JULY 1928

DONNA MI PREGA BY GUIDO CAVALCANTI
WITH TRADUCTION AND COMMENTARY
BY EZRA POUND: FOLLOWED BY NOTES
AND A CONSIDERATION OF THE SONNET

(Dedicace—To Thomas Campion his ghost, and to the
ghost of Henry Lawes, as prayer for the revival of music)

BECAUSE a lady asks me, I would tell
Of an affect that comes often and is fell
And is so overweening: Love, by name.
E'en its deniers can now hear the truth,
I for the nonce to them that know it call,
Having no hope at all
that man who is base in heart
Can bear his part of wit
into the light of it,
And save they know't aright from nature's source
I have no will to prove Love's course
or say
Where he takes rest; who maketh him to be;
Or what his active *virtu* is, or what his force;
Nay, nor his very essence or his mode;
What his placation; why he is in verb,
Or if a man have might
To show him visible to men's sight.

Copyright 1928 by Ezra Pound

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DONNA MI PREGA

IN memory's locus taketh he his state
Formed there in manner as a mist of light
Upon a dusk that is come from Mars and stays.
Love is created, hath a sensate name,
His modus takes from soul, from heart his will;
From form seen doth he start, that, understood,
Taketh in latent intellect—
As in a subject ready—

place and abode,
Yet in that place it ever is unstill,
Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down
By quality, but is its own effect unendingly
Not to delight, but in an ardour of thought
That the base likeness of it kindleth not.

IT is not virtu, but perfection's source
Lying within perfection postulate
Not by the reason, but 'tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth its judging force,
Maintains intention reason's peer and mate;
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness' friend,
Often his power meeteth with death in the end
Be he withstayed

or from true course
bewrayed

E'en though he meet not with hate
or villeiny
Save that perfection fails, be it but a little;
Nor can man say he hath his life by chance
Or that he hath not stablished seigniory
Or loseth power, e'en lost to memory.

HE comes to be and is when will's so great
It twists itself from out all natural measure;
Leisure's adornment puts he then never on,
Never thereafter, but moves changing state,
Moves changing colour, or to laugh or weep
Or wries the face with fear and little stays,
Yea, resteth little

yet is found the most
Where folk of worth be host.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI

3

And his strange property sets sighs to move
And wills man look into unformèd space
Rousing there thirst
that breaketh into flame.
None can imagine love
that knows not love;
Love doth not move, but draweth all to him;
Nor doth he turn
for a whim
to find delight
Nor to seek out—surely—
great knowledge or slight.

LOOK drawn from like,
delight maketh certain in seeming,
Nor can in covert cower,
beauty so near,
Not yet wild-cruel as darts,
So hath man craft from fear
in such his desire
To follow a noble spirit,
edge, that is, and point to the dart,
Though from her face indiscernible;
He, caught, falleth
plumb on the spike of the targe.
Who well proceedeth, form not seeth,
following his own emanation.
There, beyond colour, essence set apart,
In midst of darkness light light giveth forth
Beyond all falsity, worthy of faith, alone
That in him solely is compassion born.

SAFE may'st 'ow go my canzon whither thee pleaseth
Thou art so fair attired that every man and each
Shall praise thy speech
So he have sense or glow with reason's fire,
To stand with other
hast 'ow no desire

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DONNA MI PREGA

PARTIAL EXPLANATION

A commentary is a piece of writing in which we expose and seek to excuse our ignorance of the subject. The less we know, the longer our explanations.

