Ezra Pound – författare

Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos WIlliams said "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it—in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them."Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Now appearing for the first time is Pound's recently found Eglish translation of Italian Canto LXXII.

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to Joyce, Eliot and Pound, it was Pound's personality and position in the artistic world that enabled the experiment to transform itself into an international movement. In 1926 Pound brought together the body of his shorter poems into a definitive collection which would illustrate the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or 'masks', was called Personae. In 1926, Personae's publication gave solidity to a movement; today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century.

Even before establishing "New Directions", James Laughlin had met and studied with Ezra Pound. These selected letters capture the spirit of their growing relationship from pupil and teacher to publisher and author. Pound's correspondence summons up the inner man and the literary figure. Literature, music, friends and politics fill his pages.

This selection provides an excellent introduction to Ezra Pound's poetry for the general reader, and for the student of contemporary literature. It takes the place of the pioneer edition edited by T. S. Eliot which was published in 1928. A representative group of early poems is included; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius are printed complete; and there is a selection from the Cantos up to and including Drafts & Fragments (1969).

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. He came to Europe in 1908 and settled in London, where he became a central figure in the literary and artistic world, befriended by Yeats and a supporter of Eliot and Joyce, among others. In 1920 he moved to Paris, and later to Rapallo in Italy. During the Second World War he made a series of propagandist broadcasts over Radio Rome, for which he was later tried in the United States and subsequently committed to a hospital for the insane. After thirteen years, he was released and returned to Italy; dying in Venice in 1972.

The Cantos of Ezra Pound is one of the great landmarks in twentieth-century poetry. This Fourth Collected edition of 1987 includes two previously uncollected cantos, and some passages from other cantos, omitted from earlier printings, restored to the text. The additional cantos, numbered LXXII and LXXIII, were written by Ezra Pound in Italian, during the collapse of Italy at the end of the war.. They belong in the sequence between the John Adams and the Pisan cantos.

Ezra Pound here recreates for the English-speaking world the great poetry of ancient China. The 305 odes of the Classic Anthology are the living tradition of Chinese poetry. Since the fifth century before Christ, they have been as familiar to literate Chinese as the Homeric poems were to the ancient Greeks. Indeed, Confucius held that no man was truly educated until he had studied the odes.

"First published in the United States in 1917 by Alfred A. Knopf. Inc., as Noh or Accomplishment, a study of the classical stage of Japan"--T.p. verso.

This anthology is Ezra Pound’s own choice of the poetry of various ages and cultures—ranging from his translations of the Confucian Odes up to E. E. Cummings—which he considered the finest of its type. It is a statement by example of the "Pound critical canon" and, as such, a short course in the history of world poetry, useful alike for the student and the general reader. Nearly a hundred poets are represented, a number of them in Pound’s own translations, with emphasis on the Greek and Latin, Chinese, Troubadour, Renaissance, and Elizabethan. Of particular interest are the notes on certain of the poems and poets which Pound supplied in comment on his selections.

For this definitive collection of Pound's Literary Essays, his friend (and English editor) T. S. Eliot chose material from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations (1920), How to Read (1931), Make It New (1934), and Polite Essays (1937). 33 pieces are arranged in three groups: "The Art of Poetry," "The Tradition," and "Contemporaries." Eliot wrote in his introduction: "I hope that this volume will demonstrate that Pound's literary criticism is the most important contemporary criticism of its kind . . perhaps the kind we can least afford to do without . . . the refreshment, the revitalization and ‘making new' of literature in our time."

The verse and criticism which he produced during the early years of the twentieth century very largely determined the directions of creative writing in our time; virtually every major poet in England and America today has acknowledged his help or influence. Pound's lyric genius, his superb technique, and his fresh insight into literary problems make him one of the small company of men who through the centuries have kept poetry alive—one of the great innovators.This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works—the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem.

