Ezra Pound

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Ezra Pound (1913)

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (born October 30, 1885 in Hailey , Blaine County , Idaho , † November 1, 1972 in Venice ) was an American poet. He is considered one of the outstanding representatives of literary modernism . His main work is The Cantos . Before 1914 he propagated imagism and vorticism . During his stay in Italy from 1924 to 1945, he admired and supported Italian fascism .

Life

Ezra Pound was the only child of his parents Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel nee. Weston and a grandson of Thaddeus C. Pound . He studied comparative literature and Romance studies from 1900 to 1905 at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College in New York State . During this time he made friends with William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle (better known by their initials H. D. ). He was friends with Williams for a long time, although both were very often of opposing views - Pound stylized himself as a classically educated man of letters, Williams in his autobiography gave the uneducated American who had little knowledge of European literature. In 1908 Pound moved to Europe, where he first lived in Venice . During his studies and also further in Europe he dealt intensively with Provencal literature and created a number of translations and revisions.

From 1909 to 1920 he lived intermittently in London , where he associated with the most important English-speaking writers of his time, including James Joyce , Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis . He also saw Williams again in France, who was on a trip to Europe with his wife. During his first time in London he belonged to the Imagists , a literary movement that experimented with scarce lyrical language and was influenced by Far Eastern literature, including Japanese haikus . Pound published work in the mouthpiece of this group, The Egoist magazine . The encounter with the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska resulted in the movement of Vorticism, which is oriented towards Italian Futurism . BLAST , the magazine of the movement published by Wyndham Lewis, only saw two editions.

During the First World War , Pound worked as the private secretary of his role model William Butler Yeats in Ireland . In 1914 he married the artist Dorothy Shakespear . During this time the widow of the East Asia expert Ernest Fenollosa was looking for someone who could hand over her husband's estate. She found him in Pound, who then dealt with East Asian poetry and published Fenollosa's text on the Japanese Noh theater . In 1915 he began his main work, the Cantos ("songs"), on which he worked until his death.

From 1920 to 1924 he lived in Paris . During this time he met the violinist Olga Rudge , with whom he and his wife lived in a love triangle until his death . In 1922 he edited T. S. Eliot's poem Das wüsten Land , which, along with his own cantos, is one of the most important lyrical works of English-language modernism.

In 1924 Pound turned his back on Paris and settled in Rapallo , Italy . There he soon became Mussolini's advocate . Pound stayed in Italy even after the outbreak of World War II and spread anti-American , racist and anti-Semitic propaganda speeches on Radio Rome, in journalism and in his poems ( Cantos 72-73) . Pound blames the Jews for the rule of usury, Latin usura . “The Jew”, international and American capitalism, also caused World War II in his opinion. In 1938 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Ezra Pound as a prisoner of war shortly after the end of World War II

Pound was arrested in 1945 after American forces marched in. It is reported that he turned himself in. For some time he was imprisoned in Pisa in a specially made cage and "exhibited".

During this time, the most famous part of his Cantos , the "Pisaner Cantos", for which he received the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1949 , was created; for him had Léonie Adams , Conrad Aiken , WH Auden , Louise Bogan , TS Eliot , Robert Lowell , Katherine Anne Porter , Theodore Spencer , Allen Tate , Willard Thorp and Robert Penn Warren voted, while William Carlos Williams and Paul Green include and Katherine Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro had voted for a different author. He was charged with treason on July 26, 1943 in the USA along with Frederick W. Kaltenbach , Robert Best , Jane Anderson , Douglas Chandler , Edward Leo Delaney, Constance Drexel, and Max Otto Koischwitz . A post-conviction and possible death penalty , he only escaped because he of an appraiser for mentally ill was declared. He spent the next twelve years at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a state mental health institution in Washington, DC

In 1958, at the instigation of friends, including Ernest Hemingway , he was released. He returned to his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz in Italy and settled in the Brunnenburg above Meran in the Burggrafenamt (South Tyrol) and in Venice, which his daughter and her husband Boris de Rachewiltz owned . He lived largely withdrawn until his death and finally refused to speak at all. In 1967 Pound made his last trip to Paris to visit the sculptor Arno Breker . Pound was the model for a portrait in Breker's studio on Rue de Navarin . In the studio there was an encounter with Ira von Fürstenberg , who was also portrayed by Breker. In 1967 Pier Paolo Pasolini played a key role in the documentary Un 'ora con Ezra Pound produced by RAI . In it, the communist director and poet expressed his admiration for Pound and read his poems in Italian translation.

