"The written word hasn't kept up with the age. The movies have outmanoeuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies." So wrote Rob Brown in 1930 in his book
The Readies. Putting his money where his mouth was, he made a prototype readie, which has since been lost.
Brown's story is recounted by Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times. Brown expert Craig Saper has created a
replica Readie online, which includes amongst others texts by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti as well as translations from Horace by Ezra Pound.
[Some of the texts shock modern sensibilities]
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 28, 2010 -
17 comments
[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.
From
Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in
Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's
Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's
In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in
Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's
Cathay in full and a public domain
audiobook version (iTunes link).
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 30, 2009 -
16 comments
Des Imagistes is an online version of Ezra Pound's influential 1914 anthology of Imagist poetry, which includes work by Pound, James Joyce, H. D., and William Carlos Williams.
[more inside]
posted by whir
on Dec 16, 2008 -
11 comments
Chinese Poems is a simple, no frills site with over 200 classical Chinese poems, mostly from the Tang period. The poems are presented in traditional and simplified chinese characters, pinyin and English translation, both literal and literary. Here's Du Mu's
Drinking Alone:
Outside the window, wind and snow blow straight,
I clutch the stove and open a flask of wine.
Just like a fishing boat in the rain,
Sail down, asleep on the autumn river.
Among other poets featured are
Li Bai (a.k.a. Li Po),
Du Fu and
Wang Wei. As a bonus, here's the entire text of Ezra Pound's
Cathay, most of whom are from Li Bai originals.
posted by Kattullus
on May 19, 2008 -
15 comments
Her name was Courage & is written Olga "Olga"
(.pdf file in main link) is
Olga Rudge,
violinist, first promoter of the
Vivaldi Renaissance, and longtime companion of the
poet Ezra Pound.
Pound maintained a complicated and
delicate balance between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife
Dorothy Shakespear (who, among other things, was
the daughter of Yeats's mistress).
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’ Olga (listen to her voice
here) said later of the chance encounter with
Ezra at
20, rue Jacob, in the salon of
Natalie Barney. They were together for
fifty years, through the
dark-night years of
Pound's madness (arrested in 1945 for
treason, deemed unable to stand trial and sent to an American mental institution, he once suggested to the UPI bureau chief in Rome
that the United States trade Guam for some sound films of Japanese Noh plays, asked Truman many times to make him Ambadassor to Japan or Moscow;
Guy Davenport reports dining with him one evening and all Ez said was "gnocchi"), until
the poet's death in 1972.
She lived on for another quarter century, turning up at conferences of
Pound scholars --as far afield as Hailey,
Idaho, Pound's birthplace, where she gave a
lecture in the local movie theater. "Write about Pound", she told publishers who asked her to write her autobiography.
(more inside, with Cantos)
posted by matteo
on Jul 8, 2004 -
15 comments
Some Of Our Best Poets Are Fascists: An interesting article by Guy Davenport. My own theory is that an inordinate percentage of great (and minor) Modernist writers were, politically speaking, bonkers. Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa and T.S.Eliot were all distastefully authoritarian, anti-semitic and, in general, rancorous old farts. Why is this, if anyone still cares? [
Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Mar 26, 2004 -
22 comments
How I Met And Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: Have you ever wondered what a favourite writer really looked like? Is there any relationship between an artist's face and their art? Hemingway looks like his prose; Ezra Pound like his poetry; Picasso is a dead ringer for his paintings but, say, John Updike doesn't resemble his fiction; T.S.Eliot looks like a bank clerk and Matisse was nothing like his works. How superficial can you get? [
Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jan 2, 2004 -
27 comments
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The Collected Poems Of William Butler Yeats
posted by y2karl
on Nov 3, 2002 -
87 comments
