Sincronía Summer 2008

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Pound and Cavalcanti

Stephen W. Gilbert

Universidad de Guadalajara

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     However sympathetic Pound may have been to the social and political aspects of the Provence of the 12th and 13th centuries, it seems true that his interest focused on other aspects more intently.  For statecraft and politics, he had other models.  His interest in finding an equivalent English for the Provençal lyric (which interest guided his early translations) indicates that the poetics of the lyric was the more serious pre-occupation.  The search for and adequate language (very much Pound’s own, life-long search) conducted by the Troubadours was what Pound took from them.  The questions asked concerning Bertrand de Born in “Near Perigord” remain questions; they stand without answers.  Possibilities are noted, are of interest to be sure, but the focus is on Bertrand as poet; what lasts is poetry and the history of the search for language recorded in poetry.

     Pound’s journey to Emil Levy is a step on this search, and examination of Canto XX indicates the multiplicity of the context within which the search takes place.

     The cluster which opens the canto is one of the most amazing in the whole poem.  Catullus, Homer, the Troubadour lyric (in this case Bernart de Ventadorn’s) and Guido Cavalcanti are gathered at the opening of the canto.  Catullus and Homer give the lyric sound its nature – ringing, clear and sweet – Bernart and Guido give it focus and content – the lady.

 

     Sound slender, quasi tinnula,

     Ligur’ aoide: So no’us vei, Domna don plus mi cal,

     Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val.”

     Between the two almond trees flowering,

     The viel held close to his side;

     And another: s’adora”.

              20/89

 

     Hugo Rennert, Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, had recommended Emil Levy to the young Pound as one man who might “know anything about Provençal.”

 

     And I went to old Levy, and it was by then 6.30 in

     The evening, and he trailed half was y across Freiburg

     Before dinner, to see the two strips of copy, 

     Arnaut’s, setant’uno R. Superiore (Ambrosiana)

     Not that I could sing him the music.

     And he said: Now is there anything I can tell you?”

     And I said:  I dunno, sir, or

     “Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?”

     And he said:  Noigandres!  NOIgandres!

                   20/89

 

The word[1] is from a poem of Arnaut’s which is crowded in its first lines with garden imagery.  This may well account for the abundance of spring and garden imagery in the first sections of this particular canto:

 

     The boughs are not more fresh

where the almond shoots take their March green.

         . . .

Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered,

By the clear edge of the rocks

The water runs, and the wind scented with pine

And with hay-fields under the sun-swath.

         . . .

Air moving under the boughs,

The cedars there in the sun,

Hay new cut on hill slope,

And the water there in the cut

Between the two lower meadows.

              20/89-90

 

     And the ever-present bird-song of the Troubadour lyric is part of Pound’s “Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard.”  Here is the stanza from Arnaut: followed by Pound’s translation:

 

Er vei vermeils, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs

     Vergiers, plans, plais, tertres e vaus;

Eil votz del auzels maitin e tart.

Som met en cor qu’ieu colore mon chan

D’un aital flor don lo fruitz sia amors,

E jois lo grans, e l’olors d’enoi gandres.

 

Vermeil, green, blue, peirs, white, cobalt,

Close orchards, hewis, holts, hows, vales,

And the bird-song that whirls and turns

Morning and late with sweet accord,

Bestir my heart to put my song in sheen

T’equal that flower which hath such properties,

It seeds in joy, bears love, and pain ameises.[2]

 

          The concern of Arnaut is with perfection of language (qu’ieu colore mon chan), while Pound’s journey to Levy (undertaken shortly after Levy had completed his Provenzalisches Supplement-Worterbuch, in which the solution had just appeared) resulted in clarification of language.  The result is satisfactory.  The letters of the word noigandres are divided, two words are formed which have meaning, whereas the Ambrosiana texts had left the young poet and old scholar equally in confusion.  One needs only to examine the last two lines of Arnaut’s stanza to recognize the lucidity of Levy’s decision.

     Pound is not amiss in moving the naked kiss of Doutz brais e critz into this setting, although at first glance one might think he were.  The problem is nevertheless a complicated one.

