Pound for Pound

...More than any other writer in English, Pound served as a register for this change, and his work, although challenging, was foresighted...

...We write in the fi fth century of the Struggle for Deliverance from these religions...

...At the other end of Pound’s universe, it is hard to imagine a better evocation of the confusion and anonymity of contemporary life than his 19-syllable haiku, “In a Station of the Metro,” perhaps the simplest and most appropriate of any 20th-century poem: The apparition of these faces in the crowd...

...It will be fascinating to see how Moody deals with the poet’s remaining 52 years of life...

...Moreover, considering that his offenses were almost exclusively intellectual and literary, attacks on Pound’s sanity are in vivid contrast to the near-universal adulation accorded such Stalinist scribblers as Pablo Neruda, who was a Soviet secret terror agent in addition to his wild, public enthusiasm for Stalin...

...In illuminating this development of Pound’s intellect, A. David Moody deserves our thanks...

...Unlike, say, Yeats, who wrote marching songs for the Irish fascist movement, Pound did not compose cadences for the Italian black shirts or the German brown shirts...

...Breton had also pledged never to earn a living by ordinary means, and proclaimed his belief in his immortality...

...Breton: “Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions...

...Pound’s knotty character was defi ned early: A teenaged scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, he was judged “more or less obnoxiously different” by his fellow students...

...Few phenomena in contemporary intellectual life are more tedious than the perfunctory, but typically strident, denunciations of Pound for his distasteful political views...

...After communism collapsed in Albania in the 1990s, followed by an unprecedented explosion of translation and publication of contemporary writing in a hitherto isolated European country, my friend Rudolf Marku, the poet, chose verse by Pound, Eliot, and W.H...

...The narrative here ends in 1920, before Pound was disgraced by the full emergence (and allure) of fascism...

...Laban promised Jacob the hand of his beautiful daughter Rachel, but Jacob was tricked on his wedding night into a match with the ugly Leah...

...When I read Marku’s translations I already possessed a selection of Pound rendered into Serbian, issued under the Tito regime—a book I found for sale on a Sarajevo street, scavenged from a house wrecked in the late Balkan war...

...A “metapoetics” that is still fecund today, it was implicit in all his well-known manipulation of “personae” or “masks...

...So writes A. David Moody, a British academic, in Ezra Pound: Poet, which far exceeds the previous contributions of Hugh Kenner, C. David Heymann, Noel Stock, and others...

...Saramago, are praised beyond measure...

...Pound brought together scraps and snatches of tradition and immediate communication in a mode very much like the Internet— polyphonically, to use one of Pound’s favorite terms...

...But more important, as Moody indicates, “The university which this wholly unusual young man wanted was indeed not there for him...

...This verse, reminiscent of the Russian futurism of Vladimir Mayakovsky, could stand as a credo for the adventurous intellect embodied in Dada and in Breton’s 1928 “novel,” Nadja, where there is no development of character, and no events of substance are described...

...Pound had distinguished himself as a scholar and translator of the Mediterranean troubadours, whose prosody represented a unique product of Persian and Arabic infl uences, conveyed through medieval Andalusia, on the mystic Christian culture of Provence and Catalonia...

...of words from other sources...

...Out of key with his time,” as self-described in its opening stanza, Pound drew far ahead of his peers aesthetically, rather than stagnating in a backward-looking snobbery, as he is often caricatured...

...As noted by Moody, Pound’s incomparable rendition of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” revealed a translator “inventing a diction which kept as close as possible to the Anglo-Saxon, with a minimum Stephen Schwartz is the author of a forthcoming study of Sufi sm, The Other Islam...

...Pound further epitomized modernism in his pursuit of an ineffable poetic essence...

...At fi rst look, Pound has little in common with the life of the Old Testament Ezra, except that he resembles him in his role as a scribe who sought to reorder the national tradition...

...But the same could be said of his biography...

...Pound endures as a literary icon in English, united with James Joyce no less than T.S...

...Like other agitators for irreligion, he appeared incapable of understanding his own contradictions...

...Moody describes how, in his precocity, he was secretly nursing the overweening ambition . . . to discover “what part of poetry was ‘indestructible,’ what part could not be lost by translation, and . . . what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated...

