Ezra Pound

[Anonymous No.20220943]

Any poundchads here? I'm finally getting the Library of America collection of his poetry after reading him only in digital fragments here and there. What can I expect? I've heard good things about his early collections like Cathay.

[Anonymous No.20220951]

https://counter-currents.com/2012/11/ezra-pound-2/
(by Kerry Bolton)

https://counter-currents.com/2014/08/ezra-pound-3/
(by Jonathan Bowden, video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOmuHs5-rJE))

Good overview
https://counter-currents.com/2021/10/remembering-ezra-pound-11/

[Anonymous No.20221012]

>>20220943
>mussolini was right
what did he mean by that?

[Anonymous No.20221091]

>>20220943
Is it true that non-italian editions of the cantos cut out the verses where he praises mussolini or fascism? I remember an anon mentioning something of that sort in a previous thread.

[Anonymous No.20221103]

>>20221091
Some faggot mentioned it here but I bought the softcover edition by New Directions and the supposedly cut out sections were there. They were only cut out of the hardcover edition (which is an older edition and uses a different text).

[Anonymous No.20221194]

>>20221012
read Jefferson and/or Mussolini if you are really interested
>>20220943
Not sure what is included in the LOA collection but I recommend the New Directions Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound if you are interested in his early collections as it contains the complete collections as they were originally published. I found 'A Quinzaine for This Yule' to be quite a charming documentation of his thoughts living in Venice and moving to London.

[Anonymous No.20221213]

Early pound is rough, He was always referential, but if the Cantos are a hike through world llit, the early poems are usually a pastiche of someone like Browning or Martial or whomever. There is also alot of 'clever young man' poetry, though i think it some of his best work.

Canzoni , Personae, Lustra , Cathay , Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Are the best of them , and should only rly be read in selections.

I made a list of my favorites a while back, when I read all the way though em 3 years ago , should be somewhere on my phone.

[Anonymous No.20221223]

>>20221213
That's just the really early stuff, there should be more but I can't find it.

[Anonymous No.20221239]

>>20221223
Is this your personal list? If so, that's good. I'll try to read those.

[Anonymous No.20221283]

>>20220943
Reading Kenner's 'The Pound Era' now, been ever more obsessed with him the more i learn about him. He is best when you are a young aspiring poet with little direction in the modern time as there is. Very good line of sight from him, to the Objectivists, to Olson, who does a very good job at synthesizing his project and doing something with it. I feel as if his legacy is in vain now, way too academic and analytical, nobody really treats him as he would like to have been viewed, as a teacher and most people today scorn him and his poetics undeservedly. His writings on poetics i feel are very valuable for insights into him and into poetry and literature as a whole when he was contributing and lifting so many other writers and ideas up.
Really he is a hero of poetry, his legacy can be felt all over his century and his work and life contain multitudes ripe for exploration and discovery, as a young poet it is extremely hard to know about Pound and not look up to him with admiration i feel, despite his later political leanings and poetic avenues which are decidedly wrong turns.
Nothing but respect for Pound, i miss this nigga like you wouldn't believe.

[Anonymous No.20221291]

>>20221283
How is Kenner? I have it but haven't read

[Anonymous No.20221301]

>>20221239
Yeah, but thats the one i made in Italy skimming through Pounds collected while on various trains. I have a more complete list somewhere.

[Anonymous No.20221321]

>>20221291
i feel he spends almost as much time talking about and mentioning Joyce, but Kenner really does try to make the modern conception of language as it appeared (or appears to us) for Pound and Joyce cohere. There is a good investigatory treatment of these authors to convey these ideas to the reader (I am trying to say it is not a very good, or even wholly accurate, biography, it holds this title in the loosest sense if at all). Extremely interesting read so far, definitely luminary on the modernist project and the kinds of ideas, contexts, and influences Pound and his posse were dealing with. If you're at all interested in the Modernist conception of language, expression, poetry, etcetc then it is worth a pick up, just get through the first chapter that is mostly about Henry James. Very solid stuff in it.

