"Kinuta": a No play
included
in Fenollosa and Pound, tr.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
" as Horace Gregory had so aptly described Ezra Pound.
I slipped in unnoticed, one among thousands of hapless draftees bunked six-deep on a troop ship.
Except for my precious notes of introduc- tion, I was merely a parody Perry--a Till Eulenspiegel.
no bemedalled emissary.
For several years before, I had been visiting the most distinguished American poet, appropriately enough (for him? for the country? ) confined in a "bug house"--Saint Elizabeths Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D. C. The Master could be seen from 2 to 4 p. m. only and he allotted each regular visitor his or her "day. " Mine was, I believe, Tuesday. As Dr. Thomas Szasz has convincingly shown. Pound was often far more lucid than his incarcerators. If he was crazy, then every person with a one-track mind and a Mission is crazy.
Pound might have been called, varying Hokusai, "the old man mad about culture. " He felt that his Mission was, quite simply, to keep civiliza- tion from sinking. If the aim seems quixotic, we might remember what he had done for English-language literature in the nineteen-tens and -twen- ties. Makingconnections,bringingpeopletogether,sothat"coNversation /
should not utterly wither" [Canto 82) was part of his Mission, and each of us who had been taken into the "tribe of Ez" was expected to carry out his little mission. When I left for Japan, the very decidedly portfolio-less minister of arts supplied addresses.
First was 1649 Nishi-Ichi, Magome, Ota, Tokyo, home of the leader and doyen of the VOU movement, Kitasono Katue, poet and collagist de- nominated "Kit Kat" by Pound, who could never resist a pun. Kitasono had founded the VOU group of poets back in the thirties. Now he would meet regularly with his coterie at home, beneath towering stacks of Western avant-garde magazines. Seated round him on the straw-mat floor, they read their poems and the Master provided acerbic comment. "No smoke rises from that chimney," he would say if a poem did not please him.
Hyperbole, unbounded fantasy, words used as gesture rather than literally, mocking at sentimentality--these surrealistic props were VOU's stock in trade. Kitasono regarded both his art and his surroundings as if from a vast distance; the thick spectacles seemed to stand for an attitude. He
? 212 APPENDIX
spoke little English, but surely read a great deal. Kitasono's wife was the English speaker tor the household--as when I commented that Japan was nigh to becoming a Little America and, after struggling to find words, she said most demurely: "mod-ern won-der-land! " EP bombarded "Kit Kat" with letters in a Poundese so terse and allusive it was often difficult even for a Poundian--and, not surprisingly, Kitasono told me that he could not understand much of them.
Pound had praised Heinrich Heine's "clear palette"--by which he meant that Heine could treat emotional matters with no smudges of sentimentality--and1 supposethathesawin"KitKat"thesameclarityof vision. His punning epithet did define a certain felinity in Kitasono, who approached both his verse and his plastic art with suave indirection, as though on padded feet.
2-11-15 Midorigaoka, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Fujitomi Yasuo, then and now professionally a poet and vocationally a middle-school English teacher, was publishing a poetry magazine called Sette, in English and Italian--using his own typewriter as a printer! A copy went to Pound and he sent me Fujitomi's address. We met regularly and it was on my instiga- tion that Fujitomi began translating Cummings. He subsequently produced many volumes and founded a magazine called i devoted exclusively to Cummings. This was what Pound's mission of bringing people together meant in practice.
Fujitomi and I labored together making a rough translation of Pound's Sophoclean adaptation. Women of Trachis, since Pound had wanted it eventually done as a Noh play. Our translating sessions were often a struggle--1 holding out for brevity and Fujitomi for grammar. The project unfortunately came to nothing, as my time in Japan ended before we had finished.
In June 1954, Fujitomi and 1 visited Ernest Fenollosa's grave at the Miidera, a temple overlooking Lake Biwa near Kyoto. We wandered up and up through a great cryptomeria forest of the temple preserve to find Fenol- losa's resting place. Lake Biwa stretching immensely below. All the Orient seemed before me, as it had been for Fenollosa. I wrote Pound of my visit and he recorded it in the last line of his Canto 89--I suppose implicitly comparing the exploration of the American West (Fremont's expeditions into the Rockies) with my exploration of the East, the cultural frontier of Pound's own time:
I want Fremont looking at mountains or, if you like. Reck, at Lake Biwa . . .
Then there was 10 Kakinokizaka, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. During the
APPENDIX
213
--
? 1910's, a young Japanese dancer named Michio Ito had appeared in London salons, asking everywhere the same question--so he told me forty years later:"Whatisart? "Didheeverfindout? Alas,1 forgottoaskhim. Inall events, he had danced the Guardian of the Well in the first performance of Yeats' At the Hawk's Well. Ito told me that he had learned to dance like a bird by watching the hawks in the London Zoo. Pound had known him in London and. looking back, recorded a snatch of his conversation in Canto 77:
"Jap'nese dance all time overcoat" he remarked with perfect precision . . .
I had been seven months in Japan before a fair wind finally blew me to Michio Ito's dance studio--my Japanese finally seeming sufficient to sup- plement the elliptic English I expected of him. I found him no longer speaking epigrammatic pidgin English but a nearly perfect American. Be- tween the two world wars, he had lived in New York and Hollywood. He discoursed on balance. He told about seeing an old man amid the dust and noise of the street in Cairo, surrounded by a group of intent children and drawing with a stick on the ground. After seeing him do this every day. Ito approached him--he was teaching them astronomy. The old man had told him that 6,000 years ago in Egypt there had been a civilization with perfect balance. Ito said, "I have spent my life studying why it was lost and how to find it again. "
The pudgy white-haired gentleman stared into the air. remembering his friend of forty years before, and intoned: "if I saw Ezra today I would give him a massage and say: . . . 'relax. '" And he recounted how he had gone backstage to converse with Spanish dancers who had just given a spectacu- lar performance. "And you know," he told me. "they had absolutely noth- ing to say. " The moral of the tale being, I suppose, that art is doing, not talking about it. Perhaps, indeed, he had found out.
"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive"--I suppose. W^ell, paradise comes, as Pound observed in the Cantos, "spezzato"--in bits and pieces. My memory is of an Ezraic generosity wide as the oceans--at least spanning oceans--and a keen curiosity that swept Japan into its vast net. Light would come from the East. Pound believed: the particularity of its perceptions reflecting the physical immediacy of the ideogrammatic characters. He abhorredabstractthoughtand likeBertoltBrecht--believed"thetruthis concrete" (the phrase is Brecht's). The concreteness of truth--this is what Pound found in the Far East. He never traveled to the Orient but for a while it so happened that I saw Japan as his surrogate. Being "Reck at Lake Biwa" has left a lot to live up to.
