Ezra - the poet in the cage of the epoch

In the eighties, in the time of my human and intellectual initiation - and those were my student years in Sarajevo - in the company of bohemian-minded young writers, you couldn't help but know who Ezra Pound was. In bistros filled with tobacco smoke, anecdotes about his arrogance, crazy outbursts and - fascism were recounted. At that time, the poet had only been dead for a decade.

What we talked about the least, and what made this American significant, was his poetry. You couldn't just talk about it, like records or unrequited love. We read it individually, understood some things, intuitively understood some things. But for us at that time his work was too impassable, too demanding and cryptic.

Pound's verses are digested throughout his life. He, along with another American, TS Eliot, fell into intellectual challenges that few could match. Those "poets of culture" would remain hermetic, despite the multitude of their own and others' footnotes. Nevertheless, such distant voices reminded us that all poetry without knowledge of several thousand years of singing is dilettante chatter.

European born in America

Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in the American town of Hailey, in the state of Idaho. His father, Homer Loomis Pound, was a gold appraiser in the state treasury, and his grandfather was a senator. In 1906, he studied Roman studies in Pennsylvania, then moved to New York. During his studies, he met William Carlos Williams, who later would also become a great American poet. After graduation, he works as a professor in Indiana. In 1907, he was expelled from the service due to an alleged breach of morals. In 1908, he went to Europe - to Venice. Publishes the first collection of poems "When the lights go out". Venice will remain a mythical place for him - after all, the place where his grave will be.

"And you showed me the beauty of your Venice, until/ Her grace in me became/ too clear a tear." (Night Prayer)

Pound soon moved to London and tried to make a living from writing, lecturing and translating. He spends his days in the reading room of the British Museum. He left a record that he wanted to learn more about poetry by the age of thirty than any living man knows about it. Even during his studies, he became a polyglot. He learned Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Old English, and Provençal or Occitan, the language of the medieval troubadours.

Wild years

He solved the dilemma of his contemporaries whether he should write in rhyme or in free verse with the note: "Not a single verse is free for the one who is seriously engaged in work..." Therefore, even a non-rhymed poem has its own inner necessity, it requires precise images and a melody, which do not make it less disciplined than rhyming.

Following a series of published books, Pound founded the Imagist school of poetry. He worked for some time as the secretary of the later literary Nobel laureate, William Butler Yeats. Yeats's verses will be found in several places, mosaically woven into Pound's poetry. He marries the English artist Dorothy Shakespeare, who publishes her graphics in the Blast magazine, co-founded by Pound. The magazine proclaims "vorticism", it is close to Cubism and Italian Futurism.

He compiled the first anthology of Chinese poetry, then translated it from Japanese. He will translate all his life - from Confucius to Trakl. His idiosyncratic, sometimes controversial translations will remain unique creations. Pound did not translate literally. He recreated the text in his own language, sometimes recreating it from scratch. In 1920, he moved to Paris.

In Paris, he meets Olga Raj, an American violinist. He will remain in a love triangle with her and his wife for the rest of his life. Olga gives birth to a daughter, Mary, and Dorothy, in Paris, to a son, Omar Shakespeare Pound. It is recorded that Olga was driven to the hospital to give birth by Ernest Hemingway.

Pound's son will be an American volunteer in World War II - on the opposite side of his father.

And Olga will be the woman who will stay with him in Venice until the end, even in the period when his elderly behavior was more than eccentric and when he fell into a longer, defiant silence.

American insomnia

In London and Paris, Pound socialized with later world greats of literature and art. He helped some of them, such as TS Eliot, James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway, in their first attempts to climb the ladder of literary fame. Nevertheless, Pound eventually became disgusted with the cradle of hard capitalism, England, as well as its global capitalist realization - America. He viewed his homeland as a raw, uncultivated land. He wrote: "When I just think about what America would look like, / If the classics were torn apart more / I can't sleep all night". Pound believed that the system embodied by his native country was - organized robbery. According to him, capitalism of that kind inevitably leads to war.

