Ezra Pound was a certifiable crank by all accounts. He was deemed too insane to stand trial for treason, and spent twelve years of his life in a mental hospital in Washington, DC.
Nevertheless.
He stands head and shoulders above most poets of the early 20th century. His works are experimental, abstract, and never lacking in explosive power.
My opinion aside, anyone else want to share and dissect some of his works? The below analysis is my own; I am responsible for all of its sins and barbarisms.
Let’s start on the lighter side with his tiny Meditatio.
The strong caesura and triple alliteration of the first line set a strongly Anglo-Saxon tone which I find very appealing. You can close your eyes and pretend it’s a playful version of Beowulf. This form is partially eroded in the second and third lines: the alliteration remains, the caesura is replaced by a line break, and Pound’s use of “is” instead of “man’s” creates an unexpected stress on “man” rather than an expected stress on “superior.”
This form breaks down entirely in the second stanza: the alliteration weakens without the repetition of “carefully” in 4, there are two caesurae in 5 instead of one, and there is no symmetrical sixth line. The conclusion is abrupt at the end of the fifth line.
The speaker’s confusion is neatly reflected in the disintegration of the poem’s formal structure. He arrives at no logical conclusion, and we are spared a sixth line of the poem. Though the language of the poem is very simple, I believe that the poem itself is quite abstract, since it neatly strips poetic sense from concrete idea.
Why does the speaker conclude that man is the superior animal before examining the habits of man? What does being a “superior animal” actually mean in this context?
If you’d rather post your own, a fair number of Pound’s works can be found here.
Well, now, how are we going to exaggerate our divergent stances for the sake of the argument when you go and post a short early poem that I can heartily agree to like? Go on. post one of those challenging political poems that disgust you but appeal to your aesthetic so we can have at it.
Off on a tangent (but one pointed to by the poem posted), let’s talke about TSEliot and dogs. In the Wasteland, which Pound edited, there is this bit:
This is an allusion to “the wolf, that’s foe to men, for with his nails he’ll dig them up again,” by John Webster. But Eliot has reversed the meaning, because the Dog is a friend to man despite digging up his bones. Also, “Dog” is capitalized, and might be a reference to the Hound of Heaven (God). (I’m not smart enough to find these references/allusions alone–I remember them from another thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=216161.) And now I see that Pound was considering dogs and man and digging up bodies well before the Wasteland. I like the chain.
Moving on, I like the alliterative stuff too:
“Bitter breast-cares” is very good. And so is the “Sing GODDAMN” parody song–I first met that here on the sdmb–thanks to whoever posted it originally in the depths of time.
OTOH, I do not think Pound is the greatest English poet of the 20th century, and the Cantos I have read (which is certainly not even a quarter) have not rewarded me. So, you are right–I do not particularly relish the political stuff, and my statement that I enjoy what I can of Pound refers to the non-political stuff–but convince me if you can. My thumbnail view is that he had some (mostly shorter and earlier) things I liked, but that his grand project was not a success; the result being too slender to be top shelf. (I suppose it might be an interesting project to try to do a top 10 list of 20th century poets to show who might top Pound, but we may still be too close to the end of the century to do so.)
Very interesting insights on dogs and digging. I wonder whether or not Pound would consider the digging up of Bertran de Born (one of my favorite troubadours, naturally) to be a “curious habit.”
Agreed all the way on The Seafarer. It is a magnificent poem. Pound nicely captures some of the formal properties of the Old English and pours on the grittiness and longing.
Post a challenging political poem, eh? Curse me for being at work! I would love to talk about the Pisan Cantos, first published in 1948. He wrote them while captive in an American medical compound in Italy after spending three months in a cage at an American Disciplinary Training Center. Life sucked.
I cannot find a single decent text online to work from. I need to go home to copy out of my book. When I come back, I will bring offensiveness.
I took an english course one summer that was about poetry. One assignment involved writing a haiku. I couldn’t come up with a decent 3rd line for mine, so I turned in the same haiku with about 5 different 3rd lines. The grad student teaching the course said that they all sucked, but that the poem without the third line was very Pound like.
