In Pound's oeuvre, it is often difficult to distinguish between what is translation or adaptation and what is original composition. For Pound there seems to be no fundamental distinction between the two. More than a mere preparation to stimulate his own creative faculties, translation served as an “adjunct to the Muses' diadem”(HSM) and assumed an importance seldom found in other modern poets. Pound's translations stimulated and strengthened his poetic innovations, which in turn guided and promoted his translations. Pound's poetics is essentially a poetics of translation and he has largely redefined the nature and ideal of poetic translation for the twentieth century. This essay will try to present a roughly chronological outline of Pound's major translations and to highlight some of the most salient features of his involvement with translation in relation to his fundamental concerns as a modern poet.

Pound embarked upon the career of poetry with the determination, as he recalled in 1913, that he would try to know what was counted as poetry anywhere by finding out what part of poetry "could not be lost by translation" and also whatever was unique to each language. He claimed that he began this comparative examination of European literature as early as 1901 (LE, 77), and in 1915 he again defined his Goethean conception of world literature as involving a criticism of excellence "based on world-poetry" (LE, 225).

Understanding Ezra Pound has never been easy. His erudition and experimentation, not to say his orneriness, have constantly challenged readers. His life as an expatriate in Venice, London, Paris and Rapallo clouded his identity as an American; the war years obscured it when he delivered a series of anti-American and antisemitic radio broadcasts supporting Mussolini. That led to his subsequent arrest, trial and imprisonment in a Washington, DC mental hospital. It also led to The Pisan Cantos, which won the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1949. His release in 1958 saw him return to Italy where he died in 1972. Yet as he wrote in 1920, “I am terribly, appallingly, but I am not sure about the 'deplorably' American.” That for Pound did not change.

Literature, not politics, was his calling. As poet, translator, editor, critic, librettist, and dramatist, drawing on medieval, Italian, American, English, Chinese, French, and contemporary traditions, Pound created works that were as complex as they were absorbing. From 1915 until 1969 he worked on an ambitious epic poem, The Cantos, which embraced the multiple traditions that informed his work. Its part-publication over the years marked its constant re-creation as new influences and sources appeared. Before and during that effort, he produced a series of innovative lyric and dramatic poems that were alternately identified as Imagist or Vorticist but were undeniably modern.

Our general understanding of textual criticism, its aims and procedures, has changed rather dramatically over the past twenty years or so, and it is no longer possible to consider the texts of The Cantos, or of any other major modernist work, without first reviewing, at least in outline form, relevant theoretical perspectives. Earlier views held that authors are isolated, unified, and integral personalities, and that they naturally work toward the creation of an end-product. In fact, no one lives in total isolation as a self-contained and consistent integer. Writers normally exist in a world of friends and family, as well as of colleagues and business associates. It is also difficult to assume that they never change their minds or points of view. More importantly, authors are in constant contact with literary tradition, the innumerable works of existing literature which form and influence them, not to mention their experience of both current and historical events.

Of course, writers set out to produce poems, novels, plays, etc., but there are two possible models for the process. The first contends that the most important moment in the creative process is the initial flash of inspiration and that subsequent rewriting, the working-out of an idea into final form, compromises the tension which gave birth to the work by moving further and further away from it, perhaps even censoring or repressing it.

Ezra Pound wrote a good deal of art journalism and criticism, participated actively in one art movement, Vorticism, and wrote extensively in his poetry and prose about the effect chosen instances of art, particularly Italian Renaissance and modernist art, had on his sensibility and thinking. Aside from his 1916 book, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, his writing on art has been collected in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (1980), and most of the details of his varied interests in the visual arts have been carefully studied by a number of different critics. This essay is not one more detailed study of an aspect of Pound's interests in the visual arts as much as a synoptic overview of those interests. What, if anything, links and renders coherent Pound's varied interests in art? More importantly, what motivated Pound's interest in the visual arts?

Pound's interest in the visual arts offers a significant contrast to his interest in music. There are, of course, some similarities between the two interests. His opinions about music and painting were both widely divergent from received notions, both in his praise of modern artists such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and George Antheil, and in his intemperate dismissal of Rubens and Rembrandt and the entire solo piano repertoire. We have not quite known how to learn from Pound's consciously eccentric views without adopting all of them, but for me the value of Pound's criticism is at both extremes of the range, rarely in the middle (fortunately, he is rarely in the middle).

Approaching Modernism

Although the difficulties of defining Modernism are properly aired elsewhere in this volume, its broad outlines are now only too familiar: its peak period in the Anglo-American context lay between 1910 and 1925, while its intellectual formation encompassed a coming to terms with the lines of thought associated with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Yet despite its apparent familiarity, interpretation of the literature of the period has become less rather than more clear by the end of the century. In particular, as Modernism becomes the assumed background against which to define postmodernism, it is in danger of being both banalized and misappreciated at the same time. Since the change from Modernism to postmodernism is not a difference in metaphysic so much as a different stage in the digestion of the same metaphysic, this chapter focuses on how new thought was assimilated at the time. And similarly, rather than giving an encyclopedic synopsis of intellectual developments within and preceding the period, it concentrates on the interpretative cruxes of Modernism, which are in many ways precisely a testing of this body of thought.

Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era characterizes Ezra Pound as the driving force, the dynamo, the vortex which propelled, revitalized, energized the era of high modernism which began sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century and which survived World War II before becoming part of literary history. There are many different and differing accounts of modernism, and Peter Nicholls's Modernisms (1995) makes this clear in its very title, but one could argue that high literary modernism of the sort Pound promulgated and claimed to invent, neglected or misunderstood the significance of gender, and indeed relied on doing so. If this is the case, one could also argue that Pound's texts articulate a strenuous and at times exaggerated masculinity, and concomitantly, enunciate a range of profoundly traditional versions of the feminine. This may seem odd, given that women feature so prominently in Pound's personal and professional life and as subjects in his writing. This essay investigates Pound's relationship with some of the significant women in his life and analyzes those moments in his poetry which inscribe the archetypal feminine while recalling individual women.

“ad interim 1933” is the promisory note concluding Eleven New Cantos of 1934 in a Canto which offers Mussolini and the shade of Jefferson as potential ameliorators within the crisis of belligerency and money that for Pound constituted contemporary Europe. It is the function of the two following volumes, The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) and Cantos LIILXXI (1940), to meet that promise through a negotiation of a cultural map constructed in the main by the founding of a bank, the Monte dei Paschi, in sixteenth-century Siena, the reforms instigated in Tuscany during the eighteenth century by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and his son Ferdinando (in JFDC), the history of China (based largely on Confucian principles) through to the eighteenth century, and the career of John Adams (in CL). These are the presiding issues in a pair of volumes which offer a diagnosis of the corruption of Western culture by usury and seek to discover alternatives through resurrecting pre-capitalist systems of exchange, the values of Confucian thought, and the ideals of the early American Republic.

While Cantos LII-LXXI uses a simple bipartite structure (where the first half, Cantos LII-LXI, is devoted to China and the second half, Cantos LXII-LXXI, to Adams), The Fifth Decad is more various in its preoccupations. It begins with the Monte dei Paschi in Cantos XLII and XLIII where the bank is figured as an image of fiscal solidity and certainty based upon its deployment not of the abstract and speculatory structure of capitalist finance but of the produce from the immediate region (see SPR, 240).

Writing of W. B. Yeats at the end of the 1930s, T. S. Eliot described him as “born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes.” Eliot and his contemporaries experienced this transition as well. Like Yeats and Ruskin before him, they had somehow to reconcile the competing claims of aestheticism and social commitment. The early poetry of Ezra Pound registers this tension vividly, as it oscillates between the worship of beauty and the reform of culture. Through many changes of style, from the fin-de-siècle romanticism of A Lume Spento (1908) to the hard-edged satire of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Pound's writing served this double imperative.

From the age of fifteen, Pound says in a memoir entitled "How I Began" (1913), he knew that he was to be a poet. Moreover, he was to be a national epic poet, on the model of Homer, Dante and Whitman. His mother encouraged him to write an epic of the American West, and the early poem entitled "Scriptor Ignotus" speaks prophetically of "that great forty-year epic/That you know of, yet unwrit" (CEP, 24-5). The young man from Hailey, Idaho, and Wyncote, Pennsylvania, embraced as his destiny a high romantic ideal of the poet as bard, prophet, sage, and visionary seer. In this paradigm, the service of art and the service of society are one.

Introduction

The final phase of The Cantos began when Pound started planning the poem's paradisal conclusion. In 1944 he explained that “for forty years I have schooled myself... to write an epic poem which begins 'In the Dark Forest[,]' crosses the projected Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and 'fra i maestri color che sanno.'” Seven years before, he had assumed the middle part of that progress was concluded: in 1937 he published The Fifth Decad of Cantos [XLI-LI] and wrote in Canto XLVI that “This case, and with it / the first part, draws to a conclusion, / of the first phase of this opus” (XLVI/233-234). The crisis of impending war, however, caused him to insert an extra section on economics and politics - the China and Adams Cantos published in Cantos LII-LXXI (1940). It looked then like there would be one more push - one section in which, as he wrote to T. S. Eliot in January 1940, he had “29 canters to write” to match Dante's Commedia? At that point, the coils of Pound's own political and ideological misapprehension combined with the contingencies of history to produce a more complicated and extended outcome than the one he had foreseen. Having asked the world in general and T. S. Eliot in particular whether you "think you will / get through hell in a hurry" (XLVI/231), Pound discovered for himself how difficult it was to get to the other side of "human error," rage and hardened judgment. Whether he ever reached the light is a question that different readers will answer in different ways.

