The man who fears war and squats opposingMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimsonBut is fit only to rot in womanish peaceFar from where worth’s won and the swords clashFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;Yea, I fill all the air with my music.(Pound 1956:8)As Peter Makin has argued, Pound’s appropriations of earlier poets
like Bertran serve “as an exemplum, a demonstration of a possible way
of living,” and they are laden with various cultural and ideological
determinations (Makin 1978:42). Makin links the “phallic
aggressiveness” of “Sestina: Altaforte” to Pound’s esteem for “the
‘medieval clean line’” in architecture, as well as to his eulogies of
dictators past and present, like Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of
Renaissance Rimini and Benito Mussolini, “a male of the species”
(Makin 1978:29–35; Pound 1954:83).
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Blackburn included a translation of Bertran’s poem in the
troubadour anthology he mentioned to Pound in 1958. He followed
Pound’s example by pursuing a modernist translation strategy,
resorting to free verse with the most subtly intricate rhythms and
making an inventive selection of archaisms. Blackburn’s translation is
a strong performance that competes favorably against both of Pound’s
appropriations of the Provençal text:
And I love beyond all pleasure, thatlord who horsed, armed and beyond fear isforehead and spearhead in the attack, and thereemboldens his men with exploits. Whenstour proches and comes to quartersmay each man pay his quit-rent firmly,follow his lord with joy, willingly,for no man’s proved his worth a stiver untilmany the blowshe’s taken and given.Maces smashing painted helms,glaive-strokes descending, bucklers riven:this to be seen at stour’s starting!And many valorous vassals pierced and piercingstriking together!And nickering, wandering lost, throughthe battle’s thick,brast-out blood on broken harness,horses of deadmen and wounded.And having once sallied into the stourno boy with a brassard may think of aught, butthe swapping of heads, and hacking off arms—for here a man is worth more deadthan shott-free and caught!(Blackburn 1958:119–120)“Quit-rent,” “vassals,” “glaive-strokes”—Blackburn created a lexicon
that was obviously medieval, and he occasionally mimicked Anglo-Saxon patterns of rhythm and alliteration (“brast-out blood on broken
harness”). Yet his translation discourse was not only historicizing, but
foreignizing: some of the archaisms are decidedly unfamiliar, or
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anachronistic, used in later periods than the Middle Ages. “Stiver,” a
small coin, is first used in the sixteenth century. The verb “nicker” is a
nineteenth-century usage for “neigh,” appearing in such literary texts
as Sir Walter Scott’s novel
The Monastery (1820). “Brassard” is French
for “armor,” but in English it constitutes another nineteenth-century
usage, this time Victorian, adding a touch of pre-Raphaelite
medievalism to the translation. The word “proches” is also French, at
least in spelling; in Blackburn’s translation it is a pseudo-archaic
neologism, an Anglicized French word that appears to be an archaic
variant spelling of “approaches” but actually isn’t (no such spelling is
recorded in the OED).