Make It New
Make It New The Ezra Pound Society Little Mag
vol I, no. 1, May 2014
CONTENTS
_________________________
Editorial Notes on Contributors
2 4
Conference – EPIC Brunnenburg 2015
5
Book award in focus David Ten Eyck – The Adams Cantos Peter Liebregts
7
Portrait of a scholar – Eva Hesse My friend Mary de Rachewiltz; A Belated Visit Roxana Preda Interview with Eva Hesse FAZ 2012 Review of „Ich liebe also bin ich“ Roxana Preda
11 11 12 13 16
The Music Column 18 “Donna Mi Prega” Between Cavalcanti Rime And Canto Xxxvi Margaret Fisher Poets’ Corner Robert Stark, A Middle North
24
In Memoriam:
26
Publications on Ezra Pound 2012
28
Books of Critical Interest
29
2
Make It New
The Ezra Pound Society Little Mag EDITORIAL The Ezra Pound Society relies on its journal, Paideuma, to publish high-profile scholarly essays in the field of Pound studies. At present, Paideuma is a print annual publication, presenting work on Pound in the context of modernist and contemporary poetry scholarship. Its high standards of selection, its book-like appearance and slow rate of publication ensure that the best contributions in the field enjoy both the privilege of specialist interest and the continuity that the print medium affords. Additionally, the society officers believe that the organisation would benefit from a little magazine, a publication that would be strongly connected to its immediate activities: a place to highlight participation in conferences, promote the society awards, showcase prominent scholars and review new publications in Pound studies. It would ideally have an integrative function, coordinating news about initiatives, events, and publications all over the world, including those in foreign languages. Contributions will be welcomed from scholars, artists, and general readers. This digital publication will aim to inform scholars of what is new, promote the society, and entertain by a combination of text, image and multimedia. The term “Little Mag” was chosen to explain the one column format and the availability of this publication for longer, more detailed reviews and slightly larger clusters of materials like the portrait of Eva Hesse featured in the present pilot issue. The magazine will take the form of a digital quarterly, published within the society website and available exclusively to members. It is designed to follow the round of the events and activities in which the society traditionally participates: the cycle of conferences in USA and Europe as well as its book and article awards. The little mag will have focus articles/reports on the relevant conferences and include abstracts of the conference presentations. Conference information will also be available on the website in free access. It will contain reviews of all recent publications in Pound studies, including those that are not considered for the award (like conference proceedings, multiple contribution volumes, new editions of Pound’s poetry, monographs in foreign languages, translations). Additionally the mag will contain summaries of chapters on Pound in books about modernism in a more general sense – these are particularly important as recontextualizations of his work from the perspective of new emergent fields and topics in modernist studies. The editors will follow the articles published on Pound for the current year and publish abstracts, even if the articles are not derived from the submissions to conference panels organised by the society.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1
3
The magazine will seek to include portraits of prominent Poundian scholars as a way to outline a tradition in the field and establish the axes of reference in our discipline. All members and non-members can contribute notifications of all sorts: books they published, courses they taught, as well as personal websites they put up. The magazine will include reports on locations significant for Pound studies. Creative work in the form of poems, music, image, multimedia will be welcome. The magazine will contain information on the society officers, administration, and elections. It will support the society scholarly projects through calls for sponsorships and will report on the progress of these projects to members. The little mag takes over this repertoire of information from the tradition of its long-established journal Paideuma, to whose creativity, scholarly energy and inventiveness this publication is indebted. It seeks to honor its founding members and fosters a sense of continuity in our community of Poundians. Editorship Managing editor – Justin Kishbaugh Senior editors - Roxana Preda - Barry Ahearn Society officers: Demetres Tryphonopoulos Alec Marsh Tim Redman Ira Nadel Email address for submissions and letters to the editor is: info@ezrapoundsociety.com
Make It New
4
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS _________________
MARY DE RACHEWILTZ is poet and translator in English and Italian. From her castle at Brunnenburg, she follows closely the development of scholarship on Ezra Pound and actively shapes this community by her writing, conversation, and participation in conferences. ROXANA PREDA teaches American literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of (Post)modern Ezra Pound (2001) and Ezra Pound's Economic Correspondence, 1933-1945 (2007). She currently serves as the President of the Ezra Pound Society and has guest-edited this issue of Make It New. PETER LIEBREGTS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leiden. Among his best-known publications we find Centaurs in the Twilight: W.B. Yeats's Use of the Classical Tradition (1993) and Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (2004) which won the Ezra Pound Society prize in 2005. MARGARET FISHER is an independent researcher, musicologist and choreographer who has published extensively on all aspects of Pound's musical compositions and their relationship to his poetry. She is the winner of the society prize for 2003 for her book Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiment 1931-1933. Her most recent publications are The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound's Music and Poetry. Towards a Theory of Duration Rhyme and The Transparency of Ezra Pound's Great Bass (2013).
Cover photo © Marianne Huntington, 2013.
Fine artist, fashion designer and independent scholar, Marianne Huntington combined her talents and love of modern literature with this painting of Ezra Pound for a special collection presented at the Poets House on October 26th, 2013 in New York City.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1
5
CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS 26th Ezra Pound International Conference Brunnenburg, Dorf Tirol, Merano, ITALY 7 – 11 July 2015 Ezra Pound and the Green World Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry (81/541) The 26th Ezra Pound International Conference will be held 7-11 July 2015 at Brunnenburg, Dorf Tirol, Merano, Italy, a stunning castle perched on a mountainside above the Alto Adige River and residence of Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, since 1948 when she and her husband, Boris de Rachewiltz, began to restore it. Nearby sits Schloss Tirol, one of the oldest extant castles in Europe, where Mary’s son, Siegfried de Rachewiltz, served as Curator and Director for many years, transforming the castle into a magnificent museum of Tyrolean history and culture. In addition to four days of papers and panels on Pound and the Green World, as well as other topics related to Pound, special events tentatively planned include tours of Brunnenburg (with its implements of Tyrolean agriculture, the Pound Room, and African artefacts collected by Boris de Rachewiltz) and Schloss Tirol, excursions above and near Dorf Tirol, musical soirées, the always popular EPIC banquet (honoring Mary de Rachewiltz’s birthday), and a postconference excursion to Gais, where Mary was raised.