Charles Dickens, rising to his feet, stood at the table and surveyed the vast hall in which the leading citizens of Birmingham had gathered in early 1853 to pay him homage at a banquet. It was his duty to thank them now, and he proceeded to offer his tribute.

“The people, ” Dickens concluded triumphantly, “have set Literature free. ” And in return for that gift of liberty, he opined, “Literature cannot be too faithful to the people.”

“It is after all a grrrreat litttttterary period,” wrote Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot with typical exuberance at the end of a famous1921 letter accompanying major suggestions for revising Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land (SL, 170). That mixture of showmanship, judgement, and genuine enthusiasm typifies Pound's contribution to the making of the great period of modernism, particularly when we remember its context of the brilliant reshaping of Eliot's original chaotic manuscript into the poem we now think of as one of the modernist monuments. Pound's remark also displays a canny awareness of literary politics, not least the potential of periodicity itself.

Besides the example of his own work, Pound helped to make modernism by supporting and encouraging other modernists and by helping to produce, distribute, and institutionalize modernist works. He presented the spectacle of “Pound the major poet devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry,” wrote Ernest Hemingway appreciatively in 1925. "With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends . . . he defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail... sells their pictures . . . arranges concerts for them .. . writes articles about them . . . introduces them to wealthy women [patrons] . . . gets publishers to take their books." Those friends were the people whose work Pound admired.

Since its inception as a category of literary study during the 1930s, Modernism has been notoriously inhospitable to definition. Nowhere is this inhospitability more pronounced than in the fraught issue of the relations of art to politics. How does aesthetic activity categorized as modernist stand in relation to forms of power? And how to the experiential realities that constitute the charged political dimensions of social life? With respect to these questions, Anglo-American Modernism has been both celebrated and derided; it has been praised for its richness in negotiating historically new forms of experience, and it has equally been censured for a defensive fear and loathing of precisely those forms. To complicate matters even more, we find the makers of Modernism spread all over the political map of twentieth-century Western Europe, England, and America: running with Reds; making political broadcasts for Mussolini; militating against the Ku Klux Klan; arguing for free speech and free love as well as free verse. How are we, then, as latter-day readers, to evaluate the political meaning of Modernism, especially when we are taught that its most notable - indeed, perhaps only - unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether?

To write about the modernist novel, as opposed to the Victorian novel, say, or the Edwardian novel, is to write not only about the possibilities of the genre, but about its perceived impossibility. The possibilities were evident enough. From about 1890 to about 1930, the novel was as popular as it had been during the Victorian period, and newly diverse. According to Henry James, in 1899, it was a universally valid form, “the book par excellence”; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was indispensable, “the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives.” And yet there was also a feeling, more prevalent among writers than among critics, that the novel as traditionally conceived was no longer up to the job: that its imaginary worlds did not, in fact, correspond to the way one's fellows spent their entire lives. The feeling was most fully and influentially articulated by T.S. Eliot, when he argued, in “Ulysses, Order and Myth”(1923), that the novel had effectively “ended” with Flaubert and James: that the very formlessness which had once made it the adequate “expression” of a previous age, an age not yet formless enough to require “something stricter,” now prevented it from expressing a modernity characterized above all by the loss of form.

Still we call it Modernism, and this despite the anomaly of holding to such a name for an epoch fast receding into the cultural past. Not long after this volume is published, “Modernism”will be the name of a period in the beginning of a previous century, too distant even to serve as a figure for the grandparent. Uneasily but inevitably, we have reached a time when many feel the obsolescence of a movement still absurdly wearing such a brazen title. The temptation, much indulged in recent years, has been to dance beyond the reach of the aging, dying giant, to prove that one can live past the epoch marked by such names as Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Eliot, Eisenstein and Brecht, Freud and Marx. Certainly, many forces have joined to change the vectors of late twentieth-century culture. But our contemporary imperative to declare a new period and to declare ourselves citizens of a liberated postmodernism has badly distorted and sadly simplified the moment it means to surpass.

At first sight it might seem contradictory to include drama in a discussion of Modernism. As a movement, “Modernism” has been defined in artistic terms through the sculptures of Jacob Epstein or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky or Wyndham Lewis, while in literary terms its usage has been restricted to the work of poets and novelists: preeminently T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Indeed, in the various critical studies of the movement published over the last half-century, drama has been conspicuous by its absence; and where mentioned at all, it is generally dismissed as following a different - even anti-modernist - agenda. This may be partly due to the specifically English and American focus of studies that site the defining moment of literary Modernism in the Pound-Eliot nexus. By contrast, drama in the twentieth century has been highly international, with English-speaking playwrights and directors responding to innovations from Europe, and having their experiments picked up in turn.