The preceding canzone was known as “the philosophic canzone”; the stir that it caused, over and above the stir aroused by any beautiful work, may be attributed in part to the state of philosophic opinion in and about A.D. 1290. Guido is called a “natural philosopher,” I think an “atheist,” and certainly an “Epicurean,” not that any one had then any clear idea or has now any very definite notion of what Epicurus taught. But a natural philosopher was a much less safe person than a “moral philosopher.” ¹

It is not so much what Guido says in the poem, as the familiarity that he shows with dangerous thinking: *natural demonstration* and the proof by experience or (?) experiment. If after-dinner conversation in the Uberti and Cavalcanti families was any warrant for Guido's tone it is small wonder that Dante who was, as a young man, *bien pensant*, and probably quite content with the orthodoxy of Guinicello, thought it necessary to lodge the tough-minded seniors of these tribes in the Tenth Canto of his Inferno, where, indeed, the elder Cavalcanti might seem to be expecting his son.

My own sympathies extend even to the disrespect of Virgilio, but that point may seem irrelevant.

From this poem and from passages elsewhere it would seem that Guido had derived certain notions from the Aristotelian commentators, the “filosofica famiglia,” Ibn Sina, for the *spiriti*, *spirititi* of the eyes, of the senses; Ibn Rachd, *che il gran commento feo*, for the demand for intelligence on the part of the recipient; Albertus Magnus, for the proof by experience; and possibly Grosseteste, De Luce et de Incohazione Formarum, although this will need proving.

At any rate for any serious thought in Guido's time we must suppose the Arabian background: the concentric spheres of the heavens, Ibn Badja's itinerary of the soul going to God, Averroes' specifications for the degrees of comprehension; and we may perhaps consider Guido as one of that “tenuous line who from Albertus

¹ See Mediaevalism and Mediaevalism (Guido Cavalcanti) by Ezra Pound, THE DIAL, March 1928.

EZRA POUND

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Magnus to the renaissance" meant the freedom of thought, the contempt, or at least a moderated respect, for stupid authority.

He is possibly against Sigier and for Albertus, he wants no Truth that contradicts the "rationes naturales," he is not jamming down a dogma unsupported by nature. His truth is not against "natural dimostramento" or based merely on authority. It is a truth for elect recipients, not a truth universally spreadable or acceptable. The "dove sta memoria" is Platonism. The "non razionale ma che si sente" is for experiment, it is against the tyranny of the syllogism, blinding and obscurantist. The tone of his mind is infinitely more "modern" than Dante's. "Fuor di salute, guidicar mantiene," his position, here as on the rest of these cardinal points, shows him to be "very dangerous" to the peace of the mediaeval mind, if immobility may be considered as "peace."

And all this is done with the suavity of a song, with the neatness of scalpel-cut. Guido is eclectic, he swallows none of his authors whole. There is no open "atheism," indeed no direct attack on any church dogma, but there was probably a sense of briskness; I mean it would not have been comforting to lovers of quiet.

If part of this is conjecture, I think one can, at any rate, scarcely exaggerate the gulf between Guido's state of mind and that of Dante in the same epoch, or between it and Dante's willingness to take on any sort of holy and orthodox furniture. Dante's "heresies" are due to feeling, annoyance with Popes and so forth, rather than to intellectual hunger, or to his feeling cramped in the Aquinian universe.

I may be wrong, but I cannot believe that Guido "swallowed" Aquinas. It is perhaps by merest accident, but we find nowhere in his poems any implication of a belief in a geocentric or theocentric material universe.

"BUT THE POEM IS VERY OBSCURE"

The poem is extremely clear in a number of places, the philosophic terms are used with a complete precision of technique. I am aware that I have distorted "accidente" into affect, but I have done so in order not to lose the tone of my opening line, by introducing an English word of *double entente*.

For the rest there are certain enigmas, and the celebrated com-

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DONNA MI PREGA

mentators have done nothing to solve them. Those which face us to-day are precisely the same ones that faced Del Garbo, or Di Giunta in 1527.

Considering the clarity and precision of the text where it is clear, I am loath to think that these obscure points indicate merely a loose usage or *remplissage* on the part of the author.

Textual research brings us to a definite limit of knowledge about certain manuscript readings. The earliest known copyists found certain passages either illegible or incomprehensible: as for example, *la gir*, *largir*, or *laire simiglianza*.