Make It New
6
The EPIC committee invites proposals for papers addressing the main theme of the conference or any other pertinent Poundian topic. The committee particularly encourages papers on the nature-related portions of The Cantos, as well as of other Pound works. “The plan is in nature” (99/707) asserted Pound. He earlier considered usury as a “sin against nature” (45/229), destroying the “abundance of nature” (52/257). In Canto 71 we read: “Nor has nature nor has art partitioned the sea into empires / or into counties or knight’s fees” (71/419). Apart from these social and political implications, The Cantos also point to the philosophical ones, especially in: “We have”, said Mencius, “but phenomena.” monumenta. In nature are signatures needing no verbal tradition (87/593) And Canto 93 begins with a line in Egyptian hieroglyphs Pound first learned from Boris de Rachewiltz: “‘A man’s paradise is his good nature’/sd/Kati.” Proposals may interpret the conference theme in specific or broad terms, relating to Pound’s work and life: poetry, prose, translations, textual analysis, biography, comparative studies, literary or political influence, legacy, and/or historical matters. If you are interested in giving a paper, please send a short proposal (250-400 words). Emailed proposals (as Word Attachment or as email text), as well as those sent by surface mail, are acceptable. Please include your paper title, name(s) and affiliation(s), mailing address, and email address on the proposal. Presentations should be limited to 20 minutes delivery time. Electronic proposals should be sent to both John Gery: jgery@uno.edu and Walter Baumann: vabo42@yahoo.co.uk. To send a proposal by post, please send it to: Professor John Gery, 26th EPIC, Department of English, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA 70148-2315 USA. If you wish not to propose a paper but to receive registration information and conference details, please contact the Secretary: John Gery, jgery@uno.edu
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: October 15, 2014
The Ezra Pound Society is going to organize two panels at the EPIC 2015, highlighting the relationship between Pound’s poetry, nature and the arts. Please contact Roxana Preda for details and information.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1
7
BOOK AWARD IN FOCUS _______________ DAVID TEN EYCK EZRA POUND’S ADAMS CANTOS LONDON: BLOOMSBURY 2012
By Peter Liebregts As David Ten Eyck rightly notes, the Adams Cantos (62-71) were written at a crucial point in Pound’s life and poetic development, and constitute an essential part of The Cantos. Nevertheless, they have received a proportionally small amount of critical attention, most of which was not very positive. Dismissed by even convinced Poundians as too hastily written and too closely tied to the original source texts, the Adams Cantos in the eyes of many seem to represent a nadir in Pound’s magnum opus, only to be redeemed by the quality of The Pisan Cantos. Having offered a chronological narration of Chinese history from 2837 BC to AD 1736 in the Chinese History Cantos (52-61), Pound in the Adams Cantos focuses largely on a single individual. Both sequences are based on a single text, Joseph de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine and the ten-volume Life and Works of John Adams. Pound himself saw this use of extended citation from single source texts as a major advance in his work on his epic. Yet where the depiction of Chinese history is marked by the clarity of its chronology, the Adams Cantos does not offer such a neat chronological account as Pound stayed true to the original division of the works of Adams by genre. Volume one offers a biography, volumes two and three Adams’s diary and autobiographical writings, volumes three to six his political writings, and the concluding volumes seven to ten his state papers, and official and private correspondence. By selecting his quotations from his source text in the original order of the volumes, Pound does not offer a chronological account, and in the eyes of many critics seems to be moving in circles, and lacking a clear purpose in presenting his material. Moreover, the lyrical poetry definitely seems to have given way to a mere mediation of a pre-existing text. Ten Eyck’s monograph is a masterful and successful attempt to set the record straight by situating the Adams Cantos in their historical and archival context, and offering new reflections on Pound’s poetic accomplishment. Although it is a fact that Pound composed these Cantos very quickly at the end of 1938 and over the first few months of 1939, which is a major reason why critics tend to dismiss them as the result of a rapid skimming through his source, Ten Eyck convincingly shows how the Adams Cantos are actually the fruit of a long engagement with American history. In chapter 1, “The Genesis and Composition of the Adams Cantos”, Ten Eyck shows how Pound as a student at the University of Pennsylvania attended classes in American history in 1901-1902, and took copious notes. In the 1930s Pound turned to a more detailed study of John Adams while working on the poems that would constitute Eleven New Cantos (1934). He devoted considerable time and thought to John Adams, including studying the Works of John Adams which he read at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, although the volume of Eleven New Cantos does not fully reflect this. Ten Eyck’s monograph usefully offers us Pound’s extensive reading notes, and thus makes clear how
Make It New
8
already in the early 1930s Pound was familiar with the contents and organization of his Adams source. Moreover, these notes also show how stable Pound’s view on Adams was throughout the 1930s, seeing him as a man concerned with establishing a basis for orderly democracy, with precise verbal definition, and with a distrust of oligarchy and the possible abuse of credit. This view would crystallize in the Adams Cantos at the end of the decade, and although they were written quickly in a period of hyperactivity in which Pound was involved in many other activities and writing projects, their themes and poetic strategies had already taken shape in the poet’s mind before he actually set about writing the sequence, which is why he could compose them so quickly, as he was going over what by that time was very familiar ground. Pound’s method in reading the Works thus consisted of gathering evidence that would confirm his preconceived understanding of Adam’s life, times and thought. In Chapter 2, Ten Eyck demonstrates how Pound’s documentary method used in composing the Adams Cantos grew out of his earlier technique of incorporating preexisting prose documents, as in the Malatesta Cantos (8-11). Ten Eyck argues how these earlier Cantos had explored the interdependence of material evidence and insubstantial vision, where the documentary evidence presents examples of ‘ideas going into action’, giving a material form to a concept. Pound here still made use of a combination of a lyrical voice (expressing the vision of timeless ideas), a narrative voice (summarizing events or connecting the fragments), and a documentary mode (presenting the pre-existing material). This documentary mode gained more ground in Eleven New Cantos, in which Pound severely limited narrative commentary. Formally, Pound relied on the juxtaposition of fragments of source-based material, using a narrative voice only to make the documents more easily comprehensible. In the Chinese History and Adams Cantos, the narrative voice generally fell silent but is still implicitly there as the conceptual framework that made Pound select his fragments from the source-based material, while the lyrical voice now was supposed to arise in the reader’s mind when recognizing the vision arising out of the ideogrammic juxtaposition of fragments. The crucial difference between the Chinese History Cantos and the Adams Cantos is that Pound in Cantos 52-61 wants to let the events of Chinese history speak for themselves, thereby suggesting the evolvement of an independent historical space, whereas in Cantos 62-71 Pound shows how it is the written record that transmits knowledge of the past. Emphasis thus shifts from when and where events occurred in history to how events are recorded. As such the criticism directed against the Adams Cantos as lacking clarity and purpose is shown by Ten Eyck as a misreading of a major aim of the Adams Cantos, namely the struggle to understand history and the possibility to shape it while in the midst of it. In Chapter 3, “Reading the Adams Cantos”, Ten Eyck shows how most of the various negative responses to this section of The Cantos are misrepresenting Pound’s project in the Adams Cantos. The poet is not offering a biography, nor does he want to disseminate a body of work in the interest of political propaganda. And to claim that these Cantos are marginalia to a source, and only will make sense if one reads Pound’s selections in parallel with is source is to overlook the creative use the poet made of the material. Offering a number of close readings of passages, Ten Eyck makes clear that Pound in the Adams Cantos is juxtaposing elements that had not been associated with one another in the Works. By taking lines and passages out of their original context, Pound creates new
