No More Learning

Ezra Pound
Cordially yours, Ezra Pound
? 148
IV POUND'SCONTRIBUTIONSTOJAPANESE PERIODICALS: 1939-40
JJuRiNG THE YEARS 1939 and 1940, Pound enthusiastically wrote articles from Italy to Japanese newspapers on the European cultural, political, and economic events of the time. In 1940, he had become the Italian Correspon- dent of the Japan Times.
The Japan Times was founded in 1897 as the first and oldest English newspaper edited by Japanese in Japan. It wished, as the first editor, Motosada Zumoto, put it, to "endeavor to explain things and smooth the way between foreigners and Japanese. " Its "slogan" has been "All the News Without Fear or Favor. " In 1918 it merged with the Japan Mail and Times (originally started as the Japan Mail in 1870 but changed its name at the merger with the short-lived Japan Times which had been established in 1878). [For further reference see The Japan Times: A History from 1861 to the Present, ed. Shinichi Hasegawa (Tokyo, 1966]. ]
At the time Pound was contributing his articles to the newspaper, its official name was The Japan Times and Mail. Its chief editor, Yasotaro Mori, was a friend of Katue Kitasono.
Pound's articles, however, are his observations and his analyses of Europe in the pre-war and early war years. Some parts are somewhat biased, but scattered throughout are some quite illuminating passages. Collected here (under somewhat regularized revised headings] are:
1 Tri-lingual System Proposed for World Communications (15 May 1939]
2 Death of Yeats: End of Irish Literary Revival (5 June 1939) 3 Study of Noh Continues in West (10 December 1939]
4 An Ezra Pound Letter from Rapallo (8 January 1940]
5 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (4 March 1940]
6 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (18 April 1940]
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (13 June 1940)
8 Letter from Rapallo: In War Appear Responsibilities (22 July 1940) 9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (12 August 1940]
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (26 August 1940]
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (2 September 1940) 12 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (29 September 1940)
The original title for article 1 was in Pound's typescript "Communica-
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 149
tions, or Cultural Front. " and for article 2, "Cultural News: State of the Occident in April, anno xvii Era Fascisti (a. d. 1939). " Article 4 bore the sub-heading "Annual Music Week," and article 5, "Ezra Pound Asks Schol- ars Here to Solve Issues. " Articles 6 and 7 appeared in the Japan Times Weekly (published alsoby the/apan Times and Mail), and articles 9, 10, 11
and 12 were reprinted in it, respectively, on 22 August, 5 September, 12 September, and 10 October (1940).
I am indebted to the work done by Shiro Tsunoda on articles 1, 2, and 3 which appeared in "A Study of Some Articles Contributed by Ezra Pound to The Japan Times and Mail," Obirin University Studies of English and American Literature, nos. 23, 24, 25 (1983, 1984, 1985).
? 150
SECTION IV: ESSAYS
Tri-Lingual System Proposed for World Communications
Noted Scholar of Noh Suggests Bilingual or Trilingual Edition of Hundred Best Books on Japanese Literature
1
Note:
known in Japan, is one of the few foreigners who made enthusiastic introduction abroad of Japanese "Noh" plays and stands shoulder to shoulder with Ernest Fenollosa as a scholar devoted to the stud_v of Japanese culture. Mr. Pound has a brilliant literary record and is at present visiting the United States. --Editor, The Japan Times
The writer of the following article, Ezra Loomis Pound, although not well-
I AM READING The Japan Times with pleasure in the hope of getting some European or American news that hasn't been doctored to suit one interest or another. The difficulty in writing to a new public is to know what they have already heard. One doesn't want to bore the reader by telling him what his aunt Jemima has told him or what he has read in the week before last's picture supplement.
Perhaps I had better begin with what has not yet happened. The Italian papers are full of news of the cultural pact with Japan. I have three pro- posals for the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai. First: I respectfully ask considera- tion for a bilingual or trilingual edition of the hundred best books of Japanese and ideogramic literature.
The Leica grainless film and microphotographic processes now make such an edition commercial. It can be produced at the same price as the Loeb library of Greek and Latin texts (which has an English translation on the opposite page). With microphotography there is no reason for not using ideogramic pages taken direct from works of master calligraphers. We in the West now have only a few such pages, notably a few from ideograms written for Ernest Fenollosa by one of the Court masters.