Frate Egidio (Colonna, Romano, il beato, degli Agostini) goes round it. He begins his commentary with a graceful description of a notable lady, who must have begun life “of Paphos and the Isles” but who has attained a safe anonymity. She is seated on an anonymous mountain, by an anonymous fountain, whence she sends forth her ministers: Solomon and Ovidius Naso. However, *il beato* casts no satisfactory light on the phrase, “*largir simiglianza.*” Dino del Garbo is, in the modern sense, a much more serious character. He quotes a good deal of Aristotle, explains the preceding line as if it read “*E si non ha diletto,*” or “*quando non ha diletto,*” but slurs over the *la gir* or *largir*. The manuscripts do not help us.

*La gir* means turn there, and *largir* is to give away freely. To give likeness freely? Or is *simiglianza* the subject?

For purpose of translation one has, as Rossetti remarks, to cut through various knots, and make arbitrary decisions. I have perforce, here as elsewhere, selected one of the possible meanings, or at least attempted to do so, but without any wish to insist upon it, or to conceal either the depths of my ignorance, or my width of uncertainty.

Gilson¹ summarizes Grosseteste's ideas on light as follows:

> "La lumière est une substance corporelle très subtile et qui se rap-
> proche de l'incorporel. Ses propriétés caractéristiques sont de s'en-
> gendrer elle-même perpétuellement et de se diffuser sphériquement
> autour d'un point d'une manière instantanée. Donnons-nous un
> point lumineux, il s'engendre instantanément autour de ce point
> comme centre une sphère lumineuse immense. La diffusion de la
> lumière ne peut être contrariée que par deux raisons: ou bien elle

1 Philosophie du Moyen Age, par Etienne Gilson, Payot, Paris, 1925.

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rencontre une obscurité qui l'arrête, ou bien elle finit par atteindre
la limite extrême de sa raréfaction, et la propagation de la lumière
prend fin par là même. Cette substance extrêmement ténue est aussi
l'étoffe dont toutes choses sont faites; elle est la première forme cor-
porelle et ce que certains nomment la corporéité."

This French summary is most able, and most lucid. It is far
more suggestive of the Canzone: Donna Mi Prega, than the original
Latin of Grosseteste,¹ but my suggestion is not that Guido is a
mere dilettante poetaster dragging in philosophic terms or caught
by a verbal similarity (e.g., as Lorenzo Medici, dabbling in Pla-
tonism in his rhymed account of talk with Ficino). For "risplende
in se perpetual effecto" we do find the Latin approximation:

(De Luce, the Baur edition) P. 51—*Lux enim per se in omnem
partem se ipsam diffundit*. ...

... a puncto lucis sphaera lucis quamvis magna ... generetur

...

P. 52—*Lux prima forma in materia prima creata, seipsam seip-
sam ... multiplicans*. (? multiplicans = largir.)

P. 56—*aer quoque ex se corpus spirituale vel spiritum corporalem
generans.*

P. 58—*Forma autem, ut pote simplicissima, unitatis obtinet locum,
as bearing on the “formato” or “non formato loco.”*

P. 73—*aut transitus radii ad rem visam est rectus per medium dia-
phani unius generis ... aut transitus ... modi spiritualis, per
quam ipsum est speculum ... transitus ... per ... plura
diaphana ...*

P. 91—*reference to Plato ... anima substantia seipsam movens.*

P. 345—*formam lucis in aere vel in corpore ... transparente
... nec lucis essentiam ibi esse ... conceditur ... nomine
formae habitus censentur ...*

P. 347—*aeternae rationes rerum causatarum*, from the Timaeus.

Grosseteste derives from Arabic treatises on perspective. It is
too much to say that Guido had, perforce, read the Bishop of
Lincoln, but certainly that is the *sort* of thing he had read.

¹ L. Baur, Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Münster, 1912, Beitrage z. Gesch. Phil. d. Mittelalt. Latin text and German commentary, vols. IX and XVIII, 4-6.

