I had sent copies of VOU to Ezra Pound, who soon sent to me from Rapallo a copy of Guide Cavalcanti and a letter with his
affectionate
hail that the VOU group would remain forever in the youth of twenty-one.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
^'
;
J
^
V
199
? 200 APPENDIX
APPENDIX II VOU CLUB
In his essay "VOU Club," Ezra Pound introduced to Western readers some contemporary Japanese poets. In his generous opinion, their poems were "better work than any save those of E. E. Cummings," admiring in them the Japanese eye which was "like those new camera shutters that catch the bullet leaving the gun. " In his estimation their thought went from one peak to another "faster than our slow wits permit us to follow. "
Pound's essay appeared in the Townsman, vol. I, no. 1 (January, 1938), as an introduction, with the "Notes" by Katue Kitasono, to thirteen poems by eight of the VOU Club members: "Upon the Tragedy of a Flower on the Calm-latitudes or of a Passenger Aeroplane" and "Secrecy of a Duet" by Takeshi Fuji; "The End of Evil Fortune" by Chio Nakamura; "The Road of Flowers" and "Glassy Hour" by Takeshi Koike; "Young Swan" and "Love's Magnetism" by Toshio Sasajima; "Finger Top of Waltz" and "Outflow of Waltz" by Koichi Kihara; "A Battle of Roses" by Minoru Yasoshima; and "Poems" by Katue Kitasono. Reprinted here are Pound's "VOU Club" and Kitasono's "Notes" from the Townsman, in addition to six poems by VOU poets, as well as James Laughlin's "Modern Poets of Japan" from New Directions 1938.
As Pound had suspected, there certainly were other clubs of poets in Japan at that time. Among the "active" poets in the Tokyo area were Junzaburo Nishiwaki, Shiro Murano, Ichiro Ando, Ikuo Haruyama, and Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, to name a few. But also as Pound had guessed, the VOU Club was a center of intellectual attention at that time, rapidly in- creasing its merpbership during the years 1935-37.
Almost twenty years later, Kitasono recollected the old days and wrote an essay, "The VOU Club," upon the request of Michael Reck, who visited him in Tokyo. Reck later included this essay in his book, Ezra Pound; A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
? APPENDIX 201
Ezra Pound, VOL/ Club
It is not a case of asking what would any set of eight European and/or American poets look like if asked to translate their poems into Japanese. It is a case of saying that for half a century after Papa P'laubert started writing, any man who wanted to write English prose had to start by reading French prose. And it may be that from now on any man who wants to write English poetrywillhavetostartreadingJapanese. I meanmodernJapanese,not merely studying Chinese ideogram, as I have been advocating for the past twenty years.
Not as translations but as actual writing, these poems are better work than any save those of E. E. Cummings at his happiest. They may even serve to introduce Cummings and Peret to readers who have thought my more obscure younger contemporaries merely eccentric. Yes. You will have to read Mr. Kitasono's introduction twice, and the poems three or four times. The Japanese eye is like those new camera shutters that catch the bullet leaving the gun. You will not understand some sentences as you read them, but only after having got to their ends, see that they reach round and tuck in their beginnings, so that sense is there nicely boxed. I myself feel rather like a grizzly bear faced by a bunch of weasels. It is the Mongoose spring, the chameleon's tongue quickness. All the moss and fuzz that for twenty years we have been trying to scrape off our language--these young men start without it. They see the crystal set, the chemical laboratory and the pine tree with untrammelled clearness. As to their being a or the most active new club of poets in Tokio, I doubt if any one city contains two such clubs. I know that nowhere in Europe is there any such vortex of poetic alertness. Tokio takes over, where Paris stopped.
Make no mistake, the thought is not absent from these poems. The Japanese poet has gone from one peak of it to another faster than our slow wits permit us to follow before we have got used to his pace.
Ezra Pound
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APPENDIX
Katue Kitasono, Notes
These poems collected here were all written by the members of the VOU Club. This club was planned in a stroll of fifteen minutes or so under the platan-trees at Ginza Street, August 1935. After a week the VOU Club consisting of fifteen members was born as a most active, new club of poets in Japan. Almost the half of these poets belonged before to the "Club d'Arcueil," which was made in the spring of 1931 by four young poets and two poetesses. The magazine Madame Blanche was published under my editorship.