Glad to see that one posted–Pound was the chief promotor for what he called “imagism,” and that little poem is probably the most cited example of what is meant–a single pared down perfect* image.
Note that if you read it with the title, it you can give it that third line that it may or may not be looking for:
[sub]*The goal is a perfect image–not precluding argument about whether or not this one is.[/sub]
Pony up, Maeglin. The only thing that has offended me so far today is an unreasonable deadline.
That line is from another very quoted piece, The River Merchant’s Wife. This is not only a love poem, it is the love poem of a married woman (how rare is this? I’m drawing a blank on other examples). However, it raises anew the question: what credit should Pound get as “translator?” And is this kind of translating qualitatively different in any way from de novo composition?
I felt horrible all weekend for not posting what I had in mind, but truly, I was away from my computer. I will post a piece later today when I get home from work.
I will also take on your translation question then, I promise.
I cannot speak on his translations from Chinese, but I do have a little experience with his other languages. One of Pound’s translations springs to mind: the Amor de Lonh. This is a translation of the Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai of the Occitan poet Jaufre Rudel. The title of Pound’s poem, Amor de Lonh, Love from Afar, is one of the most fundamental themes of Occitan lyric poetry. Pound admired the troubadours greatly: his Amor de Lonh is both a translation of Rudel and a more general meditation on this theme. Pound’s use of Occitan in the title roots this firmly in the realm of translation.
The text and translation can be found here. The translation is quite prosaic, though not too bad. If I didn’t have a day job, I’d post my own translation .
Tonight I will post the Pound translation with a few thoughts. I think very highly of Pound’s translations from the Occitan, and I will try to elaborate why.
Ok, now that I am home, it’s time to backtrack a bit, since I don’t actually have the text I thought I did. Below is the first stanze of Jaufre Rudel that Pound published in a collection called Provenca:
'Tis the clear light of love I praise
That steadfast gloweth o’er deep waters,
A clarity that gleams always.
Though man’s soul pass through troubled waters,
Strange ways are to him opened.
To shore the beaten ship is sped
If only love of light give aid.
In this brief glimpse, Pound has definitely renewed Jaufre Rudel’s work. It is not a slavish translation; though its diction departs significantly from the original, Pound borrows Jaufre’s rhyme scheme and other aspects of his poesis. This is therefore not a translation, but a response and homage to the original.
Sorry about the volte face. I need to hit the books before I shoot my mouth off. I am dying to spend some time doing a more thorough analysis. My wife is not well, so it, along with the Canto, will have to wait until tomorrow. My books are in my bag, and my calendar is cleared. By way of a preview from his Pisan Cantos:
4 giants at the 4 corners
three young men at the door
and they digged a ditch round about me
lest the damn gnaw at my bones
to redeem Zion with justice
sd/ Isaiah. Not out on interest said David rex
the prime s.o.b.
Light tensile immaculata
the sun's cord unspotted
"sunt lumina" said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
"OMNIA,
all things that are lights."
and they dug him up out of sepulture
soi disantly looking for Manichaeans.
Les Albigeois, a problem of history,
and the fleet at Salamis made with money lent by the state to the
shipwrights
Tempus tacendi, tempus loquendi.
Never inside the country to raise the standard of living
but always abroad to increase the profits of usurers,
dixit Lenin,
and gun sales lead to more gun sales
they do not clutter the market for gunnery
there is no saturation
I love this stuff. Tomorrow I will try to articulate why.
The translation issue may be different for the Chinese stuff than the other–Pound did his own direct translations of the A-S, right? I can’t remember, but suspect he also directly translated the Occitan stuff you are interested in. Pound did not read Chinese characters and had to rely on the literal translations of others (literal in the technical sense that Chinese apparently lacks connective words and the translation might read “desire dust mingle you”)–I’ll find the link in a sec.
Now, I think translation/editing and similar poetry-related activity is all to the good if the end result is a speaking poem, so I don’t care if what Pound did to Jaufre is a true translation or a responsive homage. Gotta be intellectually honest about it of course, but I don’t think Pound ever claimed more than he should in this regard.