? 214 POSTSCRIPT
POSTSCRIPT: In Place of a Note to Letter 71
U SEFUL BOOKS need no explanation; they speak for themselves as this one does. But there may be some justification in underlining a new facet of Pound in his role of Father and Teacher and to add a touch of humor to an otherwise very serious text.
Pound must have been pleased when Katue Kitasono, alias "Kit Kat," assured him that young readers in Tokyo liked the description of life and customs in the Tyrol. The fact that neither Pound nor I could read Japanese made my rudimentary drawings of haystacks and rakes all the more valu- able as pictographs.
To Mary Moore of Trenton, on January 17, 1938, Pound wrote: "My own daughter has just made her literary debut in Japan. " Such explicit state- ments are rare in his correspondence. A day earlier he had fired off a typically cagey long letter "to the Rt/ Rev the possum and Omnibosphorous WHALE the one to hand to tother in ConSybbletashun. "
Everyone knows that the Possum is T. S. Eliot and that after his conver- sion to the Anglican Church, Pound playfully addressed him as the Right Reverend. The "Whale" was Frank Morley, a fellow editor at Faber & Faber who worked in close consultation with Eliot. He was sailing for New York, hence the "Omnibosphorous"; in a subsequent letter, "a wallowink on the Adlandik. " Morley, sometimes honored with the title of "Son of Narwahl," vied with his two friends in inventing a language for their private zoo filled with panthers, elephants, rabbits and cats, bats and lesser animals. Their letters can not be paraphrased, though more often than not, they need explaining. We can only hope to read them soon in their entirety.
Pound's promoting of unknown young authors is legendary. Modesty ought to forbid my transcribing parts of the letters concerning me, but it is to his credit:
. . . interesting to translate. Child of twelve/ stylistic influence if any. Miss Martineau's Norway (Italian translation of that to explain where a Norwegian child came from). And with all the fake naive stuff, a little real is a comfort/ to say nought of the perfectly good bits that Frazer hasn't got into the Golden Bough. If a child wrote it it must be compre- hensible to other infants? I don't think there can be any more cause the child has been uprooted and sent to a place to get kulchur. . . .
I have simplified the spelling. The "Norwegian child" is Henny Bull
? POSTSCRIPT
215
Simonsen, and the effect of Miss Martineau's book was such that our friendship endures to this day.
WhileI wasgettingkulchurinFlorence,Poundwassuggestingpossible illustrators for The Beauties of the Tyrol. Edmund Dulac was one of them. He made it quite clear I was not a young prodigy; Mozart and Shirley Temple notwithstanding, he had a real horror of young prodigies. He asked the gentlemen at Fabers that the contract be made with the "authoress to whomlcheerfully deed over translation fees as encouragement. . . . "There seemed to have been no doubt in his mind that the booklet would make Fabers' fortune! But Mr. Eliot, after due consideration, answered, yes, it was a nice little book, well written and life well portrayed, but there was just one objection: "it couldn't sell. "
"I takes my possum as he cooks it" (EP to TSE, 25 Nov. 1937) was not always the case. Not when the Possum was not possum enough to hide his tracks and betrayed careless reading of his friend's letters. He had some- what ironically wondered if Pound had become proficient in Swedish, or whether he had translated from an Italian translation from the Swedish.
W. C. Williams' story that my mother was a Swede curiously rankled andPound may have detected a lingering echo. So the final comment was: "Waaal naow Protopherious . . . the error was I didn't send it to Larry [Pollinger, the literary agent] who would have saved you the error of thinking it wouldn't sell. " And he bets that when it does get printed, it will sell TWO copies for every copy Faber has sold of his (E. P. 's) own work, with the exception perhaps of Selected Poems to which Eliot had written the preface. In closing, the seemingly nonchalant riposte: "Oh yes, en passant/ the Tyrol has never been Swedish/ perhaps you mix Gustavus Adolphus with the late Frangois whiskers Giuseppe. " That ended the matter, and Pound has taught us not to overestimate juvenilia, be it his own or anyone else's.
What we get in this collection of letters to Japan is the persistent effort of an adult and responsible artist to create a better understanding between distant nations and the establishment of culture as a concrete value, a measure of exchange. If the possession of a small island threatens blood- shed, let the contendants trade off land for such a commodity as a tradition- al and highly refined form of art. An island like Guam in exchange for one hundred films of No plays, for instance. Men paid to talk peace might examine such simple solutions?
--Mary de Rachewiltz
? 216
NOTES
NOTES TO LETTERS
1
YoneNoguchi:YonejiroNoguchi ^tZ ^^^j>[1875-1947]. Inanundated
(
letter of 1914 to his mother, Pound wrote: "Yone Noguchi dined with me on Tuesday; interesting litterateur of the second order. Dont like him so well as Sung, or Coomaraswami. Still you neednt repeat this, as the acquaintance may grow and there's no telling when one will want to go to Japan. "
The Pilgrimage: a book of verse by Yonejiro Noguchi, illustrated with wood-block prints by Utamaro, published by Elkin Mathews in 1909.
Mathews: Elkin Mathews had published Pound's A Quinzaine/or This YuJe (1908) [A2], Personae (1909) [A3], Exultations (1909) [A4], and Canzoni (1911) [A7].
The Spirit of Romance: was published by J. M. Dent & Sons (1910) [A5]. Yeats: W. B. Yeats
Mary FenoIJosa: wife of Ernest Francis Fenollosa (1853-1908), American scholar and Orientalist who taught philosophy and economics at Tokyo Imperial Uni- versity (1878-86) and other universities in Japan, while he studied Japanese and Chinese art, religion and literature.
Along with fellow Americans in Japan--Edward Morse, Percival Lowell, Wil- liam Sturgis Bigelow, Lafcadio Hearn and John La Farge--Fenollosa and his circle greatly contributed to the rediscovery of the value of Japan's classical artistic heritage at a time when it was being neglectfully cast aside in favor of Westernization and modernization. See Van Wyck Brooks, Fenollosa and His Circle (N. Y. : E. P. Button, 1962).
Sarojini: Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), a Bengali poet. Educated in England, she is the author of The Golden Threshold (1905) and other poems written in English. Mary Fenollosa had met Pound at Naidu's home in London on September 29, 1913. See Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz, eds. , Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914, pp. 264-70; and D. G. Bridson, "An Inter- view with Ezra Pound," New Directions 17, ed. James Laughlin, p. 177.
"My City, My beloved . . . ":i. e. New York City. Quoted from the first line of Pound's poem, "N. Y. ," included in Ripostes (1912).
Franz Hals: Frans Hals (15817-1666), Dutch portrait painter.
banshee: a supernatural being in Irish and Scottish folklore, supposed to give
warnings by its wails of an approaching death in the family.
Mr. Hirata: Kiichiro Hirata (1873-1943), translator, essayist, and scholar of English literature. After studying at Oxford University, he taught at Tokyo Koto Shihan
]
? NOTES
217
Gakko and other universities. Author of Studies of Recent English Literature,
and Essays of Tokuboku ("Tokuboku" is his pen name).