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DONNA MI PREGA

His definition of “l'accidente,” i.e., the whole poem, is a scholastic definition in form, it is as clear and definite as the prose treatises of the period, it shows an equal acuteness of thought. It seems to me quite possible that the whole of it is a sort of metaphor on the generation of light, or that at any rate greater familiarity with the philosophy of the period would elucidate the remaining tangles, particularly if one search for the part of philosophy that was in a state of activity in the years 1270-1290. One cannot absolutely rule out the possibility of Guido's having seen even some scrap of MS. by Roger Bacon, although this is, perhaps, unlikely.

Considering the quality of Guido's mind as manifest in indisputable passages it would, I think, be the greatest possible error to imagine that any part of the poem is mere decoration or stuffing. “Talento di voler” looks weak, but may not even that be due to an idée fixe on our part—“voler provare” meaning perhaps technically, “try to prove,” and the whole phrase, “I have no inclination to attempt proof” rather than “wish to will to prove”? If not, the talento is dragged in for the rhyme, and we must count it a blemish.

It may not be amiss, as illustrating the contemporary situation of philosophic thought in the British desert, and the recognition of one serious mind by another, to recall an incident of fifteen years past. When the late T. E. Hulme was trying to be a philosopher in that milieu, and fussing about Sorel and Bergson and getting them translated into English, I spoke to him one day of the difference between Guido's precise interpretative metaphor, and the Petrarchan fustian and ornament, pointing out that Guido thought in accurate terms; that the phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone; in fact, very much what I had said in my early preface to the Sonnets and Ballate.

Hulme took some time over it in silence, and then finally said: “That is very interesting”; and after a pause: “That is more interesting than anything any one ever said to me. It is more interesting than anything I ever read in a book.”

I was talking of certain passages in the Sonnets and Ballate, and not of this canzone, but the point should hold as well for the canzone.

What we need now is not so much a commentator as a lexicon.

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It is the precise sense of certain terms as *understood at that particular epoch* that one would like to have set before one.

For example, does “intenzion” mean intention (a matter of will)? does it mean intuition, intuitive perception, or does the line hòld the same meaning as that in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, intenzion being intention, and ragione meaning not reason, but “being right”?

At such points the commentators either branch off and give their own theories about the cosmos in general, or they restate with vague verbosity what Guido has said with greater pre- and con- cision.

As the philosophy of the time has been completely scrapped, there are very few specialists who can help us. I should be de- lighted to hear from any one who has more definite knowledge. Up to the present I have found out what little I have found out by concentration on the text, and not by reading commentators, and I strongly suspect that that is the road that the next man will have to follow.

There are certain definite impasses, for definite palaeographical reasons. The copyists simply did not know, and we are unlikely to find any more or anterior manuscripts.

The other dimension of the poem is its lyricism, in the strictest sense of the term. It is made for song, not for rhetorical declama- tion; on which count Dante twice mentions it in De Vulgari Eloquio, II, 12. First in connexion with his own: “*Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore*”; and secondly in comparison with his: “*Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato.*”

GUIDO CAVALCANTI

11

IN quella parte
dove sta memoria
Prende suo stato
sì formato
chome
Diafan dal lume
d una schuritade

LA qual dà Marte
viene è fà dimora
Elgh è creato
e a sensato
nome
D'alma chostume
di chor volontade

VIEN dà veduta forma ches sintende
Che prende
nel possibile intelletto
Chome in subjetto
locho è dimoranza
E in quella parte mai non a possanza

PERCHÈ dà qualitatde non discende
Risplende
in sé perpetuale effecto
Non a diletto
mà consideranza
Perche non pote laire simiglglianza:—

¹ Da Marte: I suppose as “impulse.” At any rate there is a neoplatonic gradation of the assumption of faculties as the mind descends into matter through the seven spheres, via the gate of cancer: in Saturn, reason; in Jupiter, practical and moral; in Mars, “the spirited”; in Venus, the sensuous. Cf. Dante’s *vei ch’ intendendo il terzo ciel’ movete*. Macrobius In Somnium Scipionis; and Plotinus, Ennead.