     In Doutz brais e critz, Arnaut again opens his poem with a comparison of his language to the bird-song.  Again, the bird-song impels him to perfect his language:

 

     E doncas ieu qu’en la genssor entendi

     Dei far chansson sobre totz de bell’ obra

     Que noi aia mot fals ni rima estrampa

 

     [the bird-song] is but more cause that I, whose

        overweening

     Search is toward the Noblest, set in cluster

     Lines where no word pulls awry, no rhyme breaks

        Gauges. [3]

 

The poet goes on to praise his good fortune (and good sense) in choosing a woman to love who is worthy and capable of adequate response as well as discretion.  He begs that God, who is capable of forgiving great sins, grant them privacy and consummation.

 

     Voilla, sil platz, qu’ieu e midonz jassam

     En la chambra on amdui nos mandem

     Uns rics convens don tan gran joi atendi,

     Quel sen bel cors baisan rizen descobra

     E quel remir contral lum de la lampa.

 

     . . . grant that we two shall lie

     Within one room, and seal therein our pact,

     Yes, that she kiss me in the half-light, leaning

     To me, and laugh and strip and stand forth in the lustre

     Where lamp-light with light limb but half engages. [4]

 

     The problem we are faced with in Pound’s conjoining of reference to these two Arnaut poems in the opening sections of his Canto XX is the contrast between open space and closed room.  Arnaut makes a great deal out of the concealment involved in his contacts with his lady in Doutz brais e critz.  That this contrast is employed by Arnaut intentionally may be further evidenced by his repeated antagonistic barbs against those who would discover his secrets, or steal a look behind his lady’s mantle (which she throws over him after granting him a kiss, shielding him from “culvertz’ eyes”).  The knowledge of the possibility of betrayal or discovery is a constant of the Provençal love-lyric.  It seems that for Pound, that which the Troubadour poets guarded so jealously is worthy of taking its place in the ranks he assembles in Canto XX of the noble and beautiful, brought down by betrayal and treachery:  Roland, the noble house of the Malatesti, Odysseus betrayed by the Lotophagoi.

     The reference to the Arnaut poem Doutz brais e critz deserves more attention.  The “quel remir” is a fragment of one of the most beautifully crafted light images of all Troubadour poetry.  I would suggest that this image, as a light image, represents a major part of what Pound is trying to extract from the Provençal literary tradition.

     And if we turn again to the opening lines of Canto XX, we may find further material with which to begin a comprehension of Pound’s large and detailed concept of the tradition of which the Troubadour lyric forms a pivotal part.  It is the tradition of love-poetry.  (The possibilities of reading The Cantos as essentially a love-epic have not been overlooked, I assume; however, detailed statements to this effect have escaped my notice.)

 

     Sound, slender, quasi tinnula,

     Ligur’ aoide; Si no’us vei, Domna don plus mi cal,

     Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val.”

     Between the two almond trees flowering,

     The veil held close to his side;

     And another:   s’adora.”

              20/89

 

Three possible relations with women are brought together.  Marriage, in the word tinnula (voce carmina tinnula) from Catullus? Marriage hymn, (LXI), a sexual deception in the ligur’aoide from the episode of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, and the medieval love-theory of delight as a direct result of sight from the Provençal of Bernart de Ventadorn.  The Topos: Love enters the soul through the eyes.  This fragment is the most lengthy of the three, and the description of the poet, “Between two almond trees flowering,” is undoubtedly a description of Bernart de Ventadorn.  The other, who speaks “s’adora,” is Guido Cavalcanti.  And the lady adored is the Virgin of San Michele in Orto.  She is admired, he says because here face is “Una figura de la donna mia.”

     Since Pound’s sense of connection between the love-poetry of the dolce stil nuovo and the earlier Troubadour lyric guides so much of his critical writing on medieval literature, we might indeed expect to find it functional in his ordering of tradition in The Cantos.  (He conveniently outlines what he considers to be the high points of the tradition for the student as an appendix to his essay, “Psychology and the Troubadours” in The Spirit of Romance.)  The larger context of this tradition is indicated in the opening of Pound’s essay, “The Tradition,” from Literary Essays:

 

The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.  This tradition did not begin in A.D. 1870, nor in 1776, nor in 1632, nor in 1564.  It did not begin even with Chaucer.

         The two great lyric traditions which most concern us are that of the Melic Poets and that of Provence.  From the first arose practically all the poetry of the “ancient world,” from the second practically all that of the modern.[5]

 

     At this point, it becomes possible (perhaps even necessary) to broaden the perspective somewhat and to deal with the manner in which the Provençal material in The Cantos affects or takes part in larger patterns.  If we accept Georg Gugleburger’s argument[6] that Cavalcanti (and more particularly the Donna mi Prega canzone) is central to The Cantos, then perhaps the Provençal material is best understood as it indicates the growth of the tradition which leads to Cavalcanti.  This context is defined by Pound at the opening of his essay “Lingua Toscana,” in the Spirit of Romance.