[Anonymous No.20221325]

>>20221321
Neat, thanks a lot I will start reading it. I have that and "Secret Germany," a biography of George, staring me down.

[Anonymous No.20221329]

sooooo black softcover or tan hardcover?

[Anonymous No.20221331]

>>20221329
Black softcover has more content.

[Anonymous No.20221335]

>>20221331
how does the spine hold up? it's like 800 pages, seems too big for a softcover

[Anonymous No.20221374]

>>20221335
It seems pretty sturdy. See pic rel. Which book do you think has more pages? They are roughly the same: Pound book has 824 pages while the Poe book has 841. It's all in the materials used and the page size and font size.

[Anonymous No.20221422]

>>20221291
The Pound Era is excellent. I think I got more out of reading it than any of Pound’s poetry by itself. The book takes Pound as a subject but is as much about the nature of language and modernism as a whole as it is about Pound in particular. It also does a good job explaining what drove Pound to fascism, though I think it is a little bit too quick to forgive him for this.

[Anonymous No.20221427]

>>20221422
What is there to forgive? The man was imprisoned and later regretted his past actions. Just let it go. All he did was having a fascist radio show in Italy, ffs.

[Anonymous No.20221440]

>>20221427
They psychologically tortured him as revenge. The Allies did a lot of weird shit like that. Some really dark people making some oddly specific decisions to prolong the torture and humiliation of a defeated enemy.

What they did the William Joyce still gets me. That was murder.

[Anonymous No.20221449]

>>20221440
What did they do to Pound exactly?

[Anonymous No.20221452]

>The Pound Era is excellent. I think I got more out of reading it than any of Pound’s poetry by itself.
This says it all. Pound is no good as a poet. No one enjoys him without reading a book telling them why he's good. BUT he's an important and fascinating figure, his ABC & Kulchur are worthwhile but overrated by novices, but his letters are excellent, and the transcripts from his WW2 podcast are PURE KINO.

[Anonymous No.20221465]

>>20221452
He's pretty good as a poet. Some guy's personal experience won't change that.

[Anonymous No.20221501]

Now that's POETRY

[Anonymous No.20221517]

Pound wouldn't have been able to hold onto a Twitter account for a single day.

[Anonymous No.20221524]

tried starting the cantos again, damn it is not very good.

[Anonymous No.20221527]

>>20221517
lmao

[Anonymous No.20222041]

Pound's essays are the best thing he ever did.

[Anonymous No.20222964]

>>20222041
why?

[Anonymous No.20222974]

>>20221517
Based crackhead. I wonder how many guys his crazy ass cucked.

[Anonymous No.20223026]

>>20221524
like most Pound, it's extremely hit or miss, he has a number of gems amongst a bunch of meh or terrible work

[Anonymous No.20223046]

>>20223026
>he has a number of gems amongst a bunch of meh or terrible work
that's pretty much every poet. there's not a poet with just banger after banger.

[Anonymous No.20223052]

>>20223046
Rumi Hafez and Al maari.

[Anonymous No.20223075]

>>20223046
Eliot is all bangers

[Anonymous No.20223077]

>>20223046
6ix9ine

[Anonymous No.20223181]

I feel like I've been the only person shilling Pound here for ages, this thread brings a tear to my eyes.
>>20221452
>This says it all. Pound is no good as a poet.
Why do people hold this opinion? What about his poetry says "this is no good without reading up on it endlessly??" literally all good poetry is like that. Cathay isn't avant garde at all, he has lots of traditional and lyrically beautiful poems and sections. His literary criticisms are second to none in the first half of the 20th century. If he was so average, someone like Hugh Kenner would not have books devoted to how good his poetry is.

