Was he really crazy? Was he really a traitor? Was he really a fascist? Is his poetry any good or should he be remembered solely as a promoter of modern or “imagist” poetry? Or as a “translator” (he worked from literal English translations done by someone else) of Japanese/Chinese poems?
According to a biography of Pound I’m looking at, he was probably some version of “fascist,” he was always an eccentric and probably mentally disordered during his arrest and trial and for part of his 12 years in a mental hospital. He honestly believed that his version of Confucius could remake the world after WWII.
In another thread, someone asked whether Pound’s fascism should prevent us from recognizing him primarily as a poet. I would like to discuss this. Time has passed–is it time to forget that he worked for Mussolini and had crackpot schemes to remake the world? What about his unusual ideas about economics? What do people remember Pound for?
If you have a favorite poem by Pound, I would like to see it. (In particular, does anyone like any particular canto?) I’m leaning toward thinking that he was important to the ex-patriate literary movements of the first half of the century, but that his poems don’t match his influence. Here’s one I like (scroll down to Cantico Del Sole): I like its stuttering repetitions.
I’m open here–tell me anything you know about Pound.
IMO, Humble Servant, he was a traitor, as he willingly seems to have made broadcasts for the Axis. I don’t know if he was a true fascist, or if he was really crazy. After WW2, I believe he was confined to a mental hospital, due to the intervention of Archibald MadLeish, who was a high-ranking official in the Roosevelt administration at one time.
Again, IMO, his poetry is vastly overrated, but there is no question that many academics and poets view him as being one of the best 20th Century American poets. I would have to say that you should read a few of his works if you want to have a well-rounded knowledge of American poetry.
I think he should be recognized as a poet. I think it entirely possible that a great artist can be a royal sonuvabitch or a traitor. After all, our symphonies play the works of Richard Wagner, who was an inspiration of Adolph Hitler, and Richard Strauss, who appeared perfectly willing to cooperate with the Nazis (I, myself, must confess to a weakness for Strauss’ music). No one has suggested that Knut Hamsen’s Nobel Prize for literature be revoked for playing footsie with the Nazi invaders of Norway.
I’m of the opinion that his politics matter very little in the end, and that his poetry and his thought about poetry are what matter. The only reason I know even the little that I do about his life and politics is that I came across his poetry, liked it, and wanted to know more about him. This was not as part of my formal education – I ain’t had such a thing – it was a result of my search for decent reading.
Anyway, I think Pound’s effect, both as a poet and as a theorist, on English poetry is ongoing and that we may be about to experience a resurgence in the study of his poetry and his poetics. I say this because the present social and political climates seem conducive (but don’t they always?) to repression of individual thought and to cancerous growths of euphemism, and that this has affected poetry, and I think it possible that a generation of poets looking to find a clarity of expression will look back to Pound’s ideas of poetry for help and inspiration.
Which ideas about poetry are the ones you like? Could you recommend a particular essay? It seems he wrote about what poetry should be rather continuously, and I can’t tell if he is considered to have a definitive take on it.
Here’s a couple more thoughts: should Pound “get credit” for The River Merchant’s Wife and The Bath Tub, in the usual sense? If I understand correctly, these are both “translations” (loose though they may be) of Chinese and Provencal pieces. Bully for him for bringing them to our attention (and for considerable skill in editing or adapting them), but did he originate them? It’s like the question about what he did for Eliot’s The Waste Land. Maybe it doesn’t matter exactly what he did, they exist because of him in some causal sense.
Notes for Canto CXX doesn’t appeal to me, and I do not understand Canto XIII. Overall, the cantos that I have read seem too obscure and not meaningful. I’d be willing to try again if given reasons that I should
But all this leads back to the problem of how we should see Pound: if, as IMHO, his poems don’t stand alone as great things, then he is important because of his place in the history of culture, important for his encouragement of other artists and his editing, etc. In this case, I’m less inclined to forgive his politics. He was casually anti-semitic: if he had not been so, what young Jewish artists might he have supported and brought to our attention?
I did like The Garden–it seems to be his “big work,” the Cantos, that are stumping me. Pound apparently said that the Cantos are “notes” for poems, but are not complete–ties in with his view of poetry as being “glimpses” of images. This, however, is not enough for me. If he wants to telegraph images, that’s fine, but for him to say that these are unfinished notes but still claim for them importance, then I object.
Well, I guess it depends on how you define “credit”. Most everyone knows the source of the originals, so it’s not like Pound is trying to pull one over on us. I view those poems like I do Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubyat, as something just a bit more than a translation, something that stands on its own as a work of art. Of course, these poems could just be seen as such because of Pound’s marquee value above, say, a random professor of poetry translating Li Po.
The ideas that I like most are: "to use absolutely no word that does contribute … “; “an ‘absolute rhythm’ … in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed …”; “the perfect and proper symbol is the natural object …”; “technique as the test of [a man’s] sincerity …”; [there is] a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical [formally metered/rhymed] have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms …” ; “As for ‘Every man his own poet’, the more every man knows about poetry the better. I believe in every one wrting poetry who wants to; most do. I believe in every man knowing enough of music to play ‘God Bless Our Home’ on the harmonium, but I do not believe in every man giving concerts and printing his sin.”
Those are from a group of early essays and notes collected as ‘A Retrospect’ in 1918.
