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None of that this Christmas (or any time of year).
When the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky stumbled across Byednie Lyudi [Poor Folk], Dostoyevsky's first novel, he was so overwhelmed with admiration that he ran through the snowy streets to the writer's flat and threw snowballs at his windows. (Unfortunately Fyodor's second effort, The Double, a laborious piece of Gogol-esque fantasy, enraged the critic almost as much as the first one had inspired him; he immediately expelled him from the ranks of socially-concerned writers).I’ve tried to read ... the – very many – contributions for this issue with as much objectivity as I could muster. Anything, in theory, was grist to my mill. In the end, though, I do have my own views. I have invited certain authors to contribute pieces who might otherwise not have thought to do so. I’ve also tried consciously to introduce new faces, which has led me, in some cases, to put in only one or two pieces each for poets (in particular) who would really merit a more comprehensive selection.
Do the results sound piecemeal, fragmented? Up to you to judge, but I feel that there’s a spirit in much of the writing I’ve encountered lately which does succeed in giving unity to this disparate-by-design assemblage of pieces.
Many of our younger writers wear emotional extremism as a kind of badge of honour. The best of them seem intensely aware of contemporary literary theory and linguistic philosophy – the heartbeat of postmodernism – but they’ve gone beyond it into a world of private concerns and fragilities.
Take Amy Brown (“Siamang”), for instance, who sees a captive monkey in a zoo as “tailor-made to comfort / someone as sorry as me.” It isn’t that she’s unaware that the monkey is suffering more than she is – it’s because of that he can serve as her ambiguous double.
Then there’s Thérèse Lloyd, whose Levin kids:… drag race
their souped-up Ford Escorts
leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings.
Both Brown and Lloyd are recent graduates of Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters Masters programme in Creative writing, but their work shows little of the ironic distance generally seen as characteristic of the Wellington school.
Actually I’d say that the strength of writing programmes such as Victoria's can be seen in the fact that these two writers, fresh from its workshops, do not sound at all homogenised or smoothed out – rather, individualised in a way which fits larger tendencies in New Zealand writing.
It’s easy to mock the desire of every editor to detect new trends and incipient literary movements. “Jack says that if you’re depressed, over-educated, self-absorbed, and anxious to go on about all three then you’re on the right path …” It’s not as simple as that.
My selections for this magazine may well have ended up privileging a personal impression of what is most pointed and relevant in contemporary writing. But some of the poems and stories included in this issue move me in quite a new way. I feel intensely curious to read what these new poets and fiction writers will produce next. If any of this excitement communicates itself to you, the whole venture has been worthwhile.
1 – The Anxiety of Influence
This is progress.
For instance, it is nearly dawn.
– Bill Manhire
For a long time now I’ve been wondering what the next big upheaval in New Zealand poetry was going to be.The hero-saga of New Zealand poetry (in Allen Curnow’s version, at any rate) tells us that our first few derivative colonial bards (Thomas Bracken, Alfred Dobell, Edward Tregear) were succeeded by a group of pastoral Georgians, many of them women (Eileen Duggan, Jessie Mackay and – to a somewhat lesser degree – Ursula Bethell and Robin Hyde) who were in their turn displaced by hardheaded Modernists such as Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover and (of course) R. A. K. Mason.
This triumph of the sons over their predecessors fitted in very nicely with the theory of literary revolutions promulgated by the young Harold Bloom in his seminal critical text The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). In the Oedipal drama described by Bloom, each poet’s relation to his predecessors became a source of acute anxiety. In short, poetry is one more manifestation of the Freudian family romance: sons plot to kill their father, the elder of the tribe, in order to monopolize the attentions of their mother, the Muse:Every poem [says Bloom] is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets' misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics' misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations …“A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.” Note that last point as we begin to descend to cases. Let’s take, for example, the Bill Manhire poem “On Originality” (from his 1977 collection How to Take Your Clothes Off at the Picnic):Poets, I want to follow them all,
out of the forest into the city
or out of the city into the forest.
The first one I throttle.
I remove his dagger
and tape it to my ankle in a shop doorway.
Then I step into the street
picking my nails.
Everything in these few lines is significant, is coded to make sense to other sufferers from this singular anxiety called influence (or “influenza,” as Bloom himself calls it: “an astral disease”). Our speaker wants to “follow” all poets, whether their genre be Virgilian pastoral (“out of the city into the forest”) or Juvenalian satire (“out of the forest into the city”). After killing the first of them, he steps “into the street / picking my nails” – a clear reference to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) where the ideal modern artist is described as “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible … indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
A clear reference, that is, to those in the know – to other readers of the great Modernists, with Joyce as their ultimate avatar. There’s an ironic wink here over the heads of a less learned audience, distracted by the serial-killer details of Manhire’s sinister protagonist’s pilgrim’s progress.I trail the next one into the country.
On the bank of a river I drill
a clean hole in his forehead.
Moved by poetry
I put his wallet in a plain envelope
and mail it to the widow.
“Moved by poetry …” To Manhire, like Bloom, the poet is a killer. His art can only flourish in the dead body of his predecessors (in this case, presumably, Curnow and the other New Zealand expressive regionalists: Baxter, Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman). I don’t know if he had particular originals in mind for the three poets he throttles, knifes and shoots in the course of the poem, but it wouldn’t much matter even if he did. The greatness of Manhire’s poem resides in the simplicity and pain behind lines such as:It is a difficult world.
Each word is another bruise.Of course the poem is a gag. Bill Manhire isn’t really a killer. His “originality,” here, consists of mixing the high art form of lyric poetry with the pop culture tropes of the hardboiled thriller. To us, now, that might seem a postmodern cliché, but one can see the overwhelming effect it must have had on the hothouse rhetorical earnestness of his elders when Manhire’s work first began to appear in the seventies. This was a new voice and a new attitude. Bill Manhire was cool in a way that no previous New Zealand poet had ever been. It was as if John Coltrane had suddenly stood up and started to play hot licks at a hootenanny barn dance.
And so it began, the birth of the cool. The Oedipal drama had moved into another act, the new Miles Davis / Manhire had arisen to dispatch old Satchmo / Curnow.
2 – The Birth of Soul
I like typewriters because they are always turned on.
– Will Joy ChristieAnd yet, how tedious it has started to sound, this revolution of the ironic and knowing over the ponderous and crafted. Curnow came back with a vengeance, like a roaring lion, with his own version of the postmodern aesthetic (most notably in An Incorrigible Music (1979), but actually in the whole mass of his later work). After all, if cool, postmodern irony was the new ideal, how easy it was to produce!