One of my favorite bits from the Cantos (LXXIV):

See that the sun or the moon bless thy eating
Κορη, Κορη, for the six seeds of an error
or that the stars bless thy eating

O Lynx, guard this orchard,
Keep from Demeter’s furrow

This fruit has a fire within it,
Pomona, Pomona,

No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame
what sea is clearer than the pomengranate body
holding the flame?
Pomona, Pomona,

Lynx, keep watch on this orchard
That is named Melagrana
or the Pomegranate field
The sea is not clearer in azure
Nor the Heliads bringing light

[Anonymous No.20223321]

>>20223075
if youre a complete midwit maybe

[Anonymous No.20223332]

>>20223181
>"this is no good without reading up on it endlessly??" literally all good poetry is like that
maybe if youre used to reading mediocre poets like pound propped up because they were culturally relevant rather than great writers.
im sitting here enjoying the romantics without reading a single essay on their ass

[Anonymous No.20223333]

>>20223181
also, what exactly do you get out of this passage.

[Anonymous No.20223385]

>>20223332
Yes. It's almost like the romantics tended to be poets of shallow themes, and are very easily understood. Further reading of a poet is never a slight against the poet. Think about how many great poets from even further back in history were about the times, but still wrote timeless poetry (Dante comes to mind, so does Milton). Not all of Pounds works require further reading on the subject, you can just enjoy pretty words on the paper.

I'm not one of those people that shits on the romantics or anything either, I fucking love Keats and I read a lot of Shelley.

>>20223333
It's purrty. All I got. I truly don't know much about this poem, I'm sure it relates to his time in Pisa but I do not know what the Lynx represents. I remember from one of my Greek myths that pomegranates have to do with the underworld.

Part of the fun is reading more about Pounds works, and reading mythology in general, and piecing everything together. I do it because it's fun, and will spend more time with this passage when my finals end

[Anonymous No.20223389]

>>20223332
>Be Shelley
>Write heavily about all the things that were culturally relevant in your day
>Die in relative obscurity
>Write in cliches and infantile rhymes, and get panned by most of the world post WWII
What did he mean by this

[Anonymous No.20223550]

>>20223385
well yeah, the romantics are understandeable because they actually had something to say. Same with milton and dante.
I like a few of Pounds poems but calling the romantics shallow is rich when you compare them with pound or eliot who were hardly puddles of anything.
>>20223389
>and get panned by most of the world post WWII
every critic or poet that I know of who panned Shelley are also coincidentally far worse than Shelley. Not my problem people in post modernity have fucking backwards ideas of what good poetry and literature is and think the romantics are cliche, when theyre clearly a high quality era of literature to anyone with taste.

[Anonymous No.20223600]

>>20223181
Modernists are just 3deep5me, I guess. This doesn't even seem like poetry to me. Just awkward prose with bad formatting. No rhyme, meter, alliteration. Nonsensical imagery. Is there a point at all? Or just showing off his Greek?

I imagine there's some fun and satisfaction to be had solving the crossword puzzle of his references, but I don't see anything aesthetically pleasing.

[Anonymous No.20223601]

>>20220951
>counter currents
Jesus Christ

[Anonymous No.20223651]

>>20221427
>later regretted his past actions
According to Ginsberg, not to Pound himself. He never repented, and it remains a testament to his integrity and his ignominy.

[Anonymous No.20223681]

>>20223601
>i refuse to read competent essays on important topics if they're posted on a website that also hosts a view or person i dislike
- post made on 4chan, 2022

[Anonymous No.20223694]

>>20223550
>well yeah, the romantics are understandeable because they actually had something to say. Same with milton and dante.
This is what you said:
>mediocre poets like pound propped up because they were culturally relevant rather than great writers
When, most great writers are culturally relevant to the era in which they live, and write about it. Saying Pound has nothing to say is extremely ignorant, every aspect of his personal life, philosophy and the economic and social theories he believed in are present in his writing. He has a lot to say, just because its complex and requires a breakdown for the layman doesn't mean he isn't saying anything.