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DONNA MI PREGA

NON è virtute
mà daquesta vene
Perfezione
ches si pone
tale
Non razionale
mà chè si sente dicho

FUOR di salute
giudichar mantene
E 1 antenzione
per ragione
vale
Diserne male
in chui è vicio amicho

DI sua virtu seghue ispesso morte
Sè forte
la virtu fosse impedita
La quale aita
la contraria via
Nonche opposito natural sia

MÀ quanto chè da ben perfett e torte
Per sorte ¹
non po dir om ch abbi vita
Chè stabilita
non a signioria
À simil può valer quant uom 1 oblia:—

¹ MS. might read *forte*, but wrongly.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI

13

LESSER quando
lo voler a tanto¹
Ch oltre misura
oltra
di natura
Poi non si adorna
torna
di riposo mai

MOVE changiando
cholr riso in pianto
El la fighura
con paura
storna
Pocho soggiorna
anchor in lui vedrai

CH en gente di valore il piu si trova
La nova
qualità move a sospiri,
E vol ch om mirj
s'ira in un formato² locho
Destandositi lo qual manda focho

IMMAGINAR nol puo hom che nol prova
E non si mova
perche al lui si tirj
Et non ssi a ggiri
per trovarvi giocho
E certamente gran saver ne pocho—

¹ Di Giunta. *L'essere è, quando lo volere è tanto.*

² Rivalta gives: *in non formato*.

I can only make simple sense of *non formato*, or complicated sequence of thought in reading *formato* without the *non*. But on eleventh thought perhaps my translation does violence to impartial palaeography. Reading *fermato* or *formato*, the sense wd. be perception, falling upon will in the possible whereabouts of the possible or potential intellect marks a locus or area, it does not create a stasis (the *possanza* of the second strophe). This area wd. be the *formato locho* to be contemplated, all of which is rather a strain on modern reader unaccustomed to poems having coherent thought from one end to the other, unaccustomed in fact to *any* mental sequence or coherence. Or still more briefly: "wills that he look at the form of beauty already engendered in his own mind." The words are not yet devitalized. *Immaginar* still meant "to form an image."

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THE OTHER DIMENSION

The danger of a canzone composed entirely in hendecasyllabics
is that of going heavy. Dante avoids it in Donne ch'Avete with-
out using inner rhymes. Here Guido employs them.

The canzone of Guido's which Dante takes as a model of
"construction" is not the Donna Mi Prega, but Poiche di Doglia,
of which only the first strophe is preserved, and this strophe for
some obscure reason (or from simple habits of imitation) all
editors insist on printing as a Ballata, beginning with Di Giunta
and ending, curiously enough, with Rivalta. Apart from Dante's
clear reference to it, one should be able to observe its formation.

The reader will not arrive at a just appreciation of the canzone
unless he be aware that there are three kinds of melopoeia, that
is to say: poems made to speak, to chant, and to sing. This
canzone, Guido's poetry in general, and the poems of mediaeval
Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made to be sung.
Relative estimates of value inside these periods must take count
of the cantabile values.

Modern professors with lifted eyebrows patronizing Dante's
judgements in such matters appear to me rather like hypothetical
persons who having taken an elementary course in phonetics or
physics and having heard their wives' sisters play Chaminade
bring out: "Bach's opinions on the fugue which our later criticism
has superseded . . ."

The canzone was to poets of this period what the fugue was
to musicians in Bach's time. It is a highly specialized form, hav-
ing its own self-imposed limits. I trust I have managed to print
the Donna Mi Prega in such a way that its articulations strike
the eye without need of a rhyme table. The strophe is here
seen to consist of four parts, the second lobe equal to the first
as required by the rules of the canzone; and the fourth happening
to equal the third, which is not required by the rules as Dante
explains them.