It’s salutary, in this respect, to compare the crystalline reserve of early Manhire, a mask covering unspeakable depths, with the more facile playacting of James Brown’s “Loneliness” (from Favourite Monsters, 2002):
I was just sitting there, wandering lonely as a cloud, when
– honest to heaven – looking out of the window
I saw Elvis. I know I know, but honest to heaven
it was him – or my name’s not James Brown.The Wordsworth reference segues easily into the Elvis / James Brown joke, and, yes, there’s still anguish there, but one can’t help feeling that it’s ever-so-slightly put on for the occasion. Whatever shock-value and impetus this poetic movement once possessed, it appears to have left the building. Which leaves us all sitting by the microphone waiting for the next big thing, the new Moloch before whom we can all prostrate ourselves. Is it Glenn Colquhoun? Bill Direen? Who will it be?
Meanwhile Harold Bloom himself had become unhappy with his old critical pontifications, and had written a preface to the 1997 reprint of his most famous book in which he lamented its failure to account for the protean genius of poetic shapeshifters such as Dante and Shakespeare …
And, really, it does seem very dated, this Freudian primal myth of emasculation and cannibalism performed by each new greedy generation on the last. It seems very male, among other things. Where are the daughters of the tribe in this scenario? When Michele Leggott revived the submerged voices of Bethell and Hyde in her 1994 text DIA, where was the anxiety? Was she trying to eat them, replace them? Was she Electra to Manhire and Wedde’s Oedipus?
Many questions, few answers.
*
What I’d like to do now is to recount my own poetic displacement myth, designed not so much to supplant the Colonialist / Modernist / Postmodernist map we’ve hitherto accepted as the true face of New Zealand poetic history, as to supplement and perhaps complicate it a little.
The recent Hollywood film Ray popularized the idea of the musical revolution accomplished by blind bluesman Ray Charles when he set out to combine the emotional intensity of Gospel with the sexual raunch of Honky-tonk. The Devil’s music had met up with the Lord’s, and the result was Soul – a new, overarching genre designation which continued to dominate successive generations of Funk, New Jack Swing and Hip-hop artists. Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige and (yes) James Brown were all, according to this paradigm, soul artists, nourished by this strange fusion between the church and the dancehall. Pop and Jazz continued to flourish on either side of Soul, albeit with innumerable cross-overs and connections, but there was nevertheless a distinction which had to be felt rather than described. There was a reason why Whitney Houston was pop whereas her mother’s old friend Aretha Franklin had soul.
Is it impossibly pompous of me to claim that for some time now I’ve been observing the growth of a similar trend in the most distant provinces of New Zealand poetry, far from the corridors of cultural power?
So what are the characteristics of this new poetry? Who are its high priests and priestesses? To whom do they owe allegiance? These are complex questions, to which I have (as yet) only provisional answers. All I can say is that of late I’ve observed a strange metamorphosis taking place among the “despised students of the Humanities” (to quote from Troy Kennedy Martin’s classic 80s thriller, Edge of Darkness).
On the one hand we have a generation of graduate students trained in the austere uncertainties of deconstruction – bookworms to whom Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Žižek and Baudrillard are household names. This, I suppose, might be described as their gospel, their source of intellectual rigour and intensity.
On the other hand we have the emotional realities of being “doomed – bourgeois – in love” as Whit Stillman’s preppie comedy Metropolitan (1990) put it. Some of the writers I have in mind are a country mile from being bourgeois, but you get the general idea: no money, no prospect of making any, a crippling student debt, and far too much education for their own comfort.
Out of these two elements has come the most extraordinarily passionate and disturbing poetry of our time. Some of the these writers who’ve already published books – and whose work can therefore be conveniently accessed – include Olivia Macassey (Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Titus, 2006), Will Christie (Luce Cannon, Titus, 2007), Jen Crawford (Admissions, Five Islands Press, 2000), Thérèse Lloyd (many things happened, Pania, 2006) and Tracey Slaughter (Her Body Rises, Random House, 2005).Among the men, I might mention Scott Hamilton (To the Moon, in Seven Easy Stages, Titus, 2007), and possibly that revered elder statesman Richard Taylor (Conversation with a Stone, Titus, 2007).
You mustn’t take my word for it (I wouldn’t want you to, in any case). Who, after all, is their Manhire, their Curnow? Do they gather under anyone’s umbrella? I think the whole point is that they don’t. There is no school. They’ve all come independently to the same conclusions: “My rigorous poststructuralist schooling tells me to distrust emotion and enthrone the intellect, to detect aporia [gaps] in all simple statements of feeling., and yet – I hurt. I hurt so much, I’ve been hurt so much that I have to cry about it. I crave the simplicity of childhood yet know that I can never go back to it. That was horrible, too, a lot of the time.”
In “Outhwaite Park,” for instance, Olivia Macassey invites:… three tearsBut isn’t this just the same old Romantic cult of childhood all over again, you ask? Is this the revolution? “Token wonder girls and one trick ponies, and … wooden clothespegs made into hard unhappy dolls.” (Macassey, “Outer Suburb”) Not so. Let’s take another example, Scott Hamilton’s “1918,” a prose poem about the great influenza pandemic:
for the people we used to fuck
for backbones scraped on the washing machine
for the strangers who slept outside your bedroom door
and the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennis
and the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;
and the four am trains and six am busses,
mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogs
lit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewoves
and rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my loveWhen Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae, and laid her out on a clean sheet, and fetched a bucket of creekwater, and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn’t straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest. She looked like she was diving into herself.Scott’s a Marxist and (some would say) an ideologue. But in this case it has the effect of making him value individual experience of world-historical events above the facile paradoxes of postmodernism. His work reverses the cliché about R. A. K. Mason, that his conversion to the Left made it impossible for him to write more poetry. For Scott, it’s precisely Marxism that enables his poetry – a complex realm of abandoned loners and doomed explorers heading for the frontier. It’s as if he’s decided to show us once and for all that Auden’s Orators (1932) holds the seeds of a new poetic, rather than being the “fair notion fatally injured” its own author called it.
3 – The Law of AttractionMaybe I have spent too much time these last 40 years thinking about Celan & translating his work, & maybe Celan's work has been too essential for my own writing for me to have a detached view on this, but the association of PC with Britney Spears makes me shudder...