> Not my problem people in post modernity have fucking backwards ideas of what good poetry and literature is and think the romantics are cliche, when theyre clearly a high quality era of literature to anyone with taste.
You are clearly very young. a "backwards" idea of poetry is saying that it has to be "metrical and or rhyme!". Its just ignorant to say "anyone with taste thinks they're high quality", when people who spend their entire lives studying poetry break down in detail why they don't care for most of the Romantics (Early Wordsworth and Keats always excluded). If you had read Pound, and Eliots and others analysis of why they do not like that kind of poetry, you'd probably be able to comment something more than "but they said they were bad :("

>>20223600
>No rhyme, meter, alliteration.
Which have nothing to do with good poetry. All good poetry is RHYTHMIC. Which this poem is.
>Nonsensical imagery.
All of the imagery means something. Just because you do not know what its about doesn't make it nonsensical.

Why do both of you think that its bad, when you haven't even read the entire Canto lol. I'm just posting an excerpt, go read it.

[Anonymous No.20223698]

>>20223651
>not to Pound himself.
"But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."

[Anonymous No.20223726]

>>20223698
Again, that is as reported by Ginsberg after his visiting Pound in Italy. We do not know whether those were Pound's actual words, his actual sentiment, or if that was Ginsberg trying to save Pound's legacy from himself. I myself feel more inclined to believe it was the last one.

[Anonymous No.20223732]

>>20223681
No different from you fags you complain about a post being "reddit" or whatever. I've read stuff from Counter Currents, actually, and it always veers into some ideological shit, which is fine if you're into that.

[Anonymous No.20223745]

>>20223694
>metrical and or rhyme
no, it has to be enjoyable
>(Early Wordsworth and Keats always excluded)
this is fair, i can understand not liking shelley or blake, but i think theyre alot better than eliot or pound. Pounds rhythms kinda are weak man and just not evocative.

[Anonymous No.20223757]

>>20223694
to be fair, i havent read eliot or pound analysis cause i dislike their poetry and what ive read of eliots criticism i disliked even more

[Anonymous No.20223771]

>>20223694
>All good poetry is RHYTHMIC. Which this poem is.
Sorry, I'm probably a brainlet, but I can't get any rhythm from this at all.

>All of the imagery means something. Just because you do not know what its about doesn't make it nonsensical.

Again, I'm prepared to admit that I'm a brainlet. Explain what it means for a pomegrante to have a fire inside it and be clearer than the sea. Why would an orchard, a man-made cultivation, need to be guarded from Demeter's furrow?

>Why do both of you think that its bad, when you haven't even read the entire Canto lol. I'm just posting an excerpt, go read it.
I freely admit I know nothing about Pound and I'm trying to understand why you like him. But if I can't appreciate your favorite extract, I'm not likely to bother reading the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.20223794]

>>20223732
It is fairly different. Who cares if it veers into ideology? It's an online magazine for right wing thought. Of course it's ideological. Pound was a fascist, Bolton and Bowden are fascist or fascist adjacent. Still good essays.

It's like complaining that Jacobin, which is not only leftist but also bad at being leftist lately so even other leftists should hate it, hosts some good and informative articles on interesting leftist intellectuals.

[Anonymous No.20223813]

>>20223794
>It is fairly different.
Sure thing it is.

[Anonymous No.20223856]

>>20223813
Are you addicted to making worthless replies? Respond with substance or don't bother.

Let me try posting in your style. INDEED, IT IS DIFFERENT. Now you contradict me, and we'll start the cycle over. Am I doing it right?

[Anonymous No.20223909]

>>20223771
It is the orchard of pomegranates in the underworld, from which persephone (kore) ate 6 seeds condemning her to live 6 months of every year in hell. Pomegranates are the fruit of death and and pound is charging the lynx to guard the fruit from demeters furrow i.e. persephone. It's also why he says let the sun or moon bless thy eating i.e. not to taste the fruit of death in the underworld. Of course persephone did eat the seeds though which led to the unfolding drama of the eleusinian mysteries.