Ezra Pound is destined to rank as one of the great translators of all time. Ranging through many languages, he chose for translation writers whose work marked a significant turning point in the development of world literature, or key poems which exemplify what is most vital in a given period or genre. This new enlarged edition, devoted chiefly to poetry, includes some forty pages of previously uncollected material. Anglo-Saxon: The Seafarer. Chinese: (Cathay) Rihaku (Li Po). Bunno, Mei Sheng, T'ao Yuan Ming. Egyptian: Conversations in Courtship. French: du Bellay, de Boufflers, D'Orléans, Lalorgue, Lubicz-Milosz, Rimbaud, Tailhade. Prose: de Gourmont. Hindi: Kabir. Italian: Cavalcanti, St. Francis, Guinicelli, Leopardi, Montanari, Orlandi. Japanese Noh Plays: 15 plays with Fenollosa's commentary. Latin: Catullus, Horace, Navagero, Rutilius. Provençal: Bertrand de Born, Cercalmon, Daniel, Folquet de Romans, Li Viniers, Ventadorn.

Ezra Pound's book on the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was first published in 1916. An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska. whose name he added to his own. They were living in poverty when Pound bought Gaudier the stone from which the famous "hieratic head" of the poet was made. Pound arranged exhibitions and for the publication of Gaudier's manifestoes in Blast and The Egoist. And he wrote and sent packages to him in the trenches, where Gaudier––a sculptor to the last––carved a madonna and child from the butt of a captured German rifle, just two days before he died.

The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound contains the complete text, the poet’s first six books, their title pages in facsimile (A Lume Spento, 1908; A Quinzaine for This Yule, 1908; Personae, 1909; Exultations, 1909; Canzoni, 1911; Ripostes, 1912), and the long poem Redondillas (1911), for many years available only in a rare limited edition. There are, in addition, twenty-five poems originally published in periodicals but not previously collected, as well as thirty-eight others drawn from miscellaneous manuscripts. Ezra Pound’s 1926 collection, entitled Personae after his earlier volume of that name, was his personal choice of all the poems he wished to keep in print other than some translations and his Cantos. It was intended to be the definitive collection of his shorter poems, and so it should remain. Yet even the discarded works of a great poet are of value and interest to students and devotees. Originally, brought out clothbound by New Directions in 1976, the texts were established at the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries of The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They were edited by Michael King under the direction of Louis L. Martz, who wrote the introduction, and Donald Gallup, formerly Curator of American Literature. Included are textual and bibliographic notes as well as indexes of titles and first lines.

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provides (in Hugh Kenner’s words) “the synergetic presence” to convert individual experiment into an international movement. In 1926, Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection that would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or “masks,” was called Personae. In 1926, Personae’s publication gave solidity to a movement; today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century. Pound scholars Lea Baechler (of Columbia) and A. Walton Litz (Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton) have prepared a corrected text and supplied an informative “Note on the Text” explaining both Pound’s original criteria for his selection and the volume’s subsequent history.

This newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems is intended to articulate Pound for the twenty-first century. Gone are many of the “stale creampuffs” (as Pound called them) of the 1949 edition. Instead, new emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of original composition and translation within Pound’s career. New features of this edition include the complete “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in its original lineation, early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine, and the troubadours, as well as late translations of Sophocles, and the Confucian Odes.As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parceled out his work to a variety of journals in England, America, France, and Italy. This new edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication. We can observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford’s English Review and Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based Poetry, and then as an agent provocateur for the avant-garde Little Review, Blast, and The Dial.Unlike all previous selections, this volume provides annotation to all the early poems as well as a running commentary on the later Cantos — indispensable to any reader wanting to follow Pound on his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century. The editor, Richard Sieburth, provides a chronology of Pound’s life, a new preface, and an informative afterword, “Selecting Pound.” Also included in the appendix are T. S. Eliot’s and John Berryman’s original introductions to Pound’s Selected Poems.