Wanted: Noh Film
Secondly: The whole of the Noh could be filmed, or at any rate the best Noh music could be registered on sound-track. Your film Mitsuko filled me with nostalgia. It is 15 years since Tami Koume's friends sang me fragments of Noh in Paris but the instant I heard that all-too-brief reproduction here in Rapallo (in a simple village cinema) I knew whence it came. You have there a treasure like nothing we have in the Occident. We have our masterwork: Mozart, Purcell, Janequin, Dowland, but it is a different masterwork and one is not a substitute for the other.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 151
Thirdly: I propose a tri-lingual system for world communications. None of the schemes for esperanto or other universal languages is at all satisfactory. Ogden's proposals for basic English could be developed. He has not the necessary tact or humanity to apply them. The greatest practi- cal, that is possible, simplification would be a triple system: Ideogram, with the Japanese sound (syllabic) comment, Italian and English.
Culture in retrospect needs more languages, and no one wants to constrict it. Greek, Latin and as much else as you like: all very enjoyable.
Current culture could conceivably receive great aid from this triple basis. I am not proposing this with any intention of slighting French and German. The present political alliance would suggest German, Italian and Japanese. I sacrifice one party on either side of the immediate division of forces. I do this on strictly practical and linguistic grounds.
French contains a great treasure but, as language, it is tricky. The foreigner cannot learn it. Its sounds are difficult and its letters are not uniform in connotation. You say: neither are the English. True! but English has attained a syntactical plainness that is nowhere exceeded save in ideogram.
There is also the question of actual present diffusion.
A great many Germans speak English. English is common to the U. S. A. and the British Empire. It is already a common tongue for dozens of Indians who speak different languages in India. Ideogram as a written communica- tion touches all Japan and China. Italian is the simplest of the Latin tongues. Its spelling is the clearest. (Both Spanish and French are full of tricks of
speech that are not clearly printed on the page. )
Language Simple
None of the proposed artificial languages can be more quickly learned by other Latin groups. A Spaniard understands Italian almost at once. Any one who has studied Latin can learn Italian in a few weeks. And whatever may be said of the fancy Italian styles that have pullulated since the sixteenth century, Duce Mussolini signified among other things a great drive for direct utterance, for clear and simple speaking.
I can argue my reasons for picking these three media. I could fill most of today's paper doing it, but I think the reader will save his own time by thinking about them, and weighing up the gains against the sacrifices. The quantity of cultural heritage should be set against the sacrifices. Latin contains the matter of a great deal of Greek. I mean it has been translated intoLatin. TherearegreatclaimsforGerman. I don'tthinkRussianhas much claim. The Latin treasure is fairly accessible to anyone who knows
? 152 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
Italian. Italy is a rising nation. South Americans speak a good deal of Italian as well as Spanish.
I will answer serious objections if anyone has the same set after a week's reflection that they have on first reading this note.
2 Death of Yeats: End of Irish Literary Revival
The death of Leo Frobenius last Summer is the severest shock to European cultural studies that we have had in a decade. Returning members of the Forschungsinstitut Australian expedition passed through Rapallo a few weeks ago with news of their discoveries. Mr. Fox had even found a drawing rather like the magnificent "Runner. "
The death of William Butler Yeats closes the great era of the Irish literary revival. That death will doubtless have been duly recorded in Japan. Someone in Tokyo may also know of Yeats' Japanese interlude or flirtation. He, at one time, thought he would be called to a Japanese pro- fessorship and did, I think, receive some sort of invitation. You have a "link" with Dublin in those plays of Yeats which were directly stimulated by Fenollosa's reports and translations of Noh. Having worked with Yeats during the three or four years of his intensest interest in the Noh, I know how much it meant to him.
Form Searched
"The form I have been searching for all my life" was one of his comments. (That would have been about 1917. )
A determination for a new poetic drama in Europe, not merely a Celtic twilight or a side show, but a poetic drama that will enter the main stream of our life is manifested both by Jean Cocteau (recent play Parents Terribies] and by T. S. Eliot (Family Reunion).
The present chronicler is Confucian and totalitarian. To him both these plays seem to be ends of a movement. So far as I am concerned they belong to the age of Ibsen wherein people's inner wobblings and fusses were very important. I believe in, and I believe that there exists, a growing conscious- ness of the individual in the state. "The divine science of politics" (thought as to how people can live together in an organized or organic social system), interests me more than all the Freuds that ever existed. I consider this both a catholic (in the non-sectarian sense) and a classic Anschauung.
At any rate I think the great novelists and dramatists must henceforth
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 1 53
sort out the problems dependent on economic pressure from those which remain after this pressure is removed.