At that time we were profoundly influenced by the personality and the attitude for art of Erik Satie. In the memory of this harmless great artist we used the name of the place where he had lived for our Club. The movement of this club rapidly exerted an influence over young poets, and the mem- bers increased next year to more than forty, making an epoch in the poetical world.
It was by an inevitable result of the tendency of the age that the "Club d'Arcueil" should dissolve at last without a serious reason and the Madame Blanche ceased to be published at No. 19.
Now the most interesting subject to us is about the relation between imagery and ideoplasty. Contemporary young poets are all vaguely con- scious of, and worry about this part. Some of them went over again to its extremity and returned. Others gave up exploration and found out a queer new country, remaining only as amateur thinkers. But anyone whose stand- ing ground is in literature can do nothing for it, if he ignores the system of literature.
The formation of poetry takes such a course like below: (a) Language (b) Imagery (c) Ideoplasty
That which we vaguely call poetical effect means, generally, ideoplasty which grows out of the result of imagery. Man has thought out to make a heart-shaped space with two right angles. This great discovery on plastic, and also that of the conies in mathematics, are two mysteries brought by man's intellect.
The relation between imagery and ideoplasty makes us suppose the heart-shaped space which is born by the connection of the same mysterious two curves. We standardized these two curves and got a necessity.
What we must do first for imagery are collection, arrangement, and combination. Thus we get the first line, "a shell, a typewriter, and grapes," in which we have an aesthetic feeling. But there is not any further develop-
? APPENDIX 203
ment. We add the next line and then another aesthetic feeling is born. Thus all the lines are combined and a stanza is finished. This means the comple- tion of imagery of that stanza and then ideoplasty begins.
This principle can be applied to poems consisting of several stanzas. In that case ideoplasty is formed when the last stanza is finished.
Though it cannot be allowed as orthodox of poetry that imagery is performed by ideoplasty, this violence is dared often by religionists, politi- cians, and satirists. Morality poems, political poems and satirical poems are written, almost without exception, with such an illogical principle.
The phenomena in our life proceed, through our senses to our experi- ences, perceptions, and intuitions. It is intuition rationally that provides the essentials for imagery, and it is the method of poetry that materializes intuitions perceptively and combines. Consequently, exact imagery and ideoplasty are due to an exact method. Pure and orthodox poetry cannot exist without this theory.
I fear that the contemporary Japanese literature has not been appreci- ated rightly in the western world, because of the books written not with ability but with amateur energies. The true understanding is not to be led by those to wear gloves and take the pen. It must be carried out by those who, standing on the literary fact of Japan, bravely suffer for laying the eternal literary foundation on the new land.
For a long time we have desired our poems to be read by superior poets of Europe and America. To our gratitude an opportunity has been given by Mr. Ezra Pound whom we respect heartily.
I see those poems have been deprived of the most part of the nuances of Japanese by the imperfect translation. But each of us did his best to translate his own poems. Though this first attempt may not succeed, we cannot neglect its literary and cultural meaning.
Katue Kitasono
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APPENDIX
POEMS
I
Under the the umbrella of concrete, yesterday, we laughed at tomato for its carelessness.
Their thoughts have gone rotten by a bucket, and they talk of rope-necktie. A shot is cabbage in the sky over the office.
Dear friend, now is all right the heel.
To-day a duck they dug out in a brush of philosophismus
My laugh is nearer to the condition of Dachshunde-like cylinder than the
cucumber-shaped ideas of Aquinas.
I put on gloves emeraldgreen and start with a book MembranoJogie under
my arm.
Is there a shop to sell clear bags?
To-morrow beside a bucket a necktie I shall wear for the sake of General clothed in vegetable costume.
A weary city is likened to a brush.
Be-gone! a wandering head.
Be-gone! in a fling like an explosive, over the rock through a Geissler's brass
pipe.
II
In leaden slippers I laugh at the fountain of night, and scorn a solitary swan. A parasol of glass she spreads, and wanders along the lane the cosmos
flowering.
Over the cypress tree I image, to myself, a hotel marked with two golf-clubs
crossed;
And move my camera on the sand of night.
In the street, there shining the spindle-shaped amalgam stairs, the telephone-bell is ringing on the desk.
