Posthumous Cantos E-Book

Ezra Pound

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drawing on Ezra Pound's notebooks, typescripts and contri-butions to periodicals, Posthumous Cantos is a selection of drafts and sketches that remained unpublished or uncollected in the poet's lifetime. The material spans the entire half-century of Pound's Cantos, 1915 to 1970, and includes newly-recovered passages he wrote in Italian in 1944-45, presented here in their original form alongside English translations. Accompanied by detailed introductory and explanatory notes and a full chronology, Posthumous Cantos offers new insight into the making of one of the twentieth century's most important and forbidding literary works, revealing it as an endless process of writing and rewriting, in which the poetry and the life are finally inextricable. This is a crucial part of the Pound canon, here made available for the first time in an English edition.

Leseprobe

Posthumous Cantos

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) is one of the most influential, and controversial, poets of the twentieth century. His poetry remains vital, challenging, contentious, unassimilable.

Massimo Bacigalupo is an experimental filmmaker, scholar, translator and literary critic. Since 1990 he has been Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa.

Ezra Pound

Posthumous Cantos

Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo

Contents

Introduction

Note on the English Edition

Chronology

I Three Cantos: London, 1915–1917

Hang it all, there can be but one ‘Sordello’!

Leave Casella

Another’s a half-cracked fellow – John Heydon

‘What do I mean by all this clattering rumble?’

When you find that feminine contact

What’s poetry?

II Paris, 1920–1922

And So shu stirred in the sea

Sudden gift of the stranger

Dido choked up with tears for dead Sicheus

By the arena, you, Thomas amics, Galla Placidia, and the Roman

III Rapallo and Venice, 1928–1937

the new shoots rise by the altar

irritable and unstable

‘Spent yesterday drawing a grasshopper’

‘From this grotto’

A dangle of fishermen’s lanthorns

SHINES in the mind of heaven GOD

colla coda aguzza

is burried the great financier, Lawvi or Levi

while they were discussing the former possibility

Lost sense of partaggio, of sharing, for fellowship

In their pageantry and their pride they were 40

Das endlich eine wirklicheVerständigung

Work is not a commodity. No one can eat it

IV Voices of War, 1940–45

1940

as against the sound of the olive mill

But here in Tigullio

as at Aquila with a hundred heads round the fountain

Washed in the Kiang & Han river

To attract the spirits by the beauty of jade

saying: O Kat based upon reason

for which the wind is quiet

With a white flash of wings over the dawn light

The holiness of the lord has a blister

So that in August, of the year ex–XXI

The cat stars have shut one eye

Ub. –

Maderno, and there was calm in the stillness

360 thousand and sorrow, sorrow like rain

So that he put up a saw mill, and they took him

m’apparve in quel triedro

ERIGENA

V Italian Drafts, 1944–1945

Accade ogni mezzo secolo una meraviglia

[Every half century a marvel occurs]

Ripresero allora i dolci suoni

[Then began again the sweet sounds]

In un triedro dell’oliveto mi apparve

[In a triedro of the olive grove she appeared to me]

14 Jan

[14 Jan]

Dove la salita scende e fa triedro

[Where the path descends and makes a triedro]

Mai con codardi (codini) sarà l’arte monda

[Never with cowards (fogies) will art be mended]

Ogni beato porta con sé il cielo

[Every blessed soul carries along with it the heavenly sphere]

Nel periplo che fa il vostro sole

[In the periplum that your sun makes]

e i fiocchi giaccion e fondon

[and the snowflakes lie and melt]

Com’è ch’io sento le vetuste voci

[How is it that I hear the ancient voices]

Se in febbraio il freddo rilascia la morsa

[If in February the cold relaxes its bite]

VI Pisa, 1945

a quando?

Ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio

Yet from my tomb such flame of love arise

Night rain and a Biddle sky

VII Prosaic Verses, 1945–1960

and my gt/ aunt’s third husband

Ian had felt it: ‘blown to pieces?’

‘aint no son of a bitch can help me’

‘one god and Mahomet’ stamped by Roger of Sicily

John Heydon, the signatures

‘daily exercise or more power than any President’

The EMPEROR ploughed his furrow and his wife

for a word / for the mistranslation of XREIA

L’arif est gai, de bonne humeur, souriant

Old Peters after ’48 that was

novis, nova remedia

Till Di Marzio cita

Out of Earth into tree

And might be lost if I do not record them

the madness & cancer are nothing

VIII Lines for Olga, 1962–1972

& the grasshopper was not yet dead on his stalk

The gondolas dying in their sewers

and as to why this timing?

flood & flame

Olga’s name being courage

And there was nothing but water melon

Notes

Index

Introduction

Ezra Pound devoted much of his life to the writing of a long poem, The Cantos, which was to be a history both of the world and of himself, a new Odyssey telling the story of an exile’s return to his home and promised land, and a new Divine Comedy depicting the arduous ascent from Hell to an erotic and visionary Paradise. However, while those great models were based on a linear narrative, Pound, a poet of the image and of sudden intuitions, tells his story circularly, by repetition and variation. The part contains the whole, and canto 1 already offers a blueprint for the entire poem, going from Odysseus’s descent to Hades to a vision of Venus, she of ‘dark eyelids’, as well as ‘mirthful’. She is Baudelaire’s beautiful temptress, revisited by an American poet who arrived in Europe with an insatiable desire for knowledge and self-affirmation.

Consequently, over the fifty-year course of Pound’s poem, states of mind alternate, and the only continuous and irreversible story that we can make out in its turbulent pages is the poet’s own life, his travels and sudden departures, his pitfalls and misadventures, his aesthetic youth, his maturity increasingly occupied by economic projects, the day of reckoning of his incarceration, the relatively serene twilight of his final years.

Pound always wrote with incisiveness and passion, and the best parts of The Cantos are an eccentric but powerful chronicle of his times and of some of their most representative figures. The troubadour and friend of Yeats of the London salons; the Renaissance scholiast and guru of Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop patronized by Joyce and Hemingway; the passionate tennis player and compiler of ABCs (How to Read, Guide to Kulchur, ABC of Economics), perfectly naturalized in Rapallo during the two decades of Fascism; the desperate and unregenerate prophet of the Pisan cage; and finally that painful persona – the poet in the insane asylum of Washington, DC, not far from the White House and its tenant, to whom he believed he had much to impart. These are images known to everyone, images that do not, and will not, cease to provoke fear and wonder, as well as delight, like the mirthful Venus of canto 1.