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One prominent future, not wholly new to be sure, is the ubiquity of quotations, as if the world of discourse were made up of the sayings of others, offered as authoritative. It is a paradox of Pound’s self-centered world (The Cantos can be read as an autobiographical myth), that to create his lopsided spider’s web he deploys fragments of ‘reality’, which mostly are nothing of the sort. Pound had more trouble in concluding the next volume of cantos, Thrones 96–109. For example, canto 100, which one would expect to carry special significance, is chiefly composed of left-over notes from 1951–52, which makes for an anticlimax. But this may be one of the old poet’s tricks. He had returned to Italy in 1958 and the euphoria attendant on freedom regained soon gave way to exhaustion and depression, so that he was unable to conclude to his satisfaction a final volume of cantos, 110–116. (It appeared in 1968, edited by his publisher from drafts written no later than 1960.) The volcano which had not stopped throwing out sublimities and fatuities over sixty years was finally spent, or quiescent. He had found a quiet haven in the care of his lifelong companion Olga Rudge, from whom he had been estranged from 1954 to 1962. Feeling guilty for this betrayal, and suffering from acute depression, he became convinced that Olga was making inordinate personal and economic sacrifices for his sake – while in fact she was happy to shoulder the burden of living with her great man, and to do all she could in order that the world grant him the homage his genius deserved. In this state of mind, Pound wrote for Olga a number of plangent fragments, like an old man’s love notes, full of tenderness and admiration, recalling moments of their life together (even their first meeting at a masked ball in Paris), and crediting her with a clarity of perception that he might have lacked. Thus his praise also has ethical import, and is of a kind with the paradise of The Cantos, which, though marred by grievous errors, at least tries to avoid solipsism. And so Venus, as foreshadowed in canto 1, returns at the end, with her golden ornaments and her mirth, the vanquisher of monsters, ‘bearing the golden bough of Argicida’. Massimo Bacigalupo xvi Posthumous Cantos
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Note on the English Edition The present collection of unpublished and uncollected texts by Ezra Pound is based on the Italian edition, Canti postumi, published by Mondadori of Milan in 2002, with the addition of English translations (by me) of drafts originally written (and here presented) in Italian, and of the following passages (sources for which are indicated in the Notes): Das endlich eine wirkliche Verständigung; Work is not a commodity. No one can eat it; Maderno, and there was calm in the stillness; a quando?; L’arif est gai, de bonne humeur, souriant; Out of Earth into tree; the madness & cancer are nothing; The gondolas dying in their sewers; and as to why this timing? Pound’s writings have been checked against the originals, so there are numerous variants, corrections, and additions to the Italian edition. The Pound papers are mostly housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which granted me a fellowship in 1988. Some of the results of that research were published in Italian journals, in the book Je rassemble les membres d ’Osiris (Tristram, 1989), and in Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991) and 30.1–2 (2001). In 1988 my late friend Maria Costanza De Luca was planning a facsimile edition of the source of the Seven Lakes Canto (canto 49), so I looked up for her the drafts of that famous Chinese pastiche and found that it was originally prefaced by a striking prologue concerning Lord Byron and Henry James at Portovenere and the inscription on the so-called Grotta Byron in the village (see below, ‘From this grotto’). The inscription cited by James and Pound did not quite correspond to the present one – a discrepancy due (I found out) to the fact that the original tablet was replaced with a new one in the 1950s. In 2005 I visited the Grotta Byron with Seamus Heaney and photographed him standing under its portal and tablet.

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One prominent future, not wholly new to be sure, is the ubiquity of quotations, as if the world of discourse were made up of the sayings of others, offered as authoritative. It is a paradox of Pound’s self-centered world (The Cantos can be read as an autobiographical myth), that to create his lopsided spider’s web he deploys fragments of ‘reality’, which mostly are nothing of the sort.

Pound had more trouble in concluding the next volume of cantos, Thrones 96–109. For example, canto 100, which one would expect to carry special significance, is chiefly composed of left-over notes from 1951–52, which makes for an anticlimax. But this may be one of the old poet’s tricks. He had returned to Italy in 1958 and the euphoria attendant on freedom regained soon gave way to exhaustion and depression, so that he was unable to conclude to his satisfaction a final volume of cantos, 110–116. (It appeared in 1968, edited by his publisher from drafts written no later than 1960.) The volcano which had not stopped throwing out sublimities and fatuities over sixty years was finally spent, or quiescent. He had found a quiet haven in the care of his lifelong companion Olga Rudge, from whom he had been estranged from 1954 to 1962. Feeling guilty for this betrayal, and suffering from acute depression, he became convinced that Olga was making inordinate personal and economic sacrifices for his sake – while in fact she was happy to shoulder the burden of living with her great man, and to do all she could in order that the world grant him the homage his genius deserved. In this state of mind, Pound wrote for Olga a number of plangent fragments, like an old man’s love notes, full of tenderness and admiration, recalling moments of their life together (even their first meeting at a masked ball in Paris), and crediting her with a clarity of perception that he might have lacked. Thus his praise also has ethical import, and is of a kind with the paradise of The Cantos, which, though marred by grievous errors, at least tries to avoid solipsism. And so Venus, as foreshadowed in canto 1, returns at the end, with her golden ornaments and her mirth, the vanquisher of monsters, ‘bearing the golden bough of Argicida’.

Massimo Bacigalupo xvi Posthumous Cantos

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