 

While Loris and Clopinel were compiling their encyclopedia of what passed for wisdom, the tradition of Provence was being continued in Tuscany.

The Albigensian Crusade, a sordid robbery cloaking itself in religious pretence, had ended the gai savoir in southern France.  The art of the troubadours meets with philosophy at Bologna and a new era of lyric poetry is begun.[7]

 

It may be argued reasonably that Pound incorporates some sense of connection between Cavalcanti and Dante into the fundamental structure of The Cantos, in which case, the terms of Pound’s interpretation of the line of poetic development from Provence to Dante would have to be clearly outlined.

     The remainder of this article will be devoted to a discussion of Pound’s sense of the poetics of Provence as they affected (in Pound’s view) the later flowering of Tuscan verse, exemplified by Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone, Donna mi Prega, and to a discovery of the manner in which that sense informs his notion of medieval poetics as it in turn informs the structure  and purpose of The Cantos.

     Pound’s selection of fragments may be considered from two perspectives, both necessary and relevant to a reading of the poem.  The individuality of the fragment, its sense as it stands alone or in relation to its immediate context in The Cantos is probably its final and most important reality.  However, as one discovers almost immediately in a first reading of  The Cantos, an acquaintance with the original context of every fragment, the poem or setting from which Pound has lifted it is almost invariably necessary to discovery of how the fragment adds any valuable reality to its new setting in Pound’s poem.

     For instance, the Arnaut segment “remir” in Canto XX makes a certain sense without reference to the complete poem, Doutz brais e critz.  It makes more sense as we recall its original context, and discover that Pound is recreating (something more than translating) a medieval garden scene while creating, through use of Arnaut’s rather angry poem about the necessity for concealment, a statement about the tenuous hold one has on such an ideal place.  This at least makes more sense of the strange conjunction between the description in the canto of the ideal garden and the betrayal scenes which follow.

     But if we expand our vision of the context, concentrating on the fragments of Provençal as they relate to each other, we may notice similarities among the fragments which Pound selects.  And if we wish to decide on one term or one coherent set of terms with which to approach these fragments, we must formulate those terms in relation to medieval theories of love.  But since this would suffice no matter what fragments of the troubadour lyric Pound was selecting, we should perhaps be more particular and recognize Pound’s grasp of the conjunction between sight and love as it profoundly affected the poetics of medieval literature.

     Whether Pound’s appreciation of Provençal poetry was retrospective (a search for Dante’s “sources”) or complete unto itself (the connection between the Provençals and Dante being made later), makes little difference.  The biographies of Pound are probably clear on this.  What we want to clarify now is the relations Pound sees between the Provençal lyric and Cavalcanti’s Donna mi Prega.  Pound has made quite available his decisions concerning the probable sources for Cavalcanti’s canzone (Grosseteste, Anselm.)  But quite clearly he perceives a relationship between the emotional poetry of the Troubadours and the more intellectual, scholastic, argumentative canzone.  And the connection it seems is based on more than a handing over of the craft.

     In the essay, “Psychology and the Troubadours,” he makes this more clear.  “In the Trecento the Tuscans are busy with their phantastikon.  In Provence we may find preparations for this.”8

     The preparation Pound speaks of here is the focus of many of the Provençal passages in The Cantos.   Let us return to the Provençal lines which join the cluster at the opening of Canto XX, from Bernart de Ventadour’s Can par la flors josta l vert folh.  I offer here the entire poem in the interest of understanding exactly how precise and perceptive Pound has been in establishing his vision of the tradition through the process of selection.

 

         Can par la flors josta.l vert folh

     E vei lo tems clar e sere

     e.l doutz chans dels auzels pel brolh

     m’adousa lo cor e.m reve,

     pos l’auzel chanton a lor for,

     eu, c’ai mais de joi en mo cor,

     dei be chantar, pois tuih li mei jornal

     son joi e chan, qu’eu no pes de ren al.

 

         Cela del mon quel eu plus volh,

     e mais l’am de cor e de fe,

     au de joi mos dihz e.ls acolh

     e mos precs ascout’ e rete.