But, the snippet posted is, IMHO, only pedestrian (there’s still a lack of Pound stuff on-line so I don’t have the whole thing)–there is no solid image, neither the alliteration nor the rhymes have that eerie quality you sometimes get and why “gloweth” if it is not a literal translation? Light of love, love of light–eh on the meaning too.
The Chinese thing posted is more interesting to me–I called it the love poem of a married woman, but in several senses it of course is not–the Chinese author was not a married girl and neither was Pound. There seems to be something universal to it–but is that also illusory? How many 17 year olds feel or write like this? It is possible that the “universal” in the River Merchant’s Wife is sentimentality for a married innocence/naivete that may not exist much in real life, however much I may want it to?
I don’t care much for the Canto–I am prepared to try to suspend offense at the usury crap and I can like obscure allusions, but only if the poem has a neat meaning and/or image and/or use of language and/or sound. I read it out loud and no dice. Also, the non-standard punctuation/format, slang/accent don’t particularly shock and don’t seem to have a point (EECummings always seemed to have a point when poked). Why do you like it again? I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
I read a quote from Pound once; I think it was maybe on the practice GRE subject test for Literature, a quote with an “identify this author” afterward. It went something like this:
“From the age of about fifteen, I knew what I wanted to do, so I set about it immediately. I fought against every university regulation and course requirement that was intended to steer me away from poetry. In the process I picked up fifteen or sixteen languages.”
Can anyone ID the piece?
And while we’re recommending his works, back when I was teaching English Lit at the college level I adored his ABC of Reading. Guide to Kulchur was endlessly confounding as well, although I confess it went mostly over my head. And “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is one of the most astonishing love poems I’ve ever come across: desperate, even fanatic, but totally unsentimental.
Pound’s technical mastery was so perfect as to be nearly invisible at times. When I read one of his I haven’t seen before, it always takes me several readings to get past the wonder of it and see the leonine technical prowess at work.
Maeglin said something in the other thread about not understanding Pound too–to both of you, I reply: isn’t it much more likely that Pound was not being clear? Though the false modesty from the both of yous is most charming.
Yes, I agree. It is very thin and sinewy, no overblown rhetoric or mushy stuff. OTOH, I’m not sure that it is realistic to expect that from a young married girl, and I was wondering whether it plays on my own sentimentality in asking me to believe in the persona of the writer (I do want to believe).
The Occitan first, the Canto shortly. Curse my day job.
Yes, Pound did his own translations from Old English. The Seafarer is probably the most famous example.
Ok, let me try to unpack it a little. Naturally I disagree on your assessment of this passage as pedestrian. Since I am not entirely sure how to engage this critique, I will try to compare his translation to the original to reveal his poetic technique.
Pound’s translation is a generalization of amor de lonh, the far-off love. I thus disagree with the “no solid image” critique: rather than employ the abstraction “far-off love” that Rudel uses in 4, Pound concretizes this with “waters”. The glow over deep waters or the speaker’s passage over troubled waters implies separation between the speaker and the object of his affections. Pound then captures Rudel’s rim estamp between lines 2 and 4 by repeating “waters”. To me, this repetition does possess that eerie quality to which you refer and is a sign of mature poetic powers.
I understand your objection to “light of love” and “love of light”. Occitan poets were obsessed with the idea of inversion. Guilem Peiteus wrote a famous poem about, essentially, “Opposite Day.” Thus Rudel’s poem begins in the days of May and the stanza ends during winter’s freeze, l’iverns gelatz. I believe that Pound captures this inversion with “light of love” and “love of light” and takes the further opportunity to meditate not only on the speaker’s love from afar but also his bliss at the feeling of being in love. The effects of love on the speaker is also a frequent topic in Occitan poetry. Thus loving love helps the speaker find shore, but meanwhile it opens up many strange ways in the process, which I interpret to be the effects of being in love.