A few years ago P. Bottome wrote a novel about an insane asylum. On analysis one found a common denominator, nowhere stated by the au- thoress and not I think present in her consciousness. All the patients were there because of economic pressure. All the doctors and nurses were moved by monetary pressures.
Of the poets included in my Active Anthology, the best are all aware of monetary pressure, as something more clear and incisive than the vague "social" urges to be found in last century's literature. This is not to say that Trollope and, in his last years, Henry James hadn't come to such percep- tion. They were above and beyond their time. The keenest minds today can be grouped. They can be grouped along this axis. The best writers are aware of problems that have lain unobserved in Dante and Shakespeare, problems of usury, of the just price, of the nature of money and its mode of issue.
It may interest you to know that the clarity of some paragraphs in The Japan Times on these subjects is, outside Italy, rather restricted to weekly papers and papers of special movements in England and America and in the rest of the Occident.
Lucid and incisive remarks of Hitler, Schacht and Funk do not get the wide and immediate publicity they deserve. They are however understood by writers of such divergent temperament as Wyndham Lewis and General J. F. C. Fuller.
Picture Post
As job lot items and notes on books worth reading: A current Picture Post acknowledges Wyndham Lewis to be the greatest portraitist of our time (even quotes Sickert as saying, "and of any time"--which is the generous exaggeration of an older painter for a younger one who has been too long denied his just place in contemporary art).
The best news from America is the edition of E. E. Cummings' collected poems, plus the publication of W. C. Williams' Passaic River (prose sketches).
Both the Criterion and Broletto have ceased publication, leaving my personal interest in current periodicals narrowed to The British Union Quarterly, for discussions of state organization, and to Townsman for very brief notices of books and the arts. The Examiner, published in Bethlehem, Connecticut, U. S. A. , contains some very well written and carefully thought articles.
There are valuable notes in several dozens of sectarian or group week-
? 154 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
lies and quarterlies in which publications, however, the dross and one- sidedness often out-weighs the sound matter, at least to such a degree that one cannot recommend them to Orientals wanting a clear view of the west.
3 Study of Noh Continues in West
Pound Outlines New Approach to Drama Using New Media
The work initiated by Ernest Fenollosa for better comprehension of East and West is by no means ended. Whatever Fenollosa may have done in the way of awakening his Japanese friends to the need of more active preserva- tion of Japanese values must be set against the spark lit here by his unedited manuscripts.
W. B. Yeats was at once enkindled by the imperfect versions of Noh which I was able to make from Fenollosa's notes. He started writing plays in Noh form for his Irish theatre and for performances where no western stage was available.
We in the West want an adequate edition of all the Noh in two or more languages. A few of us have the sense to want an edition with the ideogram- ic text on one page large enough to convey the calligraphic beauty and the essentially untranslatable values of ideograms themselves.
I don't mean to say that you can't in time translate an ideogram, even the most beautiful, but you will never get into any one phonetically spelled word all the associative forces of the more interesting picture-words.
it, ^
Two Media Available
It may be argued that the actual seeing of the ideograms is more necessary in the study of philosophy and the classics than in reading the romantic Noh, but one can not do without it in the latter. Two media are at our disposal which were not at Fenollosa's disposal, namely the sound film and micro- photography.
Fenollosa could not, as I did by the kindness of Dr. Shio Sakanishi, head of the Japanese Department of the Congressional Library in Washing- ton, see and hear Awoi no Uye on the screen with the sound of the singing
is contained or summed up in f P^"
The whole of a philosophy is almost contained in the three characters: the clear definition of terms as necessary to all real thought, and to sincerity, and the knowing of one's own mind and one's own meaning.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 155
and the crescendo of excitement as the hero rubs his rosary with ever faster rattling of beads against beads.
Every western university should have the complete set of Noh plays on sound-film for study in its dramatic and literary courses.
That will come and will have to come for a dozen reasons as the old half-witted system of Western teaching wakes up (30 or 40 years after modern science has made photographic conveniences a daily accessory to our industries and to our commercial filing systems).
Microphotographic methods are still very little understood in Europe. The place to study them is in the Washington Congressional Library. Any- thing in that library can be reproduced and carried away on a reel of film in one's pocket a couple of days after one has requested it and paid the modest charge of 2 cents per page for whatever hitherto priceless and, in many cases, unduplicated and unduplicable matter one wanted.