– Pierre JorisWhen I posted my poem-sequence “The Britney Suite” (first published in 2001) on The Imaginary Museum, my online blog, a couple of months ago, it was actually in response to a number of people who’d demanded to see it, presumably intrigued by the conceit of engineering a meeting between anguished concentration-camp-survivor poet Paul Celan and blonde pop goddess Britney Spears.
I was a little disconcerted to see that the point of this jarring juxtaposition escaped Pierre Joris. But I was far more surprised to see how many people rose to my defense. They could see what I was talking about. They understood the idea of trying to bridge the gaping abysses cutting across our culture.
Recently I watched a documentary called The Secret, which purported to offer the answer to all of life’s problems in the (so-called) “law of attraction.” The universe, claimed the various snake-oil salesmen and hokum-peddlers in this made-for-TV-but-gone-straight-to-DVD movie, will supply you with anything you call to yourself. If you expect a flat tyre and a bill in the letterbox, that’s what the universe will send you. In effect, anything you receive you’ve asked for in advance.Of course this is a simplistic way to go about explaining the inconceivably complex gestalt of life, the universe, and everything, but it’s so dumb it’s almost wise. If only it could be so! “Thinking positive” and “having a good attitude” may be irritating clichés, but the placebo effect indubitably works sometimes. Your mental attitude does affect your physical health.
If this double-mindedness, this fusion of extreme intelligence and New Age moron-fodder repels you, you’ll probably be happier with a more comfortable range of poetry. If, however, your attraction to it is stronger than the repulsion, then you’re probably already of the Devil’s party without knowing it. In short, you have soul.
I’d like to finish by quoting from “The Uncanny Truth about Abelard,” (published in brief 25 (2002): 39-41), Olivia Macassey’s charting of the permeable membranes connecting her two worlds.12:37 am on Oct. 4
“We deplore the disappearance of the real under the weight of too many images. But let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality”
– Jean Baudrillard c2000 (do you believe it? My lonely twin.)
9:16 pm on Nov. 16
for example I have no thought now of what you look like, except
that saints have your eyes. When they are dying.
Excisions. Elliptical scar around the nothing, and those dark thighs.
she could push her fingers in there, it is an eye
under the window, thinks a woman who thinks
1:23 am on Dec. 8
Yesterday I saw you (me) for the first time (for the hundredth time). You
told me that you have been reading those same letters etc; these coincidences no longer bother me. I can see where I have been thinking: my ghost on every page.
Already the quote marks are fading; they will be my things,
it will become my dream; you will afterwards believe – because you will only be me
You will no longer read me, it is beginning,
embraces me in the water, limping and howling,
follows me everywhere, saves for (me) the last card. I cover everything. I arrive.
Abelard had gotten it wrong – I was Abelard; I am him all along
all of the words will be mine.
Heloise, “a woman who thinks,” and Abelard, “my lonely twin” have been so chewed up, dispersed, mythologized and distanced by our histories that they’ve come to seem, finally, unapproachable. Macassey can see that, but she refuses to admit defeat. Her own levels of experience speak more strongly the more mediated they are by puppets and lonely quotes.
“Let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality …” Our nostalgia can be as much for the lost certainties of the intellect as for the simplicity of the unclouded heart.
Macassey’s poem, like so many others by the poets I’ve mentioned above, laments our incapacity to learn how to live in this strange dystopia we’ve built in the midst of plenty.
Can’t we all learn to get on? To understand each other? To stop being so goddamned horrible so much of the time? That is what the new poetry I’ve been seeing sprouting up, irrepressible, all around me, is about.
I’m afraid you didn’t realise what you were doing when you funded all those PhDs, imported those books of French theory, when you allowed those souls to grow up, angst-ridden and dispossessed, in the dark corners of your kingdom.This is my nest of weapons.So Bill Manhire, thirty years ago. I see no need to replay all those Bloomian fantasies of overthrowing the elders of the tribe, conducting a palace coup in the centre of culture. Can’t we embrace our elders instead of excommunicating them?
This is my lyrical foliage.
All the new poets want to do is to teach you how to feel again. However difficult that may be. If you don’t get it first time (thinking, perhaps, that you’re too smart), they’ll persevere. They’re patient. They’ve got soul.
On Sunday, 15th April, on TV1 at 10.00 am, I saw a German documentary called The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium and the Dying Children, made in 2004. It features Dr Siegwart-Horst Gunther and Canadian Tedd Weyman of the Uranium Medical Research Center, who travelled to Iraq to assess uranium contamination; and also some British veterans, who describe their exposure to depleted uranium and the resultant congenital abnormalities in their children.
I had no idea until seeing this how devastating this substance is. It causes the dust and water of the areas where it has been used, and of course any battle debris like damaged tanks, to be highly radioactive. It is shocking to see children playing, and life going on in total ignorance of the dangers, in these areas, with no attempt made to clear it up. The effects are just as bad as Chernobyl, if not worse, but no-one is being warned of any danger.
The military of Western countries are very keen to keep using these weapons because they are so effective, and also provide a use for some of the by-products of nuclear power generation. They deny that the stuff is radioactive or causes problems, shutting their eyes to the overwhelming truth and taking refuge behind carefully designed lying ‘investigations’ which purport to prove that its use is safe. The shells are very heavy and cut through a tank like paper and penetrate through many storeys of reinforced buildings, destroying them completely – no wonder the military will not give them up.
I saw many pictures of horrendously malformed babies, such as are never seen under normal circumstances but are distressingly common in Iraq. Similar effects are found in Kosovo, where NATO used depleted uranium shells. The British veterans were in damaged health themselves, as well as having the effects show up in their children. The denial on the part of governments and military shocked me most of all.
[Gaudier-Brzeska, 'Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound']
As soon as we start to remember this shitty war
Certain facts will resurface. In the beginning, God
The great aesthete, having created the heaven and the earth,
Volcanic red sunsets, having decked out the rock
With lichens – like a Japanese print –
Shat out the great usurer Satana-Gerione, the prototype
Of Churchill’s bosses. And now it is my turn to sing
In a half-savage cant (not the true (t)’oscano), because
Filippo Tomaso came to me, post-death, saying:
“Bene, I’m dead,
But I don’t want to go in Paradiso, I want to keep fighting.
I want your body, so I can keep fighting.”
And I replied: “Tomaso, my body’s too old,
And anyway, where would I go? I still need it.
