24. 1500 Seiten Pound

Die erste vollständige Veröffentlichung der Gedichte Ezra Pounds meldet Guy Davenport im Bookforum:

The inclusion of Pound in the Library of America—the publishing house Edmund Wilson campaigned for in the New York Review of Books and that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation brought into being in 1979—is as much a surprise as Simenon in the Pléiade. Although many will object, as they have over the years, that Pound’s poetry is unintelligible, hopelessly obscure, perhaps not even poetry at all, the inevitable objection will be Pound’s anti-Semitism, unrepentant Fascism, and the charge of treason in World War II for which he spent thirteen years in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. Here Pound found himself in a Kafkaesque double bind (complete with a psychiatrist named Kavka): To get out, he would have to be declared sound of mind. But if legally sane, his next venue would be a firing squad. One of the first things that happened to him in St. Elizabeths was being awarded the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry (for The Pisan Cantos). The prize was administered by the Library of Congress, and the money for this prize came from the Bollingen Foundation, which had it from aluminum tycoon Paul Mellon, son of Andrew, the secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1932.

POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS BY EZRA POUND, EDITED BY RICHARD SIEBURTH. NEW YORK: LIBRARY OF AMERICA. 1,383 PAGES. $45.

THE PISAN CANTOS BY EZRA POUND, EDITED BY RICHARD SIEBURTH. NEW YORK: NEW DIRECTIONS. 192 PAGES. $45.

/ April 2004