After 16 years in London and Paris, he goes back to Italy, whose past he idealized. Driven by resistance to capitalist unspirituality, he began to wish for an alternative response to that type of system that would curb usury and brokering.

Poetization of fascism

In Italy, which he loved as the homeland of Dante, it seemed to him that in the encroaching fascist movement he could see a model of state and society that would be the answer to the unbearable state of the world. He paid dearly for that delusion, but he never renounced it clearly and loudly.

"Equality before the law.

It's over with the pisistratus; now

We choose sometimes a scoundrel, sometimes a eunuch

To rule us".

When he says this in the poem "Hugh Selwyn Moberly", Pound seems to be a diagnostician of modern times, and the poem is more than 100 years old. The problem was not the diagnosis of the condition of humanity, but the illusion that a cure was at hand. In the fascist leader Mussolini, he saw a contemporary Pisistratus, the ancient Greek Athenian tyrant, who distributed the wealth of his fugitive opponents to the people of Athens, and according to tradition, he is also responsible for writing down Homer's hymns.

Pound's problem is that he did not recognize Duce as a scoundrel, but stubbornly believed that he was a modern-day Pisistratus. He calls Mussolini and his mistress "Ben and Clara" in the verses.

Metamorphoses instead of the Bible

For politicians from the Western Hemisphere, for the Americans, and especially for the British, Pound had only the harshest words: "They make speeches through their buttholes,/ they address the crowd in the mushroom..." (Canto XIV). The priestly class did not fare better either. They are for the poet "fighters against vice who fart through silk/ waving Christian symbols". Pound believed that the foundation of Europe should be Ovid's Metamorphoses, not the Bible. Of all Christianity, he valued only mystics and apostates.

On the eve of the Second World War in 1939, he visited America, left notes at Harvard - they say he was also a unique reciter of his own poetry. But he returns to Mussolini's Italy, which has already shown its aggressive face.

Pound's political delusion also has an obsessive foundation. "The past is an ideal to strive for," Milovan Danojlić, his translator into Serbian, wrote about the poet. In the preface to the book of Pound's selected poems, which was published in 1975 in the late BIGZ, in an incredible 5 copies, we learn that the poet tried to interest Mussolini in his ideal of a just world. Duce didn't really care about it, considering his suggestions as a poetic quirk.

Singing in a cage

During World War II, Pound read anti-American texts on Radio Rome. His anti-Semitism intensified. Goebbels even predicted him as one of a number of European collaborationist intellectuals who visited the Katyn Forest. When they occupied that area in 1943, the Nazis discovered mass graves in which Polish victims of the Soviet NKVD secret police were buried. However, Pound was crossed off the guest list as unreliable. However, four verses in his Bins he consecrated Katynja.

In 1942, he did not receive permission to join the Americans who were evacuated from Italy to Portugal. In 1943, he was accused in absentia in the USA of treason. In 1945, he was imprisoned in an iron cage in the American military camp near Pisa for some time and thus "exposed".

Pound rejected the modern world, and the modern world, embodied in the victorious America, put him in a cage for supporting criminal dictators whom he saw as heralds of a new world.

In that period, his famous "Pisan canti", songs in captivity, were created.

Madhouse and prizes

In America, he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and transferred to the St. Elizabeth Prison Hospital in Washington, where he will spend 12 years. "Buckets" are published in America, and in 1949 they received a significant award. This caused a heated controversy in the public. Can Mussolini's fans be important American and world poets? The jury, which included some of the greatest poets of the 20th century, such as Thomas Stearns Eliot, who received the Nobel Prize for literature a year before, or Vistan Hugh Auden, answered in the affirmative.