Romaji: Roman letters.
"Kinuta": a No play included in Fenollosa and Pound, tr. , The Classical Noh
Theatre of Japan; so are "Nishikigi" and "Hagoromo. "
"Voroboshi": "Yoroboshi," a No play. A blind child beggar at Tennoji in Naniwa
turns out to be the son of the man in the seventeen-day Buddhist practice at the same temple. The son, having been enlightened, is led by his father's prayers to describe the beautiful scenes of Naniwa as he envisions them in his mind, and dances. The two return home.
"Sumidagawa": In search of her son, the mother comes from Kyoto to the bank of the Sumida River, only to find his tomb; there at night she tries to embrace his ghost in vain.
Verdun: a city on the Meuse River, in the north-eastern part of France; site of significant battle of World War I.
8
Itow: Michio Ito (f f P^J^^p) [1893-1961], a Japanese dancer; played the part of the Hawk at the performance of Yeats' At the Hawk's Well in Lady Cunard's drawing room on April 2, 1916, for which Edmund Dulac designed and made the costumes and masks. In writing this play, Yeats had been inspired by the Japanese No plays in English translation in Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks.
the "cloud-bridge": Hashigakari, the bridge between the stage and the retiring room in the No theatre.
11
Lustra: was published by Elkin Mathews (1916) [All].
Certain NobJe PJays o/ Japan: with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, was published
by The Cuala Press (1916) [A12).
Miss Bisland: Elizabeth Bisland (1861-1929), later Mrs. Elizabeth B. Wetmore, who
edited the letters of Lafcadio Hearn; a friend of Mary Fenollosa's.
Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali poet, dramatist and mystic; acquaintance of Pound and Yeats. His "hiding, incognito, somewhere in South-
ern California" is spurious. Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
13
book on poor Gaudier Brzeska: Gaudier Brzeska, published by John Lane (1916) [AlO].
Egoist: edited by Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden.
? 218 NOTES
Quest: edited by G. R. S. Mead.
Poetry Review: edited by Harold Monro.
15
play . . . about Fox: Michio Ito had performed "Fox Dance" in 1915.
18
Coburn: Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), American photographer who resided at the time in London; see his Autobiography, ed. Helmut and Alison Gern- sheim. A photograph of Pound by Coburn was reproduced as frontispiece for Lustra (1916). Pound had listed him as a faculty member in the "Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts" (1914).
22
East Stroudsburg: a town on the upper Delaware River which Pound had been acquainted with in his youth.
DaJcroze: Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), Swiss composer and music teacher; inventor of eurhythmies, a system whereby music is coordinated with body movements. He founded the various Instituts Jaques-Dalcroze throughout Eu- rope.
Kyogen: Japanese traditional comedy which developed with the No, and is often performed with No plays on the No stage.
"Shojo," "Kagekiyo," "Hagoromo": No plays, included in Fenollosa-Pound transla- tions, Certain NobJe PJays of Japan [ Al 2] . "Your book" refers to 'Noh ' or Accom- plishment [A13].
"Busu": a piece of Kyogen. During the master's absence, his two servants find out that the "busu," which they have been told to be poison, is actually black sugar. They eat it up, and break their master's favorite hanging scroll and a bowl as well.
25
Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Russian abstract painter and mystic; see his Concerning the Spiritual in Art [Uber das Geistige in der Kunst] (pub- lished in 1914 in English translation as The Art of Spiritual Harmony).
26
Picabia: Francis Picabia (1879-1953), French Dadaist and "sur-irrealist" painter; acquaintance of Pound's in Paris.
27
Capt. /. BrinkJey; John Brinkley (1887-1964), son of Francis Brinkley and uncle of Aya, wife of Gonkuro Koume (younger brother of Tami); worked for the League of Nations in Paris.
? NOTES 219
30
Gakushuin: ( |^ p P/C ). educational institution established in 1877 in Tokyo mainly for the children of Japanese nobility. It is now open to the public, and includes a co-ed university, high school and other levels.
Barney: Natalie Clifford Barney, who held the "Friday salon," was "I'Amazone" of Remy de Gourmont's Letters to an Amazon. See Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: MacMillan, 1960), p. 269.
32
FenoJIosa: see note to letter 4.
Umewaka Minora: Minora Umewaka ( ^-^/p
) [1827-1909], a Japanese No player; gave lessons to Fenollosa. See letter 5; see aJso Fenollosa and Pound,
'Nob' or Accomplishment.
Dr. Mori: Kainan Mori ( y^^% ^ ) [1863-1911], a Japanese scholar of Chinese
language and literature; gave lessons to Fenollosa.
Dr. Ariga: Nagao Ariga ( ^ '^ h^'^%- ) [1860-1921] graduated from Tokyo Im-
perial University in 1882, where he was a student of Fenollosa. Doctor of jurisprudence in international law; taught at Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University. Author of a number of books on literature, sociology, and pedagogy as well as international law; later became a member of the Privy Council. He was an assistant-interpreter for Fenollosa while the latter was in Japan, and the translator of Fenollosa's Epochs oj Chinese and Japanese Art after it was posthumously published in 1912.
that earth quake: "The Great Earthquake of Kanto" which struck Tokyo and Yoko- hama area on September 1, 1923. According to the statistics, the magnitude was 7. 8-8. 2; deaths totalled 99,331, with 43,476 missing.
C. H. Douglas: Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), British economist and originator of the theory of Social Credit, which holds that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the reason for economic de- pressions and World Wars. Published articles in A. R. Orage's The New Age.
Gesell: Silvio Gesell (1862-1930), Minister of Finance of the second Munich Repub- lic (1919); monetary reformer and author of The Natural Economic Order.
Cavalcanti: Guido Cavalcanti Rime, published in 1932 [B27]. ABC of Reading: published in 1934 [A35]
33
Jean Cocteau: French poet and long-standing friend of Pound's from his years in Paris (1920-25).
35
Izzo and Camerino: Carlo Izzo, an Italian translator of Pound's poems, and his friend Aldo Camerino, sent out a group of letters in the fall of 1935, and launched
f:
? 220 NOTES
"a movement tending to establish a regular exchange of technical, mostly pro- sodic, information . . . between literary people of different countries"; see Charles Norman, Ezra Pound, p. 332.
Bunting: Basil Bunting, British poet.
LaughJin; James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions.
Zukofsky: Louis Zukofsky, American poet.
AngoJd; J. P. Angold, a British poet; author of an unpublished book on economics
called "Work and Privilege" which Pound tried to translate into Italian; see
David Heymann, The Last Rower (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 140. weJsh scholar: W. Moelwyn Merchant? ; Hugh Gordon Porteus?
36
]efferson and/or Mussolini: published in July 1935 [A41].