When I read the Pound version I cannot help but imagine that it is perpetually night. The glow over deep waters is most dramatic then, and the speaker finds the shore by following the light. In Rudel, the speaker hangs his head in thought and shuts out the world, thus creating his own darkness around him. I believe that Pound is able to recreate and even enhance this feeling of darkness all around the speaker without having to translate the poem literally, yet he still preserves its most important themes. To me, this is a sign of brilliance. I also react positively to it on a purely elemental level.
No comment on “gloweth”. Other than for sensory effect, I just do not know what it is doing. Sorry.
Here is a link to a few Pound poems. (Site has annoying popups.)
Sure, that’s possible, but I wrote a Master’s thesis on Samuel Beckett and studied Joyce and Eliot with Hugh Kenner; I expect myself to get the unclear and complex stuff. I’ve made several attempts on the Cantos, and as far as I’m concerned they make Finnegans Wake look like “See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” I just can’t make head or tail of them.
Precisely–I was trying to say that if we can’t make sense of Pound, it may well be because he does not make sense. The fault is not in ourselves, but in Pound. I guess I was unclear in using the word “unclear.” Of course when Maeglin proves up the glory of the Cantos after all, I may yet have to retract.
Still not there on the Rudel translation, though. Pound’s “light on water” image is not as concrete as Maeglin’s gloss on it from the original–the perpetual night, hanging of the head, shutting out light (much better stuff) is all either in the original or in part of the Pound translation not posted. The snippet has only “light…that steadfast gloweth over deep waters.” It is not sunlight or reflected light or anything specific enough for me to make a picture of. But again this is a reaction only to the translated lines as posted absent access to the whole thing.
Proving up the glory of the Cantos using one or two short passages is going to be pretty daunting, especially since you found my analysis of his translation of Rudel to be unenlightening. To make my life a little easier, can you tell me what would suffice in your book?
Good news: I am not going to be in the office tomorrow. Bad news: I am taking my wife in for a medical procedure tomorrow. I will have plenty of reading time, but no computer time until the afternoon. I won’t leave you hanging.
I am really tempted to by a guide to the Cantos this week. I know when I am getting out of my depth.
Naah, I’m a big softy–those NY bankruptcy lawyers you used to work for could probably make me scream like a little girl in about a NY minute. I’m just bloodyminded when I’m trying to figure out something I can’t understand–how dare words on a page defy me?
Hey, I liked the dog thing. (Seriously, the structural analysis you did on that one was nice.)
Taste in poetry is going to vary, no problem there. What I got from your Rudel analysis is that you like what Pound did with it because it resonates with something you find thrilling in the original–they probably play off one another–that I can’t participate in because I can’t read the original (I read it for the rhyme, but not for sense). If the posted Canto similarly twigs you to some allusion in a cool way, tell that part. If it’s got a structure/scheme that is complex but deceptively simple that makes you say “wow” when you figure it out, tell that.
I hope all will be well.
Why should educated people like you and jackalope be out of your depth? If you love something and want to dwell on every detail, by all means get a book about it, but in the meantime tell me why you love it enough in the first place to want to buy the book. I like to love stuff too, if I can.
Imagine having a friend who had always, always given you great advice on music; every album this person suggested had become one of your Desert Island Records. Clearly, you and this person not only share superficial tastes, but also have similar–if not identical–philosophical underpinnings regarding what you want and expect from music.
And now this same person comes to you with another recommendation, raving about the almost impossible-to-comprehend genius of a band you’ve never heard, how this band completes the Great Cosmic Triad with your other two all-time favorites. You’d be mighty hot to listen to them, right? And even if at first it didn’t sound all that special, you’d probably keep at it for a while; many of my own favorite bands didn’t really impress me on first listen.
That’s why I’m willing to make another attempt at Pound: Because people who I know are smarter than me, and whose advice has always, always been sound in the past, have spoken and written, eloquently and at length, about Pound’s genius.
I think I’m a pretty sharp fellow, but I try to be humble enough to admit it when someone else is smarter than I am, and to weigh their advice accordingly.
