw, Italica, 12 (1935), 102–05. For Pound on Del Gardo, Lit. Essays, p. 160.

Note 13 in page 340 L'Espositione . . . sopra la Canzone d'Amore di Guido Cavalcanti Fiorentino (Siena: Marchetti, 1602). See Pound, Lit. Essays, p. 160.

Note 14 in page 340 Comento sopra la Canzone di Guido Cavalcanti (Florence: Sermartelli, 1568).

Note 15 in page 340 Salvadori, La Poesia giovanile e la Canzone d'amore di Guido Cavalcanti (Rome: Société Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1895); Vossler, Die philosophischen Grundlagen zum “süssen neuen Stil” (Heidelberg: Winter, 1904).

Note 16 in page 340 “L'Averroismo del ‘primo amico’ di Dante,” Studi Danteschi, 25 (1940), 43–79; “Di un nuovo commento alla Canzone del Cavalcanti sull'amore,” Cultura Neolatina, 6–7 (1946–47), 123–35; Saggi di filosofia dantesca, 2nd ed. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967); Dante e la cultura medievale, 2nd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1949).

Note 17 in page 340 Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, 1949). For text: Mario Casella, Studi di Filologia Italiana, 7 (1944), 97–160; cf. Nardi, Cultura Neolatina, 6–7 (1946–47), 123.

Note 18 in page 340 Shaw, p. 213; Bird, Mediaeval Studies, 2 (1940). 154; see Letters, p. 304, which emphasizes the Italian version of Del Garbo.

Note 19 in page 340 Commentaries by Joseph Rickaby, Studies on God and His Creatures (London: Longmans, Green, 1924), p. 80; Léon Gauthier, Ibn Rochd (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

Note 20 in page 340 Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love, pp. 18–20. See Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, 7, Pt. 1 : De Anima, ed. Clemens Stroick (Munster: Aschendorff, 1968), m.i.9 (p. 176): “sunt quinque sensus interiores, sensus communis, imaginatio, aestimativa, phantasia, et memoria.”

Note 21 in page 340 ii.iii.8 (ed. Stroick, p. 110).

Note 22 in page 340 De Anima iii.ii.18 (ed. Stroick, p. 205).

Note 23 in page 340 Lit. Essays, p. 176. Nardi reads lá gir simiglanza (Studi Danteschi, 25, 1940, 65). but the notion of “likeness turning there” is not ultimately much different from the other reading.

Note 24 in page 340 He notes the heart in the ideogram for “will” (linked to directio voluntatis) in Confucius: Great Digest, Vn-wobbling Pivot, Analects (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 22, and the biceps in the “spirit” ideogram, p. 23. See Cantos lxxxvii, pp. 572, 576; xcix, p. 702.

Note 25 in page 340 Lit. Essays, p. 162. See Canto cv, pp. 747,751.

Note 26 in page 340 See J. L. Lowes, “The Loveres Maladye of Hereos,” Modern Philology, 11 (1913–14), 491–546.

Note 27 in page 340 Lit. Essays, pp. 173–74; see Albertus Magnus, De Anima i.i.5 (ed. Stroick, p. 11); also Canto lxiii, p. 353.

Note 28 in page 340 Lit. Essays, pp. 187–88, where he has to shift to the Barberiniano MS. and the commentary of Egidio Colonna.

Note 29 in page 340 De Amore n.8, rule 15, ed. E. Trojel, 2nd ed. (Munich: Eidos, 1964), p. 310; see Canto cxiv, p. 791.

Note 30 in page 340 Cattaneo's dico is read dice by Casella and Shaw (p. 89) with the sense, “says one who is worthy of faith” (i.e., Cavalcanti's source). Shaw seems to follow Del Rosso in taking the authority as the poet himself; Pound read dice but took the worthiness as a reference to love.

Note 31 in page 340 See Georg M. Gugelberger, “The Secularization of ‘Love’ to a Poetic Metaphor . . ., ” Paideuma, 2 (1973), 159–73.