37
Ken Yanagisawa: { %^f '^'^ "j^ ) [1889-1953], Japanese diplomat and poet; author of Orchard, Journals of South Europe, and Twilight on the Indian Ocean.
Ginza: the most fashionable street in Tokyo at that time.
uivKER and Bopoto: see Kitasono's letter to Pound (30 January 1937).
38
Alberto Carocci: Italian publisher.
Utai: the rhythmic chanting of No texts.
Rihaku: Japanese name for the Chinese poet Li Po.
con espressioni di alta Stima: with expressions of high esteem.
40
HajimeMatsumiya: ( T^X"^ ^'ll ),Councillorof the Japanese embassy in Italy, 1936-38.
ABC: ABC of Reading [A3 5].
W. E. Wloodward: see selection of letters from Pound to Woodward in Paideuma,
vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 105-20.
41
Suma Gen;i: a No play whose "suspense is the suspense of waiting for a supernatu- ral manifestation--which comes"; see The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.
Active Anthology: [B32].
Make It New: [A36].
The Chinese Written Character: [B36].
Ta Hio: [A28].
D. C. Fox; Douglas Fox, assistant to Leo Frobenius at the Forschungsinstitut fiir
Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt; edited numerous works of Frobenius. Paideuma was the name of the journal the institute published.
? NOTES
221
43
Margaret Lenoa; Margaret Gerstley Lenoa corresponded with Pound on staging No plays, etc.
Meierhold: Wsewolod Emiljewitsch Meyerhold (1874-1942), Russian actor and director.
44
Pauthier: M. G. Pauthier, French translator of Confucius, kana: Japanese syllabary.
Cathay: published in 1915 [A9].
45
Globe: Milwaukee magazine to which Pound contributed articles on politics and economics during 1937-38.
Uncle George: Representative George Holden Tinkham of Massachussetts; he met Pound in Italy.
J'uomo piu educate: "the most experienced, or knowledgeable man. "
Ronald Duncan: British poet and editor of Townsman (London); "no relation" of the
American dancer.
Satie: Erik Satie, who lived in Arcueil, a southern section of Paris.
Sasajima: Toshio Sasajima ( f^'? S) -^^ ), a member of the vou Club. Nakamura: Chio Nakamura ( ^ T^ ^ /%_^ ), a member of the vou Club. KOIKE:TakeshiKoike( ^hv^^^), amemberofthevouClub.
Cummings: e. e. cummings.
Morrison: Robert Morrison, a Protestant missionary in Asia who compiled a six-
volume Chinese-English dictionary (published in Malacca, 1815-22).
48
MAO SHE CH-HING tseen: Moo Shi cheng chien ( % ttf '^ ^- ), the text of the
Kwan Kwan Tsheu kew: f^ f^ ^ ^ ^H) ? The first line of the first poem (a folksong of Southern Chou) included in the Confucian Odes, meaning " 'Kwan, kwan' sing the [two] eaglefishers. " "Kwan" means "pass," but it is used here as onoma- topoeia of the bird's cry.
49
assuperiorman. . . : Pound'stranslationfromthefourthandsixthlinesofthesame
Lacharme interpretatione, edidit Julius Mohl (Stuttgart and Tubingen, 1830). Hemingway's "They aJJ made peace": VOU no. 19 (July 1, 1937) contains Kitasono's
Confucian Book of Odes edited with notes by Mao Heng [^ %. Ch'ang( \ X ), later annotated by Cheng Hsuan( ^p ^ period, and reputedly the most authentic version of the Odes.
poem in the Confucian Odes above:
old latin bloke: P. Lacharme, Conjucii Chi-King, sive Liber Carminum, ex Latina, P.
J^ ^ ~^h' \iB-
^^^^^^
) and Mao ) inthelaterHan
? 222 NOTES
Japanese translation of the poem by Hemingway (pp. 33-4).
Butcharl: Montgomery Butchart, author of Money, one of Pound's select economic
texts.
50
Jennings' appalling translation: The Shi King: The 0\d "Voeivy Classic" of the Chinese by William Jennings (1891).
51
beautiful book; Kitasono's book of poetry, Letters of the Summer
[Natsu no Tegami in Japanese]; La Lettre d'ete referred to in Kitasono's leuer of 6 September 1937.
BrinkJey: Francis Brinkley (1841-1912), an English Japanophile journalist. Visited Japan as a naval attache to the English Embassy in Tokyo in 1867; in 1881 bought the Japan MaiJ and became its president and chief editor. In 1892, also began writing for the London Times as its Tokyo correspondent. Author of Guide to English SeJ/-taught (1875); History of the Empire of Japan (1893); Japan and China (1903); New Guide to English Self-taught (1909); History of the Japanese People from the Earliest Times to the End of Meiji Era (1915).
52
^^^lih
crow. " Pound later translated the line (rightly) as "All red things foxes, each
black a crow/(evil in omen)," in Part One, Book 3, The CJassicaJ Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954), p. 19.
nowtrednot. . . :
(
%%M^%^
). "Red is the fox, black is the
Ukiyoe: woodblock print.
55
56
Bigelow: William Sturgis Bigelow (1850-1926), an American physician and Orien- talist who went to Japan in 1882. He later became a Buddhist, and gave his collection of Japanese works of art to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Van Wyck Brooks, FenoJJosa and His Circle.
58
Broletto: Italian quarterly magazine edited by Carlo Peroni.
Maria's booklet: Maria Pound's essay, "Gais or the Beauties of the Tyrol," was
eventually published in the Reijokai ( /^ -(f" ^ ) in Japanese translation by
Kitasono; Reijokai, vol. 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1939), pp. 98-111. Guide: Guide to Kulchur [A45].
(
I''i T*^
)
? NOTES
223
59
beautiful Townsman: refers to Townsman, vol. I, no. 1 (January, 1938) which contained Pound's introductory essay "vou Club" and a selection of poems by its members translated into English. Their poems were to be published in New Directions 1938, edited by James Laughlin. See Appendix.
62
Peroni: Carlo Peroni, editor of Broletto.
What does vou stand for? : According to Yasuo Fujitomi, when Kitasono and Shozo
Iwamoto were talking in 1935 about their new magazine in a coffee house, Iwamoto unconsciously and idly wrote with water from his fingertip on the table V and O and U. Kitasono thought vou had no meaning in any language, and they decided then that it be the title of the magazine.
UTAi:(^^) isthevocalpartoftheNoplay,andhasnothingtodowithvou. our PurceJJ music; Pound had organized performances at Rapallo of ten trio sonatas for two violins and continue by Henry Purcell (1658-95), based on an edition by
W. Gillies Whittaker and published by L'Oiseau Lyre in Paris. sheets of gaJiey proof: for Guide to KuJchur [A45].
63
Youngmen's Noh Plays: No plays performed by young men.
