Massimo Bacigalupo – författare

Ezra Pound’s Posthumous Cantos collects unpublished pages of his great poem, drawn from manuscripts held in the archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library and elsewhere. They are assembled by Pound’s Italian translator, the critic and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, into a companion book to the Cantos, running from 1917 to 1972 and including the Cantos he wrote in Italian in 1944-5. An Italian edition was published in 2002 and revised in 2012. This is the first English edition of a crucial part of the Pound canon. Posthumous Cantos is arranged to reflect the eight phases of the Cantos’ composition. Pound’s writing suffered the consequences of the turbulent history of his century. World War I left the cultural world he came to Europe for in ruins; and the aftermath of the World War II in which he took a contrary side, made his work, like his life, discontinuous, a sequence of brilliant moments and profound ruptures.

Ezra Pound lived in Italy spanning six decades (1920s to 1970s) and composed here most of his ambitious American and international epic, The Cantos. He largely employed Italian materials: landscapes, artworks, politics, history, people. Bacigalupo’s study approaches Pound’s poetry through its principal physical and cultural background proposing a new and rewarding reading of The Cantos as an account of things seen and noted with a poet’s eye for the striking detail and telling phrase. We visit with Pound his favorite cities and landscapes (Rome, Venice, Rapallo) and encounter some of his foremost Italian peers, associates and translators. Bacigalupo offers readings of important and neglected writings by Pound and shows how he created an autobiographical myth out of his multifarious experience. We get to see the poet at work and are provided with new essential keys to a nuanced understanding of Pound’s lively, tantalizing and contradictory poetic world. This is the first time that so much material concerning a central aspect of Pound’s life and writing has been gathered in one volume.