I’m one of the lunatics who used to love nothing more than devoting a summer to some unreadable modernist epic: one summer it was Zukofsky’s “A”, another it was Olson’s Maximus Poems. The Cantos is the daddy of them all; I devoted a chapter of my dissertation to the pastoral dimension of the Pisan Cantos. All by way of saying I look forward to seeing what fresh eyes make of the old monster—and, as you seem to hint, what he might have to tell us about confronting world-historical calamity with a ton of poetic equipment and a minima of common sense.
I look forward to reading this series even though I have little interest in Pound, but I want to provide the datum that I would pay for the biblical translation analysis.
Good luck with this. I did it in undergrad, with a helpful book that offered translations of the foreign bits to help along.
No matter how you might want to, when he writes those cantos about Mussolini or credit and usury, you can’t get politics out. And there are so many good lines mixed into turgid history recapitulated for no reason other than to prove he read Henry Adams. Such a strange poem, such a restlessly brilliant and rotted brain.
My one contribution is the memory that Ernst Jünger once wrote to Martin Heidegger that he (Jünger) was going to visit Pound in Venice and—perhaps memory is over-egging—Jünger had hopes of eventually introducing Heidegger to Pound. Alas for a thousand dissertations Pound died too soon.
I thought I was misremembering/exaggerating, but I wasn't!
Jünger and his brother organized recurring culture festival in Amriswil, Switzerland to which Heidegger often came. In 1972 Pound had promised to attend and do a reading, but he died a month before and thus (per Jünger's letter to H.) "the prospect of a meeting [between Heidegger and Pound] for which I had long hopped was shattered."
Yes, I’m familiar with this from Barnes and Elliot, although my sense is that Pound held those views in a more malicious and systemic way than was the norm for the period, and never really stopped IE; corresponding with neonazis in the 60s. That said I don’t intend to dwell overwhelmingly on it. I’ve walked back the no supplementary books etc partly because of the translations!
I’m one of the lunatics who used to love nothing more than devoting a summer to some unreadable modernist epic: one summer it was Zukofsky’s “A”, another it was Olson’s Maximus Poems. The Cantos is the daddy of them all; I devoted a chapter of my dissertation to the pastoral dimension of the Pisan Cantos. All by way of saying I look forward to seeing what fresh eyes make of the old monster—and, as you seem to hint, what he might have to tell us about confronting world-historical calamity with a ton of poetic equipment and a minima of common sense.
I look forward to reading this series even though I have little interest in Pound, but I want to provide the datum that I would pay for the biblical translation analysis.
Thank you! It would only be literary analysis though, I’m not really qualified in any of the biblical languages!
Good luck with this. I did it in undergrad, with a helpful book that offered translations of the foreign bits to help along.
No matter how you might want to, when he writes those cantos about Mussolini or credit and usury, you can’t get politics out. And there are so many good lines mixed into turgid history recapitulated for no reason other than to prove he read Henry Adams. Such a strange poem, such a restlessly brilliant and rotted brain.
Just remember to
Pull down thy vanity
Pull down
Thank you!
I'm really looking forward to this!
My one contribution is the memory that Ernst Jünger once wrote to Martin Heidegger that he (Jünger) was going to visit Pound in Venice and—perhaps memory is over-egging—Jünger had hopes of eventually introducing Heidegger to Pound. Alas for a thousand dissertations Pound died too soon.
Wow... what a crossover that would've been. And yes, absolute dissertation fodder!
I thought I was misremembering/exaggerating, but I wasn't!
Jünger and his brother organized recurring culture festival in Amriswil, Switzerland to which Heidegger often came. In 1972 Pound had promised to attend and do a reading, but he died a month before and thus (per Jünger's letter to H.) "the prospect of a meeting [between Heidegger and Pound] for which I had long hopped was shattered."
Yes, I’m familiar with this from Barnes and Elliot, although my sense is that Pound held those views in a more malicious and systemic way than was the norm for the period, and never really stopped IE; corresponding with neonazis in the 60s. That said I don’t intend to dwell overwhelmingly on it. I’ve walked back the no supplementary books etc partly because of the translations!