I can't make full sense of the passage either but I'm sure you'd need to read the full Canto for context. Pound says that beauty appears to us first as mystery and wonder and that through perception and realization we can learn to appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.20223924]

>>20221517
Poundchads, it feels good to be us.

[Anonymous No.20223966]

>>20223909
aight

[Anonymous No.20223993]

>>20223385
>Yes. It's almost like the romantics tended to be poets of shallow themes, and are very easily understood.
Based.
>To be considered a great poet, it is necessary to address the masses and to act upon them; the great poet must treat general ideas that the vulgar may understand; everyone likes to find an idea he has had expressed in a more refined manner within a poem.
>The most celebrated verses are those that express banalities. Take ten from Byron, for example, that talk about love, the brevity of life, or any other common subject.
>Naturally, this appeals to the masses who have experienced the joy of falling in love or the pain of falling out of love; who still fear death etc etc.
>But how many of them have seen or even dreamed of the fantastical silhouettes emanating from the works of Medieval poets?

[Anonymous No.20224022]

Cathay is amazing, some of his other early stuff is great too. The Cantos is hit and miss. A lot of it is really indecipherable gibberish, a mix of obscure historical and cultural references and foreign languages including Chinese, Latin, Italian, German and more. Reading Cantos as a 21th century Westerner is a bit like showing Simpsons pop culture reference jokes to an African bushman.

[Anonymous No.20224064]

>>20223856
>Let me try posting in your style
How very Poundian.

[Anonymous No.20224159]

>>20223993
who are the based medieval poets?
also love is not banal retard

[Anonymous No.20224164]

Were him and Fenollosa right about Chinese characters? What do you think of their use in his poetry?

Pic related is one of my favorite examples

[Anonymous No.20224175]

>>20224159
Millions of people are in love right now. It's pretty common.

[Anonymous No.20224180]

>>20224164
>Were him and Fenollosa right about Chinese characters?
No, the ideogram theory was debunked already.

[Anonymous No.20224190]

>>20224164
is this pound? its pretty good even tho im not a pound fan

[Anonymous No.20224241]

>>20220943
>Ezra Pound
Don't know who he is.

[Anonymous No.20224244]

>>20224241
not my problem

[Anonymous No.20224365]

>>20224175
Banality is not the quality of being common.

[Anonymous No.20224407]

>>20224365
>Synonyms for banality
>bromide, chestnut, cliché (also cliche), commonplace, groaner, homily, platitude, shibboleth, trope, truism
>commonplace
>Definition of commonplace (Entry 1 of 2)
>commonly found or seen : ORDINARY, UNREMARKABLE

[Anonymous No.20224478]

>>20220943
Literally who?

[Anonymous No.20224718]

>>20223651
His regret is clear in the late Cantos, especially the fragments.

[Anonymous No.20224725]

>>20223757
Eliot is... idk. People keep telling me he's second to Pound when it comes to analysis, but I do not believe that for a second. Every piece of Eliot I've read has been "in an earlier book I said XYZ, and some of you took it to mean this, when it was really that". And the entire book is explaining shit he already said in an earlier lecture, its incredibly weird. Maybe I need to start at the beginning.
>>20223771
>Sorry, I'm probably a brainlet, but I can't get any rhythm from this at all.
No need to belittle yourself, I wouldn't either. Read this:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54320/canto-lxxxi
all the way through, then listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX0h1KSM5fs
Pound is so rhythmic and his cadence is incomparable imo.
>I freely admit I know nothing about Pound
Read Cathay, no insane journals to go through. Just beautiful poetry.

[Anonymous No.20224728]

>>20224718
I cannot make it cohere...

[Anonymous No.20224731]

>>20223771
>>20224725
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz-_8QxoFfA I found the whole thing with the writing available. Worth a listen.