Even after 1945, Pound did not distance himself from fascism . He confessed to his "life in the totality of ups and downs". His grave is on the cemetery island of San Michele north of Venice.

plant

Pound's early work is characterized by his preoccupation with the work of the English Pre-Raphaelite and medieval literature, especially the Provencal troubadours and Dantes . This seal also gave rise to the models for Pound's "Personae" process. Starting from Robert Browning and his dramatic monologues and from William Butler Yeats , whose secretary Pound was for a time, Pound wrote poems in which the lyrical self is a famous poet personality (such as the troubadour Bertran de Born ), using this personality as an alter ego , as a mask (Latin persona means "acting mask "). It is not so much the texts that strive for an authentic rewrite than for a renewal of the poetic vision behind them.

The fascination for East Asian poetry led to a turning point in Pound's work. It was triggered by the notes of the Asia researcher Ernest Francisco Fenollosa with poems from China and Japan, which Pound inherited in 1913/1914. He translated Chinese poems and looked for an English equivalent of the Japanese haiku . One of his most famous poems, In a Station of the Metro , is one such modeled short poem. These "translations" did not try to reproduce the content as precisely as possible in the conventional sense, but wanted to renew the poetic qualities of the text in another language. Instead of using the correct words in terms of content, he preferred to use identical words in order to transform the spirit and sound of the texts into his own language. The best-known example of this new approach to ancient texts (Pound referred to the "New Method" in Literary Scholarship ) was his controversial translation of the Old English poem The Seafarer . In this context, Pound's work The Sextus propertius in homage from 1919 should also be viewed.

The anthology Des Imagistes (1914) published by Pound founded the Anglo-American literary movement of imagism , which propagated the central importance of a powerful, precise image for a poem. Both the Imagism movement and the later Vorticism , which also emerged in London, were shaped by the confrontation with the avant-garde challenge posed by the Italian Futurism of FT Marinetti.

Another turning point in Pound's lyrical work is the First World War , the senseless slaughter of which made him deeply doubt Europe's future and modernity. The fruit of this crisis was his most important long poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , in which he critically examines his London years, discarding various aesthetic-political points of view and for the first time basically using the term usura ( Latin for usury ) and rejecting the interest system . He identified "the Jews" as the supposed originators of the pernicious Usurah rule over the world and took up anti-Semitic stereotypes. Among other things, in Canto CII , published in 1937, he justified anti-Jewish riots with the alleged misconduct of rich Jews like the Rothschilds , whose names he corrupted as "stink guilt":

"Stinkschuld's sin drawing vengeance, poor yitts paying for Stinkschuld
paying for a few big Jew's vendetta on goyim."

"Stink guilt sin brings vengeance, poor Jidden pay for stink guilt,
pay for the blood revenge of a few great Jews against the goyim ."

The British literary critic Max Wykes-Joyce analyzed Pound's economic conceptions with sympathy in Some Considerations Arising from Ezra Pound's Conception of the Bank .

The model for his main work, The Cantos , was initially Dante's Divine Comedy , in later decades he integrated numerous other forms and an encyclopedic abundance of motifs, which are often of an occult or mystical nature. Central are the Pisan chants that he wrote during and after his internment in Italy.

Pound was a major sponsor of TS Eliot and James Joyce .

The Cantos are considered to be one of the most important poems of the 20th century in the USA. Pound was the model for numerous young poets. Nevertheless, it was controversial for many years and in some cases to this day; In particular, the controversy surrounding the Bollingen Award for the Pisaner Gesänge shows that Pound's support for fascism and his treason made him a “persona non grata” in many literary and journalistic circles.

Adaptations

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Hieratic head by Ezra Pound , marble, 1914
  • Hanns Cibulka deals in a late (2000) edited war diary about the end of the Second World War, referred to as a “novel”, among other things with Pound, to whom he puts his own sadness in the mouth. He searches for the camp where Pound was held in Italy for his collaboration and finds no trace of it. He can no longer determine whether Pound actually had to live there under the bad circumstances that have been reported; possibly these reports were only interest-based.
  • Fritz J. Raddatz translated the events surrounding the trial for treason into the radio play The Pound Trial in 1985 .
  • The French historian Jacques Le Goff makes several references to pounds usura-cantos in his work on the origin of the medieval concept of usury .
  • In 1997, Franz Koglmann composed by him Jazz - cantata O Moon My Pin-Up on that link to excerpts from the Pisan songs based.
  • The right-wing extremist and neo-fascist movement and party CasaPound , which has existed in Italy since 2003, refers programmatically to Ezra Pound.