     E s’om ja per ben amar mor,

     eu en morrai, qu’ins en mo cor

     li port amor tan fin’ e natural

     que tuih son faus vas me li plus leyal.

 

          Be sai la noih, can me despolh,

     el leih qu’eu no dormirai re.

     lo dormir pert, car eu lo.m tolh

     per vos, domna, don se sove;

     que lai on om a so tezor,

     vol om ades tener so cor.

     S’eu no vos vei, domna, con plus me cal,

     negus vezers mo bel pesar no val.

 

         Can me membra com amar solh

     la  fausa de mala merce,

     sapchatz que tal ira me colh,

     per pauc vius de joi no.m recre.

     Domna, percui chan e domor,

     per  la bocha.m feretz al cor

     d’un doutz baizar de fin’ amor coral,

     que.m torn en joi e.m get d’ira mortal.

    

         Tals n’i a qued an mais d’orgolh,

     can grans jois ni grans bed lor ve;

     mas eu sui de melhor escolh

     e plus francs, can Deus me fai be.

     C’ora qu’eu fos d’amor a l’or,

     eu sui de l’or vengutz al cor.

     Merce, domna! Non ai par ni engal.

     Res no.m sofranh, so que Deus vos me sol!

 

         Domna, si no.us vezon mei olh,

     be sapchatz que mos cors vos ve;

     e no.us dolhatz plus quéu me dolh.

     Mas, si.l gelos vos bat’ al cor.

     Si.us fai enoi, e vos lui atretal,

     e ja ab vos no gazanh be per mal!

 

         Mo Bel-Vezer, gart Deus d’ir e de mal.

     s’eu sui de lonh, e de pres atretal!

 

         Sol Deus midons e mo Bel-Vezer sal,

     tot ai can volh, qu’eu no deman ren al.9

 

The lines chosen by Pound, S’eu no vos vei, domna don plus me cal,/ Negus vezer mo bel pesar no val, give indication of the topos of the Tuscan lyric – the theoretical relation between love, eyes, heart (amor, occhi, cor).  The necessary connection implied by Bernart between his “good thought” and the sight of the lady, although described in negative terms of reversal, is essentially the same relation amplified and expanded in the Vita Nuova.

     The topos, as it was used by the Provençals served mainly to indicate the pain of love at being denied sight of the beloved, the joys afforded by the priveledge of looking upon her.  In the development of this topos by the Tuscan lyricists, especially in Guido Cavalcanti, the metaphysical realities of the relationships between light and seeing are incorporated into the context, complicating it, substantiating it beyond the simple emotions portrayed by the Provençals. (In Canto XXIX, Pound again selects a fragment from the Provençal.  This time the opening couplet of a Sordello poem.  Ailas que-m fau miey huelh/ Quar no vezar so qu’ieu vuelh.  The choice repeats the same pattern.)

     If the study of the Provençal material in The Cantos is undertaken with the intention of clarifying its place and affect upon some tradition of poetry (or love, or light) which includes and culminates with Dante, then the relationship between the Provençals and the Tuscan lyric should be examined.  This can be accomplished best through an examination of Pound’s treatment of Guido Cavalcanti.

     In one of the early analyses of the Cavalcanti canzone in The Cantos, Georg M. Gugleburger10 argues that Pound is attracted for the “Donna mi Prega” for its metaphorical nature.  And indeed, Pound has clarified (albeit in rather guarded language) his conception of the metaphorical implications of the canzone: “It seems to me quite possible that the whole of it is a sort of metaphor on the generation of light...”11  Gugleburger, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore this rather clear direction of Pound’s and decides that what Pound really admired about the poem is that it functions more as a metaphor for the generation of poetry itself.

     Since it is my contention that Pound’s poem depends largely on systems of light imagery, I cannot accept the substitution of an easier, more available context within which to discuss Pound’s use of the the Cavalcanti canzone.

     That Cavalcanti is proposing some similarity between love and light is undeniable.  In those lines of the poem to which Pound returns most often, Cavalcanti discusses the origin of love:

 

     In quella parte

         Dove sta memoria

     Prende suo stato

         Si formato

              Chome

     Diafan dal lume

         D’un schuritade . . . .12

 

Pound’s early translation in the Literary Essays:

    

     In memory’s locus taketh he his state

     Formed there in manner as a mist of light

     Upon a dusk . . . .13

 

Transforms into the later translation of The Cantos:

Where memory liveth

     It takes its state

Formed like a diafan from light on shade. . . .

