“I have in my translations tried to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of that power which implies the man. The science of the music of words and the knowledge of their magical powers has fallen away…That there might be less interposed between the reader and Guido, it was my first intention to print only his poems and an unrhymed gloze. This has not been practicable.
I cannot trust the reader to read the Italian for the music after he has read the English for the sense.”
Ezra Pound’s “Introduction to Sonnets and Ballate” in Pound’s Cavalcanti by David Anderson).