65
Kagekiyo and Kumasako: two No plays.
very smaJJ Western college: Olivet College (Michigan); see Pound/Ford, Letters, ed.
T. Materer, pp. 152-4.
For several years before, I had been visiting the most distinguished American poet, appropriately enough (for him? for the country? ) confined in a "bug house"--Saint Elizabeths Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D. C. The Master could be seen from 2 to 4 p. m. only and he allotted each regular visitor his or her "day. " Mine was, I believe, Tuesday. As Dr. Thomas Szasz has convincingly shown. Pound was often far more lucid than his incarcerators. If he was crazy, then every person with a one-track mind and a Mission is crazy.
Pound might have been called, varying Hokusai, "the old man mad about culture. " He felt that his Mission was, quite simply, to keep civiliza- tion from sinking. If the aim seems quixotic, we might remember what he had done for English-language literature in the nineteen-tens and -twen- ties. Makingconnections,bringingpeopletogether,sothat"coNversation /
should not utterly wither" [Canto 82) was part of his Mission, and each of us who had been taken into the "tribe of Ez" was expected to carry out his little mission. When I left for Japan, the very decidedly portfolio-less minister of arts supplied addresses.
First was 1649 Nishi-Ichi, Magome, Ota, Tokyo, home of the leader and doyen of the VOU movement, Kitasono Katue, poet and collagist de- nominated "Kit Kat" by Pound, who could never resist a pun. Kitasono had founded the VOU group of poets back in the thirties. Now he would meet regularly with his coterie at home, beneath towering stacks of Western avant-garde magazines. Seated round him on the straw-mat floor, they read their poems and the Master provided acerbic comment. "No smoke rises from that chimney," he would say if a poem did not please him.
Hyperbole, unbounded fantasy, words used as gesture rather than literally, mocking at sentimentality--these surrealistic props were VOU's stock in trade. Kitasono regarded both his art and his surroundings as if from a vast distance; the thick spectacles seemed to stand for an attitude. He
? 212 APPENDIX
spoke little English, but surely read a great deal. Kitasono's wife was the English speaker tor the household--as when I commented that Japan was nigh to becoming a Little America and, after struggling to find words, she said most demurely: "mod-ern won-der-land! " EP bombarded "Kit Kat" with letters in a Poundese so terse and allusive it was often difficult even for a Poundian--and, not surprisingly, Kitasono told me that he could not understand much of them.
Pound had praised Heinrich Heine's "clear palette"--by which he meant that Heine could treat emotional matters with no smudges of sentimentality--and1 supposethathesawin"KitKat"thesameclarityof vision. His punning epithet did define a certain felinity in Kitasono, who approached both his verse and his plastic art with suave indirection, as though on padded feet.
2-11-15 Midorigaoka, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Fujitomi Yasuo, then and now professionally a poet and vocationally a middle-school English teacher, was publishing a poetry magazine called Sette, in English and Italian--using his own typewriter as a printer! A copy went to Pound and he sent me Fujitomi's address. We met regularly and it was on my instiga- tion that Fujitomi began translating Cummings. He subsequently produced many volumes and founded a magazine called i devoted exclusively to Cummings. This was what Pound's mission of bringing people together meant in practice.
Fujitomi and I labored together making a rough translation of Pound's Sophoclean adaptation. Women of Trachis, since Pound had wanted it eventually done as a Noh play. Our translating sessions were often a struggle--1 holding out for brevity and Fujitomi for grammar. The project unfortunately came to nothing, as my time in Japan ended before we had finished.
In June 1954, Fujitomi and 1 visited Ernest Fenollosa's grave at the Miidera, a temple overlooking Lake Biwa near Kyoto. We wandered up and up through a great cryptomeria forest of the temple preserve to find Fenol- losa's resting place. Lake Biwa stretching immensely below. All the Orient seemed before me, as it had been for Fenollosa. I wrote Pound of my visit and he recorded it in the last line of his Canto 89--I suppose implicitly comparing the exploration of the American West (Fremont's expeditions into the Rockies) with my exploration of the East, the cultural frontier of Pound's own time:
I want Fremont looking at mountains or, if you like. Reck, at Lake Biwa . . .
Then there was 10 Kakinokizaka, Meguro-ku, Tokyo. During the
APPENDIX
213
--
? 1910's, a young Japanese dancer named Michio Ito had appeared in London salons, asking everywhere the same question--so he told me forty years later:"Whatisart? "Didheeverfindout? Alas,1 forgottoaskhim. Inall events, he had danced the Guardian of the Well in the first performance of Yeats' At the Hawk's Well. Ito told me that he had learned to dance like a bird by watching the hawks in the London Zoo. Pound had known him in London and. looking back, recorded a snatch of his conversation in Canto 77:
"Jap'nese dance all time overcoat" he remarked with perfect precision . . .
I had been seven months in Japan before a fair wind finally blew me to Michio Ito's dance studio--my Japanese finally seeming sufficient to sup- plement the elliptic English I expected of him. I found him no longer speaking epigrammatic pidgin English but a nearly perfect American. Be- tween the two world wars, he had lived in New York and Hollywood. He discoursed on balance. He told about seeing an old man amid the dust and noise of the street in Cairo, surrounded by a group of intent children and drawing with a stick on the ground. After seeing him do this every day. Ito approached him--he was teaching them astronomy. The old man had told him that 6,000 years ago in Egypt there had been a civilization with perfect balance. Ito said, "I have spent my life studying why it was lost and how to find it again. "
The pudgy white-haired gentleman stared into the air. remembering his friend of forty years before, and intoned: "if I saw Ezra today I would give him a massage and say: . . . 'relax. '" And he recounted how he had gone backstage to converse with Spanish dancers who had just given a spectacu- lar performance. "And you know," he told me. "they had absolutely noth- ing to say. " The moral of the tale being, I suppose, that art is doing, not talking about it. Perhaps, indeed, he had found out.
"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive"--I suppose. W^ell, paradise comes, as Pound observed in the Cantos, "spezzato"--in bits and pieces. My memory is of an Ezraic generosity wide as the oceans--at least spanning oceans--and a keen curiosity that swept Japan into its vast net. Light would come from the East. Pound believed: the particularity of its perceptions reflecting the physical immediacy of the ideogrammatic characters. He abhorredabstractthoughtand likeBertoltBrecht--believed"thetruthis concrete" (the phrase is Brecht's). The concreteness of truth--this is what Pound found in the Far East. He never traveled to the Orient but for a while it so happened that I saw Japan as his surrogate. Being "Reck at Lake Biwa" has left a lot to live up to.
? 214 POSTSCRIPT
POSTSCRIPT: In Place of a Note to Letter 71
U SEFUL BOOKS need no explanation; they speak for themselves as this one does. But there may be some justification in underlining a new facet of Pound in his role of Father and Teacher and to add a touch of humor to an otherwise very serious text.