In Congo by a barber a parrot is trained and sold at Kabinda.
Then by cheerful young sailors her head is replaced by a leaden one: Just a glimpse of it a watchmaker catches under cocoanut-trees, where is
seen a dome tightly closed.
On the table I toss the gloves of antelope, and the gloomy fellows I ignore. A typewriter packed in a raincoat of oil-skin is dead and gone on the Le
Temps.
She, spreading the parasol of glass, pursues a nightingale, in the space
? APPENDIX 205
between the Le Temps and the cosmos flowers. Or the new age is born.
Under the hydroplane, "Hamburger Fliigzeugbau Ha 139," a duck throws into confusion the battle line.
Among the cosmos flowers vibrate machineguns. By the drain a young washerman blows up.
the clearer, the better is the sky over the street. Flash on the concrete a bright wire and shovel.
UPON THE TRAGEDY OF A FLOWER ON THE CALM-LATITUDES OR OF A PASSENGER AEROPLANE
Sliding down the stair-cases of plants,
Tearing off the soft stripes of calm-latitudes,
A round-bodied mannequin's yellowish bare foot Suddenly crushes a chalky structure with a bang of a gun. Then, the fountain of soda-water is opened.
And the inner-side of the zoo comes slowly to be seen.
--Takeshi Fuji
FINGER TOP OF WALTZ
1 switch on a gilded turbine of glass.
Give an anticorrosive of asphalt upon the air current ascending,
Pave the street with white-gold lines, and ballasts toss.
The mind of sky brightens canvas shoes.
Since then a system of necktie became milkwhite colour.
A single sound of cloud has dissolved.
When came out a sound of lens.
Finger tops of a boy who praises verdure, stepping emergency stairs of
afternoon.
--Katue Kitasono
--Koichi Kihara
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APPENDIX
YOUNG SWAN
One stamp is going down on the white canal Along its side the red cuhure tosses chairs and its a pageant
In this time the dahlia venerates my mind But high steady forest Enjoy this tablet Many windows are more beautiful than the goods Take care I'm nothing But at last I'm a blue manifesto for her.
THE END OF EVIL FORTUNE
Summer falls crushing
My dear jar of champagne
Your love affair is dispersed over the sky, and in vain, So the empty conception
Which has now burnings the perfume, colour,
And there grows the white empty grass
And it is a dream of one cigarette only
oblivion, all must he reject on the ground
Now glistening the valley, so bitter the slips of glasses Nor shabby the shining sun
Death is ugly
Tomato is crashing too
Tomorrow is not so good as aujourd'hui In broad day camouflages the clothings 1 am sorry to feel the Zephyr Cucumber drifts
Silhouette of present state
OI honouryourfortunelight.
GLASSY HOUR
--Tio Nakamura
Coming back from the sea, the morning after a long absence. Training the gymnastics, a sun-dial and a priest.
In front of the theater, a clipping-man is standing.
Aiding by a swallow, an envelope, from a hospital, is gnawing the
apples, and runs after the side of Obelisk.
--Toshio Sasajima
--Takeshi Koike
? APPENDIX 207
James Laughlin, Modern Poets of Japan
Thk pokms that follow are the work of a group of young Japanese poets, members of the Vou Club, translated into English by themselves. I am particularly glad to be able to publish them because of two dissociations which they can effect. They will show first of all that militaristic imperial- ism has not wiped out artistic activity and secondly that there is live poetry in Japan. We might not have known it, as little, apart from the classics, filters through to the Occident except the very bad modern imitations of the classics--such as the poems written by the emperor's third cousin's grand- mother for his birthday.
The first thing to think about in stating these poems is the fact of the ideogram. The Japanese language, derived from the Chinese, is still very much a picture language. In spite of the intrusion of the phonetic characters the Japanese can still see in many of the words which he writes the picture of the thing itself. What is the result in terms of poetry? Naturally there is more verbal reality, a closer relationship between the thing and its name, some of the essence of the thing in the name.
But of course that quality is not carried over into a translation. So we can only surmise that the oriental poet and poetry reader are, in this respect, "better off" than we are, and let it go at that.
