The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Notes on organizing readings of "Ulysses" for Bloomsday in Genoa, Italy (since 2005). A reading of the text facilitates understanding the shifts from narrative to interior monologue. Molly Bloom's memories of Gibraltar compared with Ezra Pound's as recorded in "The Cantos". Differences between an actual stream of consciousness (as in "The Cantos") and a constructed one (as in "Ulysses").

En el horizonte de una investigación amplia acerca de las solidaridades entre configuraciones de lenguaje –especialmente formas poéticas de significación– y maneras de concebir lo real o habitar el mundo –incluida la experiencia de la temporalidad–  se interrogarán las formas de articulación y comprensión históricas en la poética del modernismo angloamericano, concentrándose en la lectura de obras literarias y críticas de T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound y James Joyce. Considerando la conciencia aguda que muestran estos autores de las relaciones entre sus formas de experimentación lingüística radical y modos de conocimiento, el seminario gravitará en torno a una serie de estrategias poéticas, a menudo superpuestas, que pueden ser agrupadas bajo tres rúbricas principales: ‘ironía’ (escepticismo y entusiasmo, negación y superación crítica, aufhebung), ‘montaje’ (fragmentación y discontinuidad, método mítico y sincronización temporal), y ‘traducción’ (sobrevida, despliegue del pasado). La contraparte subjetiva de tales figuras (o, anti-subjetiva, si se quiere) será examinada a partir de sus concepciones del autor/hablante como un catalizador más o menos impersonal (ausencia de intencionalidad, personae, desdoblamiento crítico). Se propone dilucidar así la especificidad de una poética vanguardista que, confrontada a la crisis del discurso de la modernidad y a diferencia de otros movimientos que le fueron contemporáneos, no pretendió una ruptura simple con el pasado, sino un distanciamiento y reabsorción a través de estrategias de disyunción y superposición. En último término, se tendrá que evaluar hasta qué punto esta poética de la historia, que se forja entre las primeras décadas del siglo XX y el comienzo de la Segunda Guerra (y corresponde a lo que nosotros solemos entender como postmodernismo más que como modernismo), es una de la que aún se está intentando salir, o acaso tan sólo desplegar en lo que ha dejado pendiente.

In this most accessible sequence in Pound's epic, poetry no longer manifests itself as the superimposition of order onto disorder: male, authoritarian, "the phallus or spermatozoid charging head on, the female chaos" (Natural Philosophy of Love, 170), but as passive, fragmented, circumstantial. The poetry seems symptomatic of a mind brutalized, perhaps even unhinged. POOR EZ! But Pound's critics are not all moved. Because of Pound's problematic stature as a preeminent man of letters, and as a high priest of fascism, an anti-Semite and a crackpot economist, critics have failed to observe the formal implications of how first Mussolini, and especially Pound function as sacrificial bullocks in the Pisan sequence. Il Duce and Pound are pharmakoi, at once casualties of a shift in the historical winds, poisonous, medicine for cultural renewal out of the ravages of war, the focus for the emotional and irrational fragments seemingly dispersed across the landscape of the Pisan Cantos. We must defer discussing the charges against Pound, substantial though they may be, in order to inquire how Pound's role as pharmakos shapes the matter and form of the Pisan sequence. Specifically: how sincere is Pound in registering the experience of a man "on whom the sun has gone down"(74/430)? How precise is he in transforming that experience into a poetics of victimization that diverges radically from the fascistic implications of his earlier, geometric and phallo-centric aesthetic, and indeed, bears study as a crucial anticipation of post-modern poetics? By comparing the palpably disintegrating interior and exterior landscapes of the Pisan sequence by reference to attractor states in complex systems, new and significantly original orderings seem to emerge spontaneously, contingently, and with significance beyond the emphasis of either the formal or substantial issues at stake with Pound's imprisonment.

Until recently, scholarship on Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature has been dominated by studies discussing the influence of ‘hokku’ on his work, especially with reference to his famous ‘hokku-like sentence’, ‘In a Station of the Metro’. In the past few years, however, there has been a significant turn towards re-examining nō’s importance for Pound. Both the 2014 and 2016 Ezra Pound Society Article Awards were presented to essays with such a focus: the first discusses the discovery of Pound’s translation of the nō play Takasago in relation to his claim that this play constitutes ‘the theme’ of The Cantos, as well as the way in which it anticipates his fascism; the second further explores the political implications of Pound’s interest in nō, with a particular emphasis on Pound’s wartime articles. This chapter gives an overview of the latest developments in Pound studies concerning the influence of  both ‘hokku’ and nō on Pound before concluding on an outline of Pound’s impact on modern and contemporary Japanese poetry, which has received little attention thus far in English-language Pound scholarship, and possible directions for further research in all three of these areas.