Pound must have been pleased when Katue Kitasono, alias "Kit Kat," assured him that young readers in Tokyo liked the description of life and customs in the Tyrol. The fact that neither Pound nor I could read Japanese made my rudimentary drawings of haystacks and rakes all the more valu- able as pictographs.
To Mary Moore of Trenton, on January 17, 1938, Pound wrote: "My own daughter has just made her literary debut in Japan. " Such explicit state- ments are rare in his correspondence. A day earlier he had fired off a typically cagey long letter "to the Rt/ Rev the possum and Omnibosphorous WHALE the one to hand to tother in ConSybbletashun. "
Everyone knows that the Possum is T. S. Eliot and that after his conver- sion to the Anglican Church, Pound playfully addressed him as the Right Reverend. The "Whale" was Frank Morley, a fellow editor at Faber & Faber who worked in close consultation with Eliot. He was sailing for New York, hence the "Omnibosphorous"; in a subsequent letter, "a wallowink on the Adlandik. " Morley, sometimes honored with the title of "Son of Narwahl," vied with his two friends in inventing a language for their private zoo filled with panthers, elephants, rabbits and cats, bats and lesser animals. Their letters can not be paraphrased, though more often than not, they need explaining. We can only hope to read them soon in their entirety.
Pound's promoting of unknown young authors is legendary. Modesty ought to forbid my transcribing parts of the letters concerning me, but it is to his credit:
. . . interesting to translate. Child of twelve/ stylistic influence if any. Miss Martineau's Norway (Italian translation of that to explain where a Norwegian child came from). And with all the fake naive stuff, a little real is a comfort/ to say nought of the perfectly good bits that Frazer hasn't got into the Golden Bough. If a child wrote it it must be compre- hensible to other infants? I don't think there can be any more cause the child has been uprooted and sent to a place to get kulchur. . . .
I have simplified the spelling. The "Norwegian child" is Henny Bull
? POSTSCRIPT
215
Simonsen, and the effect of Miss Martineau's book was such that our friendship endures to this day.
WhileI wasgettingkulchurinFlorence,Poundwassuggestingpossible illustrators for The Beauties of the Tyrol. Edmund Dulac was one of them. He made it quite clear I was not a young prodigy; Mozart and Shirley Temple notwithstanding, he had a real horror of young prodigies. He asked the gentlemen at Fabers that the contract be made with the "authoress to whomlcheerfully deed over translation fees as encouragement. . . . "There seemed to have been no doubt in his mind that the booklet would make Fabers' fortune! But Mr. Eliot, after due consideration, answered, yes, it was a nice little book, well written and life well portrayed, but there was just one objection: "it couldn't sell. "
"I takes my possum as he cooks it" (EP to TSE, 25 Nov. 1937) was not always the case. Not when the Possum was not possum enough to hide his tracks and betrayed careless reading of his friend's letters. He had some- what ironically wondered if Pound had become proficient in Swedish, or whether he had translated from an Italian translation from the Swedish.
W. C. Williams' story that my mother was a Swede curiously rankled andPound may have detected a lingering echo. So the final comment was: "Waaal naow Protopherious . . . the error was I didn't send it to Larry [Pollinger, the literary agent] who would have saved you the error of thinking it wouldn't sell. " And he bets that when it does get printed, it will sell TWO copies for every copy Faber has sold of his (E. P. 's) own work, with the exception perhaps of Selected Poems to which Eliot had written the preface. In closing, the seemingly nonchalant riposte: "Oh yes, en passant/ the Tyrol has never been Swedish/ perhaps you mix Gustavus Adolphus with the late Frangois whiskers Giuseppe. " That ended the matter, and Pound has taught us not to overestimate juvenilia, be it his own or anyone else's.
What we get in this collection of letters to Japan is the persistent effort of an adult and responsible artist to create a better understanding between distant nations and the establishment of culture as a concrete value, a measure of exchange. If the possession of a small island threatens blood- shed, let the contendants trade off land for such a commodity as a tradition- al and highly refined form of art. An island like Guam in exchange for one hundred films of No plays, for instance. Men paid to talk peace might examine such simple solutions?
--Mary de Rachewiltz
? 216
NOTES
NOTES TO LETTERS
1
YoneNoguchi:YonejiroNoguchi ^tZ ^^^j>[1875-1947]. Inanundated
(
letter of 1914 to his mother, Pound wrote: "Yone Noguchi dined with me on Tuesday; interesting litterateur of the second order. Dont like him so well as Sung, or Coomaraswami. Still you neednt repeat this, as the acquaintance may grow and there's no telling when one will want to go to Japan. "
The Pilgrimage: a book of verse by Yonejiro Noguchi, illustrated with wood-block prints by Utamaro, published by Elkin Mathews in 1909.
Mathews: Elkin Mathews had published Pound's A Quinzaine/or This YuJe (1908) [A2], Personae (1909) [A3], Exultations (1909) [A4], and Canzoni (1911) [A7].
The Spirit of Romance: was published by J. M. Dent & Sons (1910) [A5]. Yeats: W. B. Yeats
Mary FenoIJosa: wife of Ernest Francis Fenollosa (1853-1908), American scholar and Orientalist who taught philosophy and economics at Tokyo Imperial Uni- versity (1878-86) and other universities in Japan, while he studied Japanese and Chinese art, religion and literature.
Along with fellow Americans in Japan--Edward Morse, Percival Lowell, Wil- liam Sturgis Bigelow, Lafcadio Hearn and John La Farge--Fenollosa and his circle greatly contributed to the rediscovery of the value of Japan's classical artistic heritage at a time when it was being neglectfully cast aside in favor of Westernization and modernization. See Van Wyck Brooks, Fenollosa and His Circle (N. Y. : E. P. Button, 1962).
Sarojini: Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), a Bengali poet. Educated in England, she is the author of The Golden Threshold (1905) and other poems written in English. Mary Fenollosa had met Pound at Naidu's home in London on September 29, 1913. See Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz, eds. , Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914, pp. 264-70; and D. G. Bridson, "An Inter- view with Ezra Pound," New Directions 17, ed. James Laughlin, p. 177.
"My City, My beloved . . . ":i. e. New York City. Quoted from the first line of Pound's poem, "N. Y. ," included in Ripostes (1912).
Franz Hals: Frans Hals (15817-1666), Dutch portrait painter.
banshee: a supernatural being in Irish and Scottish folklore, supposed to give
warnings by its wails of an approaching death in the family.
Mr. Hirata: Kiichiro Hirata (1873-1943), translator, essayist, and scholar of English literature. After studying at Oxford University, he taught at Tokyo Koto Shihan
]
? NOTES
217
Gakko and other universities. Author of Studies of Recent English Literature,
and Essays of Tokuboku ("Tokuboku" is his pen name).
Romaji: Roman letters.