With proper apparatus we or you could photograph all the most beauti- ful calligraphic editions and reproduce them as cheaply as we print our worst books.
In the case of most of the Noh plays even this is not necessary as you have a very excellent calligraphic edition which could be supplied for a few cents per play to an American firm and interleaved with the American text. These editions would allow our students to study the text before and after seeing the cinema-representation of your plays.
And this, I need not say, would get over a good deal of the difficulty that now exists for the simple-minded student. For 1200 years Japan has meant more than commerce and business wrangles. In fact irritations over trade concessions between our countries are only a man's life old and need not and (permit me the strong phrase) damn well should not and shall not be regarded as a permanent and everlasting barrier between the best minds of your country and my country and between your country and the best minds in a dozen European nations.
I don't in the least wish to detract from the merit of the Funa-Benkei edition sent me by Katue Kitasono but it does not satisfy the requirements: the ideogramic type is too small. The ideograms ought to be big enough to convey their intrinsic beauty whether in grass writing or block type, and they ought to be big enough to permit, say 7 point, gloze and explanations on the English page facing them, page per page.
When we come to the matter of what English or European texts should be used, we are up against a much thornier proposition. There must of course be a plain literal version somewhere available, with explanations and notes, however tiresome and unpoetic. There should also be the best
? 156 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
available translation of the poetic values, in whatever European language this may have been attained. There are now American, English, French, German and Italian versions of Noh. And there is at least one Spanish text that is quite charming in the less vital parts of the play I read but falls down when it comes to the more intense passages.
Dr. Sakanishi caused me a good deal of anguish by insisting that something I had found in Fenollosa did not exist in the original. I am puzzled as to how it got into my text. Did it spring from Umewaka Minoru, or from Professors Mori and Ariga or did Fenollosa or I catch it out of thin air?
Fenollosa wrote that the Noh was in secret language; it was, for centur- ies, reserved for the Samurai and Nobles. You can not translate poetry merely by translating words. Some freedom (but not too much) must be left the poet who finds a new verbal manifestation for the original thought. He or she must in some way convey the feel and the aroma of the original play and of the inter-relation of characters.
Tami Koume had danced the Hagoromo before the Emperor, taking the tennin part when he was, as I remember, six years old. At twenty he still remembered the part and movements of the tennin's wings, which as she returns to the upper heaven, are the most beautiful movements I have seen on or off any stage. Tami knew something of Noh that no mere philologist can find out from a text book.
BUT when it came to the metaphysics he could not answer questions which seemed to me essential to the meaning. Very probably the original author had left those meanings in the vague. There may not have been ten men in Europe who would have asked those particular questions, but it so happened that Yeats, in my company, had spent several winters trying to correlate Lady Gregory's Irish folk-lore with the known traditions of var- ious myths, psychologies and religions.
Two or three centuries ago Catholic missionaries bothered the Chinese court with analogous questions, such as "Did the spirit of Confucius enter his cartouche," etc.
My own ignorance is very dense, but I have no wish to maintain it. I merely want to put other students on their guard against the needJess sacrifice of poetic values.
By all means let us have a prose translation, but where Umewaka Minoru or his friends have left a haze over the almond blossoms or the reflection of the moon in two buckets, let us be very much on our guard against any rumor that such and such a meaning is not in, or associated with, or associable with the Noh text.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 157
Background Necessary
When I quote /Eschylus, even if only to say "Thus was it" or "These are the facts," I do something more than state that certain things had occurred. It is that continual assertion of one set of acts in relation to a whole other set of acts, a whole series of backgrounds and memories, that enriches the Noh. The poetic translator must break his back to attain an English version that will keep at least part of this air and color. He must be allowed adequate, but not boundless, freedom toward this end, and only the finest critics and judges will be able to say when he reached it or how nearly he attains, or when he has sinned against the spirit of his original.
At any rate the news value of this article may lie in my stating that Dr. Arthur Hummel, head of the Oriental Department; Dr.
Sakanishi, head of the Japanese division of the Congressional Library (Washington]; the head of Arrow Editions, New York; R. Duncan, editor of Townsman; Margaret Leona who has tried Noh effects, on a Noh basis for the London television; Edmond Dulac, who made masks for Yeats' Irish Noh experiments; and a few dozen or hundred more of us are interested in any and every attempt toward further diffusion of the plays, and that I personally will do all that I can to correlate the fine work done by the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai with whatever Western nuclei that exist or can be brought into being. The start had already been made in their (K. B. S. ) Funa-Benkei program and edition for Shigefusa Hosho's performance of August 6, 1937.