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1
9
combinations and surprising connections, which then is what constitutes the poetry of these Cantos: the poet’s perspective on Adams as representing and performing the themes permeating this section. The reader quickly learns to recognize these themes: John Adams’s active and passionate intelligence; the cultivation of natural wealth and the careful attention to natural processes; the law as a means of defining the legitimate basis of authority and erecting the framework of a well-ordered state; the basic importance of economic justice to good government; and the clear definition of language, or the ‘right naming of things’. (p. 73) These themes arise from the textual fragments culled from the Works, and Pound does help the reader to establish the connections by the use of poetic techniques such as repetition, assonance and alliteration; enjambment and change in rhythm also serve to emphasize key ideas. (It is a shame, although quite understandable, that Ten Eyck does not fully work out his observation, derived from Delmore Schwartz, that Pound is fond of using trochees or spondees to signal important moments in the text.) Moreover, more than before, Pound has an eye for the spatial arrangement of the words on the page, making The Cantos as much a visual as a verbal poem. These typographical arrangements also help the reader to perceive meanings. Having successfully countered the generally negative criticism of the Adams Cantos that emphasizes the speed of composition, resulting in a sloppy “section” which lacks unity and poetic accomplishment, Ten Eyck in the second half of his book discusses three main topics related to these poems. Given Pound’s didactic ambition to use examples from history to present an ideal of good government or as tools to bring about such, the question arises if and to what extent the poet has a public responsibility and whether poetry can transmit historical knowledge. Pound would have been quite positive on these matters, but that does not allow the critic to avoid answering these questions. In chapter 4, “The Representation of History and Law in the Adams Cantos”, Ten Eyck analyzes the tension between representation of the individual subjectivity of Adams and the public sphere in which he worked: Pound seems to have blurred this distinction since the ‘men of exceptional intelligence’ in his poem stand for ideas, they are embodiments of the will of the people, and forces of history. As such, Pound projects his notions upon his study of historical sources and manipulates the facts to serve his message, although he still suggests that he is only quoting sources and thus is imparting historically accurate information. Ten Eyck gives a careful analysis of passages to depict Pound’s approach to his source, whereby Adams becomes more than a man. As a visionary he sees into the essential nature of things and the absolute order of reality, thereby transcending his own time and even his own subjectivity. Ten Eyck’s critical eye emphasizes how nuanced his understanding of the Adams Cantos is, as he sharply sees what Pound’s blind spots are. In Chapter 5, “The Adams Cantos and Ezra Pound’s Social Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s”, this study, as the title indicates, describes how Pound’s attitudes to history and the law as reflected in the Adams Cantos have deep roots in the poet’s political, economic and social writings of the decade, which to a large extent determined the critical and poetical choices behind these poems. The tension between the public and the private, the blurring of the line in the case of ‘great men’, and the championing of the synthesis between individual freedom and the authority of the state, are all key notions, which Pound dealt with in his criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Here too Ten Eyck subtly analyzes the link between the Adams Cantos and Pound’s commitment to Italian Fascism, and deftly nuances Pound’s ‘Fascism’. (And I do not like to point it out but there is a serious misprint on p. 120 which nowadays seems all too common even with very
Make It New
10
established publishers when it comes to the use of Greek in the original: “’τὸ χαλόν’” should read “’τὸ καλόν’”.) Pound’s interest in state authority on the basis of permanent principles of justice rooted in ‘natural’ order, which he saw reflected in Confucian thought, carried over into the Adams Cantos, which in many ways shows how a Confucian ethics of good government can be carried into action. Here too, then, Pound made his poetry serve his ethical and social cause. In fact, as Ten Eyck rightly points out, these Cantos remain the section of Pound’s poem where the nature of good government and the legal framework of the state are given their fullest expression. Of course, these notions are also very much present in Rock-Drill and Thrones, in which John Adams seems conspicuously absent. Yet in his final chapter, “The Continuing Importance of the ‘Adams Paideuma’ in Ezra Pound’s Late Cantos”, Ten Eyck makes a strong case for the continued presence of Adams and the poetic strategies used in the Cantos devoted to him in the last sections of Pound’s epic. As such, we receive the ‘legacy’ of the Adams section, especially in the Coke Cantos (107-109), where Pound once again reflects upon the foundation of the American Republic by focusing on the work of Sir Edward Coke, one of the major influences on John Adams’s legal work in support of the American Revolution. The themes touched upon in the Adams Cantos find a continuation in the later Cantos, thereby making very clear that the Adams Cantos are not “an isolated poetic adventure”. Ten Eyck persuasively argues that they were composed “in order to give voice to a thematic convergence that expressed the basic premises of [Pound’s] Confucianism in the late 1930s, and that would remain of fundamental importance to the later stages of his work on The Cantos.” (p. 151) As part of the ‘Historicizing Modernism Series’, this monograph at the end includes primary sources relevant to an understanding of Pound’s view on John Adams. As such, we are given a selection of Pound’s college notes on Colonial and Revolutionary America, taken when he was a student in 1901-1902; Pound’s 1931 reading notes for the Works of John Adams; annotations in his copies of the Works; the unpublished but important Italian essay “Confucio Totalitario” with an English translation by Ten Eyck; and unpublished material on John Adams and the American Revolution from the Thrones Poetry Notebook (Beinecke Library). All this material is part of the extensive analysis of the Adams Cantos offered by Ten Eyck. The result is a carefully researched and wellwritten book that is very informative and insightful, and which will without any doubt become an indispensable tool for any reader of Pound’s work.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 11
PORTRAIT OF A SCHOLAR __________________ EVA HESSE
My friend by Mary de Rachewiltz
(Brunnenburg, April 30, 2014) Eva Hesse is Kulchur, her background is History. She is a great Lady. What more can be said?
She was kind to the prisoner, sent him chocolates and marzipan and a shawl to cover his shoulders - he wore it like Saladin, the scarf in his cimier. And she sent him a picture of her beautiful self in a bikini. Pound knew her forthwith and told me to invite her to Brunnenburg, as ever concerned about my (lack of) education. She and her husband, Mike O'Donnell, entered their name in our guest book on September 9, 1956, specifying: “of the tribe of Ez”. Following the family profession, Eva speaks in tongues - Vom Zungenreden in der Lyrik: “Grossvater war ein Dragoman” - a born translator. Pound speaks of “Sophoclean Light”, Eva speaks of the “physischen Frisson” of poetry. In his youth Pound read Heine and Walter von der Vogelweide. As for history: “Eva's pa heard that on the telephone” and wrote Das Spiel um Deutschland. Before WWII Pound read Frobenius, my first assignment had been “Das Bauerntum in Africa”, a chapter in Erlebte Erdteile. In captivity, Pound studied Law Codes and History. He read and carefully annotated the 3 volumes of Bernhard von Bülow, Denkwürdigkeiten and must have enjoyed the facsimiles :”Quis erudiet without documents ?” And von Papen's Memoirs. And, yes, for my education, he sent me his annotated Shadows Lengthen by Clara Longworth de Chambrun, as well as Wong Su-Ling, Daughter of Confucius. Eva is generous, she cultivates friendship, sharing her knowledge, her enthusiasms, sometimes even royalties. I owe her E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore and many a silk blouse. She took me to Berlin for the performance of her translation of Sophocles-Pound, Women of Trachis. It was my first flight. She also held my hand, swimming under water in Mliet. I saw new colors in the domain of fishes. Also thanks to Eva, the Poet had his moment of glory on the stage. The Mayor of Darmstadt invited him as guest of honor to the premiere of Die Frauen von Trachis. He joined the actors at the end and received a standing ovation: what SPLENDOR. It coheres all right. What counts is the statement in Canto LXXIV: that free speech without free radio speech is as zero in Eva's version: dass Redefreiheit ohne Radiofreiheit gleich null ist and in Canto CII: Eva has improved that line about Freiheit.