I’ll give you a spot in my Canto, I’ll give you the mike;
But if you just want to fight, scram – get hold of some kid;
Gedda holda some keed – some dumb scaredy-cat
And lend him some balls (not to mention some brains)
... As if Italia needed one more bloody hero!
That way you’re reborn – a ravening beast –
You have a Renaissance, then die one more time.
Don’t die in bed, viejo,
But to the sound of trumpets
– That way Paradiso!
Purgatorio you’ve suffered
After the Surrender, the twenty-first of September,
Ze dyes of Betrayal!
Scram – go make yourself a hero,
Leave the talking to me.
Leave the explaining to me,
Leave me to sing of the battle eternal
Between the filth and the light.
Addio, Marinetti!
Drop in when you’re free.”
“Atten-SHUN”
And, after the barked command, he added sadly:
“I wasted my time in futile folly,
Loved show more than substance,
Ignored the ancients - nor did I study
Confucius or Mencius.
I praised war, you wanted peace
Blindmen both!
though I was hollow, you hated the now.”
Only in part
Was he speaking to me – nor from nearby –
A part of him seemed to be quizzing himself
Without touching centre; and so his shadow
Shaded off into grey
Until from another turn of the dial
A voice issued from the hollow receiver:
“Vomon le nari spiriti di fiamma.”
Quoth I:
“Torquato Dazzi, is’t that chloroform in verse
you’ve come here to peddle –
‘Nostrils spewing flame’ – translated 20 yrs back to wake up Mussato?
Marinetti and you – a great double-act
Both over the top, he for the future
And you for the past.
Too often over-affection
Creates over-kill – all that damn’d blasting;
By now there’s enough ruins even for him!”
Again that hasty and impatient spirit
Like a messenger who’s chafing at delay
And will not stay for business of less merit
Burst in – I recognised the voice of Marinetti
Heard long ago in Piazza Adriana, down by Tiber-side.
“Come back!
At Macallè, the Gobi’s farthest bound
A skull lies bleaching in the desert sand
& SINGS
Tireless, strident, sings, & sings, & sings:
– Alamein! Alamein!
We shall return!
We shall return! –”
Me: “I believe you”
... Enough, I hope, to give his soul some peace.
The other spirit resumed his own refrain
With:
“poco minor d’un toro” ...
(a line translated from the Eccerinus;
Latin: “little less than ... bull”).
He did not cap
The quote.
For all the air was trembling, and the shade
Wavered
And, as with sounds drowned out by driving rain,
Flung phrases without sense. Just like a ship
Whose sunken hull caves in when touched by light,
I heard a rattling sigh
Of discharged breath (or on a sick-
Bed, when a man’s about to die):
“Guelph slanderers! Their weapon was it ever –
Calumny ... still is; world without end.
The age-old war’s still raging in Romagna,
Filth risen to Bologna
With looting and rapine – See horses stand
In darkies fetlock-deep as in a river,
Moroccans and such scum
Enough to rouse the bones beneath the fields
To breathe, clench fists, salute, come
Back to life, armed shaft & shield
Against the foe.
I’ve seen such dirt-bags often in my time –
Look through the books, you’ll find them there in droves
Betrayers of a province or a city
But this microbe
The Empire sold, as well as Italy!
Forlì in flames & Rimini forsaken;
Who shall again frequent Gemisto’s shrine
(A wise man surely, even if a Grecian)?
The walls on fire, the arches all are fallen
In Ixotta’s pied-à-terre – goddess & queen ...”
“Who’s there?” I cried
Clamouring to be heard above the storm,
“Is it Sigismundo?”
He did not listen, but
Raved on:
“Sooner the Seat of Peter will be clean
Of a Borgia papa than of a Pacelli.
Sixtus, too, was a son of usury
– The whole conspiracy
Of those who’ve grown so fat on scribbled deeds
Aimed to deny him worthy followers;
So now they’re bellowing that Farinacci
Has dirty hands, because he caught on quick.
One hand is dirty, but the other one
Has earned him pride of place among our many
Unsung heroes: Tellera, Maletti,
Miele, de Carolis & Lorenzini,
Guido Piacenza, Orsi & Predieri,
Volpini, Baldassare, Borsarelli,
To give you just the names of the commanders.
Clement was a banker’s brat - a son
Of usury il Decimo Leone ...”
“Who’s there?” I cried.
“I am that Ez-zelino who would not credit
The universe was created by a Jew.
No doubt I was guilty of other errors, too –
let’s just forget that
Now. Your friend & I were scammed
By the same man: ol’ Muss,
Who told me I was damned
As ‘Satan’s son’ (try swallowing that
& you’ll not need carrots to turn into an ass).
Adonis was disembowelled by a boar
Simply to make the Cyprian goddess cry.
It’s tempting to make a joke of it & say
A prize bull from the zoo or abattoir’s
Worth more, because he weighs more than a pig
(Students of Aesop’s Fables will complain
That animals can’t do arithmetic).
More harm’s been done by one false load of bull
Than all my tricks: a fig, a bagatelle!
Dig that fat ferret out of his warm lair
& see if he don’t say:
‘The bête humaine rejoices in its chains’?
If ever an Emperor sent forth that decree
Byzantium had defiled the parent stream;
His Virtue had ebbed into a parody
Of law, divided from the golden mean.
Caesar sapped not his own integrity,
Augustus, before Peter, built in stone
(The rock sustained the same authority).
‘The lawgiver is law’s custodian’
– Fought for in Florence by the ghibelline.”
Like waves that come from more than one transmitter,
The rippling voices
Fused (in broken phrases), and I heard
A skein of birds who sang in counterpoint
As in a garden
on a summer’s day,
‘Mongst whom, most softly:
“Placidia fui, sotto l’oro dormivo.”
“I, Placidia, sleeping under gold” – rang from a well-tuned string.
“Malinconia di donna e la dolcezza” ...
I began
“Sorrows and sweets of ladies;” but I felt
Goose-pimples rising,
pulse was racing
Like an engine,
arm and shoulder seized
As if by force: that is, I saw a hand
Had gripped me,
yet I could not see the arm
Pinning me like a thumb-tack to the wall
(You won’t believe me – who cares? You weren’t there).
And then the one who raged at me before
Cut in – I say ‘cut in’; not rudely, rather
Almost like a father
Explaining to his son the fight they’re in:
“It’s an old man’s prize, & you’re the greenest hand.
Listen to me, before I have to go
Back to the night.
Where the skull sings our soldiers
Will return, those banners will come in.”