Editions of the works

  • Certain Noble Plays of Japan : From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. 1916
  • Noh ", or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan : Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound. Macmillan, London, 1916.
  • Nō - From the genius of Japan. Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa, Serge Einstein, foreword: Eva Hesse . Die Arche, Zurich, 1963. ISBN 3-7160-1912-7 .
  • ABC of reading. Translation and epilogue by Eva Hesse. Arche Verlag, Zurich / Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-7160-2511-6 .
  • The Cantos . Bilingual edition, German translation by Eva Hesse, edited and commented by Heinz Ickstadt and Manfred Pfister . Arche Verlag, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7160-2654-0 .
  • Ezra Pound . (= Poetry album. 279). Märkischer Verlag, Wilhelmshorst 2008, ISBN 978-3-931329-79-2 .

literature

  • Aleida Assmann : The fall of Parnassus. The de-canonization EPs In: Aleida Assmann, Michael C. Frank (Ed.): Forgotten texts. UVK, Konstanz 2004, ISBN 3-87940-787-8 . (especially about Pounds anti-Semitism)
  • Leonard W. Doob: "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Contributions in American Studies. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 1978, ISBN 0-313-20057-2 .
  • Hans-Christian Kirsch : Ezra Pound. Represented with testimonials and photo documents. (= Rowohlt's monographs. No. 480). Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-499-50480-4 .
  • Eva Hesse (Ed.): Ezra Pound: 22 attempts on a poet. Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
  • Eva Hesse: Ezra Pound. Of sense and madness. Kindler, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-463-00728-2 .
  • Eva Hesse: The axis of avant-garde fascism. Reflections on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Ezra Pound. Arche, Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-7160-2123-7 .
  • Anthony David Moody: Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work. Volume 1: The Young Genius, 1885-1920. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-921557-7 . (Relevant monograph on the early work)
  • Paul Morrison: The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Paul De Man. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996. ISBN 978-0-195080858 .
  • Wieland Schmied : Ezra Pound Studies I. Rimbaud, Aachen 2000, ISBN 3-89086-752-9 .
  • Wieland Schmied: Ezra Pound Studies II. Difficult Beauty. Ezra Pound and the fine arts. Rimbaud, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-89086-705-7 .
  • Wieland Schmied: Memories of Ezra Pound. Rimbaud, Aachen 2002, ISBN 3-89086-719-7 .
  • Walther Skaupy, Great Trials of World History, The American poet Ezra Pound - mentally ill ?, p. 273 ff, Magnus Verlag, Essen
  • Leon Surette: Pound in Purgatory. From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. University of Illinois Press, 2003. ISBN 0-252-07159-X
  • Daniel Swift: The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound. Harvill Secker, London 2017.
  • Carroll F. Terrell: A Companion to 'The Cantos' of Ezra Pound. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles / London 1993, ISBN 0-520-08287-7 .

Web links

Commons : Ezra Pound  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Ezra Pound  - Quotes

Individual references, footnotes

  1. ^ Paul Morrison: The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Paul De Man. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996
  2. ↑ Members: Ezra Pound. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 20, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Jörg Bremer: Mein Kampf in Italian. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. August 18, 2012.
  4. ^ Richard Severo: Karl Shapiro, Prize-Winning Poet, Dies at 86. Obituary, in: The New York Times , May 17, 2000.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Wendy Flory: Pound and antisemitism. In: Ira B. Nadel (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, p. 293.
  6. ↑ Verses in the Cage. In: Der Spiegel . 19/1958, accessed April 26, 2012.
  7. ^ Fritz J. Raddatz: The Pound Process. Director: Günter Hahn. With Hans Paetsch , Alois Garg, Heinz-Theo Branding , Gerd Mayen , Rolf Becker , Wolfgang Büttner and others DLF / WDR 1985, 83 minutes; see. Contribution to the broadcast date March 17, 2012 at DLF (accessed on March 21, 2012).
  8. ↑ Jacques Le Goff: Usury and Infernal Torments. Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. 2nd Edition. Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-608-94468-6 , pp. 194ff.
  9. ^ Matthew Feldman, Andrea Rinaldi: 'Penny-wise ...'. Ezra Pound's Posthumous Legacy to Fascism. In: Paul Jackson, Anton Shekhovtsov (Eds.): The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right. A Special Relationship of Hate. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-39619-8 , pp. 39ff.
personal data
SURNAME Pound, Ezra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pound, Ezra Weston Loomis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Hailey (Idaho) , Idaho
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1972
Place of death Venice