MetaFilter posts tagged with ezrapound

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound." - T. S. Eliot

Kattullus — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:03:27 -0800

[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).

Voices and Visions

vronsky — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:48:41 -0800

Voices and Visions explores -- through interviews, archival footage, and readings -- the lives and works of some of America’s greatest poets. Newsweek called the series "the most ambitious, most expensive and most accomplished series of films ever made about American poetry." Elizabeth Bishop 1::2::3 l T.S. Eliot 1::2::3::4 l Robert Frost 1::2::3 l Wallace Stevens 1::2 l William Carlos Williams 1::2 l Ezra Pound 1 l Langston Hughes 1::2 l Marianne Moore 1::2 l home

Search me. Ezra liked foreign titles.

whir — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:18:55 -0800

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. The anthology was placed online, apparently for the first time, by students at MIT. For those who prefer the look and feel of an old book, it is also available in convenient 21mb PDF format. via Grand Text Auto. The quote in this post's title is from an amusing anecdote related on the anthology's wikipedia page.

Chinese Poems

Kattullus — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:16:41 -0800

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.

The Modernist Journals Project

mediareport — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:50:15 -0800

The Modernist Journals Project collects literary arts journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both issues of Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist manifesto Blast, the first ten years of Poetry magazine (with Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound), topical essays, the Virginia Woolf-inspired December 1910 Project, the amazing proto-dada zine Le Petit Journal des Réfusées and a searchable biographical database of famous and not so famous artists and writers.

Ezra Pound, foreign correspondent to the Richmond News Leader

Kattullus — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:45:44 -0800

In 1958, Ezra Pound, after being released from a mental hospital, became a foreign correspondent for the Richmond News Leader. All but one of his dispatches were deemed unprintable by the editor and the one that was printed ran as a letter to the editor. The Virginia Quarterly Review has put scans of the dispatches up on their site. Because the interface makes the letters illegible on some computers, here are links to the actual jpegs. First Impressions 2 European response to American elections 2 French Elections Italian Renaissance The Mind of Europe 2 They Did It Permanent Plebiscit Campaign The letter to the editor And, finally, jpegs of the two pictures of Pound in the article: 1 2

Ezra Pound: The Complete Poetry Recordings

ubueditor — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:30:42 -0800

Ezra Pound: The Complete Poetry Recordings at PennSound

Olga can get him to eat; I can't

matteo — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 07:53:01 -0800

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)

Ezra Pound Finally Makes The Library of America

MiguelCardoso — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 06:17:51 -0800

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.]

Writers' and Artists' Faces And Demeanours

MiguelCardoso — Fri, 02 Jan 2004 10:06:20 -0800

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.]