Each strophe is articulated by 14 terminal and 12 inner rhyme
sounds. That means that 52 out of every 154 syllables are bound
into pattern. The strophe reverses the proportions of the sonnet,
as the short lobes precede the longer. This reversal is obviously of
advantage to the strophe as part of a longer composition.

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DONNA MI PREGA

At this point we divagate for fuller ultimate reference. The
prestige of the sonnet in English is a relic of insular ignorance.
The sonnet was not a great poetic *invention*. The sonnet occurred
automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a
canzone. His "genius" consisted in the recognition of the fact
that he had come to the end of his subject-matter.

It should not be necessary for me now to quote the whole of the
De Vulgari Eloquio. That notable opusculus is available in many
and cheap editions. My own brief study of Arnaut Daniel may
throw a further light on earlier phases of the canzone in the
"lingua materna."

As to the use of canzoni in English, whether for composition
or in translation: it is not that there aren't rhymes in English;
or enough rhymes or even enough two-syllable rhymes, but that
the english two-syllable rhymes are of the wrong timbre and
weight. They have extra consonants at the end, as in *flowing* and
*going*; or they go squshy; or they fluff up as in *snowy* and *goeth*.
They are not "rime agute"; they do not offer readily the qualities
and contrasts that Dante has discussed so ably in De Eloquio.

Even so, it is not that one "cannot" use them but that they
demand, at times, sacrifice of values that had not come into being
and were therefore not missed in Limoges A. D. 1200. Against
which we have our concealed rhymes and our semi-submerged
alliteration. (En *passant*, the alliteration in Guido's canzone is
almost as marked as the rhyming though it enters as free com-
ponent.)

It is not always that one language cannot be made to do what
another has done, but that it is not always expeditious to approach
the same goal by the same alley. I do not think rhyme-aesthetic,
any rhyme-aesthetic, can ever do so much damage to english verse
as that done by latinization, in Milton's time and before. The
rhyme pattern is, after all, a matter of chiselling, and a question
of the "*lima amorosa*," whereas latinization is a matter of com-
post, and in the very substance of the speech. By latinization I
mean here the attempt to use an uninflected language as if it were
an inflected one, i.e., as if each word had a little label or postscript
telling the reader at once what part it takes in the sentence, and
specifying its several relations. Not only does such usage—with
remnants of latin order—ruin the word order in English, but it

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shows a fundamental miscomprehension of the organism of the language, and fundamental stupidity of this kind is bound to spread its effects through the whole fibre of a man's writing.

HENDECASYLLABLES

Another prevalent error is that of dealing with italian hendecasyllables as if they were english "iambic pentameter." One is told in college that Italian verse is not accentual but syllabic but I can't remember any one's having ever presented the anglo-american reader with a lucid discrimination between the two systems of measurement.

Some day I shall erect a monument to the books one reads in country hotels. Their titles and their authors evade one. One is not there "on business," one does not take notes and make excerpts. Let me however record here, that once in Sicily I came upon a century-old Italian school-book containing intelligent remarks upon metric. It was probably G. Biagioli's Tractato d'Armonia di Verso Italiano (Palermo 1836), with references to the Elementi di Poesia of G. Gherardini. The author did not "lay down rules," he merely observed that Dante's hendecasyllables were composed of combinations of rhythm units of various shapes and sizes and that these pieces were put together in lines so as to make, roughly, eleven syllables in all. I say "roughly" because of the liberties allowed in elision. I had discovered this fact for myself in Indiana twenty years before and in my own work had made use of the knowledge continually, but I wish to salute Messrs Biagioli and Gherardini.

This system represented versification when it was in a healthy state, when *motz* had not been divorced from *son* and before the sonnet had got in its dirty work.