12
Make It New
A Belated Visit _____________ by Roxana Preda Eva is a survivor. All the old guard is gone: Kenner and Terrell, the two great friends and doyens of Ezra Pound studies passed away in 2003. Burt Hatlen followed them in 2008, Wilhelm in 2012, Stock just November 2013. There is just Eva – born in 1925, she is still with us. I found it was high time to see her, so on a fine sunny weekend in October 2013, I did. Professor Richard Taylor, living in Bayreuth, not far from Munich, was a friendly mediator. At the time, I knew nothing of Eva’s circumstances: Rick broke it to me gently. Eva had suffered a stroke. I froze: was she paralyzed? Well, she was in a wheelchair, but otherwise well, some days better than others, as normal at her age. Her mind was still working, which, given the situation, was nothing short of a miracle. She lives in a neat room on the first floor of a retirement home in Schwabing, the Munich district where she has spent all her adult life. The two big windows opening unto a park let in a lot of light, which was troublesome to her: she wore dark glasses and often turned her wheelchair away from the window. The sunny October day was a boon to us but difficult for her. She invited us to Kaffee und Kuchen downstairs – we could sit in the shade and talk of old times. I had prepared my questions about things I wanted to know, especially about her participation in the founding of Paideuma at the beginning of the 1970s – however, the conversation turned around other memories, which were obviously dearer to her. Her letters to Pound during the 1950s and her personal acquaintance with him, for instance, or the trials and tribulations of her lifelong effort to translate The Cantos into German, a work that had been finished that year with a beautiful bilingual volume that I had brought for her to autograph. Our whole conversation was in English; she had no difficulties or hesitations in using it. She asked me if I could read German – when I answered in the affirmative, she gave me her latest monograph – a handsome volume about Pound and love published in 2008, which I promised to review. The conversations with Eva that we had on that weekend made it even clearer than before that she did not consider herself a Pound scholar exclusively. Her list of publications showed her to be a scholar of modernism in the broadest sense: she had written books about modernist poets, translated their work into German and corresponded with them too. I suggested that these letter exchanges, especially those with Pound and Eliot will surely be interesting for scholars to study and that they should be published. She took a drag out of her slim cigarillo and said nothing. Did I see the shadow of a smile? Eva Hesse's publication list can be consulted on her own website at http://www.bernhard-frank.de/evahesse/veroeffentlichungen.htm
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 13
WHY CAN’T YOU BREAK AWAY FROM POUND? Interview with Eva Hesse Hannes Hintermeier for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06/08/2012 (excerpts)
Scene – Munich retirement home. When did you first engage with the poet Ezra Pound? The first time was in 1958 when I wrote a text called “Ezra Pound – against the currents of time” for Gerhard Szczesny’s “Night studio” on the Bavarian radio. It was about his position against the Americans joining the war – and about his role as helper of younger writers. E. E. Cummings, whom I was translating at the time, read the manuscript. He recommended I send it to Pound himself. It found Pound in a great depression and so I began a longer correspondence with him, which over the years grew to two hundred letters. At that time Pound had just been discharged from the St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington twelve years and a half after he had been accused of treason and declared insane. It was called “Institute for the Criminally Insane”. The situation there was awful. Though suffering from claustrophobia, he was put in a common room with all other mentally ill persons. The light was on day and night. T.S. Eliot protested against it, but it didn’t help. In the course of our correspondence I asked Pound what he meant by a certain passage. He replied he meant this, that and the other thing. I replied to him insolently, as I was then, that if that was what he meant, then certainly he did not write it. The answer, in big letters, promptly came back: “Damn it – don’t translate what I wrote, translate what I meant to write”. That impressed me and I have always kept it in mind in my later work. Which must have been difficult in his case, since he found quotations from many fields of knowledge and included even ideograms in his poems. Pound differentiates among three elements of poetry, which translate to different degrees. Melopoeia, whereby the poem sound creates significance beyond the words’ meaning: that is often untranslatable, can be successful only through sheer luck. Phanopoeia, the power of language to create images – that, in Pound’s opinion can never go wrong, you only have to hold onto the precise picture. The third element is logopoeia “the dance of intellect among words” – language games which you can recreate. These were the three elements, which I was aiming at. That is not the same thing as translating prose, but people often don’t understand this dimension of language. The most famous part of the poem, The Pisan Cantos are proof of how closely life and work were knit together in Pound’s case. It is remarkable that he could work in such circumstances. He was locked in a cage illuminated by floodlights day and night. He was not permitted to speak to anyone. He was then over sixty. When he broke down, he was moved to a medical tent, he could go out at night into the medical compound, there he began to write again. From that point on, his soul was damaged.