[I've been having some correspondence lately on the interpretation of some of the personnel in this canto, so I've decided to append all the notes I compiled at the time (you can find the text of my translation of Canto 73 online here)].
The purpose of these notes is threefold: first, to give a sense of the context of these two poems in the larger body of the Cantos[1]; second, to explain unfamiliar allusions (even those which are common knowledge to students of Pound, Dante, or Cavalcanti); and third, to justify my own translations of particular phrases and expressions. The last of these is, of course, the most self-serving - but if I were to pass over such matters in silence, I would lose whatever pretensions to strict, objective usefulness this version of Pound's Italian verses can claim. I have tried to cross-reference the annotations as far as possible, but cannot conceal the fact that they are really designed to be read progressively, as a kind of cumulative commentary.
I accept Massimo Bacigalupo's contention that this title is 'a reference to the cry "PRESENTE!" (Here!) thrown out by one of its heroes ... The title also appears to suggest that these cantos amount to Pound's act of allegiance - or "presenza" - to the Salò régime' (Bacigalupo, 1984, 72). In order to reproduce this effect in English, however, I have been forced to reject such literal expressions as 'Being there' (to match 'HERE, SIR' at l.35?), but have instead taken it to refer to the 'presences' ('spiriti ... personae') who appear to Pound in his Dantean dream-vision.
When conflated with the 'guerra eterna/ Fra luce e fango' at ll.31-32, and the 'guerra antica in Romagna' at l.94, and perhaps the entire struggle against 'usurers' and the 'padroni di Churchill' (see notes on ll.6 & 7 below), this undoubtedly represents Pound's view of the Second World War.
Terrell (1980, p.112), defines 'Boja d'un Dio!' as (literally) 'Hangman of a God'; the equivalent of 'Darn it!' in Romagna dialect.
Carpenter (1988, p.638), in his partial translation based on 'a literal prose version by Mary de Rachewiltz', gives this line as 'after [making] the fiery sunset'. I have, however, preferred to preserve the volcanic (and Vulcanic!) associations of the word 'vulcanico' (fiery).
Bacigalupo (1984, 73), translates this as 'in Nipponese fashion', which he glosses as 'a topical reference' (i.e. to Japan's role in the war). Carpenter, however, provides 'like a Japanese print' (1988, p.638).
Pound includes the following note at the end of Canto 45, devoted entirely to 'Usura' (p.230): 'N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank)'. See note on l.120 below.
I have left this name in its italianized form in order to signal its Dantean associations. Toynbee's Dante Dictionary (1968, p.310) describes Geriòn as the 'guardian of Circle VIII of Hell (Malebolge) where the Fraudulent are punished, representing him as a kind of dragon' (1968, p.310) (see Inf. XVII, 1-27 ); and on p. 562 gives Satàn as a (rare in context) synonym for the 'Evil One' - also Lucífero, Dite, Belzebù, rex inferni, etc. - citing specifically Inf. VII, 1.[4]
Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) was one of Pound's pet hates, as a representative servant of international usury (see notes on l.6 above, and Canto 73, l.11 below).
I have attempted to reproduce Pound's own echoing, 'in gergo rozzo' (in 'clumsy jargon'), of the sound of spoken Italian dialect: '(h)antar 'oscano' I interpret as 'cantare toscano' (sing in Tuscan). See also, in this connection, l.17: 'Pigiate hualche ziovanozz'', Marinetti's northern (Piedmontese?) dialect version of 'Piglia qualche giovanotto' (l.16); l.22: 'viejo', dialect (and Spanish!) for 'vecchio'; and l.27: 'ziorni', for 'giorni' (l.26).
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1875-1944), Futurist poet and publicist, converted later in his life to Fascism. Loyal to the German-backed Republic of Salò, 'he participated in the Ethiopian war and was on the Russian front for a period in 1942-43' (Bondanella, 1979, p.318). See also references to 'Tom[m]aso' at l.13, and 'Marinetti' at ll.33, 56 & 65. The Ethiopian references at l.68 are also his (see note). His death in 1944 seems to have been one of the things that prompted the writing of Cantos 72-73.
An attempt to echo the effect of Poundian coinages such as 'her hands have no kindness me-ward' ['Homage to Sextus Propertius', III, l.14 ] (Pound, 1984a, p.83).
I have expanded the abbreviation in order to keep up the fiction of an Italian speaking in accented English. Hence, too,'in Paradiso' (l.11), 'Italia' (l.19), and 'Paradiso!/ Purgatorio' (ll.24-25). See also Canto 73, l.63.
'Canto', here, could mean Canto or song. I have tried to parallel this ambiguity in the Italian by introducing here prematurely the idea of radio communication ('I'll give you the mike'), intimated by Pound at ll.50 & 166.
I have perhaps exaggerated (given Pound's enthusiasm for 'eroi' at ll.127-32), the degree of disillusionment implied by 'ancor' un eroe fra tanti'. Certainly Bacigalupo (1984, p.79) dismisses Barbara Eastman's similar reading: 'in [Canto] 72 I find no "nice contempt for 'heroics' as a sort of 'folie de jeunesse'" ... - a misunderstanding, apparently, of lines 16-19'. I would, however, plead in my (and Eastman's) defence the narrator's abrupt dismissal of Marinetti at l.28: 'Vai! Vai a farti di nuovo eroe'. I have emended the - in context - meaningless 'Par' at the beginning of the line to 'Per' (the only other emendation to the text of these cantos proposed by me is 'veder' for 'veder’' at Canto 73, l.103).
After King Vittorio Emmanuale deposed Mussolini, the new Badoglio government signed an armistice ('il tradimento') with the Allies on 21st September 1943, 'i ziorni del crollo' (l.27) (Carpenter, 638).
Two more of Pound's heroes.
Bacigalupo, 1984, p.75: 'the hero-narrator is quick to recognize his friend ... Dazzi's translation of the Ecerinis, the fourteenth-century Senecan tragedy of Albertino Mussato (1262-1329)'. In context it serves as a neat epigrammatic comment on the 'fire' of Marinetti's 'sovra-voler'; as does 'poco minor d'un toro' (l.79) on the Ethiopian passage (ll.67-74). See note on l.53 below.
