Ezra Pound's Cantos. Why so meta?

Abstract

[...]the current paper focuses on the ways of and the reasons for writing about and beyond cultural elements. [...]the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil The liquid and rushing crystal beneath the knees of the gods... First honey and cheese honey at first and then acorns Honey at the start and then acorns honey and wine and then acorns (C: 194) In a later canto, Circe's myth is linked to the idea of usury and of lust which transforms men into pigs: every bank of discount is downright iniquity Robbing the public for private individual's gain nec benecomata Kirkê, mah KaKa ^apYOK' ¿öwkev neither with lions nor leopards attended but poison, veleno in all the veins of commonweal (C: 208) Here we have Latin and Greek besides English used jointly to communicate the evil effects of usury. [...]the text foregrounds a transformation as example (Circe's, Actaeon's, Procne's) and then turns it into an allegorical instrument for the extraction of a theme or idea (love must be free from repressive action) followed by its actualization in the cotext (The Cantos) and context (for example, Pound's incarceration due to his manifested ideology).

Headnote

Abstract:

If the general acceptance of meta- (...-) is something beyond or about something else, with Ezra Pound, it tends to be something about everything. Within an epistemological vortex of references, from American politics to medieval France, we, the readers, are given critical suggestions, reconsiderations and a considerable amount of work to do about and beyond the meaning of the words on the page. The Cantos are a brilliantly assembled register of cultural signifiers. Merging in a context of dynamism, they signify beyond the primary connections to factual data. Myths, metaphors or metamorphoses become decontextualized representations, models and vehicles for a higher, more abstract or more complex vision of the whole. Pound is constantly using and manipulating meaning for a higher goal. This does not guarantee a full understanding of the characteristics of the signifiers, nor is it intended to. Therefore, the current paper focuses on the ways of and the reasons for writing about and beyond cultural elements.

Keywords: context, cultural signifiers, metadiscourse, metaphor, metaphrase, metamorphosis, metareferentiality, metatext, modernism

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Introduction

Since the bulk of our doctoral research has focused mostly on the extrinsically pertinent aspects concerning Pound's internationalism, with a focus on such imagological concepts as spector-spectant, ethnocentrism and otherness, as they appear in the Cantos (and not only), we find it profitable to tackle here some of the more intrinsic mechanisms of meaning production by focusing on the interplay of signifiers branching into an intricate network of intra- and intertextualities. It is, as W.K. Wimsatt put it, the critic's task or commitment to go into the poem and bring out trophies (1965: 215). And trophies we find in abundance in this American poet's texts, if only one takes the time and the patience to look for them. For the modern reader, several Pound Companions (Terell, 1993) are nowadays available and necessary in order to reach a fuller comprehension of texts like the Cantos. These forms of meta-literature compensate for the missing information, characteristic of Pound's laconic style, or for the actuality that has become outdated today. But poetry, according to Pound is "news that stays news" and the literariness of the text is conveyed by the poems' capacity to strike the reader's intuition and sensibility by a constant use of foregrounding and backgrounding of semantic references and context. The modernity of this device, together with Pound's encyclopaedic knowledge, makes the readers of poetry feel they are in the presence of greatness. With the inclusion of non-liter ary texts in the poem, doubled by sudden changes of code (of language) or even of alphabets (Chinese, Sanskrit), not to mention the blanks on the page, the reader is taken beyond his or her legitimate expectations of a poem. The poem becomes something about something else.

What part ob yu iz deh poEM? (Mauberley: 37)

The answer is in the inclusiveness of the epic. The poet (Pound/ Mauberley) uses the lyric as a poetic catalogue of signs. Parts of it relate to previous texts, others refer to the distant past or to the far-distant. Filtered through the personality of the writer, the poem superposes several layers of texts into one, to give a new, personal orientation to the whole. The text in itself becomes a part of its creator.