Make It New
14
Where does your love for Anglo-American poetry come from? Besides Cummings I have translated T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Langston Hughes and a lot of other poets. It began when as a seven year old I went to England with my father who worked at the German Embassy in London [1931]. I grew up bilingual, though I was condemned to a year of complete silence – until I learned English. After a year it was better, I even won prizes for essay composition. But it was a difficult time for me because at school I always had to explain what Mr Hitler meant when he claimed colonies in Africa. But at this time I discovered English poetry. Lawrence Olivier read Shakespeare at the Old Vic and I caught fire. At school we also read Shakespeare with a dictionary for old words. But that he could become so alive – that was an important experience for me. Did you live in Germany throughout the war? When the war broke out, I came back – and had to realize that I really liked the English criticism of Hitler. I hated the Nazi tone. And then went to school very irregularly. But that is too personal. Well then, let us talk about Ezra Pound some more. I realized very late that all his life Pound had suffered from his own trauma as I had suffered from mine, and that there was no link between the two. His trauma was the First World War in which a total breakdown of culture happened and where a lot of his young friends, whom he had himself discovered, died in the trenches. My own showed itself only after the Second World War when I realized how many people the Nazis had murdered. I could never overcome that. But my trauma is barely mentioned in Pound’s poetry. This is why he is so notorious – for his support for Mussolini whose side he took in his radio speeches. He had primarily the First World War in mind; this is why he wanted to prevent America’s participation in the second. He made efforts to talk to Roosevelt but the president naturally refused to see him. But it is of course true: he never dissociated himself from fascism. The sole meeting with Mussolini he has kept in a Canto – when the Duce tapped an edition of Pound’s poetry with his finger saying “Questo e divertente” – this here is amusing. [Canto XLI] So where does this fascination with the man and his work come from? He won me over by not treating me in an authoritarian way – like everybody else did, beginning with my father. One could really criticise him with no fear. And besides, he was an exceptional poet. In the beginning I stood up for him without knowing his case really well. Then I came to know him personally in Brunnenburg, by Merano after his discharge – he ran after us as my husband Mike and I were hauling our heavy luggage down to the valley. He gave me a crumpled piece of paper. As I opened it on the train it read: “Don’t argue”. I expect he meant that I should not stand up for him in public – so as not to discredit myself for his sake. Touching and enigmatic.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 15
Luckily it was not the only meeting. He visited you in Munich more often. He was not interested in the city. But he wanted to meet my parents because he had read my father’s Fritz Hesse’s book “Das Spiel um Deutschland” [The Game over Germany]. It is about the pre-war period from the point of view of the German embassy. The Duke of Windsor plays an important role there. Historians have rejected the book because my father who was born and grew up in Baghdad was actually a storyteller who told his stories imaginatively.1 My father took Pound for crazy and I corrected him: Papa, if people will talk about you they will do so because he mentioned you. In Canto 86 he wrote “Eva’s pa heard it on the telephone” – he means the news of the Duke of Windsor’s abdication. You stood on the left side of the political spectrum and translated a man who until today has had the fascist label stuck on him. I have never identified with Pound but have always examined him critically. Besides, I have not always translated. In 1974 I published my book “Die Wurzeln der Revolution” [The Roots of Revolution] where I analyse theories of money and state. Ezra Pound is not even once mentioned there. The years after 1968 fired my imagination; I made a mistake, however. I was wrong in my evaluation of Mao. In the last years of his life, Pound had all but stopped talking. He was very deeply buried in his silence. Also with his partner Olga he talked only the bare essentials. My last meeting with him was shortly before his death in Venice. In the restaurant, Olga ordered the food. When it was brought to the table he asked “What is this? Did you order this for me?” She hissed: “Yes Ezra, eat it!” When I was about to leave, Olga ordered a gondola to take me to the station. Pound came with me and in spite of his advanced years wanted to carry my heavy suitcase. He almost got into a fight with a porter at the station over this. But he did not say a word. You can hardly decipher anything and you need someone to read aloud to you – is this the highest penalty for an intellectual? I am nevertheless very choosy, don’t like novels, for that I’m too old. Recently I have listened to the whole Proust. Well, you may not lie while listening otherwise you fall instantly asleep. He is not at all modern - if I had read him at the beginning of my career, I would have given up literature. I love philosophical texts and have unfortunately missed many authors. I am interested in the medieval mystics, church history. As Ernst Bloch once remarked, the church nevertheless has the merit of creating heretics. (tr. by Roxana Preda) 1 Fritz Hesse. Das Spiel um Deutschland. München: Paul List Verlag, 1953, translated as Hitler and the English by F. A. Voigt and published by Allan Wingate in 1954. The book was very negatively reviewed in Die Zeit (December 1953) and received a charitable notice in Der Spiegel (October 1954). A more extensive commentary focusing on Hesse’s errors of memory and imaginative embellishments about the Ribbentrop plan can be found in Klaus P. Fisher, Hitler and America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 259-261. Hesse was quoted by Observer (6 September 2009) in connection with Hitler’s plans of invading Britain.
Make It New
16
EVA HESSE. “ICH LIEBE, ALSO BIN ICH” DER UNBEKANTE EZRA POUND. MIT CANTO XXXVI UND CAVALCANTIS CANZONE D’AMORE. BERLIN: OSBURG VERLAG, 2008. review by Roxana Preda For the naïve reader who approaches Eva Hesse’s book of 2008 “Ich liebe, also bin ich” Der unbekante Ezra Pound [I love, therefore I am. The unknown Ezra Pound] with some expectation of finding biographical revelations about Pound’s illicit love affairs or else a mapping of the interplay between these and his personal family life will be largely disappointed. S/he might also be confused by chapters that are exclusively philosophical and don’t seem to be strictly related to love. Starting from the premise that Pound is portrayed in the media as someone overwhelmed by hate, an unredeemable Fascist deep in anti-Semitic prejudice, Hesse maps that other side of a poet who at Pisa realized and affirmed that he is alive to the extent he is capable of affection. Her subtitle “The unknown Ezra Pound” therefore points to the affirmative side of Pound’s personality and intellectual pursuits. “Love” is therefore generically understood as that side of the mind (the Freudian Eros), which affirms and supports our wish and strength to live. Sexual love, certainly but also human relationships and intellectual curiosity, as well as religious and mystical impulses, the veneration of beauty and the desire for happiness. Hesse’s premise is that love, as a way of getting out of egoism and exploring the world in inextinguishable curiosity for the Other, was the mainspring of Pound’s readiness for constant renewal and experimentation in The Cantos. It is Eros, which stands behind his creative impulse and his desire and ability to include the most disparate zones of interest in stable and personal poetic syntheses. Hesse follows a few of these: her book is framed by historical considerations on the concept of the amour courtois with which she starts her investigation, and the extensive commentary on Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega as it appears in Canto XXXVI, which ends it. In between, we find the hard nucleus of her philosophical investigations: a consideration of Neoplatonism and its ramifications in Pound’s absorbing interest in the philosophy of light as an expression of transcendent beatitude; an examination of the dialectics between Confucianism and Taoism in the Cantos, and a reflection on the role of language and metaphysics in Pound’s view of the self in its relation to the world. All through the book she stays true to the principle of the critical confrontation (“kritische Auseinandersetzung”): she follows the instigations of Pound’s poetry which lead her to the study of his sources, she will then present a mapping of this study and a judgement of Pound’s work from this new vantage point. What seems to absorb her most is the delineation of those points where Pound seems to have misunderstood the source or where the personal angle he took on the source failed to translate into a viable recipe for life. She starts her analysis by devoting the first section of her book to the ‘invention of love’ in the Middle Ages. She does this from a feminist point of view – her perspective is therefore refreshing, funny, and interesting. Even if courtly love was a game among men, it had been invented at the court of Eleanor d’Aquitaine and testified
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 17
of female power such as it could be understood at the time. Here she examines the crucial difference between the French understanding and the Italian one, as it appears in the dolce stil nuovo. Whereas troubadours understood themselves as vassals to women and deferred to them as uncontested experts in love matters, Cavalcanti, Dante and their circle made disquisitions about love a male intellectual game and a means of communicating among themselves. Even if Cavalcanti’s canzone d’amore is formally the answer to a lady’s question, it is in fact a point-by point response to a poem by Guido Orlandi. His philosophical disquisitions, drawing on Aristotle and Albertus Magnus could not be addressed to a lady but to another man who would have been able to understand them. Hesse goes into details of historical and philosophical background of Pound’s intellectual interests gauging his particular perspective on them. Courtly love and its reverberations in Pound’s understanding of the relationship between love and marriage; the classical view of sex as sacrament in the Eleusinian rites; Gourmont’s theory of sex; Confucius’s view of the role of family. Hesse points out the discrepancy between Pound’s sacramental view of sex and the troubadour fin amor and again between these two and the value that Confucius places on the family. The second section of her book is devoted to Pound’s philosophical interests in Neoplatonism and an elucidation of the various strands he was indebted to: Plotinus, Erigena, Grosseteste and Bruno, showing how this lifelong interest flowed into the adaptation of Brancusi’s art into a personal world of paradise on earth. In her third chapter, Hesse provides a biography of Confucius and a contextualisation of his position in relationship to Taoism. In her précis of Confucius’s biography it is uncanny to discover analogies to Pound’s own life. Both Confucius and Pound set to a life of wandering, trying and failing to advise princes of a revolutionary ideology. Both established universities of one with a circle of informal students. Even the curricula were similar: history, poetry, philosophy, and politics. Here too Hesse finds that Pound had not gone far enough in his Confucian studies: he had failed to see the difference between the original revolutionary social theory and its later elaboration and application in the running of the Chinese empire. In her last philosophical chapter, devoted to knowledge and identity, Hesse revisits Pound’s approach to poetic language as opposed to Aristotle’s logic of noncontradiction. She emphasizes that Pound’s language expresses the acquisition of knowledge, accommodating growth, contradiction and discovery. She compares it to the Chinese view, which similarly accepts the simultaneity of contradiction. Particularly enlightening is her last chapter devoted to a discussion of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega, with a very useful detailed commentary. Her conclusion is that even if Pound had loved this poem well enough to devote a great deal of intellectual energy to it, the difference between the fin amor and woman as the object of immediate consumption is denied by the contradiction to Pound’s lifelong belief in the holiness of sex, derived from the Eleusian rites and de Gourmont. Hesse’s book implicitly invites the reader to be aware of the co-existence of Pound’s contradictory cherished opinions and to be a judge in how these flowed into his poetry and personal life.