                   36/177

 

     Gugleburger passes easily over the implied identification of love with light and makes facile equivalence between love and poetry for the purpose of giving a particular sense to Pound’s inclusion of the Cavalcanti canzone in his Cantos.  The Cavalcanti poem becomes, in these terms, a metaphor for the production of poetry.  If we accept that it was for this reason that Pound incorporated the Donna mi Prega into The Cantos, and further accept Gugleburger’s assertion that the entirety of The Cantos is somehow encompassed by the Cavalcanti canzone, then The Cantos becomes identified with other self-conscious literature of the Twentieth Century, and can be read as nothing more than circular, self-contained, self-referential, poetry about poetry.

     That The Cantos  is a poem informed by what Mr. Gugleburger calls “pre-textual light sources” is an intriguing notion, one which could easily illumine certain aspects of Pound’s use of Dante, as well as his use of earlier medieval material.  But to replace that discussion with a claim that the poetry is a definition of love which is a metaphor for light which equals poetry seems not only circular, but ultimately self-defeating.

     Rather, let us turn again for clarification to Pound’s own statements and see if they don’t illuminate the poetry and perhaps some of its purpose.  IN the Cavalcanti essay, Pound defines a good portion of his “medievalism.”

     We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies ‘mezzo oscuro rade’, ‘risplende in se perpetuale effecto’ magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to sense. . . .14

 

     To regain that world may have been Pound’s intention as a poet.  That he believed Cavalcanti to have lived fully in that world is clear.  He says in his commentary on the poem, “...if ever poem seemed to me a struggle for clear definition, that poem is the Donna mi Prega.”15  The struggle for clear definition is probably the most important idea which would guide a study of The Cantos’ relation to the Divina Commedia.  Dante’s journey (as that of Odysseus/Pound) is one inn search of true, clear knowledge.  The manner in which that knowledge occurs in Dante is medieval, scholastic.  The love that has been defined in Cavalcanti is very like the kind of love that leads Dante to its source.  But, to stress again my earlier contention, the amplifications by Cavalcanti on the topos of the love-sight relationship seem to mark a metamorphic moment in Pound’s conception of the relationship between Provençal lyric and Dantean epic.

     It seems now that the canzone takes its place as an aspect of several central themes in The Cantos.  It is a definition of love; it is a kind of metaphor on the generation of light; and, finally, it is a piece of the tradition – more than a fragment shored against ruin, it is perhaps a captured knowledge, an artifact,

     A little light, like a rushlight

              to lead back to the splendour.

                            116/797

 

     Pound’s introductory remarks to his translation of the Donna mi Prega include the following as part of his conception of the relations between the Troubadour lyric and the Tuscan:

 

     What is the difference between Provence and Hellas?  There is, let us grant, a line in Propertius about ingemium nobis fecit, but the subject is not greatly developed.  I mean that Propertius remains mostly inside the classis world and the classic aesthetic, plastic to coitus.  Plastic plus immediate satisfaction.

     The whole break of Provence with this world, and indeed the central theme of the troubadours, is the dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption.16

 

And that Canto XXXVI ends with a bitter elegy for Sordello is no accident.  Cavalcanti, Eriugenal, Sordello, all are grouped together, a radiant cluster of names, lost, forgotten, damned, Sordello forgotten immediately, his estate sold by his heirs six weeks after his death.  Sacrum, Sacrum, inluminatio coitu (36/180) seems to establish the quality of the art of poetry which had been reached by the time of Cavalcanti.  No longer merely “plastic plus immediate satisfaction,” but through the process of considering well in one’s courtly thought (see Sordello, Atretan deu ben chantar finamen) the plastic becomes illuminated, coition cognitive.

     Cavalcanti’s canzone is the culmination (in the lyric tradition) of the “dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption.”  In the Provençal lyric, this dogma may have best been imaged (for Pound at least) by Arnaut’s e quel remir and the rest of it.  And all of it of course coheres in Dante.

     Finally, I would suggest that The Cantos of Ezra Pound must be read (if read to be understood) as a conception of tradition.  Perhaps separable, identifiably distinct traditions, perhaps as a conception of one unified tradition.  It is polemic in that Pound conceives the modern world as having lost the thread, having cut itself away from the tradition; it is a poetry of high ethical determination in that it attempts to point the way to a re-alignment with the best of the world’s history, of which the Provençal lyric was an original and outstanding part.