Historically the sonnet, the "little tune," had already in Guido's day, become a danger to composition. It marks an ending or at least a decline of metric invention. It marks the beginning of the divorce of words and music. Sonnets with good musical setting are rare. The spur to the musician is slight. The monotony of the 14 even lines as compared to the constantly varying strophes of Ventadour or of Arnaut: the vocal heaviness of the hendecasyllable unrelieved by a shorter turn are all blanketing impediments for the music. This is not to say that the unrelieved hendecasyllable is impossible, and Dante, seeking the difficult, is

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DONNA MI PREGA

quite right to set the canzone in unrelieved hendecasyllables as the
grand bogy of technical mastery.

Guido as we here observe, and as Dante had observed before us:

*rithimorum repercussionem frequenter videtur assumptum.*

He keeps the sound sharp and light in the throat by the rhymes
inside the long line. Even some of the best Provençals, using a
strophe of half his length, are unable to keep this cantabile virtue.
All of which is probably a matter for specialists who will not be
content with any general statement but will want to compare sound
by sound the actual examples of mastersong that *totam artem com-
prehendunt*.

But one owes it to the general reader to jab his curiosity as to
the degree of sonorous art, one might almost say of concrete or
material sonority, required in this exposition of a general theme,
in the case of the Donna Mi Prega; and of its relativity to the
sonnet.

Of the great songs one remembers, that is songs sung with music,
from Ierusalem Mirabilis to Le Pauvre Laboureur, and from that
to Debussy's settings of Charles d'Orléans, does one remember a
sonnet? And if so, how many?

The Canzone, any canzone, is obviously in intention a *capo
lavoro*, a consummation of *métier*. Perhaps no poet has left half
a dozen, or shall we say that Dante and Arnaut Daniel alone have
left half a dozen each, that any one can remember? If I exaggerate,
I do not exaggerate very greatly.

Of Guido this one survives undisputed. There is one inferior
canzone ascribed to him; there is a strophe of another (Poiche di
Doglia); and there is, I should be inclined to sustain, a *chance*
of his having written the first strophe, though certainly not the
entire, canzone to Fortune.

Apart from the Donna Mi Prega, Guido's reputation rests
largely on the ballate, more or less his own field. That is to
say, for purposes of song he chose a lighter and freer form, *not* the
sonnet. In the ballata the first lobe is not immediately re-echoed.
Tradition is that the ballata is made from popular dance-song,
a scrap of folk-song caught up for the beauty of its tune, or for

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HENDECASYLLABLES

Another prevalent error is that of dealing with italian hendeca-
syllables as if they were english "iambic pentameter." One is
told in college that Italian verse is not accentual but syllabic but
I can't remember any one's having ever presented the anglo-
american reader with a lucid discrimination between the two
systems of measurement.

Some day I shall erect a monument to the books one reads in
country hotels. Their titles and their authors evade one. One is
not there "on business," one does not take notes and make excerpts.
Let me however record here, that once in Sicily I came upon a
century-old Italian school-book containing intelligent remarks upon
metric. It was probably G. Biagioli's Tractato d'Armonia di Verso
Italiano (Palermo 1836), with references to the Elementi di Poesia
of G. Gherardini. The author did not "lay down rules," he merely
observed that Dante's hendecasyllables were composed of com-
binations of rhythm units of various shapes and sizes and that these
pieces were put together in lines so as to make, roughly, eleven
syllables in all. I say "roughly" because of the liberties allowed in
elision. I had discovered this fact for myself in Indiana twenty
years before and in my own work had made use of the knowledge
continually, but I wish to salute Messrs Biagioli and Gherardini.

Historically the sonnet, the "little tune," had already in Guido's
day, become a danger to composition. It marks an ending or at
least a decline of metric invention. It marks the beginning of
the divorce of words and music. Sonnets with good musical
setting are rare. The spur to the musician is slight. The monot-
ony of the 14 even lines as compared to the constantly varying
strophes of Ventadour or of Arnaut: the vocal heaviness of the
hendecasyllable unrelieved by a shorter turn are all blanketing
impediments for the music. This is not to say that the unrelieved
hendecasyllable is impossible, and Dante, seeking the difficult, is

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EZRA POUND

19

some felicity, and then made into an art-form, more emotional
and more emotive than the form of the Italian canzone.

