Ezra Pound, Twisting and Bending Natural Symbolism (original) (raw)
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Technium Social Sciences Journal, 2021
The Cantos by Ezra Pound serves in a quintessential way to focus on the Modernist idea of literature. By defining the Modernist movement, it is emphasized in what aspects this movement penetrates the monumental poem, The Cantos. Alongside showing a sequence as to how modernism was formed and developed in time, the research provides a deeper understanding through Ezra Pound’s modernist perception and W. B. Yeats’s occultism over his work of art, A Vision. Pound’s epic poem, The Cantos and Yeats’s unique work, A Vision fulfill the need of a literary satiation in The Modernist period. By juxtaposing The Cantos and Yeats’s occultist perspective, the research probes the extent that the two works create a literary escapism, which attempts to balance the sanctity of human sanity. In the Modernist period, the period of picturing the frustration of the First World War, the interrelation of these works of art turns out a reflection of a literary recuperation from the cataclysm led by The Mode...
Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth-Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing
Modern Book History, ed. Kate Longworth, spec. ed. of Literature Compass 4.4 (July 2007): 1158-1168, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x. Reprinted in Virtual Issue: Modern Book History, Literature Compass 4 (Dec 2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.
Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.
Beyond the pictogram: echoes of the Naxi in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
Two unusual characters appear in the closing lines of Ezra Pound’s Canto CXII (from his “Drafts and Fragments”), characters that may offer up the most complete example of Pound’s much-discussed “ideogrammic method”. The characters discussed in this paper belong to the Naxi dongba script, the logographic writing system of a tribe in China’s south-western province of Yunnan. Pound’s sources are analysed and a new theory of the origin of the two characters—from Joseph Rock’s translation of a Naxi ritual text—is put forward. The two Naxi dongba characters in Canto CXII unlock the meaning of the canto within which they appear, and echo themes that run through the Cantos when taken as a whole. But we can also see Pound using both pictorial and phonetic elements of the script to create a “cumulative ideogram”, and through this comparative Poundian lens we can update our historically limited understanding of the Naxi writing system.
“And as for text we have taken it...”: Retranslating Ezra Pound’s Renaissance Cantos
Lingue e linguaggi, 2014
Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a Modernist classic, present many challenges for the translator, who has to follow in Pound’s footsteps and often divine the intention and context of the fragments that compose his historic and lyric collage. A new Italian translation of the first extensive installment of the poem, XXX Cantos (1930), appeared in 2012; a previous Italian rendering of the same work, by the poet’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, was published in 1961. By comparing representative excerpts of the two translations, this paper discusses different approaches to one source text. While the 1961 target text aimed at concision at the expense of fluency, the 2012 text employs a more colloquial style, attempting to make an arduous and complex work more reader-friendly. However, the two translations adopt the same strategy when rendering the many passages Pound paraphrased from medieval and renaissance Italian writings. Rather than retranslating Pound’s English, they print excerpts from the Italian originals he worked from, with their quaint spellings and often obscure wording. Just as Pound asks his readers and translators to work with him on the texts he presents in the poem, so the translators presuppose a reader who is also a collaborator, and who will be intrigued by the old documents appearing opposite Pound’s modernist paraphrases. Translation is always a work in progress, but this is particularly the case when approaching the uniquely intricate and collaborative project of Pound's Cantos.
“This ‘Magic Moment’: Ephemera in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as Literary Readymades”
South Atlantic Review 80.1/2, 2015
Reading Pound’s work alongside the writings of Marcel Duchamp, this paper explores ephemera in The Cantos as literary readymades which revealed themselves to the poet in moments of “rendezvous,” a term Duchamp chose for his selection of readymade objects turned artistic things. Such a reading not only collapses the critical distance between Pound’s Imagist movement and Duchamp’s Dadaism, it also affirms a comprehensive modernist project of indefinitely deferred meanings continuously reinscribed within a constantly shifting hermeneutic temporal horizon. At the same time, this paper takes up the call in modernist studies by those such as Dilip Gaonkar for resisting hegemonic critical paradigms as it deploys the temporal aspect of modernism conceptually to think about the materiality of Pound’s text as a form of literary immanence.
Aesthetic and Methodologic Resources of Ezra Pound’s Poetry
American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 2012
The study of The Cantos, one of the most complex and difficult works belonging to literary modernism makes possible, precisely due to this observation, the exploration of a series of characteristics and dimensions of Pound’s work that have either remained in a programmatic stage or should be revisited more closely in order for their meanings to be discerned. ‘Analyticity’ and ‘scientism’ can be considered relevant characteristics of Pound’s work, with both aesthetic and methodologic meanings. The present study aims at investigating these two dimensions of Pound’s poetry as they appear in the second and the fourth decades of the 20th century. In conclusion the question is whether Pound’s analyticity and scientism could still be considered valuable from an aesthetic or methodologic point of view.
The present investigation offers a synthesis of Ezra Pound’s contribution to the translation of poetry. After a prefatory “Exergue,” the thesis follows a tripartite division based on the understanding that there can be no sustained translation practice without both a poetics and an ideology. Part One –“Transportation of the Poetic Meaning (searching for principles)”– shows how Pound’s departure from the philological method and his holistic conception of meaning in poetry –‘plain sense’ charged by melopoeia, phanopoeia and/or logopoeia– requires a differential approach to translation that varies according to the literary values privileged in the rendering of an original, and explains the primary strategies Pound devised: ‘translations of accompaniment’ and ‘creative translations’. Part Two –“A Differential Strategy of Translation (examining the performances)”– samples Pound’s translations from a variety of languages (especially Provençal, Chinese via Fenollosa, French and Classical Latin) in order to analyse Pound’s methods of transmitting poetic devices pertaining to melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia respectively. Part Three –“Transportation is Civilisation (unfolding the implications)”– examines the cultural ramifications of Pound’s translation project, which was grounded in a plea for an international civilisation opposing provincialisms of ‘space’ and ‘time’. This section focuses on the ways in which Pound thought translation, through its very technical ‘donation’, impacts the receiving language and culture (strengthening its perception and expanding its world-view), and revives the voices of the past which criticise and shape the present. Finally, an “Epilogue” –“Towards The Cantos as a translation performance”– discusses the ways in which Pound’s translation project, position and ideology help us to understand the texture, the structure, the historical economy and the very programme of his lifelong epic.