...Breton was a Trotskyist and pronounced Judeophile, Pound an admirer of Mussolini and infamous Jew-baiter...

...But in line with a suggestion by Arthur Koestler discussing the fate of the 1930s Communists, Pound has more in common with Jacob...

...It may seem absurd to have learned these languages by recourse to the most diffi cult of all American poets—spelled “Paund” in both Albanian and Serbian— but it was surprisingly helpful, and a source of pride in me as an American, demonstrating how far his standing is recognized...

...Auden to introduce to a public hungry for knowledge of the wider world...

...His anti-Jewish prejudice proved to be a herald of the persistence of this atavism in modern life...

...In some ways Pound and Breton could not have been more different...

...Pound’s “Salutation the Second,” one of a series of poems published during World War I, concludes with these lines: But above all, go to practical people— go...

...But Pound began as a critic of all people of religion, not the Jews alone...

...Eliot, and notwithstanding his intellectual overreaching and undeniable moral faults...

...In 1920, as argued by Moody, he showed little evidence of an exclusive anti-Semitic bias...

...An Eastern inspiration provides spiritual resolution for Pound’s introspection and sense of isolation...

...There his voice, even as a translator, remains clearest...

...Moody writes that if Pound’s collegiate peers “could not take him seriously they were probably quite right not to, since his life among them was for the most part artifi - cial...

...Say that you do no work and that you will live forever...

...In this regard, Pound is symbolic of other right-leaning authors, including Gottfried Benn and Knut Hamsun, whose biographies are habitually besmirched, while the lives of Soviet enthusiasts (and, sometimes, spies) such as the Pulitzer poetry laureate George Oppen and the Portuguese novelist Jos...

...There would have been no troubadours without the monotheistic passion for God, and without the troubadours, there would have been no Pound worth recalling...

...In this sense, the young Pound might have considered ridiculous the presumption of translating his work, many decades later, into the Balkan tongues...

...While Pound’s long-term ideological stance embodied a cracked modernism that led him to embrace and express repellent opinions, this outlook had little or nothing, in principle or practice, to do with his verse or criticism...

...He was the fi rst literary exemplar of today’s “remix”—parallel with, but because of the freedom of his words, bolder than his friends in such successive experimental movements as Imagism, Vorticism, futurism, poetic cubism, even Dada...

...This brilliant fi rst volume records in detail the maturation of the poet, a period encompassing his Romance translations, his eccentric but monumental Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian studies, and concludes with the achievement of the long poem-cycle, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley...

...According to Moody, “Mauberley” was “metafi ctional” in its varied perspectives on the text and its creator...

...Meanwhile, Pound had come to serve as an indispensable mentor to Eliot as well as friend of William Carlos Williams...

...Petals on a wet, black bough...

...His career was a scandal that is still scandalous, and Pound is among the 20th century authors whose personality remains vivid almost 40 years after his death, at age 87, in 1972...

...That last comment echoes a dictum of Pound’s younger French contemporary, the surrealist Andr...

...This fi rst volume of Ezra Pound: Poet traces, through the life of the young Pound, the transformation of Western literary sensibility, in its Anglo-Saxon incarnation, from the mannerism still in place at the end of the 19th century to the radical, dissonant aesthetic that emerged from the global confl ict of 1914-18...

...Yet he remains America’s Jacob, who taught us to wrestle with our idiom, and how to subdue it...

...Pound’s talent for anticipation naturally comprised positive and negative elements...

...Yet in their understanding of the modernist impulse, they were alike...

...Still, his most permanent, satisfying works illustrate the continuing tension between classicism and modernism...

...jangle their door-bells...

...Existence is elsewhere...

...The “nightmare, stammering confusion” of Pound’s later verse, as described by William Butler Yeats, represented a harbinger of the cultural babel of globalization...

...Pound then wrote in an idiom remarkably like that of our contemporary enemies of faith, condemning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike: “All religions are evil...

...Like most totalitarian intellectuals, Pound believed the grandiose promises of fascist modernism, and found himself tied to the bloody cart of Mussolini and, eventually, to Hitler’s minions...

...His real life was elsewhere...