Modernisms

With the Modernists' reconsideration of the poem in the early '20s and their undertaking to make it new, special topoi, as well as poetic registers, have made their (re)entry into the literary, together with the revisitation of earlier models, like the Provençal, the Renaissance or the Antiquity. The poets of the High Modernist generation, with Ezra Pound as arguably the most aggressively modern of them all, and their fascination for the remotely past or the remotely far, helped accomplish an artistic re-evaluation of culture from a modern perspective. A secondary level of literariness was invented: literature about literature, and including (not only) literature. Hence the meta-dimension of the poems. The polyphony and the heterogeneity of the text make up the difficult beauty of poems like The Cantos, The Waste Land or Paterson, to be comprehended as a whole. Rather, the multitude of references, voices and centrifugal meanings span from philological re-interpretations of previous texts to social models, history, politics and ambitions of a post romantic cultural renaissance. In this irreducible abundance, Ezra Pound extended the limits of the language of poetry into a progression through ages and texts for the partisans of a cultural renaissance. In order to do so, Pound turned towards the Ancients:

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with the bellying canvas.

Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.

Sun to slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean. (C: 3)

These are the opening lines of the Cantos, in Pound's English version of the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Beginning in illo tempore with "And then..." suggests that the poem may already have begun long before the poetry reader started reading. Pound's magistral opening, in the mythical mode, starts by addressing our memory, more precisely the modern reader's prior knowledge of the Odyssey. Forwarding this passage in initial position (as it was first designed as the ending of Canto III) functions as a first attempt to intertextual recovery. Pound credits, apparently, his idealized readership with an enlightened reading practice so as to trigger an ideogrammic energy of symbolization from revisited texts.

Metaphrase

Revisiting Homer via a Latin translation by a sixteenth century poet, Andreas Divus, in other words poetically re-translating a poetic translation, rather than familiarizing the subject, it defamiliarizes what we knew about Homer by making the passage strange again. Latin was already a dead language at the time of Andreas Divus' translation, so by using a late Renaissance text loosely translated into an archaic-sounding English, the metaphrase functions as a go-between from mythical past to re-actualized present. This is, of course, aesthetically relevant for Pound's technique of poetic actualization. Raising the curtain on Ulysses setting sail and further addressing the spirits of the dead is in itself a metaphor of this poem populated by ghosts. It is also a metadiegesis, an epic within the epic. In the imposing archaic register of this Homeric epic, the shadows of the dead, who drink from the sheep's sacrificial blood, will start speaking in human tongues. This passage sets the tone for the voices and the masks to come to life.

Voices, in the Cantos, manifest themselves visually on the page as foreign dialects or in between inverted comas, in truncated quotations or in shifts of register. Pound defended this process used at length by inserting untranslatable and un-familiar linguistic forms everywhere: "I have never intentionally used any classic or foreign form save where I asserted: this concept, this rhythm is so solid, so embedded in the consciousness of humanity, so durable in its justness that it has lasted 2000 years or nearly three thousand. When it has been an Italian or French word, it has asserted or I have meant it to assert some meaning not current in English, some shade of gradation." (Pound, 1991: 251) What the poet asserted is the truthfulness, or fidelity of the sources with the atmosphere or intention of the target text. In the beginning of Canto 20, for example, we read:

Sound slender, quasi tinnula

Ligur' aoide : « Si no'us vei, Domna don plus mi cal,

Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val. (C: 89)

The quotation is from Bernart de Ventadorn's Provençal poem Can par la flors (when the flower appears). It means "If I don't see you, Lady for whom I must burn, even not seeing you can't match my beautiful thought of you." (Terell, 1993: 81) Its sounds are as close to Latin or to Romanian as phonetically possible. Here, Ventadorn, as Pound's poetical mask, speaks not in metaphrase but in the original. His discourse melts into the modernist text as a luminous detail, a fragment whose beauty would be spoiled by metaphrasing. Quotations are used as objects in the Cantos; they symbolize as things. They represent slices of reality included in the text. Translation, on the other hand, for Pound, was to be an ingenuous 'turning' of previously produced text, which in Aristotelian rhetoric would be the equivalent of metaphorical translation.