Whatwecan,tosomeextent,judgeisthegreatertension. IfI under- stand Japanese syntax aright it has, to an even greater degree than an inflected language like Latin, a minimum of dead words--that is, words which have no charge of meaning apart from their purely grammatical function--articles, prepositions, etc. --all the useless little words which clutter up a positional language like English and thin out the vigour of the poetic line.
I think anyone must concede that one of the most important factors in poetry is verbal inter-activity--word working upon word, the sense-aura of one word fusing and contrasting with those of the words near it. The dead little words of English lessen this activity by separating the meaning- bearing words. Thus in English we only get in small segments of the line--in adjectival and adverbial phrases for the most part--the kind of tension that we often get in a whole line of Latin, where there will be perhaps only one word out of seven that does not carry a meaning. The same sort of thing, I think, is possible in Japanese; certainly these poems confirm that thesis.
And the poets of the Vou Club are very well aware of the rich possibili-
? 208 APPENDIX
ties of their medium. They would not perhaps use the word "tension" but they have coined the word "ideoplasty" to express the esthetic effects which the close juxtaposition of verbal images makes possible. Here is what the leader of the group, Katue Kitasono, has to say about ideoplasty and about the group's general conception of poetry. Occidental poets will not waste any time they may spend studying Kitasono's statement, so I print it in full.
[seJection from Kitasono's previous "Notes"l
There is one other fact that the American reader should know before he applies himself to these poems--that there is a very strong French in- fluence in Japan. Tokyo knows a great deal more about what is going on in Paris than New York does. All of the important books of Eluard have been translated into Japanese ideogram. None have been published in New York.
And so the thoughtful reader will think about the relation of ideogram to Surrealism. He will also want to think about the following statement, which I quote from Kitasono's last letter: "The experiment we are now making on poetry is to express our polygonal ideas vividly as by painting. The poetical movement of the Vou Club might be defined as directed to natural-scientific realism. "
The name "Vou," by the way, means nothing special. Kitasono writes that it is "not even so significant as a single grape-leaf. The word Vou shall be bestowed its quality and its value by the club's strong will and its solid action. "
"Strong will and solid action" sounds rather bad, sounds like Fascism and poets in uniform. But this is not the case. The real outlook of the poets can be appraised from a few of the biographical notes which accompanied the manuscript: "Haruki Sohu . . . walks with a stick as slender as a feeler. Tio Nakamura . . . she raised the most charming voice when she was near being drowned in the sea last summer. Eiko Sirota . . . so poor at sums that she cannot add up the money she must pay for the cakes she had. but very proud of that. Syuiti Nagayasu . . . when tired of work he goes to the street and enters a lonely coffee-house, and sometimes goes home from there. "
[The above introduction, accompanied by a selection of poems hy VOU poets, appeared in New Directions 1 938. In New Directions 1 940, poems by Kitasono and Ueda Toshio further appeared. ]
? APPENDIX 209
Katue Kitasono, The VOU Club
The VOU Club was born in 1935. The members at the start were Kitasono Katue, Iwamoto Shuzo, Miki Tei, and eleven other poets. The initial num- ber of the magazine VOU was issued on the 5th of July in the same year, containing four essays on poetry, fifteen poems and the translation of a letter of Jack Vasse.
I can remember the moment in which the strange name VOU was adopted by us. It was on the table of a small coffeehouse on the Ginza street. We had been satisfied with none of the names introduced there, each of them having its own meaning restrictive to our activities, when we hit upon the meaningless spell[ing] which Iwamoto was scribbling automatically on a scrap of paper, and thus we became VOUists.
The VOU poets wanted to create a new trend of art in Tokio entirely different from those which were already born after the First World War. To begin with, we needed to break up every traditional and conventional art in Japan. We decided that we should be as ironical in our artistical attitude as Erik Satie who fought for modern music.
In VOU's third issue we printed Abstraction-Creation Art Non Figura- tive, and Boethy's essay in the fourth issue. I specially mention this, because I wish to suggest the direction of art of the VOU group at this time.
In the beginning of 1936 the members of our group counted 21, several composers, painters, and technologists having joined us. In May of the year we held the VOU Club demonstration at the hall of the Denki Club, in which we read eight manifestos and recited poems of our own. This attempt was rather a failure as there came up only a few opponents.