This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound’s aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world’s best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound’s great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

First published in 1915, Cathay, Ezra Pound’s early monumental work, originally contained fourteen translations from the Chinese and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer.” Over time, these poems have been widely read and loved as both translations and original poetry. In 1916, Cathay was reprinted in the book Lustra without “The Seafarer” and with four more Chinese poems. Cathay is greatly indebted to the notes of a Harvard-trained scholar Ernest Fenollosa. “In Fenollosa’s Chinese poetry materials,” Pound scholar Zhaoming Qian writes, “Pound discovered a new model that at once mirrored and challenged his developing poetics.” Edited by Qian, this centennial edition reproduces for the first time the text of the original publication plus the poems from Lustra and transcripts of all the relevant Fenollosa notes and Chinese texts. Also included is a new foreword by Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, providing an appreciation and fascinating background material on this pivotal work of Pound’s oeuvre.

First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound's understanding—it is fair to say, his appropriation—of the text. Fenollosa's manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North Americaand East Asia.Pound's editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa's encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry.This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa's important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound's deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa's sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa's ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition.This masterfully edited book will be an essential resource for scholars and poets and a starting point for a renewed discussion of the multiple sources of American modernist poetry.

Finalist, Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismEzra Pound's Cathay (1915) is a masterpiece both of modernism and of world literature. The muscular precision of images that mark Pound's translations helped establish a modern style for American literature, at the same time creating a thirst for classical Chinese poetry in English. Pound's dynamic free-verse translations in a modern idiom formed the basis for T.S. Eliot's famous claim that Pound was the "inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Yet Pound achieved this feat without knowing any Chinese, relying instead on word-for-word "cribs" left by the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, whose notebooks reveal a remarkable story of sustained cultural exchange.This fully annotated critical edition focuses on Pound's astonishing translations without forgetting that the original Chinese poems are masterpieces in their own right. On the one hand, the presentation of all that went into the final Cathay makes it possible for the first time to appreciate the magnitude and the nuances of Pound's poetic art. At the same time, by bringing the final text together with the Chinese and Old English poems it claims to translate, as well as the manuscript traces of Pound's Japanese and American interlocutors, the volume also recovers practices of poetic circulation, resituating a Modernist classic as a work of world literature.The Pound text and its intertexts are presented with care, clarity, and visual elegance. By providing the first accurate and unabridged transcriptions of Fenollosa's notebooks, along with carefully edited Chinese texts, the volume makes it possible to trace the movements of poetic ideas and poetic expression as they veer toward and away from Pound's creations. In supplying the full Fenollosa texts, the volume overturns decades of scholarship that has mystified Pound's translation process as a kind of "clairvoyance," displaying instead the impressive amount of sinological learning preserved in Fenollosa's hard-to-read notebooks and by detailing every deviation from the probable sense of the originals. The edition also supplies exhaustive historical, critical, and textual notes, clarifying points that have sometimes lent obscurity to Pound's poems and making the process of translation visible even for readers with no knowledge of Chinese. Cathay: A Critical Edition includes the original fourteen Chinese translations as well as Pound's unique version of "The Seafarer," which is fully annotated alongside its Anglo-Saxon source. Also included are Pound's fifteen additional Chinese translations from Lustra and other contemporary publications, his essay "Chinese Poetry" (1919), a substantial textual Introduction, and original essays by Christopher Bush and Haun Saussy on international modernism, the mediation of Japan, and translation.The meticulous treatment and analysis of the texts for this landmark edition will forever change how readers view Pound's "Chinese" poems. In addition to discoveries that permanently alter the scholarly record and force us to revise a number of critical commonplaces, the critical apparatus allows readers to make fresh discoveries by making available the specific networks through which poetic expression moved among hands, languages, and media. Ultimately, this edition not only enables us more fully to appreciate a canonical work of Modernism but also resituates the art of Pound's translations by recovering the historical circulations that went into the making of a multiply authored and intrinsically hybrid masterpiece.