A modern paradigm of Oriental-Occidental translatio is presented by ... Andrés Claro ... in his comprehensive study “Montage as East-West Poetic Configuration. Ezra Pound’s Translation of Chinese Images”. The critic demonstrates that Ezra Pound’s principle of montage, developed at first in his early collection of translated Chinese poems called Cathay (1915) that contributed  to revolutionize English and Western poetry, is not only a re-orientation of euro-centred literature and of global translatio studii, but a reconfiguration of poetic form and representation as such. As a result, montage ‘formally’ emerged as “a hybrid figure of mixed origins”.
In order to illustrate the complexity of cultural transfer or translatio studii in the field of translation between Eastern and Western languages and literatures, Claro starts with the presentation of Pound’s iconical notice on the front cover of Cathay. This notice synoptically displays in the shape of an inverted cone the creative translation process leading to East-Western Cathay: it goes from the Chinese poems, many of them by Li Po (jap. Rihaku), to Ernest Fenollosa’s English translation and notes, via a Japanese sinologue – Pound’s professor, ignoring English – and via an auxiliary Japanese-English interpreter – up to Ezra Pound himself who, besides retranslating in Cathay Fenollosa’s cribs and paraphrases of Chinese poetry, was to edit Fenollosa’s essay The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918) whose ideas had inspired his own translational poetry and poetics since he was handed over the manuscript in 1913, after the author’s death (1908).
In the first chapter on “East-West Poetic Figurations” Claro analyses the principles of Pound’s creative transpositions of the Chinese images into the English language, with constant reference to Fenollosa’s notes and with close comparisons between Fenollosa’s more prosaic and Pound’s more poetic translations. The basic principle is the English re-creation of Chinese imagery, rooted in the partly pictographic writing system and in the syntactic isolation, the asyndetic juxtaposition of discrete images stimulating a vivid dynamic between the imagistic figures in the reader’s mind. While Pound’s translations aim mainly, in accordance with the principle of phanopoeia, at an adequate, yet creative, verbovisual figuration, the ‘equivalence’ of Chinese and English melopoeia, i.e. phonic and rhythmic figuration, and of logopoeia, i.e. cultural and allusive figuration, is either reduced or completely left apart, due to historic and linguistic resistance or to the poet’s personal ignorance, as he declares himself.
Another principle of Chinese writing is the cosmic correspondence between nature and literature, firstly the word considered as a natural and moving thing, and secondly the verbovisual configuration of invisible cosmic correlations between things. Its symbolic matrix is the figure of Yin Yang that constitutes the dynamic parallelism of corresponding and complementary pairs of all kinds. In a series of lucid interpretations, Andrés Claro, so to speak, ‘carves the dragon’ by working out some subtle stylistic couplings or “dynamic imagistic arrangements” in classical Chinese poetry, namely in Li Po’s couplets, quatrains and octets, heteroglossically transfigured in Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Claro’s interpretation includes the philosophical value of imagistic figuration, where he notes, with reference to contemporary sinologues, the significant linkage between the Taoist principle of cosmic correspondence and the Chinese word wen that designates literature through the meaning of ‘pattern’, especially the stirring figure of parallelism. This goes along with a comparative analysis of Oriental and Occidental conceptions of cosmic and literary figures, of parallelism and metaphor.
In his second chapter “East-West Metaphysical Configurations: from ideological criticism to the transcendental revolution of montage”, the scholar looks at the more or less ‘discrete’ and ‘discreet’ modes of montage within the context of the work of Ezra Pound: the more ‘discreet’ and a bit less ‘discrete’ Cathay versus the more ‘discrete’ and less ‘discreet’ The Cantos. At the same time, he considers the modes of montage in the larger context of Western Modernism in the fields of literature, the arts and the media, with a focus on T.S. Eliot, on Picasso and on Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram”. Since montage is substantially linked to the aspect of history, the scholar investigates the double connexions between the context of World War I in which Cathay is embedded and the topic of ancient history in Cathay, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the connexions between ancient and contemporary world history, including World War II, in and around The Cantos.
Against the background of Chinese ‘ideogrammaticality’, The Cantos induced a new form of representation in epic poetry where ideogrammic and idiomatic fragmentation and semantic polyvalence become overwhelming and eliminate intentional meaning and anticipatory historical sense, while staging it in an kaleidoscopic way. The performative and imagistic impact is predominant, very much like Walter Benjamin has stated in his Passagen-Werk regarding the phenomenon of Modernity. Both world views, the traditional Occidental dualism of two separate worlds with its static mode of metaphorical figuration and the dynamic ideogrammic figuration of correlated immanent worlds in Oriental poetry and Taoism are finally disconnected from Modernity. They are replaced by the poetic and ideogrammic figure of the interruptive and instantaneous event that generates flashes of impersonal meanings and multiple perspectives on a possible past and future, lacking both origo and telos.
Still, in the broken figures of montage there is also a partial re-membring of disiecta membra: the figure of interlingual and intermedial couplings of Chinese and European characters, of translational parallelisms in The Cantos. They are conceived as a multiple écart, semantic, phonic and graphic, operating erratically in praesentia and in absentia: a complex convergence and divergence of Eastern and Western idioms and ideas. 