"Kinuta": a No play included in Fenollosa and Pound, tr. , The Classical Noh
Theatre of Japan; so are "Nishikigi" and "Hagoromo. "
"Voroboshi": "Yoroboshi," a No play. A blind child beggar at Tennoji in Naniwa
turns out to be the son of the man in the seventeen-day Buddhist practice at the same temple. The son, having been enlightened, is led by his father's prayers to describe the beautiful scenes of Naniwa as he envisions them in his mind, and dances. The two return home.
"Sumidagawa": In search of her son, the mother comes from Kyoto to the bank of the Sumida River, only to find his tomb; there at night she tries to embrace his ghost in vain.
Verdun: a city on the Meuse River, in the north-eastern part of France; site of significant battle of World War I.
8
Itow: Michio Ito (f f P^J^^p) [1893-1961], a Japanese dancer; played the part of the Hawk at the performance of Yeats' At the Hawk's Well in Lady Cunard's drawing room on April 2, 1916, for which Edmund Dulac designed and made the costumes and masks. In writing this play, Yeats had been inspired by the Japanese No plays in English translation in Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks.
the "cloud-bridge": Hashigakari, the bridge between the stage and the retiring room in the No theatre.
11
Lustra: was published by Elkin Mathews (1916) [All].
Certain NobJe PJays o/ Japan: with an introduction by W. B. Yeats, was published
by The Cuala Press (1916) [A12).
Miss Bisland: Elizabeth Bisland (1861-1929), later Mrs. Elizabeth B. Wetmore, who
edited the letters of Lafcadio Hearn; a friend of Mary Fenollosa's.
Tagore: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali poet, dramatist and mystic; acquaintance of Pound and Yeats. His "hiding, incognito, somewhere in South-
ern California" is spurious. Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
13
book on poor Gaudier Brzeska: Gaudier Brzeska, published by John Lane (1916) [AlO].
Egoist: edited by Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden.
? 218 NOTES
Quest: edited by G. R. S. Mead.
Poetry Review: edited by Harold Monro.
15
play . . . about Fox: Michio Ito had performed "Fox Dance" in 1915.
18
Coburn: Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), American photographer who resided at the time in London; see his Autobiography, ed. Helmut and Alison Gern- sheim. A photograph of Pound by Coburn was reproduced as frontispiece for Lustra (1916). Pound had listed him as a faculty member in the "Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts" (1914).
22
East Stroudsburg: a town on the upper Delaware River which Pound had been acquainted with in his youth.
DaJcroze: Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), Swiss composer and music teacher; inventor of eurhythmies, a system whereby music is coordinated with body movements. He founded the various Instituts Jaques-Dalcroze throughout Eu- rope.
Kyogen: Japanese traditional comedy which developed with the No, and is often performed with No plays on the No stage.
"Shojo," "Kagekiyo," "Hagoromo": No plays, included in Fenollosa-Pound transla- tions, Certain NobJe PJays of Japan [ Al 2] . "Your book" refers to 'Noh ' or Accom- plishment [A13].
"Busu": a piece of Kyogen. During the master's absence, his two servants find out that the "busu," which they have been told to be poison, is actually black sugar. They eat it up, and break their master's favorite hanging scroll and a bowl as well.
25
Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Russian abstract painter and mystic; see his Concerning the Spiritual in Art [Uber das Geistige in der Kunst] (pub- lished in 1914 in English translation as The Art of Spiritual Harmony).
26
Picabia: Francis Picabia (1879-1953), French Dadaist and "sur-irrealist" painter; acquaintance of Pound's in Paris.
27
Capt. /. BrinkJey; John Brinkley (1887-1964), son of Francis Brinkley and uncle of Aya, wife of Gonkuro Koume (younger brother of Tami); worked for the League of Nations in Paris.
? NOTES 219
30
Gakushuin: ( |^ p P/C ). educational institution established in 1877 in Tokyo mainly for the children of Japanese nobility. It is now open to the public, and includes a co-ed university, high school and other levels.
Barney: Natalie Clifford Barney, who held the "Friday salon," was "I'Amazone" of Remy de Gourmont's Letters to an Amazon. See Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: MacMillan, 1960), p. 269.
32
FenoJIosa: see note to letter 4.
Umewaka Minora: Minora Umewaka ( ^-^/p
) [1827-1909], a Japanese No player; gave lessons to Fenollosa. See letter 5; see aJso Fenollosa and Pound,
'Nob' or Accomplishment.
Dr. Mori: Kainan Mori ( y^^% ^ ) [1863-1911], a Japanese scholar of Chinese
language and literature; gave lessons to Fenollosa.
Dr. Ariga: Nagao Ariga ( ^ '^ h^'^%- ) [1860-1921] graduated from Tokyo Im-
perial University in 1882, where he was a student of Fenollosa. Doctor of jurisprudence in international law; taught at Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University. Author of a number of books on literature, sociology, and pedagogy as well as international law; later became a member of the Privy Council. He was an assistant-interpreter for Fenollosa while the latter was in Japan, and the translator of Fenollosa's Epochs oj Chinese and Japanese Art after it was posthumously published in 1912.
that earth quake: "The Great Earthquake of Kanto" which struck Tokyo and Yoko- hama area on September 1, 1923. According to the statistics, the magnitude was 7. 8-8. 2; deaths totalled 99,331, with 43,476 missing.
C. H. Douglas: Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), British economist and originator of the theory of Social Credit, which holds that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the reason for economic de- pressions and World Wars. Published articles in A. R. Orage's The New Age.
Gesell: Silvio Gesell (1862-1930), Minister of Finance of the second Munich Repub- lic (1919); monetary reformer and author of The Natural Economic Order.
Cavalcanti: Guido Cavalcanti Rime, published in 1932 [B27]. ABC of Reading: published in 1934 [A35]
33
Jean Cocteau: French poet and long-standing friend of Pound's from his years in Paris (1920-25).
35
Izzo and Camerino: Carlo Izzo, an Italian translator of Pound's poems, and his friend Aldo Camerino, sent out a group of letters in the fall of 1935, and launched
f:
? 220 NOTES
"a movement tending to establish a regular exchange of technical, mostly pro- sodic, information . . . between literary people of different countries"; see Charles Norman, Ezra Pound, p. 332.
Bunting: Basil Bunting, British poet.
LaughJin; James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions.
Zukofsky: Louis Zukofsky, American poet.
AngoJd; J. P. Angold, a British poet; author of an unpublished book on economics
called "Work and Privilege" which Pound tried to translate into Italian; see
David Heymann, The Last Rower (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 140. weJsh scholar: W. Moelwyn Merchant? ; Hugh Gordon Porteus?
36
]efferson and/or Mussolini: published in July 1935 [A41].
37
Ken Yanagisawa: { %^f '^'^ "j^ ) [1889-1953], Japanese diplomat and poet; author of Orchard, Journals of South Europe, and Twilight on the Indian Ocean.