I had sent copies of VOU to Ezra Pound, who soon sent to me from Rapallo a copy of Guide Cavalcanti and a letter with his affectionate hail that the VOU group would remain forever in the youth of twenty-one. He gave us as many opportunities of touching the avant-garde of England and America as he could. If VOU still keeps the youth of twenty-one (as I am sure of it), it's much indebted to his sensible suggestions.
In 1937 through Ezra Pound I knew D. C. Fox, member of Forschungsin- stitut fiir Kulturmorphologie supervised by Leo Frobenius, and I published the very interesting essay "Paideuma" in VOU's sixteenth issue. It was in this same issue that the VOU poet Fuji Takeshi treated of T. E. Hulme's Speculations in his article "The Direction of Poetry as a View of the World. "
In February 1937 I sent to Pound sixteen VOU poems with my notes, which were printed the next year in the first number of Townsman started
? 210 APPENDIX
by Ronald Duncan, with Pound's introductory notes for them. This was the first appearance of VOU poems in Europe, and the next year James Laughlin in America printed fourteen VOU poems with his notes in New Directions. The war between China and Japan already began in July 1937. We hoped it would soon be finished, but on the contrary it was marching to the death fight of the Pacific War. The government began to stiffen even on art. Some of the surrealists were imprisoned. In 1940 we were forced at last to abandon publication of the magazine. I succeeded somehow or other in keeping VOU poets from arrest.
On December 8th 1941, I heard, in the library of the Nippon Dental College (the librarian of which I have been from then till now), the radio news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fortunately there came an interval in which the pressure on culture was a little slacked, and I could reissue the magazine under the title New Technics, with the contents just the same as before. It lasted four numbers and then ceased as the army persecuted again every movement of international tendencies. We diverted ourselves in cultivating the classical field of Japanese literature. I began printing the literary pamphlet Mugi [Wheat), which was continued until the beginning of 1945 when Tokio was exhaustively bombed out.
InAugustJapansurrendered. I caughtontheradiotheEmperor'svoice in the Ichijoin Temple in Sanjo, a small town three hundred kilometers from Tokio. VOU poets came back from the war by twos and threes, and in 1947 we revived the magazine VOU. After numbers 31 and 32, the inflation in this country forced us to give up the next issue.
It was by the backing of [the] Asagi Press that we could begin publica- tion of the newly titled Cendre, which was put out six times until 1949 when Asagi got into depression. In January of this year [1950] we again put the title back to VOU and published the thirty-third and thirty-fourth issues aided by the Shoshinsha Press.
VOU's orientation: everything humanistic is a boredom. Tears, cryings, loves, crimes, ironies and humors, all attract us in no ways. We only find a little of aesthetic excitement in erasing every humanistic vestige from art.
"Everything tends to be angular"--T. E. Hulme.
? APPENDIX 211
Michael Reck, Memoirs of a Parody Perry^
Nearly a hundred years after Admiral Perry hove into Tokyo harbor, I myself landed in Japan--with no letter from the U. S. President, like Perry, but at least some notes of introduction from the American "minister of the arts without portfolio. " 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.
;
J
^
V
199
? 200 APPENDIX
APPENDIX II VOU CLUB
In his essay "VOU Club," Ezra Pound introduced to Western readers some contemporary Japanese poets. In his generous opinion, their poems were "better work than any save those of E. E. Cummings," admiring in them the Japanese eye which was "like those new camera shutters that catch the bullet leaving the gun. " In his estimation their thought went from one peak to another "faster than our slow wits permit us to follow. "
Pound's essay appeared in the Townsman, vol. I, no. 1 (January, 1938), as an introduction, with the "Notes" by Katue Kitasono, to thirteen poems by eight of the VOU Club members: "Upon the Tragedy of a Flower on the Calm-latitudes or of a Passenger Aeroplane" and "Secrecy of a Duet" by Takeshi Fuji; "The End of Evil Fortune" by Chio Nakamura; "The Road of Flowers" and "Glassy Hour" by Takeshi Koike; "Young Swan" and "Love's Magnetism" by Toshio Sasajima; "Finger Top of Waltz" and "Outflow of Waltz" by Koichi Kihara; "A Battle of Roses" by Minoru Yasoshima; and "Poems" by Katue Kitasono. Reprinted here are Pound's "VOU Club" and Kitasono's "Notes" from the Townsman, in addition to six poems by VOU poets, as well as James Laughlin's "Modern Poets of Japan" from New Directions 1938.