Interesting questions. And I’ve always meant to compare TRM to other translations. Maybe this thread will finally get me to do that. As for Pound working from literal translations of Chinese poems instead of directly from the Chinese itself, and how this should affect the way we see such ‘translations’ … perhaps as ‘versions’ of poems by _____?
As for the Provencal pieces – the work on the troubadour poets – Pound did study the Romance languages and was fluent in langue d’Oc (now called Provençal), the language spoken in Provence during the 11th to 13th centuries. I think we can certainly consider his work in that area as ‘translations’.
The Notes for Canto CXX were written near the end of Pound’s life I believe. A time when he had pretty much given into despair and didn’t even talk much anymore. The despair had many sources, I suppose; not least the charges of treason and subsequent time (12 years?) in mental hospital before MacLeish and Frost managed to get him out, and the sheer magnitude of the task he had set himself with the Cantos – a work, if I recall correctly, he referred to as of “crysoelephantine” proportions near the beginning. He was living in Venice by this point with his longtime mistress, Olga Rudge, while his wife, who had visited him every day in hospital in the States, had finally given all she could and gone to live with Pound and Rudge’s daughter, Mary.
The “crysoelephantine” Cantos were intended, I guess, to be a collection of compressed images (10,000? or so, finally) making up one huge, precisely cut and polished jewel. Whether it’s worth reading I leave to you decide. I will say that my experience has been that picking it up and turning in what meagre light I’m able to project has always given me something.
Canto XIII: Kung, apparently is Confucius. It fascinates me with what it has to say about order and simplicity, and the necessity of living in the world of the five senses. I love the closing lines.
Hmmm, I think a significant number of Pound’s poems do stand alone as great, or at least very good poems.*
Even if the number is less than I think it is, I still think his contributions to poetry are very great and cannot be easily separated from what followed him without tearing a great and gaping hole in 20th century literature.
I know little, or have retained little about his alleged anti-semitism. This is something I’d like to know more about. It’s possible that a thorough knowledge of that part of Pound’s story would significantly alter my view of him.
The Cantos stump everyone, apparently. The scope Pound claims for them, notes or not, makes it important, I think, that they be hammered at by readers and poets and scholars until some coherent view can be had of them. Although I seem to recall that either somewhere near the end of them, or in writing of them near the end, Pound talked of being past the point of being able to make them ‘cohere’.
*For instance, The Garret, Further Instructions, Portrait d’une Femme, A Girl, Meditatio. I could go on, I guess, because I keep finding things of worth to me in many of his poems.
I do agree with this, to some extent. I have no problem ascribing the term “art” to translation and editing, especially in the case of Pound whose translations appear to have wandered off from the originals for the sake of the poetry. Nonetheless, it is a type of art which cannot stand alone apart from the works of others, an art “in context,” so to speak. The “context” of Pound includes his fascism–if he writes an original poem that praises the cult of personality of a particular leader, I know where I stand. If he does it in a translation of a Chinese piece, I have to know whether he’s put it there or whether it’s in the original.
The biography I’m reading, by Noel Stock, was done with the Pounds’ cooperation while he was still alive, and it is almost embarrassingly servile–it is laughably circumspect when it describes the fact that Pound maintained two households (one with his wife and one with his mistress) down the road from each other in Italy. Thus, that it apologetically mentions Pound’s issues with “Jew bankers” (one of his hobbyhorses was usury), suggests that his antisemitism (in the intellectual sense–he did not personally take part in any physical repression) was real.
I found “A Retrospect” on-line, and I intend to read it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Your mention of finding ‘A Retrospect’ online spurred me to do some more looking for things Pound. I don’t know if this is the site where you found it, but it looks like a little vein of Pound gold (and a gold mine of poets in general), including a page full of other translations of The River Merchant’s Wife beginning with a “transcription of Ernest Fenollosa’s Notebook (Pound’s Source [for TRM])”.
After reading the other linked translations of The River Merchant’s Wife, I do think Pound’s is the best overall–though some of the alternates have neat words/variations. Many of the alternates themselves are obviously indebted to Pound’s version–what do we call a new version based on a translated poem based on a criticized transliteration taking into accout alternate transliterations?
In any event, what did you think of them? Did they tell you anything?
They tell me that translation is not easy. And that, under the circumstances, I’m perfectly happy to think of Pound’s version as a translation.
Speaking of translation, here’s an excerpt from Umberto Eco’s book on the subject, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation.
Right now I’m trying to absorb Pound and Fascism, and On Canto 45. I have a copy of that Canto in an anthology, but unfortunately I cannot find it online. It’s quite obvious that he was a fascist, and anti-semitic.
They tell me that translation is not easy. And that, under the circumstances, I’m perfectly happy to think of Pound’s version as a translation.
Speaking of translation, here’s an excerpt from Umberto Eco’s book on the subject, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation.
Right now I’m trying to absorb Pound and Fascism, and On Canto 45. I have a copy of that Canto in an anthology, but unfortunately I cannot find it online. It’s quite obvious that he was a fascist, and anti-semitic.
Langue d’Oc is now called “Occitan”, of which Provencal is only a dialect. The language is still spoken across all of southern France and in fact seems on the way up. I just picked up a copy of “L’Occitan sans peine” last night and look forward to learning the language myself.