Ginza: the most fashionable street in Tokyo at that time.
uivKER and Bopoto: see Kitasono's letter to Pound (30 January 1937).
38
Alberto Carocci: Italian publisher.
Utai: the rhythmic chanting of No texts.
Rihaku: Japanese name for the Chinese poet Li Po.
con espressioni di alta Stima: with expressions of high esteem.
40
HajimeMatsumiya: ( T^X"^ ^'ll ),Councillorof the Japanese embassy in Italy, 1936-38.
ABC: ABC of Reading [A3 5].
W. E. Wloodward: see selection of letters from Pound to Woodward in Paideuma,
vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 105-20.
41
Suma Gen;i: a No play whose "suspense is the suspense of waiting for a supernatu- ral manifestation--which comes"; see The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.
Active Anthology: [B32].
Make It New: [A36].
The Chinese Written Character: [B36].
Ta Hio: [A28].
D. C. Fox; Douglas Fox, assistant to Leo Frobenius at the Forschungsinstitut fiir
Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt; edited numerous works of Frobenius. Paideuma was the name of the journal the institute published.
? NOTES
221
43
Margaret Lenoa; Margaret Gerstley Lenoa corresponded with Pound on staging No plays, etc.
Meierhold: Wsewolod Emiljewitsch Meyerhold (1874-1942), Russian actor and director.
44
Pauthier: M. G. Pauthier, French translator of Confucius, kana: Japanese syllabary.
Cathay: published in 1915 [A9].
45
Globe: Milwaukee magazine to which Pound contributed articles on politics and economics during 1937-38.
Uncle George: Representative George Holden Tinkham of Massachussetts; he met Pound in Italy.
J'uomo piu educate: "the most experienced, or knowledgeable man. "
Ronald Duncan: British poet and editor of Townsman (London); "no relation" of the
American dancer.
Satie: Erik Satie, who lived in Arcueil, a southern section of Paris.
Sasajima: Toshio Sasajima ( f^'? S) -^^ ), a member of the vou Club. Nakamura: Chio Nakamura ( ^ T^ ^ /%_^ ), a member of the vou Club. KOIKE:TakeshiKoike( ^hv^^^), amemberofthevouClub.
Cummings: e. e. cummings.
Morrison: Robert Morrison, a Protestant missionary in Asia who compiled a six-
volume Chinese-English dictionary (published in Malacca, 1815-22).
48
MAO SHE CH-HING tseen: Moo Shi cheng chien ( % ttf '^ ^- ), the text of the
Kwan Kwan Tsheu kew: f^ f^ ^ ^ ^H) ? The first line of the first poem (a folksong of Southern Chou) included in the Confucian Odes, meaning " 'Kwan, kwan' sing the [two] eaglefishers. " "Kwan" means "pass," but it is used here as onoma- topoeia of the bird's cry.
49
assuperiorman. . . : Pound'stranslationfromthefourthandsixthlinesofthesame
Lacharme interpretatione, edidit Julius Mohl (Stuttgart and Tubingen, 1830). Hemingway's "They aJJ made peace": VOU no. 19 (July 1, 1937) contains Kitasono's
Confucian Book of Odes edited with notes by Mao Heng [^ %. Ch'ang( \ X ), later annotated by Cheng Hsuan( ^p ^ period, and reputedly the most authentic version of the Odes.
poem in the Confucian Odes above:
old latin bloke: P. Lacharme, Conjucii Chi-King, sive Liber Carminum, ex Latina, P.
J^ ^ ~^h' \iB-
^^^^^^
) and Mao ) inthelaterHan
? 222 NOTES
Japanese translation of the poem by Hemingway (pp. 33-4).
Butcharl: Montgomery Butchart, author of Money, one of Pound's select economic
texts.
50
Jennings' appalling translation: The Shi King: The 0\d "Voeivy Classic" of the Chinese by William Jennings (1891).
51
beautiful book; Kitasono's book of poetry, Letters of the Summer
[Natsu no Tegami in Japanese]; La Lettre d'ete referred to in Kitasono's leuer of 6 September 1937.
BrinkJey: Francis Brinkley (1841-1912), an English Japanophile journalist. Visited Japan as a naval attache to the English Embassy in Tokyo in 1867; in 1881 bought the Japan MaiJ and became its president and chief editor. In 1892, also began writing for the London Times as its Tokyo correspondent. Author of Guide to English SeJ/-taught (1875); History of the Empire of Japan (1893); Japan and China (1903); New Guide to English Self-taught (1909); History of the Japanese People from the Earliest Times to the End of Meiji Era (1915).
52
^^^lih
crow. " Pound later translated the line (rightly) as "All red things foxes, each
black a crow/(evil in omen)," in Part One, Book 3, The CJassicaJ Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954), p. 19.
nowtrednot. . . :
(
%%M^%^
). "Red is the fox, black is the
Ukiyoe: woodblock print.
55
56
Bigelow: William Sturgis Bigelow (1850-1926), an American physician and Orien- talist who went to Japan in 1882. He later became a Buddhist, and gave his collection of Japanese works of art to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Van Wyck Brooks, FenoJJosa and His Circle.
58
Broletto: Italian quarterly magazine edited by Carlo Peroni.
Maria's booklet: Maria Pound's essay, "Gais or the Beauties of the Tyrol," was
eventually published in the Reijokai ( /^ -(f" ^ ) in Japanese translation by
Kitasono; Reijokai, vol. 18, no. 1 (January 1, 1939), pp. 98-111. Guide: Guide to Kulchur [A45].
(
I''i T*^
)
? NOTES
223
59
beautiful Townsman: refers to Townsman, vol. I, no. 1 (January, 1938) which contained Pound's introductory essay "vou Club" and a selection of poems by its members translated into English. Their poems were to be published in New Directions 1938, edited by James Laughlin. See Appendix.
62
Peroni: Carlo Peroni, editor of Broletto.
What does vou stand for? : According to Yasuo Fujitomi, when Kitasono and Shozo
Iwamoto were talking in 1935 about their new magazine in a coffee house, Iwamoto unconsciously and idly wrote with water from his fingertip on the table V and O and U. Kitasono thought vou had no meaning in any language, and they decided then that it be the title of the magazine.
UTAi:(^^) isthevocalpartoftheNoplay,andhasnothingtodowithvou. our PurceJJ music; Pound had organized performances at Rapallo of ten trio sonatas for two violins and continue by Henry Purcell (1658-95), based on an edition by
W. Gillies Whittaker and published by L'Oiseau Lyre in Paris. sheets of gaJiey proof: for Guide to KuJchur [A45].
63
Youngmen's Noh Plays: No plays performed by young men.
65
Kagekiyo and Kumasako: two No plays.
very smaJJ Western college: Olivet College (Michigan); see Pound/Ford, Letters, ed.
T. Materer, pp. 152-4.
