Has anyone noticed that Pound's Cavalcanti is often just not very good?

Voi, que per gli occhi miei passaste al core
E svegliaste la mente che dormia

It's a pretty simple concept: you, who passed from my eyes to my heart / and awoke my sleeping mind." The Italian is easier to understand than Pound's

"You, who do breech mine eyes and touch the heart
And start the mind from her brief reveries"

Obviously Pound is going after a 16th-century Wyatt/Surrey feel. The mimickry is convincing on and off, but results in padding. "brief reveries" sounds more 19th century than 16th anyway.

"Guardate a l'angosciosa vita mia,
Che sospirando la distrugge Amore"

"Look at my anguished life / that sighing Love destroys"

Pound: "Might pluck my life and agony apart / Saw you how love assaileth her with sighs"

Once again, a relatively simple original / convoluted translation.

We find other gems in Pound's version like "so brute a might" "a new face upon the seigniory," "wherefrom my pain," and "First shot's resultant! and in flanked amaze..." The last is surely one of the worst lines of poetry in Pound's poetic works.

Cavalcanti's poem does seem "dated," in the sense that it follows the conventions of the dolce stil novo of the 13th Century. The donna will be gentile and the lover will be pierced by Cupid's arrow. Yet it is perfectly readable even today. Stylistically it is fresher than Philip Larkin. I don't even know Italian and I can understand it fine by looking up a few words. The translation is dated in a different, and far worse way. It gets in the way of itself, unable to decide whether it wants to be 13th Century, 16th Century, 19th Century, or 20th Century.

Now I know that that Lawrence Venuti has defended this exact kind of "heterogeneity" in modernist translation practice, pointing specifically to Pound. This puts me in the awkward position of questioning not only the greatest translator of the 20th century, but also the most interesting theorist of translation of the present day (Venuti). It's a nice theory, and I tend to go along with it... until I see the results. I stand here in flanked amaze at how bad they can be sometimes.

Now you could say that I am invoking a standard of badness or goodness based on what's "acceptable" to me as a reader, and hence falling back into a comfortable conservatism. I would answer that Pound is committing the typical sins of ennoblement, expansion, destruction of rhythms, and rationalization that Antoine Berman analyzes in "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign." The translation trips my WTF switch too many times. "che m'ha disfatto..." [which has undone me] becomes "hath drawn me down through devious ways."

None of this has anything to do with questions of simple accuracy. In other words, I would have no objection at all to slight shifts in meaning (the shift from past to present in the first line for example). I think I could even tolerate the archaisms. I think the padding and the constant "overthinking" are much more objectionable. The changes go in one direction: toward less simplicity, elegance, and concision. This shift contravenes Pound's modernist prescriptions. I'm not saying he should have translated Calvacanti into "Imagism," but on the other hand I don't see why he has to translate away from imagism, in the opposite direction.