I am merely asking that more plays be printed in two or more languages, and hoping that so able a translator as Michitaro Shidehara will insist on the use of larger ideograms above or facing his English version. The inter- linear printing, first the Japanese spelled out phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the ideogram and then the English, is preferable to the interleaving when the publisher has the means at his disposal, for by it the musical value of Japanese text is also conveyed to the stumbling foreign student. Nevertheless both transliteration of sound and the European ver- sion could be printed on a page facing a calligraphic text.
? 158 SECTION IV : ESSAYS
An Ezra Pound Letter from Rapallo
Annual Music Week Proposed to Introduce Each Year Insufficiently Known Composer
At the beginning of the war in Ethiopia, as we could not expect a concert audience, the Rapallo group resolved itself into a study circle with the immediate intention of hearing as many of the 310 concerti of Vivaldi as were available in printed editions and executable by one or two violinists and a piano. Having done that, two Americans, Olga Rudge and David Nixon, gave a concert in Venice, made up entirely from Vivaldi's Estro Armonico (Op. 3) and an abortive Vivaldi society was started in his own city. Miss Rudge then made the first thematic catalog of the unpublished Vivaldi lying in the Turin Library (309 concerti] and other works--which catalog has now been printed by Count Chigi of Siena in the Note e Documenti for the full-dress Vivaldi Week given there.
That festival marks a definite advance in the Italian official method in treating their music. We have for some time been insisting that the whole of an evening's program should have a form in itself, which need not be inferior in structure to that of, say, a fugue or any other art form. And we have insisted that the auditor can not get a clear or adequate conception of a great composer's meaning unless he hear a lot of that composer's work all at once.
Methods Suggested
We also, as Katue Kitasono noted some time ago in VOU, suggested various methods of contrast between musical compositions, intended to test their real value and to demonstrate what modern compositions could stand comparison with past master-work.
Yeats long ago pointed out that minor poets often show up very well in anthologies, but that the difference between them and the greater poets is quickly apparent if you contrast whole books of their work.
The Sienese Week was admirable in various ways. Their first program was a model of construction (due I think to Alfredo Casella). And as Mr. KitasonohascitedsomeRapalloexamples. I shallperhapsbepermittedto cite the Siena evening in detail, though the reader will have to verify what I say of it by future experiment on his own part. The program contained six items, five by Vivaldi and one transcribed from Vivaldi by his better known contemporary, J. S. Bach. Given in this order:
1. Sinfonia in Do. magg. 2. Concerto in Sol. min.
4
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 159
3. Concerto in Si min.
4. Aria, from La Fida Ninfa
5. Bach's transcription from the Concerto in Si. min. reworked, that is, by Bach for four harpsichords, and in the key of La min. 6. ConcertoAliaRustica.
The Week's music was ably varied: there were instrumental works, a revival of the opera Olimpiade (probably the first performance since Vival- di's death in 1741], and choral works given in the Church of S. Francesco with full orchestra.
The Week amply testified to Vivaldi's being a major composer, not simply "another" Italian composer of his period to be remembered by the often reprinted "Cucco" movement from one of his violin concerti, or by the single aria, "Un Certo non so che," which had been the only bit of his vocal music available in a modern edition.
All this being in accord with the beliefs printed by the violinist Rudge and by Cobbett, who had said a few years ago that Vivaldi was a composer with a future. Of course this doesn't mean that one has "discovered" Vivaldi. His name has long been in every encyclopedia or dictionary of music, but it does mean that musical history is undergoing a revision in its estimate of him. A number of general questions rise and or have been raised.
Timeliness Pointed Out
There is a timeliness in all resurrections in art; whether it be in painting, literatureorinmusic. InMissRudge'sownrenderingoftheconcertoI have found a close kinship with the line of the surrealist Dali. I don't know whether this comes from the manuscript or from the executant. I have long blamed or at least teased the surrealists for their naive belief that they had invented something which had already been present in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry when Dante was 16 years old. There is plenty of surrealism in mediaeval poetry. The human spirit has recurring needs of expression.
Even before one knew the detail of Vivaldi's life, one could hear certain qualities in his music, and possibly one exaggerates one's own perceptivity when one learns the personal and human background from which the Venetian master produced his music. He was priest, professor of music to a girl's convent school, and then in later life ran an opera company, present- ing his own operas and traveling from Mantua to Vienna in company with a barber's daughter, whom he had taught to sing with great success, and with assistant nymphs or whatever. Goldoni describes visiting the old man who was scribbling musical phrases on his desk and dipping into his breviary.