18
Make It New
THE MUSIC COLUMN ___________________ by Margaret Fisher
“DONNA MI PREGA” BETWEEN CAVALCANTI RIME AND CANTO XXXVI
Pound’s musical setting of Guido Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone Donna mi prega (late thirteenth century) richly rewards the scholar interested in Pound’s application of personae, medievalism and rhythmic proportions to his poetry as well as the scholar interested in methods of translation and criticism. The canzone would become the centerpiece of Pound’s second opera Cavalcanti, composed between 1931 and 1933. Written for radio, the opera emphasizes the hearing (vs. the reading) of Cavalcanti’s poetic and philosophic oeuvre. The opera engages with medieval philosophy, at times humorously, as when Pound references Averroës in connection with the Donna mi prega aria. Of all the arias in the opera, Donna mi prega best demonstrates Pound’s conclusion that music composition may function as literary criticism.
Timeline July 1928: Pound’s first translation of “Donna mi prega,” published in The Dial 85. January 1932: This same translation is published as Guido Cavalcanti Rime by Edizioni Marsano, Genoa. Summer 1932: Pound sets “Donna mi prega” to music as an aria for Act II of his opera Cavalcanti and at summer’s end he sends his score to Agnes Bedford in London for comment. April 1934: Pound’s new translation of “Donna mi prega” appears in Harkness Hoot IV.4: 26–29; and later that year as Canto XXXVI in Eleven New Poems (Farrar and Rinehart, NY, October 1934). September 1934: Pound writes that music composition may function as literary criticism in the essay “Dateline” (Ezra Pound, Make It New, Faber and Faber, London, September 1934).
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 19
Musical Timeline
Composed: summer of 1932 by Pound, not performed in his lifetime. The music was considered “lost” or “unfinished.” Recovered and Reconstituted: by Robert Hughes 1982–1983. Olga Rudge provided Hughes access to music from among her personal papers; Mary de Rachewiltz facilitated Hughes’ access to the uncatalogued music among the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Concert Premiere: 28 March 1983 at the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco by the Arch Ensemble, conducted by Robert Hughes, sung by Thomas Buckner. Olga Rudge in attendance at the premiere. Stage Premiere: 13, 14 July 2000 at the Nuovo Teatro di Bolzano by the Conductus Ensemble. Aria arranged and directed by Marcello Fera, sung by Marco Camastra. Produced by Mary de Rachewiltz.
Music in translation Did Pound’s immersion in music composition influence the new translation? If so, how? One way to begin to answer this question is to compare the first two lines of the Italian with Pound’s English 1928 and 1934 translations: Donna mi priegha /perch’i volglio dire D’un accident / che sovente / é fero Because a lady asks me, I would tell Of an affect that comes often and is fell (1928) A lady asks me / I speak in season She seeks reason for an affect, wild often (1934) As in the Cavalcanti canzone, end rhymes, double and internal rhymes, assonance and alliteration play a role in both of Pound’s translations. Other clues can be found in the phrasal durations, and in the posé and levé characteristics of the syllables (Maurice Emmanuel’s terms for long and short values in Greek poetry, Pound’s favored method in the early 1930s for considering syllabic weight [David Gordon, “Ezra Pound to Mary Barnard,” Paideuma 23.1:165–170]). Toward an answer, I offer a graphic rendering of Cavalcanti’s sonic scaffolding (example 1) and rhythmic transcriptions of Pound’s reading of Cavalcanti’s poem (example 2) and the musical values Pound assigned his aria, “Donna mi prega” (example 3).
Make It New Example 1
20
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 21
Example 2 (Note: One does not need to read music. Add the top numbers of the fractions given.)
Example 3 (Note: One does not need to read music. See the top numbers of the fractions and/or their translation into musical ratios or intervals.)
22
Make It New
Pound’s setting of the poem’s first six lines has a duration scheme with these harmonic equivalents: 5th 5th / unison 2 not shown)
5th / 5th 5th
//
5th 5th
/ unison
5th / maj. 3rd 5th (last
Donna mi prega, strophe 1 (43 seconds):
Envoi (54 seconds):
Private recording. Baritone: Joshua Bloom; Piano: Rae Imamura. © 2001! 2014. All rights reserved. For more information on Pound’s use of phrase duration and line duration in his poetry, see The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound’s Music and Poetry: Duration Rhyme (from the Le Testament 1923 Facsimile Edition) More examples of duration rhyme are here. What Pound said of the aria: (Letter, Pound to Agnes Bedford, 20 August 1932, Ezra Pound MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana).