As Pound had suspected, there certainly were other clubs of poets in Japan at that time. Among the "active" poets in the Tokyo area were Junzaburo Nishiwaki, Shiro Murano, Ichiro Ando, Ikuo Haruyama, and Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, to name a few. But also as Pound had guessed, the VOU Club was a center of intellectual attention at that time, rapidly in- creasing its merpbership during the years 1935-37.
Almost twenty years later, Kitasono recollected the old days and wrote an essay, "The VOU Club," upon the request of Michael Reck, who visited him in Tokyo. Reck later included this essay in his book, Ezra Pound; A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
? APPENDIX 201
Ezra Pound, VOL/ Club
It is not a case of asking what would any set of eight European and/or American poets look like if asked to translate their poems into Japanese. It is a case of saying that for half a century after Papa P'laubert started writing, any man who wanted to write English prose had to start by reading French prose. And it may be that from now on any man who wants to write English poetrywillhavetostartreadingJapanese. I meanmodernJapanese,not merely studying Chinese ideogram, as I have been advocating for the past twenty years.
Not as translations but as actual writing, these poems are better work than any save those of E. E. Cummings at his happiest. They may even serve to introduce Cummings and Peret to readers who have thought my more obscure younger contemporaries merely eccentric. Yes. You will have to read Mr. Kitasono's introduction twice, and the poems three or four times. The Japanese eye is like those new camera shutters that catch the bullet leaving the gun. You will not understand some sentences as you read them, but only after having got to their ends, see that they reach round and tuck in their beginnings, so that sense is there nicely boxed. I myself feel rather like a grizzly bear faced by a bunch of weasels. It is the Mongoose spring, the chameleon's tongue quickness. All the moss and fuzz that for twenty years we have been trying to scrape off our language--these young men start without it. They see the crystal set, the chemical laboratory and the pine tree with untrammelled clearness. As to their being a or the most active new club of poets in Tokio, I doubt if any one city contains two such clubs. I know that nowhere in Europe is there any such vortex of poetic alertness. Tokio takes over, where Paris stopped.
Make no mistake, the thought is not absent from these poems. The Japanese poet has gone from one peak of it to another faster than our slow wits permit us to follow before we have got used to his pace.
Ezra Pound
? 202
APPENDIX
Katue Kitasono, Notes
These poems collected here were all written by the members of the VOU Club. This club was planned in a stroll of fifteen minutes or so under the platan-trees at Ginza Street, August 1935. After a week the VOU Club consisting of fifteen members was born as a most active, new club of poets in Japan. Almost the half of these poets belonged before to the "Club d'Arcueil," which was made in the spring of 1931 by four young poets and two poetesses. The magazine Madame Blanche was published under my editorship.
At that time we were profoundly influenced by the personality and the attitude for art of Erik Satie. In the memory of this harmless great artist we used the name of the place where he had lived for our Club. The movement of this club rapidly exerted an influence over young poets, and the mem- bers increased next year to more than forty, making an epoch in the poetical world.
It was by an inevitable result of the tendency of the age that the "Club d'Arcueil" should dissolve at last without a serious reason and the Madame Blanche ceased to be published at No. 19.
Now the most interesting subject to us is about the relation between imagery and ideoplasty. Contemporary young poets are all vaguely con- scious of, and worry about this part. Some of them went over again to its extremity and returned. Others gave up exploration and found out a queer new country, remaining only as amateur thinkers. But anyone whose stand- ing ground is in literature can do nothing for it, if he ignores the system of literature.
The formation of poetry takes such a course like below: (a) Language (b) Imagery (c) Ideoplasty
That which we vaguely call poetical effect means, generally, ideoplasty which grows out of the result of imagery. Man has thought out to make a heart-shaped space with two right angles. This great discovery on plastic, and also that of the conies in mathematics, are two mysteries brought by man's intellect.
The relation between imagery and ideoplasty makes us suppose the heart-shaped space which is born by the connection of the same mysterious two curves. We standardized these two curves and got a necessity.