? 160 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
All of which is complementary to the qualities of his musical phrasing.
As composer his mind was furnished with the thoughts of Dante's Paradise and with the gaiety of his home city. At any rate the qualities registered in his music extend from one of these frontiers to the other. And the greatest of European composers, J. S. Bach, was sufficiently interested in six of his (Vivaldi's] concerti to transpose them for his own use, without perhaps having improved them. The work of fitting this music to modern orchestra for the Siena Festival was admirably performed by Casella, Fraz- zi, and Virgilio Mortari under the general direction of Casella. Count Chigi and the Italian authorities propose to proceed to an annual music week devoted each year to the work of one insufficiently known Italian creator or to a group of related composers. Possibly in 1940 we shall hear the two Scarlatti, and in 1941 possibly, on the bicentennial of Vivaldi's death, a second week of Vivaldi, amply justified by the results of this year's per- formance.
It all means a much more serious presentation of old Italian music than we have yet had. It means a much more intelligent study of the enormous treasure of Italian musical composition.
Both the eminent musicologue S. A. Luciani^ and the violinist Rudge^ have raised another basic issue, namely the distinction and proper criteria for "musica vocaJe and musica verbaie. "
Which merely means: can one understand the words when they are sung? And this question can be divided into two aesthetic questions, name- ly: Has the musician preserved or has he ruined the rhythm and phonetic qualities of the poetry?
Or, on the other hand, did the poet know his job well enough to write with such qualities of sound and movement that his words are worth preserving or illustrating and emphasizing? In the twelfth century the troubadours tried to fit words and music to each other. Dante animadverted on this subject.
When it came to a question of theater and sung drama, along about the year 1600 a. d. Vincenzo Galilei, Giulio Caccini and a literary circle in Firenze tried to make opera that would keep the verbal values as such. Then came stage music which used the voice mostly as an "instrument to rival the flute," etc. The words, then usually of no great interest in themselves, gave way to vocalization and the intellectual qualities of opera, or at any rate the literary values of libretti are often dubious. Rossini attained a very
' MiJIe Anni di Musica, volume I, published by Hoepli of Milan. ^ Article in Meridiano di Roma. 3 Sept. 1939.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS
'^61
high degree of mastery; in fact I know of no opera where the words and orchestra are so well combined as they are in the Barhiere di SevigJia.
On the other hand the French cafe-concert songs usually emphasize their words and the sharp meaning of the phrases.
The ideal or an idea, or call it merely my desire, if you like, is an opera where the singer sings great poetry to a fine music which emphasizes and illuminates the significance of the words, and, to do this, makes them clearly audible and comprehensible to the listener.
I have made a few attempts in this direction. No one is compelled to like my music, but I have at any rate set some of the greatest European poetry, namely that of Villon, and of Guido Cavalcanti with a few bits of Sordello. When the Villon was transmitted by the London radio, 1 sat in the electri- cian's kitchen in Rapallo and could understand every one of the words.
Antheil and Tibor Serly both wanted to work on these lines: but it is very difficult to find poetry sufficiently well written to stand such musical treatment. Especially in English, the amount of poetry that can be sung without either distorting the words or damaging the musician's invention is limited. Shakespeare wrote for declamation. He wrote a few lyrics to be sung in his plays. He solved the problem of using the voice merely as instrument by writing in such meaningless syllables as "Hey, nonny non- ny" on which the singer could turn loose, without damaging the sense of the rest of the poem. The syllables have no meaning in themselves but have good sounds for the singer, and guide the musician in rhythm. In Italian there is a vast amount of libretto writing that is probably singable. But
literary snobbism may or may not have obscured it.
However all this battle field is now again laid open.
If the Italians start again listening to two kinds of singing it can hardly
fail to stimulate discrimination, and with the proper exposition of seven- teenth century and, let us hope, also of sixteenth and fifteenth century music, we should have a musical reform in Italy or a new and valid movement in which fine musical line and strongly active invention will replace the sloppiness of the XlXth century composition.
At any rate, thanks to Count Guido Chigi Saracini and his associates, the Sienese annual week of music has started something and opened up possibilities. It is to be followed with increasing attention by critics of music in general, from all countries.