“The Donna mi prega is the twister/ tour de force and danger zone”
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 23
Bibliography:
Pound, Ezra, Eds. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound, double volume with engraved music score, libretto, background, analysis, commentary, Emeryville CA: Second Evening Art, 2003. Guido Cavalcanti Rime, Intro., Trans. Ezra Pound, Genova: Edizioni Marsano S.A., 1932. Pound's Cavalcanti, Ed. David Anderson, Princeton University Press, 1983. “Cavalcanti” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions Publishing, 1968. The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti: A Critical English Edition, Ed. Simon West, Leicester UK: Troubadour Publishing, 2009. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, University of Toronto Press, 2002. Cirigliano, Marc, trans., Guido Cavalcanti, The Complete Poems, Ithaca Press (NY), 1992. Keller, David Michael, Ezra Pound and Guido Cavalcanti: The Poetics of Translation, University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. Cavalcanti, Ezra Pound’s Philosophical Opera <http://independent.academia.edu/MargaretFisher/Papers>
Cavalcanti’s lady as D.G. Rossetti imagined her. In the Vita Nuova, Dante affirmed that Madonna Giovanna (Monna Vanna) would come first (prima verra), anticipating the arrival of Beatrice. Using this suggestion, Rossetti called this picture Monna Vanna and conceived it as a spiral imitating the rose, symbol of spring (It. primavera) (n. RP)
24
Make It New POETS’ CORNER ____________
A Middle North ____________ Robert Stark
Robert Stark is already known to Poundians as the author of Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition. A Jargoner Apprenticeship (2012), which we will review in these pages shortly. In this issue of our little magazine we would like to signal the publication of his volume of verse, A Middle North, in April 2014. We reproduce these poems by permission. Imagine! In the sea confiding ‘til arms elbows sculpted palm unlearn the ease of air
Deeper. Another thrown moon another vaulted intractable sky & light of verdigris Thus I, Persephone thus do I rapt descend or rise unto your realm, thus Love rises or descends & dare it gasp? For J. C. I have your satchel on the kitchen table &I have ransacked your home for medication to no avail: what use the alcoholic’s bag his stash of sleeping pills and supplements? Not quite dead you sit alone
not noticing the strangers around you you are in their home now & it is their game: you play the fabled bird ashen, waiting waiting for the moment for the right moment to take off A MIDDLE NORTH The water turned late August & the pulse of sun on Tulaby is met with deliquescent green. September disappoints – that is the rule this far north - & the exorbitant patience of the all-year fishermen tends to the shore. Early dusk, not much noticed now, will settle with disinclination on the lake within the hour. A protracted summer seemed it would be consummated here at this time in this spot; how quaintly marginal & circumspect we were. Eutrophic heart surface shivering & shagged in dulse; our summer bearing has deserted us, our love is lakish now. You idle in your work & I separately revert to an accustomed yearning: Articulate and ravenous, we have been cruel as much as blind; this leewarding together here on Tulaby is not a kindlier compulsion though it may be we cannot subdue the stars or bare in compass with the poles of the magnetic & the true. The night we sped towards the casino in our week-old rental car two lanes were scarcely wide enough; a mad diversion, agonic & apart, to peer into the void of the road, the void of the slot machine the heart.
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 25
Make It New
26
IN MEMORIAM _________ NOEL STOCK (1929-2013) Noel Stock, a native of Australia, has worked as a writer and translator since 1949. From 1968-1969 he was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, and from 1969-1971 was Visiting Professor at the University of Toledo, English Department. In 1971 he assumed the position of Professor. Stock first began to read Ezra Pound's poetry in Melbourne in 1946. He knew that Pound had been connected with the beginnings of the "modern movement" in English poetry and that he held strong views on economics and politics. He also knew of Pound's problems due to broadcasts he had made over Rome Radio during World War II and of his indictment for treason by the U.S. In 1953, after Pound was sent to St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C., Hugh Kenner who had just published a book on Pound's poetry, suggested that Stock contact Pound. He did so and received an immediate reply which was followed by more than 100 letters in the next five years. Stock left Australia in 1958 and was en route to England when charges against Pound were dropped, and he was released from the hospital. Pound returned to Italy in 1959 and Stock moved to Brunnenburg Castle, Tirolo di Merano, Italy where the poet's daughter lived. He first met Pound at Rapallo that summer and edited a collection of his essays entitled Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization, which were published in 1960. From that year on, Stock had full access to Pound's collection of books and papers and had frequent contact with the poet and his wife and daughter. In 1961 he was awarded the Bollingen Fellowship to catalogue the Ezra Pound Archive at Brunnenburg. He was also awarded the Leverhulme Fellowship in 1968. Stock has published several books including Poet In Exile (1964), Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (1967, 1968), The Life of Ezra Pound (1970, 1974, 1982, 1985), Ezra Pound's Pennsylvania (1976), A Call to Order: Essays and Reviews, 1954-1974 (1976). In addition, he and Ezra Pound were the translators of Love Poems of Ancient Egypt (1962, 197l, 1978). Between 1960 and 1980 he edited and contributed to several books, including some written by Ezra Pound. Some of the periodicals he edited and contributed to between 1953 and 1980 are Shenandoah, X Quarterly, Modern Age, Quadrant, Poetry Australia, Helix, Edge, and Texas Quarterly. He also had numerous poems published in literary and poetry magazines between 1950 and 1957. (Noel Stock’s papers are housed at the Ward M. Canaday Center, U. of Toledo, from whose Finding Aid this biographical sketch was taken)
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 27
JAMES JEROME WILHELM (1932-2012)
Dr. Wilhelm was born February 2, 1932 in Youngstown, Ohio. After moving to Seattle as a child, he went there to school and received a scholarship to Yale. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1954, graduating valedictorian of his class. He later went on and received his doctorate in philosophy. Dr. Wilhelm was a professor at Rutgers University for over 40 years, retiring in 1997. He was an author of twenty-plus books and a world renowned scholar of Ezra Pound, Dante Alighieri, and medieval literature.