To Pound, all poetry was musical. I don't know how someone finds music in it, but I've listened to pieces of music set to the words of several of the Cantos.

[Anonymous No.20224775]

>>20221427
This was taken when he got off the plane back on Italy as an old man after the whole prisoner affair. And after the Nuremberg Trials.

I like some of his poems quite a lot (though for each good one there’s a dozen onanisms), but let’s not pretend he wasn’t a bastard, even if he did eventually repent

[Anonymous No.20224786]

>>20224775
That's a roman salute you fucking pussy.

[Anonymous No.20224794]

>>20224728
I cannot make it flow thru
A little light, like a rushlight
to lead back to splendour

[Anonymous No.20224797]

>>20224775
Did he actually do something bad at some point? All I'm seeing is rhetoric on his part. Any bad actions (like killing someone or stealing)?

[Anonymous No.20224803]

>>20224164
No, Pound was on most topics a compete hack, including economics (internally inconsistent theories), and especially when it came to Chinese

t. can read the poems he “translated” in the original. His version sometimes stand for themselves in English but they’re delusion adaptions not translation

[Anonymous No.20224823]

>>20224786
Lick his sweaty armpits they’re probably salty enough for you bby
>>20224797
How about scapegoating an ethnic group for the systematic problems of capital, said group who were then genocided for their supposed crimes?

[Anonymous No.20224828]

>>20224823
>Genocided
>Still here
>Have their own nation in fact
Really makes you think.

[Anonymous No.20224837]

>>20220943
Hispanicbros, thoughts on ADEH TV's video on Pound?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH9cZwvFrUo

[Anonymous No.20224844]

>>20224823
>scapegoating
So he didn't actually do anything? Nothing to see here, lads.

[Anonymous No.20224864]

>>20224828
“and liars in public places”

Seethe more loser

[Anonymous No.20224870]

>>20224803
>t. can read the poems he “translated” in the original. His version sometimes stand for themselves in English but they’re delusion adaptions not translation
This would be really interesting. If he translated any chinese poetry.

[Anonymous No.20224871]

>>20224718
This can be read not as repentance, but as regret that he couldn't "make paradiso / terrestre".

[Anonymous No.20224873]

>>20224864
Suck my dick jewboy.

[Anonymous No.20224875]

>>20224837
Wow this is really good. It is embarrassing how bad my spanish has become though... lo siento mama

[Anonymous No.20224883]

>>20221422
>NOO FASCISM BAD FASCIST BADDIES
grow up

[Anonymous No.20224886]

>>20224875
If there was a way to add subtitles for you guys I would do it. Sadly I think YouTube has removed that feature.

[Anonymous No.20224888]

>>20221501
>>20221517
Wonder what a conversation between Celine and Pound would sound like

[Anonymous No.20224897]

>>20224888
>DEM FREAKIN KIKES ARE TAKIN ER JOBS AAAAAAHHHHHH I'M GOING INSANEEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.20224926]

>>20224897
Sounds based. Two drunk boomers commiserating over the Jewish rats.

[Anonymous No.20224945]

>>20221517
I think Pound in his final moments was a very different man than he was in his earlier years. Imagine living through both world wars, every art movement you were apart of fizzle out, your friends day before your eyes, and everything you believed in crumble around you. That level of depression has to be rough, and I imagine made him very introspective.

>By the mid-1960s, Pound, unlike the women he was closest to, did come to see that somewhere, somehow, he had gone terribly wrong. “My errors and wrecks”, he wrote in Canto 116, “lie before me.” On his eightieth birthday in Paris, where he attended a performance of Endgame, he evidently broke his silence long enough to tell its author Samuel Beckett, “C’est moi dans la poubelle”

[Anonymous No.20225041]

>>20224945
punished. He is a tragic character, in this he is immortal.