? 162 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
There is one field of discussion in which the Japanese intellectuals can be of great use to us. I repeat "of great use" because you are outside the immediate effects of the problem and can discuss it with greater calm, as, indeed, a purely intellectual and aesthetic problem without coming down to political and economic implications. It is a question of the kind Fenollosa opened for us when he began about 50 years ago telling the Occident that Japan is not merely an inferior form of China. And he continued repeating that theme.
Firstly: Japan is different from China.
Secondly: As regards the Chinese elements in Japanese art and culture, Japan continued to preserve some of the best Chinese skills and customs when China had fallen into her decadence.
From the fragmentary notes he has left us we can at any rate see that Kumasaka is basically Japanese. The ghost in that play carries admiration to every western romantic. The gist of what three or more races have meant by chivalry, Ritterschaft and bushido finds concentrated expression in that Noh drama.
Homeric Passage
Kagekiyo contains the one Homeric passage in such part of the Noh as remains in the Fenollosa manuscript. This is akin to our classic epos, whether of Greece or the Nordics. It binds in with the episode of Confucius' father holding the portcullis on his shoulder while the men under him escape. These things are the universals of heroism. If I am to be of any use to you in establishing a better communications service between the Orient and the Occident you must let me speak very plainly.
I believe that the ^ ^ of one nation finds it quite easy to converse with the j|, -)- of another. And the form of those characters suggests to me that the ^ ^ is the ancestral voice speaking through the mask of the child of the present. Though I do not find this explanation in available dictionaries. The better the child of the present's quality and the more up to date he is, the more does he seem to me to be the edge of a very old sword.
He converses with the /^ -^ of another nation not by effacing his racial characteristics but by intensification of them,
I ask you not to mistake the amiability of my tone of voice. 1 find with many of my young compatriots that when I try to speak clearly and with proper precision, they think I am scolding them. Nothing of the sort. There
5
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 163
are plenty of occasions for being correctly indignant without being sup- posed to be indignant on other occasions.
Not Detracting
If 1 tell you that you can use Confucius and Mencius in talking to Occidentals to better advantage than by talking Buddhism I am not detract- ing from the virtues of Zen concerning v^hich I know very little, save from the great charm of some of the Noh into which I believe Zen is infused.
To cut the cackle, Tami Kume had very great personal charm; he wanted to save us by Zen and plastic abstractions. But on the other hand Occidental Buddhists are nearly always a bore, at any rate they have been invariably so in my personal experience of them.
The ethic of Confucius and Mencius not only inspires respect but it serves as a road map through the forests of Christian theology. I don't know that the sage Jesuit translators intended it for that use, but that use can be made of it. At no point can the Christian find in it anything opposed to the best of his own doctrine. The Chinese imperial councilors on the other hand and I believe your own dignitaries, found Christianity helplessly immoral, anti-statal and anti-familial. And they have thereby given con- siderable satisfaction to the few Occidentals who know of the said dis- approval. Voltaire, you may remember, said: "I admire Confucius. He was the first man who did not receive a divine inspiration. "
Men with less gift for verbal incision but with my kind of mind are apt to think that both Buddhists and Christians make positive statements about things of which very few men can have any certainty. At any rate they offer two different sets of positive teachings about heaven, about souls, survival after death, etc. , which are in quite apparent contradiction.
As to that very clever and somewhat westernized author Lin Yutang I do not think he knows his Confucius. He has quite obviously been annoyed by silly and stilted Confucians, who are, I doubt not, as much a nuisance in the East as are stale Christians with us. But I cannot blame St. Ambrose for today's archbishop of Canterbury.
It is quite possible that I over-simplify, but it is also possible that from the greater distance I get a glimpse of some main proportions.
Greek Philosophy
It is with regard to similar main proportions that I now appeal to the Japanese historian and philosopher. If you take Francisco Fiorentino's Storia deIJa Filosofia (by which he meant Occidental philosophy] or any other good Western summary, you will find "Greek philosophy" fairly clear
? 164 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
in its guesses and then quite elaborate in its details. You will find "mediaev- al philosophy and/or theology" somewhat more puzzling. Usually consid- ered rather inferior to the Greek, now rather out of favor. I can't think it deserves total neglect. There was a lot of hard mental work done in the millenium between St. Ambrogio and St. Antonino but I don't think our historiographers have yet given us a competent analysis of the period. I don't know how far the subject enters your system of study. But as a Japanese lexicographer, Dr. Motoichiro Oguimi, had started making a Greek-Japanese dictionary at the age of 79 and completed it at the age of 94 (incidentally a form of courage which we can admire), I don't see why I should despair of effective collaboration.