Comprehensive list of publications: http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/569979.James_J_Wilhelm
28
Make It New PUBLICATIONS ON EZRA POUND _________________ 2012 BOOKS Ten Eyck, David. Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Stark, Robert. Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition. A Jargoner Apprenticeship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. ESSAY COLLECTION Coyle, M. and S. Yao, eds. Ezra Pound and Education. Orono: NPF, 2012. Table of Contents
McDonald, G. American Scholars: Emerson, Pound and the Possession of Knowledge 322 Birien, A. Pound and the Reform of Philology. 23-46. Webster, M. Pound Teaching Cummings, Cummings Teaching Pound. 47-66. Miller, A. J. Dreaming the Super College: Ezra Pound, Lionel Trilling and the Arnoldian Ideal 67-96. Davis, M. T. and C. McWhirter. Pounding the Globe: the Correspondence of Ezra Pound and James Taylor Dunn. 97-120. Marsh, A. “Ezratic ‘Reeducation.’” Pound and the Solons. 121-136. Nicholls, P. “You in the Dinghy astern There”: Learning from Ezra Pound. 137-162. Welch, M. “Till was hung yesterday”: Louis Till as Lynching Topos in the Pisan Cantos. 163-182. Golding, A. From Pound to Olson: The Avant-Garde Poet as Pedagogue. 183-212. PAIDEUMA, VOL. 39, 2012 Rebecca Strauss, “‘External Modernity’ or Something of That Sort: Ezra Pound’s Transatlantic ‘Redondillas’” Alastair Morrison, “Come Far Poteresti un Sofismo?: Guido Cavalcanti and the Poundian Argument” Sarah Ehlers, “Ezra Pound’s Perverse Anthology” Jerome Kavka, M.D., “The Dreams of Ezra Pound” (introduced by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos) Gary Grieve-Carlson, “’The Fathers Run Out in the Sons’: Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, and ‘The Song of Ullikummi’”
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 29
ARTICLES IN JOURNALS and COLLECTIONS Bush, Ronald. “‘Young Willows’ in the Pisan Cantos: ‘Light as the Branch of Kuanon.’” In Zhaoming Qian, ed., Modernism and the Orient. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2012, pp. 185-213. Bush, Ronald. “Between Religion and Science: Ezra Pound, Scotus Erigena and the Beginnings of a Twentieth-Century Paradise,” Rivista di Letterature d'America XXXII.141/42 (2012), pp. 95-124. Depper, Corin. 'Elpenor, Unburied': Ezra Pound, Jean-Luc Godard and the Descent of Dwelling. Vertigo (30:), 2012, (no pagination). (In special issue: "Godard Is". English summary.) http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/issue30-spring-2012-godard-is/elpenor-unburied1/ Estrade, Charlotte. Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting and the Roman Classics: Translating the Reference to Myth. Ranam: Recherches Anglaises et Nord-AmÈricaines, (45:), 2012, 129-140, 223. (In special issue: "Reprise, Recycling, Recuperating: Modes of Construction of Anglophone Culture." English summary; French summary.) Farahbakhsh, Alireza The Anti-Modernist Quality of Ezra Pound's The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Cantos XLII-LI). War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities , (24:), 2012, 15 pages. (Electronic resource.) http://wlajournal.com/24_1/pdf/farahbakhsh.pdf Feldman, Matthew. The 'Pound Case' in Historical Perspective: An Archival Overview. Journal of Modern Literature, (35:2), 2012, 83-97. Katz, Daniel. Ezra Pound's Provincial Provence: Arnaut Daniel, Gavin Douglas, and the Vulgar Tongue. Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (73:2), 2012, 175-199. http://www.academia.edu/3292799/_Ezra_Pounds_Provincial_Provence_Arnaut _Daniel_Gavin_Douglas_and_the_Vulgar_Tongue_ Pestell, Alex. 'INCORPORATE/& in One Body': Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos. In Aji, Hélène (ed.)Kilgore-Caradec, Jennifer (ed.), Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. viii, pp. 41-52. Rosenow, C. 'High Civilization': The Role of Noh Drama in Ezra Pound's Cantos. Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, (48:3), 2012, 227-244. Ten Eyck, David. Evaluating the Status of Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos. In Aji, Hélène (ed.) Kilgore-Caradec, Jennifer (ed.). Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. viii, (pp. 23-40) Turner Sarah Victoria. Ezra Pound’s new order of artists: ‘The New Sculpture’ and the critical formation of a sculptural avant-garde in early twentieth- century Britain. Sculpture Journal. 21 (2012) 2-22.
Â
Make It New
30 Â
BOOKS OF CRITICAL INTEREST _________________ Spoo, Robert. Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. xvi, 355 pp. This book tells the story of how the notoriously protectionist American copyright law impacted transatlantic modernism by encouraging the piracy of works published abroad. From its inception in 1790, U.S. copyright law withheld protection from foreign authors, creating an aggressive public domain that claimed works just as soon as they were published abroad. When Congress finally extended protection to foreign works, legal technicalities caused many authors to continue to lose their copyrights. The American public domain made vast numbers of foreign works freely available to American publishers. In order to avert ruinous competition for these unprotected resources, publishers evolved "trade courtesy," whereby the first house to announce plans to issue a foreign work acquired informal rights in the work-a kind of makeshift copyright grounded on unwritten norms and elaborate professional etiquette. Courtesy was a form of order without law that safeguarded publishers' interests, punished deviants from the code, and remunerated foreign authors for the exploitation of their works. Drawing on previously undiscovered archives, this book reveals the convergence of law, piracy, and courtesy in the dissemination of transatlantic modernism in the United States. The chief actors are James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and the New York piratepornographer Samuel Roth, with their very different attitudes toward intellectual property. Joyce's growing reputation in America, Pound's proposals for copyright reform, Roth's activities as purveyor of a hybrid modernism compounded of verbal experiment and entertainment for men-these and other developments cannot be understood apart from the contemporaneous American law and the voracious public domain it created. The book also tells the untold legal stories behind key events of modernism. When Roth reprinted the uncopyrighted Ulysses without permission, Joyce retaliated by drawing upon the punitive dimension of trade courtesy and by filing a lawsuit seeking damages for Roth's exploitation of his valuable name. Later, the courtesy tradition enabled Joyce to enjoy informal protection for Ulysses after Random House published the authorized American edition in 1934. Publishing norms, not copyright, kept pirates from Ulysses. Book summary at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199927876.do Table of Contents: Introduction Chapter 1: "The American Public Domain and the Courtesy of the Trade in the Nineteenth Century" Chapter 2: "Transatlantic Modernism and the American Public Domain." Chapter 3: "Ezra Pound's Copyright Statute: Perpetual Rights and Unfair Competition with the Dead." Chapter 4: "James Joyce's Ulysses and American Copyright Protectionism." Chapter 5: "James Joyce v. Samuel Roth and Two Worlds Publishing Company." Chapter 6: "The 1934 Random House Ulysses: Copyright and Trade Courtesy. Epilogue
Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 1 31
Schulze, Robin G. The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 This book offers an important reconsideration of the cultural impulses that drove American literary modernism. America's modernist poets came of age in a nation struggling to redefine its relationship with poetry and with nature. In the early twentieth century, Darwinian science dictated that as countries became more civilized, as their citizens dwelt increasingly in the realms of artifice they created, they ceased to engage in the invigorating struggles against nature that kept them fit. Civilization led to the medical condition known as degeneration, the morbid deviation of men from an identifiable "normal type." Eager to save America from the fate of a degenerate Europe, Progressive Era reformers prescribed the invigorating contact with American nature as a means to keep the American race clean and healthy. In order for nature to serve as an antidote for degeneration, however, it needed to remain a realm of hard facts and unremitting forces, a delusion-free place free of art that cleansed the mind rather than clouded it. Drawing on a wide range of primary and archival sources, this book argues that the widespread American turn back to nature in the early twentieth century had profound consequences for America's modernist poets. Like other Americans of their day, Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore heeded the widespread American call to head back to nature for the sake of the nation's health, but they faced a difficult challenge. Turning to American nature as a means to combat the threat of American degeneration in their literary work, they needed to create a form of American poetry that would be a cure for degeneration rather than a cause. My work reveals the ways in which Monroe's, Pound's, and Moore's struggles to create and publish poems that could resist degeneration by keeping faith with American nature influenced ideas about what American poetry should be and do in the twentieth century. Book summary at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199920327.do Table of Contents: Introduction: Toward a Modern Nature Chapter One: Nature Study, Degeneration, and the Problem of Poetry Chapter Two: Harriet Monroe's Pioneer Modernism Chapter Three: Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Hygiene Chapter Four: Marianne Moore, Degeneration, and Domestication Chapter Five: Marianne Moore, Nature, and National Health Conclusion Bibliography