MetaFilter posts tagged with pound

"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).

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

Your Bottom Dollar

chuckdarwin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:06:24 -0800

The pound has hit its highest level against the dollar in 26 years.

Thy spotless Muse, like Mary, did contain The boundless Godhead

rudster — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:29:38 -0800

"No notice was taken by the press of artist-writer Sheri Martinelli's death in November 1996, unfairly ignoring the significant role she played in the cultural history of our time." Just to drop a few names. Nin. Pound. Parker. Gaddis. Cummings. Bukowski. Brando. A staggering roll-call for a life almost forgotten.

Hash hat bang and star

Plutor — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:45:42 -0800

# ^ ! & *

Octothorpe, not hash!

riffola — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 09:03:00 -0800

The real source of the word "Octothorpe"