Manlio Torquato Dazzi (1891-1968), was 'first librarian in Cesena, where Pound met him while researching Malatesta; he was then director (1926-57) of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice' (Bacigalupo, 1984, p.75). His translation of Mussato's Ecerinis was 'in fact published ... in 1914', thirty years before Canto 72 was composed. The quotation from Canto 91 above refers to Torquato Nanni, who did indeed publish a biography of Mussolini in 1924, twenty years before, and was one of those captured and shot with Mussolini and Clara Petacci at Como in 1945 (Terrell, 1984, p.552). The similarity of names has tempted me to infer an oblique reference here to 'Muss., wrecked for an error' [Canto 116, l.7] (p.795) - 'Mussato' as a pun on 'mussare' (to boast, froth, hiss), along the lines of the critical remarks of the 'wide-awake', anti-government boys encountered by Pound in Rome in 1943.[5] This might also explain the fact that only ll.9-35 (excluding l.18) of this canto were printed in Marina Repubblicana (Heymann, 1976, p.351) in 1945. Pound certainly admired Mussolini, but his desire was always to 'svegliar' (awaken) him to certain new ideas. See also Ezzelino's complaint, l.141, at having been 'tradì' (betrayed) by 'him whom your friend translated' ('tradotto') - wrote a biography of?
I have adapted, here, Mark Twain's description of the Book of Mormon as 'chloroform in print' (1918, p. 87) to give the effect of Dazzi's 'lulling' verses. See note on ll.59-60 below.
Bacigalupo (1984, p.75) glosses this line as follows: 'Like Dante, Pound does not hesitate to coin new words (as with "ninna-nannare" above); needless to say, the result is often awkward'. 'Ninna-nannarmi' is a conflation of 'ninnananna' (lullaby) with 'ninnare' (to sing to sleep). There is, however, a case for regarding the whole poem as being written in a kind of 'Ital-ese' (on the analogy of 'Franglais'), perhaps in some ways more accessible to English readers with a little knowledge of Dante than to native Italians.
'May this not be a way of reflecting how closely the Vorticist Blast of the "Men of 1914" was followed by less cordial explosions?' (Bacigalupo, 1984, p.75).
'Pound says he recognizes the voice he heard at his colleague's home, in Piazza Adriana, Rome - a typically Poundian (and Dantesque) aside' (Bacigalupo, 1984, pp.75-76).
'Makkalè was an outpost surrendered in 1941 when Italy lost Ethiopia to the Allies, while the Axis defeat at Alamein in 1942 was generally regarded as the turning-point of the war' (Carpenter, 1988, p.638).
Unless Pound has confused the African 'Makkalè' with the Asian 'Macao', the only explanation I can offer for this odd piece of geography is that the Gobi represented to him (and Marinetti) the ultimate in deserts.
Dazzi's quotation from Mussato's play at l.79 (see note on l.51 above) proves sufficient to call up its hero, Ezzelino III da Romano (1194-1259), head of the Ghibellines, included (as 'Azzalino') among the tyrants in Circle VII of Dante's Hell (Inf. XII, 109-10).[7] Ezzelino's sister Cunizza (Par. IX, 28-31) had an affair with the troubadour Sordello - another Poundian connection (through Browning's Sordello).
A textual detail often stressed by Pound.
Why is 'Guelfa' capitalized in Pound's Italian text, and not 'ghibbelin' at l.165? Ezzelino was, after all, a leader of the Ghibbeline (Emperor's) party and an enemy of the Guelph (Church) party. Dante and Cavalcanti were both Guelphs, and both victims of internal dissension between 'white' and 'black' splinter-groups. In the translation, I have preserved this feature, but have made it consistent by putting 'Guelph' at the beginning of a sentence.
The scene, also, of the Malatesta Cantos (8-11). Bacigalupo (1984, p.78) adds, 'Pound wanted these cantos to be read by Mussolini, and the insistence on Romagna (three prominent laudatory mentions [Canto 73, ll.53, 98 & 102]) may have been intended as a hook to catch the attention of the Duce.'
A city in the Romagna.
Identified as 'the multiracial Allied forces' by both Bacigalupo (1984, p.76) and Carpenter (1988, p.638).
I have had to rearrange the order of action somewhat in order to echo the pun on 'fascismo' in the verb s'affascia (though the clenched fist is more of a Communist emblem - 'gather arms', perhaps?)
Bacigalupo, 1984, p.76: 'The speaker goes on to insult "that demi-foetus" (Victor Emmanuel III) who "sold all of Italy and the Empire" (by abetting the fall of Mussolini and initiating the armistice)'. See note on l.26 above.
Forlì is the central town of Romagna (Toynbee, 1968, p.288). Sigismundo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468), hero of the Malatesta Cantos (see note on l.94 above), built the Tempio for his mistress and third wife Ixotta (or Isotta). See also ll.112 ('[il] letto arcano della divina Ixotta ') and 115 («Sei tu Sigismundo?») below.
Gemisthus Plethon (c.1355-1450), a Neo-Platonic Byzantine Philosopher (Cookson, 1985, p.19), buried in the Tempio at Rimini (see note on l.108 above).
Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), is compared in corruption to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-58).
Francesco della Rovere, Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), builder of the Church of S. Pietro in Vincoli (see Canto 74, l.797, 448), is probably the 'Sixtus' referred to here. He was involved in the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici, which would account for the mention of two Medici popes at ll.133-34: 'Clement was a banker's brat - a son/ Of usury il decimo Leone' - Leo X (1513-21) and Clement VII (1523-34).
Roberto Farinacci (1892-1945), a prominent Fascist politician, executed in 1945, who 'favoured war on the side of Germany in 1940' and was 'a power behind the scenes during the brief history of the Italian Social Republic [Salò]' (Coppa, 1985, p.147). ‘Mangia-foglia’ (literally ‘leaf-eater’) is a pun linking his ‘farinaceous’ surname with an Italian idiom meaning ‘to catch on quick.’ Pound's other,'lesser known heroes of the same ilk' (Bacigalupo, 1984, p.76), include (ll.128-31): Tellera, Maletti, Miele, de Carolis, Lorenzini, Guido Piacenza, Orsi, Pedrieri, Baldassare, Borsarelli, and Volpini. The only one of these surnames to come up again in other Cantos is that of Paolo Orsi (1859-1935), an Italian archaeologist (Terrell, 1984, pp.673-74) - Canto 103, ll.138-39: 'and Orsi: Anch'io sono/ antichità Siracusana' (p.736) - a no more than half-plausible identification.
An archaic form of 'figlio' (son), repeated at l.142: 'fiol d'Orco'.
