Posthumous Cantos

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.

The Cantos began among false starts and revisions between 1915 and 1925, when they first appeared in a book-length sequence, A Draft of XVI Cantos – a title still suggesting tentativeness, though cantos 1–16 were to remain substantially unchanged in later editions. In 1917 Pound published in Poetry, the groundbreaking Chicago monthly of which he was European correspondent, ‘Three Cantos’, a rich and brilliant overture to his long poem, devoted in part to a debate with himself on ‘what’s left for me to do’, in part to descriptions of cherished landscapes (chiefly Sirmione on Lake Garda) and to extracts from, and comments on, his omnivorous reading (Lorenzo Valla; Catullus; the Chinese poets, who were a recent enthusiasm). The last of ‘Three Cantos’ was for the greater part a version of Book XI of the Odyssey, the descent to Hades of Ulysses to consult Tiresias – a version, as the poet-scholar notes, based not on Homer’s original but on a Latin crib published in 1538. Why so? Essentially because Pound always uses the material at hand, and perhaps Latin was easier for him to read – and misread – than Greek. Through the travesty of a double translation it might be possible to recover the foreignness and potency of the original. Yet Pound’s main conceit here was the use in his version of the rhythms and alliterations of the Old English Seafarer and Wanderer, which he had admired at college. The result is a music touched by archaism, a neo-medievalism that blends with classicism and modernism in a characteristic Poundian pastiche: history is present in the layers of the text. As for subject-matter, Odysseus’s encounter with the dead is a metaphor of Pound’s own confrontation with friends lost in the First World War, which he experienced as a non-combatant in London, in a period of intense productivity, possibly enhanced by that great European tragedy. It also alludes to Dante’s otherworldly travels and encounters, and suggests that The Cantos will be a summoning of ghosts, from whom much will be learned about our present and future.

Between 1917 and 1922, the ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917 were followed by nine further cantos, numbered progressively, but when in 1923 Pound gave quasi-final form to cantos 1–16 for book publication, he radically revised the overture, with the same decisiveness he had brought one year before to the manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The descent to Hades of the third canto became, with appropriate cuts, canto 1, thus providing a grandiose though precarious introduction to all that follows. ‘Canto I’ and ‘Canto II’ of 1917 were also broken up, rearranged and augmented. The poem resulting from these radical changes was more experimental. Pound no longer detained his readers with doubts and perplexities about his intentions: he said what he had to say, and stopped. In this way, despite some uncertainties, the ship of The Cantos was launched, not to be overshadowed for esotericism and experimentalism by those two coeval cruisers – Ulysses and The Waste Land.

However, not all was gain in the transition from ‘Three Cantos’ to XVI Cantos. Pound was more confidential and sympathetic in the early version, with his student’s literary passions, his portrait of the not very young artist (he was over thirty), his not invariably persuasive anecdotes (this was not to change in the final version), and his infectious lyric breakthroughs. But the 1917 ‘Three Cantos’ remained forgotten in the back files of Poetry (and in the volumes Lustra and Quia Pauper Amavi of 1917–1919), to be reprinted only after Pound’s death. Thus they can be justifiably included in a book titled Posthumous Cantos.

After this uncertain start, The Cantos proceeded without too many obstacles. Pound had found a canto-style and he went on to perfect it and modify it over the decades. But given the composite nature of his project, which is made up of autobiography, history and economics, evocations of moments of immersion in nature and physical and mental delight (the gods), translations of and annotations on Cavalcanti, Dante and the ancient Confucian annals – given all this, the text of The Cantos as it appeared in a series of installments (called ‘decads’ by Pound, though often containing not ten but eleven cantos, sometimes more) is the result of an extensive process of writing and rewriting. Pound wrote lines and passages in notebooks or on stray sheets, then typed and retyped his notes, and was often dissatisfied with first drafts. The ‘canto’, as the name suggests, had to be a kind of composition, or talk, moving on without breaks from opening to close. Pound drafted a canto and if he was not happy with the result he started again from the beginning. This explains in part the notorious obscurity of Pound, who as he wrote and rewrote the same passages forgot, or decided he could do without, this or that clarification. Let the readers worry. He had more important matters to attend to, nothing less than ‘the tale of the tribe’, as he called his poem. (In the meantime he had become enthusiastic about Leo Frobenius and African civilizations.) Surprisingly enough, Pound carefully preserved his notebooks and drafts, perhaps thinking that he could make use of them later. (He surely did not anticipate that university libraries in his native land would vie for their possession.) Thus the text of The Cantos as published is only the tip of an iceberg of mostly unpublished material: notebooks, typescripts, proofs. At times Pound really forgot memorable passages among his drafts, though generally he proved a good judge in choosing what to preserve and what to discard.

The present volume offers a selection from this abundant material, based on criteria of quality, accessibility, and documentary interest. Passages from the inter-war years are relatively few because the best writing appears to have made it into The Cantos as we have them. The early lines about Pound’s meeting with Eliot in Verona (By the arena, you, Thomas amics) offer a sketch of an encounter that was to find its place, more allusively, in the Pisan Cantos, and give an idea of Pound’s method. (It is striking how rough and journal-like these notes are, even mentioning ‘Bitter Bonomelli’, a popular drink in Italian cafés of the period.) Similarly, the three discarded openings of what was to become canto 2 (And So-shu stirred in the sea) show us the poet at work, sketching, abbreviating and even eliminating entire segments, some of them notable, as he seeks both themes and procedures. Of great interest are three such passages that appeared in various drafts of canto 49, the often-cited ‘Seven Lakes Canto’ on Chinese themes. This originally had an anecdotal prologue (two distinct and striking versions) and included a long and distasteful invective, wisely omitted by Pound. This is the period in which Pound wrote his celebrated ‘Usura’ canto, denouncing with Ruskinian fervour the destruction that bad economic practices brought to the pre-Raphaelite ‘world of moving energies’, and to great art and artists. He repeated the theme in canto 51 (for ‘repetita juvant’), a canto