A. Knauth (from "Configuration of the Book" - Introduction).

In this essay, written in Italian, I analyze the different parts composing a poetic text. Therefore, I analyze how these parts affect the translation of the text, basing myself upon some practical examples from the Italian translation of Ezra Pound's "The Cantos" by his daughter Mary de Rachewilz.

In December 2019, an unrecorded painting by Gladys Hynes appeared unexpectedly at a Paris auction house. Formerly part of the collection of Impressionist and Modern art of the Petit Palais in Geneva, the museum had deaccessioned their one British work – a painting by an obscure woman artist about whom very little information was available. Entitled Morning and dated to around 1916, the painting depicts six female bathers at Lamorna Cove. As such, Morning belongs with a series of paintings produced by Hynes in the 1910s and 1920s in which the landscape of Western Cornwall forms the backdrop

Within Pound's poetic oeuvre, surely the appeal of The Pisan Cantos lies in their candor. After the inexhaustible variety of personae Pound employs in earlier poems and cantos, here at last the poet seems to speak as "noman" (74/445), if not himself. Indeed, the impressive, though often elusive catalogue of names, places, quoted lines, snippets of conversation, phrases from diverse languages, and fragments of images Pound packs into the Pisans might not in themselves be so moving, were it not for the spontaneity, lack of pretension, vivid imagery, and powerful memories that permeate this section of The Cantos. While lying under the sun in the small cage where the U.S. Army housed him for several weeks near Pisa or sitting in his tent later, Pound evoked for himself cityscapes, encounters, lines of poetry, and conversations from his past, which he arranges "[p]ly over ply" (4/15) in the Pisans. As A. Walton Litz has observed, "[T]he more one reads Pound's poetry against his other writings (including his letters), the more one realizes that he was the most occasional and particular of poets" (34). Is it not these intimate Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008): 278-299.

Ezra Pound’s contrast between a Western civilization corrupted, in his view, by the “Bellum ... perenne” waged by “usura” and an alternative social model based on Confucian ethics is apparent throughout The Cantos (“Canto 86” 19). Confucian thought is central to Pound’s dream of a more enlightened society. This centrality is neatly summarised in his response to T. S. Eliot’s question of what he believes: “I believe the Ta Hio,” Confucius’s Da xue (“Great Learning”), which he had translated in 1928 under that title and again as The Great Digest in 1951 (Make It New 18). Pound repeats this statement in Canto 88: “I believe the Dai Gaku,” this time with the Japanese reading of the characters (“Canto 88” 186). Pound’s interest in Confucian thought has already been masterfully treated in Feng Lan’s Ezra Pound and Confucianism. Lan does not, however, explore the role that Japanese neo-Confucianism played in Pound’s imagination of the Confucian tradition. As Pound put it in a wartime article, “Japan continued to preserve some of the best Chinese skills and customs when China had fallen into her decadence” (“Ezra Pound Asks” 6). Pound thus repeated a conventional Japanese view used to justify Japan’s invasion of China at that time. He also considered this cultural transmission to have occurred with Confucian thought. This article will break new ground by examining Pound’s encounters with Japanese neo-Confucianism. It will do so by discussing the significance of his reference to the Japanese neo-Confucian philosopher Nakae Tōju (1608-48) and its function within Section: Rock-drill as a contrast with a corrupted West; it will then trace the development of Tōju’s influential promotion of Wang Yangming learning in Japan through to the famous samurai Saigō Takamori (1828-77), who inspired the kenbu (“sword-dance”) poem Pound translated as “The Sole Survivor” in his 1915 “Sword Dance and Spear Dance” translations. Saigō’s “honour” in defeat depicted in this poem seeks to exemplify Yangming’s neo-Confucian ethics of “virtuous action.”