Note that by A. D. 1290 the sonnet is already ceasing to be
lyric, it is already the epistle without a tune, it is in a state of
becoming, and tends already to oratorical pronunciamento.

The strophes of canzoni are perforce symmetrical as the musical
composition is only one fifth or one sixth the length of the verbal
composition and has to be repeated. I don't believe we can prove
complete absence of modulation; or that in case of canzon in
tenzone one should assume impossibility of answer to tonic from
dominant. Neither do we know what happened to the tune of the
sestina while the recurrence-scheme was performing its evolution;
the six units of the tune may, and in the case of Arnaut's Oncle
ed Ongla could very well, have followed the permutation. The
aesthetic of the carry-through of one rhyme-scheme from strophe
to strophe is of Provençal not of Tuscan composition.

We know something of twelfth-century music, or have at least
some grounds for particular conjecture, graphs, that is, of pitch
sequence for some two hundred melodies; we are without any such
comparable guide for "Dante and his Circle." I know of no
manuscript containing music of that particular period; the one
"item" in the Siena *archivio* is not a fragment of melody, but two
lines of police record: Casella, jugged for being out after Curfew.

But considering the finesse of some of the Limousin melodies
there is nothing to prevent our conjecture that the decadence of
verbal mastery in Italian poetry may have paced a parallel decline
in the melodic component. This would apply to the perfection
of the single line or the "snatch" of song; to the close fit of word
and melody, but not presumably to the whole form of the music.
One may summarize the phases of development of the canzon as
follows:

1. Strophe with few terminal sounds, sometimes only two, often no more than four sounds, repeated throughout the poem, meaning that the same rhyme wd. occur 18, or 24 times in the poem, or even more. After a century or so this grew monotonous, and we have

2. Use of *rimas escarsas* which may mean either the hunting up

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of less usual terminal sounds, or the spacing out of the rhymes.
In Arnaut's L'Aura Amara, we have 14 different rhyme sounds only
3 of which repeat inside the strophe, eleven of them repeat only
from one strophe to the rest, that is occur only six or seven times
in the poem.

3. Abandonment of the carry-through from one strophe to an-
other. Arnaut had omitted carry-through in Can Chai la Fuoilla.
Here in Guido's canzone 8 different sounds form the pattern inside
the strophe; 5 occur 4 times, and 3 twice.

To be well done this patterning must lighten, not clog the move-
ment, either of sense or sound.

As to the atrocities of my translation, all that can be said in
excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and
committed with the aim of driving the reader's perception further
into the original than it would without them have penetrated. The
melodic structure is properly indicated—and for the first time—
by my disposition of the Italian text, but even that firm indication
of the rhyme and the articulation of the strophe does not stress
all the properties of Guido's triumph in sheer musicality.

One must strive, almost at any cost, to avoid a sort of mealy
mumbling almost universally tolerated in English. If english
verse undulates the average ear tolerates it, or even welcomes it
though the undulation be but as a wobble of bread-dough, utterly
incantabile, even when not wholly unspeakable.

I have not given an english “equivalent” for the Donna Mi
Prega; at the utmost I have provided the reader unfamiliar with
old Italian, an instrument that may assist him in gauging some
of the qualities of the original.

NOTE: All this is not so unconnected with our own time as might seem. Those writers to whom *vers libre* was a mere “runnin’ dahn th’ road” videlicet escape, and who were impelled thereto by no inner need of, or curiosity concerning, the quantitative element in metric; having come to the end of that lurch, lurch back not into experiment with the Canzone or any other unexplored form, but into the stock and trade sonnet.