The left-wing poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini answered that question in 1967 with a documentary film about Pound, in which Pasolini himself recites Pound's verses. Socialist Yugoslavia answered the same question a long time ago with its translation practice. What would our libraries be without the best literary works of open sympathizers of Nazism, Knut Hamsun or Gottfried Behn? Mussolini's fan Pound is definitely in that series.

After an appeal signed by world-famous writers, such as Hemingway, he was released from the mental hospital in 1958. He returns to Italy, to his daughter Mary and her mother, his lover Olga, who never left him alone. He died there in 1972, at the age of 87. He was buried in Venice.

Translator Danojlić believes that Pound, in his voyage "against time and outside of time", remains a fascinating phenomenon that "stands out for the madness in which there is true greatness", and that the stubborn resistance to modernity is nevertheless also "an indication of the pride of the human spirit".

A book written 50 years ago

Since "Canto I" with verse was written down "Then we crowded to the ship", until the last, one hundred and twentieth canto from this series, more than 50 years have passed.

"Canto LXXIV" is a sumptuous, impenetrable poem about our civilization in which names from Odysseus to Stalin appear. And there are also songs with just a few verses. Pound made a Homeric attempt to encompass his epoch, which he was stubbornly opposed to. He shared his poetic and intellectual obsessions with Provençal troubadours, Italian Renaissance poets, Homer, and Confucius. He did not create a rounded but fragmentary, but monumental work. Without the glossary provided by the translator Danojlić, much would remain unlocked for us. And they contain 11 determinants from the history of civilization - an American Englishman counted them. Those verses, says Danojlić, are looking for "unusual readers, readers who are patient and persistent, with a special preference for a type of rebus, which did not arise from mere leisure."

There were few such readers in 1975, when the translation was published. Today, almost half a century later, there are hardly any of them outside the narrowest professional circle. The reader's patience is running out in the digital age.

Perhaps Pound's poems would be more comprehensible with a new multimedia technique, in which they would be organized like a multidimensional virtual space, in which we can freely go to any encyclopedic digression, and return to the mainstream. It would be a kind of poetry video game.

"With wax in the ears"

It could be said that against the excessive indulgence of his poetic contemporaries, Pound contrasted the cold edge of haiku and the network of meanings from the multi-millennia verse stock of humanity.

Did Pound sing in vain? Did his will for a song create a work that shines with a cold glow, but does not allow access to itself, hard as a diamond? Poignant, easily understandable passages say that the poet, like a diver, descended into the depths of the past in search of beauty that can last:

"Tell her I'd give anything, just

Her beauty lasts, like a rose

Enchanted in amber".

Following in the footsteps of Horace, he named one of his poems after the verses of the Roman poet: monumentum aere...

Horatio says in that poem that he raised "...monument/ more impassable than bronze/ and higher than the royal pyramids". He believed that a good poem will search all human material achievements.

Following in the footsteps of Horace, Pound responds with a poem to the objection of his contemporaries that he is "too self-conscious" and that he wears "dresses of pride". He says that the "insignificant parts" of him will disappear. But he says to his critics:

"As far as you are concerned, you will rot in the ground,/ and the question is whether your rot will be rich enough/ to maintain the grass over your grave".

We know that Horace's poetry lasted longer than the mighty Roman Empire. The following can be said about Pound: whoever wants to understand contemporary poetry, willy-nilly, cannot help but stumble upon his work. Although he is deeply immersed in the millennium-long poetic tradition, he paradoxically modernized poetic practice. Or, as he wrote in the song "Provincia deserta": "I walked those roads; thought of them as if they were alive".

His obsessive search for the truth in the past of human civilizations, his serious political delusions, his encyclopedic education, multilingualism, his consequent craziness combined with lucidity, make him one of the most interesting literary phenomena of the last century.

Finally, Milovan Danojlić wrote something back in 1975, to which even today there is not much to add: "Ezra Pound passed through our century with wax in his ears; by resisting him, he helped us to understand: that we do not originate from yesterday".