Here we have the two processes more frequently used by Pound to mirror and work through revisited texts: conceiving a rough equivalent of an unfamiliar source or using it as such in his Canto. The musicality which the poet found and praised in Provençal verse comes to meet the requirements of the long modernist poem, just as its title (Cantos) indicates. From this perspective, the poem has an elitist cast. Medieval sourcing represents an artifice taking the reader beyond the relative opacity of the Procençal and into a diafane melopoeia, i.e. words "charged" beyond their normal meaning with some musical property which further directs their signification. (1954: 25) As elitist as Pound's intention may seem, the sound of the verses appeals to any reader, whereas alliterations ("Soundslender", "Domna don"), assonances ("Ligur' aoide: Si no'us") and the rhythm of the lines create an impression of ancient music. The awareness of a go-between from present to medieval past introduces a diachronic dimension in the synchronicity of writing. Once we comprehend, via footnotes or Companions, phrases such as Catullus's "quasi tinnula", Homer's rendering of the songs of the sirens, "ligur' aoide", besides the quotation from Ventadorn's lyric, we incorporate meaning from earlier literature into the context of the Cantos. "Any mind ... worth calling a mind" will discover "needs" beyond the existing categories of his or her language, Pound explains. (1961: 87-88)

About the opportunity or desirability of inserting passages from the classic or the foreign into the modern lyric, what needs to be clarified is the necessity of re-working them into a new sign, or a cluster of signs. The interpreter of these signs, made accessible to him from a poly-lingual context, must construct a semiosis based on the justness of their cultural context. The outcome of this process of interpretation is a signifying unit in the manner of a hieroglyph or an ideogram. The archaic, the classic and the melopoeic fuse together in a sort of signifying compound, which becomes the heart of the Canto. Imbued with the musicality of the Provençal, Canto XX continues:

Between the two almond trees flowering,

The viel held close to hisside;

And another: s'adora".

"Possum egonaturae

non meminisse tuae!" Qui son Properzio ed Ovidio. (C: 89)

The glittering melody of the alliterative verse (in bolded characters) above is enhanced by the preceding lines, when suddenly Ovid and Propertius (and possibly Eliot - Possum) join in this musical decorum of alliterative lyric, intermingling languages and sounds. The Canto slipped into a form of reminiscent diachronic set of motifs illuminating the synchronicity of the discourse. Hence the metatextual dimension of this passage in which Pound's text expands into a harmonious blending with other texts.

Metadiegesis

On a different level of interpretation, the epic within the epic has proven its efficiency as Pound's favourite technique of textual blending. In order to defend the inclusions of texts so different in nature into his poem, Pound forwards the notion of historical equivalence. In other words, luminous details found in history (Western or Oriental), art and texts can be joined together, if the link is pertinent. Translation, transliteration, quotation or metaphrase can enrich the epic if they prove relevant and if they render some of the qualities of the target text more vivid, in other words more authentic. If literal translation often fails to "make new" a poem to the modern sensibility, poetic assimilation or authentication in a broader epic such as the Cantos give the quotes a renewed signifying energy.

Pound's extensive use of quotations superposes layers upon layers of cultural signifiers, by a new articulation of subjects and by developing or re-using themes or epic pieces, such as the often cited passage from Canto IV about Soremonda's death: "And she went toward the window/ The slim white stone bar/ Making a double arch" (C: 13). Later on, the same motif is reused, in Canto CXVII "Without jealousy / like the double arch of a window / Or some great colonnade" (C: 678). Another variant is pasting a quotation in its original form and reusing it in paraphrase in another Canto. Circe's words from the Odyssey, for example, appear in original form in Canto XXXIX "koko ^apYaK ¿5®k£v" and in a paraphrase at the beginning of Canto XLVII. It is clear that such a palimpsest of quotations produces a special topos, by-passing the time and space coordinates and putting together voices from the past or the legendary with voices from the present, including Pound's own. Quotation, metaphrasing and repetition of motifs transform the modernist text into a literary palimpsest.

The question whether this process makes the references more accessible and poetic, or on the contrary, makes the Cantos more obscure and hermetic, is still a matter of debate. Pound's lifelong project had always been to assemble an epic for the Western civilization. As such, his Cantos were intended to be a practical instrument for instructing and rejuvenating the West by presenting it with the treasures of the Orient, and to that end the poet compiled a modernist encyclopaedia (from the Greek enkyklios 'well rounded' and paideia 'education') or paideuma, as Frobenius called it. Nonetheless, the poem, written with the declared intention of building something unique and singular, becomes the repetition of a repetition, which is the very essence of the modernist meta-diegetic epic.