[Anonymous No.20225047]

>>20224803
What are you talking about anon?
Didn't you know that was his whole translation shtick?
It wasn't just Chinese

[Anonymous No.20225242]

>>20225047
Yeah, japanese Noh plays, loads of italian stuff. They aren't supposed to be accurate translations.

[Anonymous No.20225576]

>>20224945
Source on the quote?

[Anonymous No.20225671]

>>20224159
>who are the based medieval poets?
He didn't name any specifically but the source of this quote was pulled from an essay he wrote on Villon. So Villon.
>also love is not banal retard
Yeah it is. That shit is so mainstream and popular. Taylor Swift and Billie Eyelash say hi.

[Anonymous No.20225675]

>>20220943
they almost built a dedication site to him near here in Cleveland, Ohio but the local jews kvetched over it.

[Anonymous No.20225784]

>>20225242
Exactly.
Not even his versions of Propertius and The Seafarer (which he even mutilated) are supposed to be accurate, and those are poems which every scholar back them knew pretty well. I mean, he even translated Greek dramas into Ebonics.
He simply did not set out to do what most people (who haven't studied him) think he set out to do. He didn't give a shit about "fidelity", because fidelity means writing prose, and the originals are not prose.
The Brazilian poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, who follow Pound's translation techniques, created a new name for it, "transcreation", in order to avoid any confusion.

[Anonymous No.20225786]

>After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist.[30] After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906.
We will never read his thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays :(

[Anonymous No.20225879]

>>20225784
Obviously he didn't particularly care about fidelity. He still didn't understand Chinese at all, and pretended like he did. Same with most other languages he pulled from -- he was basically just hot air about languages in general. So presumably he either undershot whatever accuracy he was aiming for or willingly misled people. But who cares: Cathay is fine enough.

[Anonymous No.20225882]

>A friend of Pound's, the writer Lina Caico, wrote to him in March 1937 asking him to use his musical contacts to help a German-Jewish pianist in Berlin who did not have enough money to live on because of the Nuremberg Laws. Normally willing to help fellow artists, Pound replied (at length): "You hit a nice sore spot ... Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England."
what was he talking about?

[Anonymous No.20225910]

>>20225882
Extremely based.

[Anonymous No.20225917]

>>20225879
>and pretended like he did

No, he didn't. He was explicit about using Fenollosa's notes.

[Anonymous No.20225930]

>>20225882
>From around 1932 he began using a dating system that counted Benito Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922 as year zero
> "The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions.". In 1922 he apparently disliked that so many Jews were contributing to The Dial, and in 1939, when he read his poetry at Harvard, he was said to have included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews in the audience.
>He took part in a poetry reading at Harvard, where he agreed to be recorded by the Department of Speech, and in July he received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College, along with the radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn, whom Pound referred to at the time as Kaltenstein, gave an anti-fascist speech after lunch ("dictatorships shall die, but democracies shall live"), which Pound interrupted loudly to the point where, according to one account, the college president had to intervene.
>To his publisher, James Laughlin, he wrote that "Roosevelt represents Jewry" and signed off with "Heil Hitler". He began calling Roosevelt "Jewsfeldt" or "Stinky Rooosenstein". In Meridiano di Roma he compared Hitler and Mussolini to Confucius. In Oswald Mosley's newspaper, Action, he wrote that the English were "a slave race governed by the House of Rothschild since Waterloo".
>Between May and September 1939 Pound wrote 12 articles for the Japan Times (he became their "Italian correspondent"), which included the claim that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews'". He discussed the "essential fairness of Hitler's war aims" and wrote that Churchill was a senile front for the Rothschilds
was he right?

[Anonymous No.20225938]

>>20225882
>>20225930
lmao based where is this from i want more

[Anonymous No.20225939]

>>20225930
Irl shit poster extraordinaire. It's like he only lived on till old age just to dab on kikes.