In reply to T. S. Eliot's speculation as to what I (personally) believe and in opposition or at least deprecation of Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society (published by Faber, London), I have taken leave to doubt whether we Europeans and descendants of Europeans in America really believe anything that is not at root European. We kid ourselves into "accepting" or saying that we believe certain formulae, or we refrain from attacking them, because, like George Washington we believe that they are useful for keeping the lower classes in order. "The benign influence" and that sort of thing. It is therefore my wish that if the Japanese student starts browsing among rare Latin theologians, he would try to sort out which parts of their writing are due to Greek thought, which parts to Roman, and which parts to the Jewish scriptures. He will also find, a little later, a number of fine minds from the north of Europe, as John Scotus of Ireland, Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, or Albertus of greater Germany. At the present moment I have a definite bias. I find the Platonics enthusiastic, the Latins orderly and I enjoy the contact with such minds as the three Europeans just mentioned as with Ambrogio or Antonino (Italian). But I also find an element of disorder and obfuscation.
These quite good minds indulge in all sorts of contortions to get sense out of nonsense, they (as the men of Athens most emphatically did not) spent a great deal of time inventing allegorical meanings, often very in- genious, for statements about winged-bulls and strange animals never encountered in ordinary farming or hunting. There is also a tendency to shift and to avoid civic responsibility.
There is the "pie in the sky" offer, sometimes in our time derided. I quite sincerely wish some dispassionate Oriental would look into this matter and try to sort out these four elements and put fair values upon them.
Did the total European mind lose 1200 or 1500 years in these exercises,
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 165
say from the fall of Rome down to the day Signor Galileo invented his telescope?
And if so, why did the Europeans do it? And who and for what cause planted this seed of Confusion, and why for that matter did the races of Europe after Luther and Calvin take to giving Near Eastern names to their children?
With Calm
You, far from our immediate struggles, can treat this matter with calm and distinction; if I start going into it I might fall into the snares of power psychology or even of monetary psychology, and this, your admirable poet KitasonoKatuewouldfind,I fear,unpoeticonmypart.
Two other points occur to me that are not exactly part of this article and are, yet, kindred to it. Firstly: Very few young men get round to thinking that the idea of good government is perhaps the highest idea that we can ever translate into action. At the age of 23 no one was less given to thinking of such subjects than was the present author.
Secondly: If your students take to KuJturmorphoiogie in the wake of Leo Frobenius or of your present correspondent they might find signifi- cance in the fact that Aristotle began his list of intellectual faculties with TEXNE, that is the skill that enables a man to paint a good picture or make a good pair of shoes. Poor "Arry" was scarcely cold in his grave before the professors had removed that faculty from their edition of his works.
Note the text of the Nicomachean Ethics, and then that of the Magna MoraJia wherefrom I observed the discrepancy. Thence, as I see it, dates the decline of Western thought and the inferiority of our writings on ethics when compared to those of Confucius and Mencius. A paragraph to this effect disappeared from my Kulch in the printing house. My publishers thought it would do me no good at Oxford.
? 166 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I FEEL a little lost writing for an unknown public which must, in some sense, be a "newspaper public. " Most of my criticism has been written for a nucleus of writers and I have to considerable extent known their beliefs or known when I was infuriating them by attacking particular literary im- becilities. I know the Japanese reader must be friendly or he wouldn't be finding me in print at all, but I haven't the least idea when I may tread on his toes or when I am likely to bore him to death by repeating what he has already read six times.
Back in 1917 or thereabouts 1 received and replied to a Dadaist greeting from Switzerland. Then Picabia printed magazines in New York. Then in Paris, about 1922, he printed a unique issue of PiJhaou-Thibaou, saying good-bye to Dada. By 1923 all the Surrealists were lined up in The Little Review, so that neither these movements nor their particular terminologies can now have for me any great news value.
From 1912 for a decade I did my best to tell the ignorant Britons and Yankees that there had been some very good French poetry, and that English poetry, so far as the technique went, had mostly stopped along about the state of Gautier's Aibertus, and never caught up with his Emaux et Camees.
I doubt if anybody gave the frogs more conscientious free advertising than your present correspondent. And, with that past, I claimed, and still claim, a right to be judged impartial in saying that at a given date poetry in English (largely by American writers) began to be "more interesting" or to have, at any rate, an interest which contemporary French poetry had not.