Metaphor

Before moving further to consider some textual evidence of the above, we have to mention Pound's views on the metaphor, as it represents the very essence of his poetical discourse. Influenced by the orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, Pound saw in metaphor the very primitive device which speech is built on, and the first generator of poetry. The meta- in metaphor, standing for the subtle transfer or carrying over of meaning between tenor and vehicle, allows the tenor to go beyond (meta-) its habitual sphere of reference and to bear (-phero) unexpected semantic qualities (luminous details in Pound's terms) without impregnating it with abstraction. It charges the meaning to the utmost possible degree, much more than an as if. "Metaphor... is at once the substance of nature and of language". (1964: 23) So the Cantos builds itself into a knot of intersecting metaphors. To complicate things even further, Fenollosa introduced Pound to the Chinese ideogram, the metaphorical writing par excellence. In the ideogram, the subject and object are fused together because the ideogram visually depicts the metaphoric layers of reality, as all the words are things. Pound used this as a metaphorical fusion technique between motifs, themes and characters. As in Canto IV, when the Provençal enriches the mythical mode as follows:

Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil

The liquid and rushing crystal beneath the knees of the gods...

Danäe! Danäe!...

the god's bride, lay ever waiting the golden rain (C: 15-16)

Notice how Pound blends the notions of light, rain and the divine fertility in Provençal original and the paraphrased myth. These are motifs of love, eroticism and rebirth, blended into a metaphor of the vital flow of creativity.

Another of Pound's metaphorical use of motifs resides in the social and political motifs that overlap so as foreground qualities and ideals observable in one of the models. For instance, the figure of John Adams appears in Cantos LII-LXXI, dealing with China and with American history, overlaying social themes in the juxtaposition China/ America. Each world modifies the other and both are shaped at times into a loose allegory in favour of the Italian Fascist regime and of its leader. One line referring literally to nature can be considered as a moral reading of the Chinese history to follow, of all history and of the Cantos: "Strife is between light and darkness." (C: 320) The conclusion to be drawn from Chinese history is that good emperors and ministers follow good (Confucian) principles and bad ones do not. This is superposed over the principles of Western rule, for governments, as well as dynasties, take their "mandate" from the people (C: 322) and fall 'from losing the law of Chung Ni/Confucius". This is an ominous note, for it is the accusation Pound will bring against himself and Mussolini five years later in the Pisan Cantos, after the fall of the Fascist regime. In line 55, the Duke and the Italian people are addressed directly: "TSONG of TANG put up granaries/somewhat like those you want to establish". The Chinese emperor is obviously Mussolini in disguise. Personal identity surrenders to the interplay of moving identities.

After the last of the China cantos (Cantos LXI) carry the history of China down to about 1776 and anticipate the American Revolution and the rise of the Adamses, Pound presents the figure of John Adams metaphorically as an American equivalent for the Confucian good ruler. The ten Adams cantos that follow borrow extensively from the Works of John Adams. Pound's Adams is the man who, more than any other before him, brought about the birth of the United States as an independent nation. His character is summarized by the Greek word dvpóv (that which animates breath, spirit, force of mind and will), showing the President as a vital force in the shaping of America by virtue of his passionate commitment to the respect of the law as the basis of liberty. That is what places Adams in the line of succession to the exemplary emperors of Confucian China.

What is intended here is a transformation of Western thought, modelled upon the East. Not only do motifs and political ideologies transform one another, but, as seen above, one often finds examples of toponyms, events, identities, or poetic voices in transformation. "It is ultimately a metaphorical device" - William J. Gordon explains - because a local object or situation in a poem, always by parody or analogy, tends to suggest another object or situation which is not present." (Gordon 1961 in Moss and Morra, 2004: 186)Thus, in Canto IV, mentioned earlier, Itys and Cabestan are presented in a metaphorical relation, just like Actaeon and Vidal in the same canto. The same holds true for De Tierci and Menelaus in Canto V, or, further on, for both of them, in opposition to Saint Boniface in the next canto. We may thus speak of a poetic technique relating metaphor to metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis

Used allegorically as an interplay of ideologies, stories and myths, metamorphosis as a poetic technique is justified in the light of its ability to make new. This expression is repeated in Canto LIII, together with its corresponding ideogram:

...