[Anonymous No.20225964]

>>20225917
I suppose you could say that Fenellosa mislead him, but Pound absolutely seemed to believe he (and anyone else) could get a long way into understand Chinese characters by basically staring at them and trying to decipher them as visual objects. And made direct statements on that matter He did not ever claim to be fluent in Chinese, but he did claim he was able to decipher certain characters which he did not understand at all, and made many general statements about Chinese poetry (couched in the idea that he had some experience of it, which he really didn't), based on that idea. I mean, what authority are we supposed to take all of Pound's theorizing about Chinese verse if not on, at least partially, his own supposed reading of it?

[Anonymous No.20226232]

>>20225047
Not even his translations of the Confucian classics, his “Ta Hsio” (大學) for example that he gloats about in Guide to Kultur? That’s means sincerely as a translation and it’s double bad given that Legge had already produced a pretty good version over 50 years prior

[Anonymous No.20226300]

>>20221517


>>20224159
>also love is not banal retard
What passes for it out of the mouths of the animal masses is

[Anonymous No.20226329]

>>20225671
theyre experienced by every one, but certainly not banal.

[Anonymous No.20226334]

>>20225671
also i dont read translated poetry desu

[Anonymous No.20226353]

>>20226300
yes but we arent discussing that, we're discussing the great poets writing about deep feeling.

[Anonymous No.20227186]

>>20225964
No. He was setting out to write imagist poems, and he believed (erroneously) that Chinese was pictographic enough to fulfill imagism from a text perspective, but also from a visual perspective. As he believed (correctly) that kind of poetry should trust visual images into the readers head. It's okay to admit he had faults, but I've read several papers (which I will try to find and link) defending his position from a professor in China that was a very interesting perspective.

For reference this is how the chain of translation went: Chinese into French. Those french notes then translated into English. However I think I remember reading that all the names are in Japanese, and as Fellonosa studied in Japan there is probably translation error there too.

It's simply impossible to be accurate like that.

>>20226232
Yeah they aren't accurate, but they're extremely good poetry. And they follow Pounds later aesthetic ideals. His formatting is extremely interesting.

[Anonymous No.20227208]

>>20227186
Where's the extremely good poetry in his Confucian translations?

[Anonymous No.20227381]

>>20227208
I cant copy and paste from this PDF I found, so ill give you the first lines and page numbers for you to check instead

>Frost's nimble silk / beneath a summer moon

https://www.aoi.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-c059-cfbc-ffff-ffff90d4ba46/PoundTheConfucianodes.pdf its page 63 here. I think its about as good as any of the ones from Cathay. And the one after. "Queen Pae Sy".

However upon re-reading some of these I do think "good poetry" would not be a correct label for the entire collection, some of these seem very un-pound like. Very wordy i guess?

[Anonymous No.20227447]

To be honest I think it would be fine to call your poems "translations" if you deliberately avoided one-to-one translation and instead tried to capture the original poem's "essence," but if Pound couldn't even read Chinese (and it's pretty evident that he couldn't), then I don't know how he could grasp the "essence" of the originals either. The River Merchant's Wife is a great poem, but I've been told that it utterly fails to replicate the beauty of Li Bai's work.

[Anonymous No.20227511]

>>20227447
They seem pretty popular among Chinese language critics in any case:

>Chinese critic Wai-lim Yip wrote: "One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of Chinese studies, but it seems clear that in his dealings with Cathay, even when he is given only the barest details, he is able to get into the central concerns of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance."

I tried getting this original article to read, and I found out its a $100 from Princeton... why?

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691648569/ezra-pounds-cathay

A nearly 300pg breakdown of the poems and the difficulty with translating, by someone who knows what they're talking about and its completely inaccessible without shelling out some big bucks lmao

[Anonymous No.20227758]

>>20227511
I think his "translations" are mixed among Chinese scholars. Cathay is beautiful, but his poems shouldn't be viewed as actual Chinese literature. For example, in some classical Chinese lit collections, his poems are presented next to ones from legit translators, which is confusing and misleading.
Basically, they're worthwhile but should come with an asterisk.