In December 2019, an unrecorded painting by Gladys Hynes appeared unexpectedly at a Paris auction house. Formerly part of the collection of Impressionist and Modern art of the Petit Palais in Geneva, the museum had deaccessioned their one British work – a painting by an obscure woman artist about whom very little information was available. Entitled Morning and dated to around 1916, the painting depicts six female bathers at Lamorna Cove. As such, Morning belongs with a series of paintings produced by Hynes in the 1910s and 1920s in which the landscape of Western Cornwall forms the backdrop

Biodoc  on Mary de Rachewiltz, née Rudge, daughter of Ezra Pound. Translator of his most important poem "Cantos", editor of his writings and fervent fighter for the acknowledgement of her father as a great poet, rather than a deeply convinced fascist.

È un paradosso soltanto apparente che uno dei grandi autori del Modernismo quale Ezra Pound abbia fatto risuonare e rivivere nei suoi versi la voce dei poeti del passato, tra cui in particolare Dante, e vada perciò annoverato anche tra i massimi esponenti del Medievalismo. Appassionato studente di letteratura medievale, Pound ne è stato per qualche tempo anche insegnante, ma soprattutto ha continuato ad amarla per tutta la vita, professandola con le parole del poeta, secondo la vocazione di un genio e di un magistero artistico capace di rendere nuova la tradizione dei cosiddetti “secoli bui” e di ritrovarne il “dettaglio luminoso”. Nei corsi e ricorsi storici i nani sulle spalle dei giganti del noto detto medievale diventano a loro volta giganti nella modernità: così Dante grazie a Virgilio e ai trovatori provenzali, così Pound grazie agli stessi trovatori e a Dante. I contributi di affermati specialisti e di giovani ricercatori raccolti in questo volume fanno nuova luce sulla presenza del Fiorentino nell’opera dell’Americano e confermano nel tempo l’epiteto dantesco di miglior fabbro attribuito a Pound da Thomas Stearns Eliot.

This book is the first to deal with the subject of Ezra Pound’s relationships with Japanese literature as a whole. It provides a wealth of new scholarship on this subject, including on the nineteenth-century Japanese contexts that led to Pound’s interest in ‘hokku’ and Fenollosa’s nō translations on which Pound based his own; significant original research on Pound’s Japanese friendships that enriched his understanding of Japanese literature; and an examination of all the explicit references to nō in The Cantos in unprecedented depth. Finally, it proposes that his nō translations function as a transition point from his Imagist and Vorticist aesthetics to his later embrace of totalitarian politics.

For more information, and to purchase the book (available in both hardback and paperback), please follow this link:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ezra-pounds-japan-9781350174306/

For a selection of the book's contents, please follow this link:

https://www.google.co.jp/books/edition/Ezra_Pound_s_Japan/LKIPEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ezra+pound%27s+japan&printsec=frontcover

Published in ELH 78 [2011], 769-800.

Ezra Pound, who filled his Cantos with untranslated and untranslatable archaic and foreign words and phrases, imagined a reader who would take up the claims of modern philology in a startlingly energetic way. The eighteenth century language philosophy inherited by Pound helped him to shape a modernist understanding of the energeia of finding and using unfamiliar words, one in which roots and etymologies are less important than current meanings. In 1906, a likeminded philologist, Michel Bréal, theorist of diachronic and synchronic realms, formulated a model of Homeric finding and using that he called “plasticity.” I consider the limits of plasticity in Pound’s Canto XX.

Princeton University's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication Lecture Series, Princeton, USA: November 16, 2020.

Previous version presented: The American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages (AATT) Conference, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA: November 13, 2019.