The symbol joins the notions of sun and new in a compound, meaning 'rejuvenation, renewal day by day'.

Another example points to the metamorphosis of the idea that it is immoral to twist the will, to defraud one's fellow in need: it is the case of usury. To express this in verse, Pound uses two stories in transformation: first that of Circe who appears extensively throughout the first half of the Cantos. Canto XXXII shows the mutations she inflicts on men: "and thus are become as mere animals/ ...where in a sty, a stable or a stateroom" (C: 158-59). Canto XXXIX is focused entirely on her, and it mentions the potions she concocts for her male victims:

First honey and cheese

honey at first and then acorns

Honey at the start and then acorns

honey and wine and then acorns (C: 194)

In a later canto, Circe's myth is linked to the idea of usury and of lust which transforms men into pigs:

every bank of discount is downright iniquity

Robbing the public for private individual's gain

nec benecomata Kirkê, mah KaKa ^apYOK' ¿öwkev

neither with lions nor leopards attended

but poison, veleno

in all the veins of commonweal (C: 208)

Here we have Latin and Greek besides English used jointly to communicate the evil effects of usury. Greed is the link between the bank of discount and the luring traps of Circe. By intermingling the two threads in the canvas of the poem, Pound cleverly uses the theme of metamorphosis to transform the mythical into the social as Circe becomes a cultural signifier for greed.

Elsewhere, in the Chinese Cantos, we find the ruler Hien of Tang who dies in search of the alchemist's elixir "seeking the trasmutation of metals / seeking a word to make change" (C: 313). Immediately after we see the ideogram for to transform:

...

Here "seeking a word to make change" by plunging into Orientalism, as he saw it, had long been one of Pound's techniques for building a metatext. Everywhere the poet superposes cultural signs, or themes or referents; he adds an ideology to the source text(s), which was not present in the original. As in the episode of Soremonda's death, in Canto IV:

Ityn!

Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!

And she went toward the window and cast her down,

"All the while, the while, swallows crying:

Ityn!

"It is Cabestan's heart in the dish."

"It is Cabestan's heart in the dish?"

"No other taste shall change this."

And she went toward the window,

the slim white stone bar

Making a double arch;

Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone;

Swung for a moment,

and the wind out of Rhodez

Caught in the full of her sleeve.

. . . the swallows crying:

'Tis. 'Tis. 'Ytis! (C: 13)

After being served her lover's, Cabestan's, heart in a dish by her jealous husband, Soremonda prepares her own defenestration. Here, the motifs of metamorphosis are highly intensified as Pound's text is woven from the epic of Cabestan and that of Itys, Procne's son, served in a dish to his adulterous father by Philomel. The legends blend with an echo from Horace, which makes the allusion even richer: Ityn flebiliter gemens (Horace, Odes, IV, 12): the swallow (Procne, metamorphosed) weeps Itys with such lamenting tones while making her nest. It is from the incessant leitmotif of the swallow's cry that the metamorphosis overtones are obtained. The two myths intertwine with the theme of love which must be free.

The metamorphosis of an idea operates a change within a change. Firstly, the text foregrounds a transformation as example (Circe's, Actaeon's, Procne's) and then turns it into an allegorical instrument for the extraction of a theme or idea (love must be free from repressive action) followed by its actualization in the cotext (The Cantos) and context (for example, Pound's incarceration due to his manifested ideology). About the metamorphic actualization of myths, Pound wrote in a 1915 essay in The New Age (quoted in Hirsch 1999: 132-33):

The first myths arose when aman walked sheer into"nonsense", that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiving that no one could understand what he meant... he made a myth-a work of art that is -an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words. That story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotion in others.

Following this, the essay goes on to discuss myths that can be used allegorically to express political or ethical ideals.