See note on l.80 above. Carpenter (1988, p.639), speculates that Ezzelino da Romano 'seems to stand for Ezra himself, or some aspects of him, since he defends having "made fun of reason" [l.147], and says that "one single falsification" [l.152] does more harm to the world than "all my outbursts" [l.153]'. I accept this identification, and have signalled it by writing 'Ez-zelino'.
(Odyssey X, 502 - in Andreas Divus' 1538 Latin translation). See note on l.133 above.
Venus, ruler of the third sphere (see note on Canto 73, l.23). Cunizza, Ezzelino's sister, is in this part of Paradise (see note on l.80 above).
In the Italian, Ezzelino is excusing himself from having made a joke of reason, and says that having a 'bull' (usury?) to slaughter excuses such a 'pigeon' ('canard' would be the French equivalent). Mere choice of 'animal' [l.151] does not make (i.e. cannot discredit) a belief. I replace the bull/pigeon dichotomy with a metaphor of weight: bull/pig - 'ol' Muss' the 'false load of bull' (Canto 74, l.6: 'the dead bullock' (425)); and Ez-zelino's tricks the 'pig in a poke': behaviour excusable under the circumstances.
In the Cantos, this generally refers to Julius Caesar; here , however, it seems to be to 'Caesar' as an institution.
The pun on 'Pietro pietra' I have continued on the next line, 'The rock sustained ...', to give the necessary hint of 'upon this rock I will build my church' (Matthew 16, xviii).
In Canto 16, 'Il Fiorentino' refers to Dante, 'who as he left Hell could see Satan, as in a mirror, only backwards or "upside down"' (Terrell, 1980, p.69); I have interpreted the uncapitalized 'il fiorentino' here as the everyday inhabitants of Florence, Cavalcanti’s 'Gente stizzosa e leggiera' (Canto 73, l.131).
Galla Placidia (c.388-450), Empress of the Western Roman Empire, buried in Ravenna. Cookson (1985, p.29), describes her tomb as 'one of the sacred places in the Cantos'. Bacigalupo (1984, p.77), remarks that 'Out of the chorus [of birds] ... a woman announces herself, somewhat like Pia in Purgatorio V'.
That this sonnet meant something particular to Pound is confirmed by the sub-title he gave his translation: '"Hoot Zah!!!"'
Bacigalupo (1984, pp. 77-78), interprets this as meaning 'He will, Ezzelino promises in the end, "return in the night/ Where the skull sings"'. I prefer to interpret 'tornare in' as Ezzelino returning to the night - with the promise that the soldiers ('fanti') will return (as in ll.99-102 above), and have supplied an example of this usage from Dante's Commedia to substantiate the point.
Another attempt to find an English-language equivalent for the Dantean echoes in Pound's Italian.
I see this as the dark, 'trembling' air of Pound's own chamber, 'wasted' by so many supernatural visitors. Bacigalupo (1984, p.78) adds that 'the aere perso functions as a metaphor of the dark days at war's end'.
Guido Cavalcanti (1250-1300) is referred to in the pun on 'cavallo' here, also at l.24: 'cavalcante' (riding), and is 'quel Guido che amasti' (that Guido whom you [Pound] loved) at l.19. Canto 36 is a version of Cavalcanti's canzone 'Donna mi Prega', whose form is again echoed here. Pound wrote in the introduction to his complete translation of Cavalcanti's poetry, 'if he is not among the major prophets, he has at least his place in the canon ... with Sappho and Theocritus; with all those who have sung, not all the modes of life, but some of them, unsurpassedly' (1984b, p.17).
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd President of the U.S.A., Robert Anthony Eden (1897-1977), Churchill's Foreign Minister - more of the servants of international usury. For Churchill, see note on Canto 72, l.7 above.
Pound (1984b, p.21): 'Guido was sent with the "Whites" [a Guelf faction - see note on Canto 72, l.92 above] to Sarzana, where he caught his death fever. Dante at this time (1300) being a prior of Florence, was party to decree of exile'.
See also ll.100-1: 'Io tornato son'/ dal terzo cielo'.
Firenze = Florence.
'Arimininum' is the ancient name of Rimini, a seaport in Forlì province (Terrell, 1980, p.96). See notes on Canto 72, ll.94 & 95 above.
Terrell (1984, 466): 'and then I asked the sister/ of the little shepherdess of the hogs/ and these Americans?/ do they behave well?/ and she: not very well/ not very well at all/ and I: worse than the Germans?/ and she: the same'. An advance in insight? Not perhaps so much as the latter passage would suggest on its own.
Bacigalupo (1991, p.18) argues for the reading ‘le davo un vezzo’ [‘I would give a trinket’] from the first printing in Marina Repubblicana. As he remarks, the revised text means ‘she gave a trinket’ (to Cavalcanti?). I bow to his superior knowledge of his mother tongue, but have preferred to play on possible alternative meanings for the word ‘vezzo’ (habit, pet trick, affectation).
Mussolini's Salò Republic, based in the North of Italy.
Wolves were running in the streets of Montmartre when Villon wrote the original phrase.
Notes:[1] Dilligan, Parins & Bender (1981), has been invaluable in this respect, as has Terrell (1980, pp.1-360) & (1984, pp.361-791).
[2] All Italian definitions are quoted from vol.1 of Reynolds (1962); and have been cross-checked against the Dizionario Garzanti (1978).
[3] All quotations from the Cantos are taken from the 4th Collected Edition (1987).
[4] All Dante references are quoted from Grandgent's edition of the Commedia (Alighieri, 1933); with additional information from Wilkins, Bergin & De Vito's Concordance (1965).
[5] de Rachewiltz (1971): '"Sono svegli," Babbo said as we left - Wide-awake, those boys' (quoted in Carpenter, 1988, p.619).
[6] I have adopted this convention to signal a difference in line numbers between the translation and the Italian original.
[7] Information from Toynbee, (1968, pp. 77-78.) Bacigalupo (1984, p. 75), adds that 'It could in fact be claimed that Dazzi does not actually appear in the vision [as he is not yet dead], but is only believed to be present by Pound-as-hero'.
re: the cry of "Presente": this was also the way Spanish Falangists saluted their leader, José Antonio Primo de Riviera, who had been executed by the Republicans in 1936. At roll calls José Antonio's name would always be called out and the militiamen would answer "Present!"