In-depth chronological analysis of the correspondence between the British art critic Adrian Stokes and the American poet Ezra Pound and how it illuminates each others' work, especially in the 1930s. See also Art and its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes (London: Ashgate, 2002; PA: Penn State U. Press, 2003).

A discussion of questions faced by translators of Ezra Pound's Cantos dealing with China (e.g., Confucius in Canto 13) and working from previous Western translations -- on the occasion of the publication of a new Italian translation of Pound's XXX Cantos (1930).

"Starting from China: A New Translation of The Cantos." Europe Facing Inter-Asian Cultural, Literary, Historical and Political Situations. Ed. Lina Unali and Elisabetta Marino. Rome: UniversItalia, 2014. pp. 239: 17-32. ISBN 9788865076064.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/565366?language=de&tab_body=overview

Das Ziel der Studie ist eine Neulektüre von Haroldo de Campos’ polyphonem Weltgedicht Galáxias (1984), das bisher vor allem im Kontext der konkreten Poesie und des lateinamerikanischen Neobarock besprochen wurde. Jasmin Wrobel zeigt, dass das Werk vielmehr als poetisches Zeitzeugnis des Jahrhunderts der Katastrophen zu lesen ist: die Referenzen auf traumatische historische Ereignisse – insbesondere auf die Shoah und den europäischen Faschismus – verankern sich als ‹Stolpersteine› in der Textarchitektur der Galáxias, eine Konzept-Metapher, die in der Untersuchung in erster Linie von Gunter Demnigs Mahnmal-Projekt hergeleitet wird. In der Analyse wird erörtert, wie diese ‹textuellen Stolpersteine› zu Momenten des Innehaltens und Verstehens an der hermetischen, neobarocken Textoberfläche führen und wie sie sich zu einer ‹Poetik des Stolperns› fügen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch die Bedeutung von Haroldo de Campos’ Europareisen 1959 und 1964 aufgezeigt, die sich als interpretatorische Schlüsselrouten für das Werk erweisen. Die Begegnung mit dem US-amerikanischen Dichter Ezra Pound 1959 wird hierbei als eigener ‹Stolperstein› auf de Campos’ Weg zu den Galáxias identifiziert.

The polyphonic world poem Galáxias (1984) by Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos has, to date, mainly been discussed in the broader context of concrete poetry and the Latin American neo-baroque. In this book, Jasmin Wrobel offers a completely new reading of the work as a poetic testimony to a century of catastrophes: references to traumatic historical events are embedded as ‘stumbling blocks’ in the textual architecture, guiding the reader towards a ‘Poetics of Stumbling’.

This new edition of a great modernist innovator is a gift for the reading public. Everybody who’s ever been changed by Ezra Pound, Eliot, Jeffers, H.D., or even Dylan Thomas will recognize the landscape of this work. Like Pound, Bunting is a floridly learned, serious character. He worked with Pound at Rapallo from 1929 to 1933 (the span from the market crash to the rise of Hitler), cultivating a genuine cosmopolitanism that remained essentially untainted by Pound’s fascist sympathies. In fact, Bunting was so much his own man that Pound’s narcissism and megalomania don’t seem to have held him at all tightly

This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Utilizing a theoretical lens provided primarily through the writings of Jacques Derrida and an historical context established by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the paper argues that the literary texts of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce deconstruct a Western cultural history of a transcendent-immanent binary and seek to revive elements of the transcendent as a cure to the consequences of the dominant materialist-immanent worldview of Enlightenment modernity.  This paper relies on the distinction between twentieth century literary modernism and modernity, seeing literary modernism as an avant-garde movement that experiments with style and a more responsive, adaptable, de-centered, view that is suspicious of the stratified, hierarchical, mechanistic view of modernity, a view of human life which can lead to a flattened and oppressive view of reality and the universe.  Modernity, beginning around 1500 according to Taylor, in its emphasis on rationality and the empirical, and its de-emphasis on belief in the spiritual or enchanted, has a had negative effect, a sense that something is missing in twentieth century views of life that these works seek to address. Ultimately, these works produce moments of the transcendent in their fragmented twentieth century view of the world that do not coalesce into a stratified view but allow for the incorporation of elements of both the immanent and transcendent.

Within Pound's poetic oeuvre, surely the appeal of The Pisan Cantos lies in their candor. After the inexhaustible vari-ety of personae Pound employs in earlier poems and cantos, here at last the poet seems to speak as “noman” (74/445), if not himself. Indeed, the impressive, ...