Metamorphosis as metaphor

When Pound uses metamorphoses as metaphors, he makes them available to the sensibility of the informed reader in a form of language that by-passes language. Themes and motifs such as violence, beauty, freedom of love, perversity of usury or good leadership are generated out of this multifaceted diegesis that transforms, adapts and repeats them, mapping a multitude of semantic signs onto the canvas of such a broad metatext. The variety of signs, together with the interactivity of epics in Pound's never-ending poem, is born out of a drive to use and to re-use the stories meta-diegetically into a cluster of ideas so as to make it cohere (C: 816). For this, Pound uses another term borrowed from the anthropologist Frobenius, that of sagetrieb (the instinct to tell stories, observed by Frobenius in the oral cultures of African tribes). Pound's drive to tell and re-tell legends is manifested everywhere in the Cantos, but the poem's originality consists in having the epics interact with one another, in energizing them, so that they become interconnected, mutually revealing.

For example, Pound's fascination for the Orient and his fascist ideals are treated in analogy, as Pound's Confucius lends moral authority to the Italian dictator's political goals. Theories on social credit and proper value increase, as opposed to usury, are placed in relation to writing techniques (good and bad writing). Further through the Pisan Cantos, Mussolini's fall and execution are poetically assimilated to Pound's own detention and François Villon's macabre lyric, Testament.

Recollection triggers meditation and association of ideas, such as in the Pisan Cantos, where the poet had almost no sources available for poetry writing, and memory pointed out references forwarding the motif of a consciousness of loss, against the background of the Italian detention camp. The tone is that of Villon:

Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,

color, diastasis,

careless or unaware it had not the

whole tent's room

nor was the place for the full ...

interpass, penetrate

casting but shade beyond the other lights

sky's clear

night's sea

green of the mountain pool

shone from the unmasked eyes in a half-mask's space.

What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

Fist came the seen, then thus the palpable

Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell (C: 540-41)

There is much seeing in this passage, as the Canto mirrors back one of Cavalcanti's Canzone, where love comes from seeing, which in turn leaves so many "forméd traces" or elements of experience in the consciousness of the lover, so that the heart becomes an Elysium able to record and store images in itself, like a poem. Pound's Canto, or the Cavalcanti's Canzone, lyrical forms of verse meant to be read out loud, or sung, or learned by heart take us back to the notion of sagetrieb, the drive or instinct to tell legends, orally, to the members of the community; the stories told in the final instalments of the Cantos foreground a series of myths gravitating round such themes as metamorphosis and substitution, on a background of loss, regret and fear of futility and of madness. These fragments of Cantos reach an ultimate shattering of the voice as in the following lines:

I have brought the great ball of crystal; who can lift it?

Can you enter the great acorn of light?

But the beauty is not the madness

Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod,

I cannot make it cohere. (C: 815-16)

The metaphor of the ball of light is all too illustrative here. For the legend teller, who no longer uses masks but the I more than anywhere else in the Cantos, the sagetrieb is threatened by the incoherencies and contradictions in the epic. This disillusioned retrospective assessment shifts the technique from prevalence of metaphrase to metaphor, as the overwhelming quantity of the signifying units, forming the magician/ storyteller's ball of crystal, jeopardizes the intended finality of this all-too-inclusive poem.

Towards the end of the passage, the tone takes the form of lament:

Let the Gods forgive what I

have made

Let those I love try to forgive

what I have made. (C: 822)

Jean-Michel Rabaté (2010: 140) sees in forgive some remnants of give, of transmission of the gift of the poem, paraphrasing Mallarmé, but also of forget, which compromises the sagetrieb and the very essence of an epic. The former make it appropriate for the unfinished poem to be "given forward" and allowed to be reworked into new intertexts. The latter justify a lyric of regret and a subsequent silence of the poet that lasted until his death. As Pound's Cantos were intended to express a poetics of impersonality, the dislocations, cracks and the irregularities in the discourse prevail, but the intertextualities and the frequent plunges into semantic areas of different cultures and eras in search of the "gold thread in the pattern." (C: 807) make up the meta-textual dimension of this epic at the scale of the 20th century.

References

References

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