As Terrell notes, "not a right but a duty" was an Italian fascist slogan, in full "Liberty is not a right but a duty". Terrell also notes that Pound had this engraved on his stationary. Terrell also addresses "Presente!" at p.417 note 50 in a rather thorough manner, writing "A significant word at Fascist gatherings" and quoting Finer: "For members who have died in great exploits...When the roll is called and the unbreathing lips remain silent, his circle of Fascist comrades reply, "Presente!" Finer dubs it a kind of Fascist transubstantiation. Terrell notes that M de R thought this assessment was a gross overstatement. I have not read her original thoughts so shouldn't comment to much in that regard, but I would say that Finer has not overstated the ritual nor the deep meaning of the word in the Fascist death cult. All this to say that I am not sure that my mention of José Antonio (who I don't believe is mentioned in the Cantos - I couldn't find the mention of "José" Terrell states is on p.466) would add anything - perhaps a reference to Terrell would be more appropriate.
I note that you translate "Presente" at line 35 as "Atten-SHUN". I understand that poetic translation is a delicate matter and anyone who reads Pound's translations knows he would have been pleased with any translation of his own work so long as the message and the lyricism were intact, and I certainly think your translation of 35 lives up to these Poundian requirements. However, Pound has used the term, untranslated, in another Canto (Pound's own translation of 72 leaves in the Italian word). The term also has a specific symbolic significance to an ideological viewpoint that is expressed in Italian (and Spanish) and that may be lost by translating it as a variant of "Attention", the Anglo-Saxon military drill term. Pound's use of the term in Canto 78 in the context of an "uncancelled" fascist slogan certainly could be the basis for an argument that it was used in 72 in a similar fascist context.
At l.36 you use the term "command" with regard to your translation of presente - I have no Italian, but I did a quick internet search for a few of the Italian words. Is this what you have for grido? The (albeit online and non-professional) Italian dictionary I used translates this as "scream" or "cry", noting also that grido di battaglia is "battle cry". Given the symbolic meaning of "Presente" the term may not have been so much of a command as a cry, perhaps a fascist cry linked Marinetti's desire, after death, to keep fighting, his desire for another body (e.g. linked to the notion of transubstantiation associated with the term) - perhaps the dead Fascist wants to have Pound cry "Presente" for him, to acknowledge that he still fights after death or - at even more of a stretch - perhaps it is a reflection of the dire situation of "the cause" that dead fascists have to cry "Presente" for themselves.
I would only add that fascists and sympathisers argued that this reversal was an example of mala fides, especially as Badoglio had initially insisted that the régime change would not alter Italy's commitment to the Axis war effort.
I think it is important to note that both Cavalcanti and Dante were actually of the Guelf faction ("White Guelfs") that ended up opposing papal authority.
This theme is also seen in the line:
l.162 - 'Augustus, before Peter ...' [or Emperor before Pope]
In other words, Dante and Cavalcanti were what pro-Imperial Pound would have considered "good Guelfs", e.g. anti-papist, and not beset by "Guelf calumny", and perhaps sympathetic to the Ghibellines.
Although I do not disagree with the way you have characterised these lines, I think it is of note that a black flag (or banner) bearing a skull was a symbol of the Brigate Nere, or Black Brigades - units of police/blackshirt militia/fascists/fellow travelers who helped the Germans battle partisans within the Italian Social Republic (RSI in Italian), and who were also responsible for significant atrocities.
A theme in both cantos is damage to Italy's cultural sites as a result of Allied action, especially with reference to Rimini (the destruction of the apse of San Francesco/Tempio Malatestiano/Ixotta's memorials within - Piero della Francesca's fresco of Malatesta was removed to Mantua for safekeeping in 1944). This is in keeping with official ISR propaganda - as an amateur philatelist (although focused on France, so I can only make superficial comments re Italy) I can note that many of the definitive stamps issued by the ISR displayed cultural sites destroyed by the Allies, with the legend "Hostium Rabies Diruit". Other pieces of philatelic mini-propaganda show a young boy beating a drum with the legend "All' armi", which also fits into the general theme of the cantos (youth taking up the 'cause'; " 109-111: "what girls, what boys wear black!"). I have often wondered whether Pound was in some way inspired by the stamps he saw on his mail, although perhaps it is more likely that he was influenced by other forms of Republican propaganda with similar content, e.g. newspapers (especially the Marina Repubblicana, as you note).
One of the themes of the Cantos was of good patrons and poor patrons and the results of good and poor patronage, with e.g. Malatesta, Cunizza and Jefferson being good patrons (educated, surrounding themselves with the best or accomplishing great works or otherwise fulfilling their duties to kin and society) contrasted with others, like the unfortunate Italian poet (I forget his name) crushed in a well after the Pope made him a governor of an area he could not control or Mozart's ungrateful mentor. The general feeling I got from the 'fascist' cantos was that Pound may even have been suggesting that Mussolini himself had been a poor leader, turning from the radical, but fascist, Farinacci ("who had rough hands" e.g. the castor-oil king), and signing a concordat with Pacelli. Mussolini falls, his regime in tatters and Italy in ruins - the heroes Pound celebrates are not the fascist leaders but are instead the young fascists, those youths "who wear the black"; who ostensibly should have been the subject of Mussolini's patronage but in the wake of his failure seem to redeem his ideology by their very selflessness, by their rallying to what is compared to the other 'lost cause', that of the Ghibellines. Propaganda of course, but the Black Brigades in the North did attract enough supporters to trigger a real civil war in Italy.
I am not sure it is fair to say, as O’Connor did in his review of your work, that Pound propagated an "ideology of hate", at least no more so than the many Communist authors and artists of his time did. Pound may have said hateful things throughout his poetic career but I don't think it consumed his oeuvre, no more say, that Sartre or Picasso's Stalinism did with regards to their work/legacy. Pound was no Brasillach. I think at times Pound honestly believed he was depicting an eternal war between mud/darkness and light/gold in his work, and he associated the Guelfs/papacy/Churchill/Roosevelt/the Jews/the federal bank with usury, corruption and war and the Ghibellines/the Holy Roman Empire/Mussolini and even Hitler/fascism/Jefferson/social credit with order, peace, law and a sort of confucianism. It is a view of history totally alien from our perspective, but when I think about it, it probably does not differ tremendously from the political views of the "extreme" left today (pacifist in the sense that wars are believed to be the result of conspiracy theories or the cynical manipulations of cartels/anti-Zionist/anti-capitalist/anti-American and anti-British/sympathetic to dictators, be it Castro or otherwise). Had he been young today I wonder if Pound would be considered right of left. As it stands I think he was as much left as right (but I suppose this applies to all fascists and national socialists). Do you reckon I am wrong?