What we must do first for imagery are collection, arrangement, and combination. Thus we get the first line, "a shell, a typewriter, and grapes," in which we have an aesthetic feeling. But there is not any further develop-
? APPENDIX 203
ment. We add the next line and then another aesthetic feeling is born. Thus all the lines are combined and a stanza is finished. This means the comple- tion of imagery of that stanza and then ideoplasty begins.
This principle can be applied to poems consisting of several stanzas. In that case ideoplasty is formed when the last stanza is finished.
Though it cannot be allowed as orthodox of poetry that imagery is performed by ideoplasty, this violence is dared often by religionists, politi- cians, and satirists. Morality poems, political poems and satirical poems are written, almost without exception, with such an illogical principle.
The phenomena in our life proceed, through our senses to our experi- ences, perceptions, and intuitions. It is intuition rationally that provides the essentials for imagery, and it is the method of poetry that materializes intuitions perceptively and combines. Consequently, exact imagery and ideoplasty are due to an exact method. Pure and orthodox poetry cannot exist without this theory.
I fear that the contemporary Japanese literature has not been appreci- ated rightly in the western world, because of the books written not with ability but with amateur energies. The true understanding is not to be led by those to wear gloves and take the pen. It must be carried out by those who, standing on the literary fact of Japan, bravely suffer for laying the eternal literary foundation on the new land.
For a long time we have desired our poems to be read by superior poets of Europe and America. To our gratitude an opportunity has been given by Mr. Ezra Pound whom we respect heartily.
I see those poems have been deprived of the most part of the nuances of Japanese by the imperfect translation. But each of us did his best to translate his own poems. Though this first attempt may not succeed, we cannot neglect its literary and cultural meaning.
Katue Kitasono
? 204
APPENDIX
POEMS
I
Under the the umbrella of concrete, yesterday, we laughed at tomato for its carelessness.
Their thoughts have gone rotten by a bucket, and they talk of rope-necktie. A shot is cabbage in the sky over the office.
Dear friend, now is all right the heel.
To-day a duck they dug out in a brush of philosophismus
My laugh is nearer to the condition of Dachshunde-like cylinder than the
cucumber-shaped ideas of Aquinas.
I put on gloves emeraldgreen and start with a book MembranoJogie under
my arm.
Is there a shop to sell clear bags?
To-morrow beside a bucket a necktie I shall wear for the sake of General clothed in vegetable costume.
A weary city is likened to a brush.
Be-gone! a wandering head.
Be-gone! in a fling like an explosive, over the rock through a Geissler's brass
pipe.
II
In leaden slippers I laugh at the fountain of night, and scorn a solitary swan. A parasol of glass she spreads, and wanders along the lane the cosmos
flowering.
Over the cypress tree I image, to myself, a hotel marked with two golf-clubs
crossed;
And move my camera on the sand of night.
In the street, there shining the spindle-shaped amalgam stairs, the telephone-bell is ringing on the desk.
In Congo by a barber a parrot is trained and sold at Kabinda.
Then by cheerful young sailors her head is replaced by a leaden one: Just a glimpse of it a watchmaker catches under cocoanut-trees, where is
seen a dome tightly closed.
On the table I toss the gloves of antelope, and the gloomy fellows I ignore. A typewriter packed in a raincoat of oil-skin is dead and gone on the Le
Temps.
She, spreading the parasol of glass, pursues a nightingale, in the space
? APPENDIX 205
between the Le Temps and the cosmos flowers. Or the new age is born.
Under the hydroplane, "Hamburger Fliigzeugbau Ha 139," a duck throws into confusion the battle line.
Among the cosmos flowers vibrate machineguns. By the drain a young washerman blows up.
the clearer, the better is the sky over the street. Flash on the concrete a bright wire and shovel.
UPON THE TRAGEDY OF A FLOWER ON THE CALM-LATITUDES OR OF A PASSENGER AEROPLANE
Sliding down the stair-cases of plants,
Tearing off the soft stripes of calm-latitudes,
A round-bodied mannequin's yellowish bare foot Suddenly crushes a chalky structure with a bang of a gun. Then, the fountain of soda-water is opened.
And the inner-side of the zoo comes slowly to be seen.
--Takeshi Fuji
FINGER TOP OF WALTZ
1 switch on a gilded turbine of glass.
Give an anticorrosive of asphalt upon the air current ascending,
Pave the street with white-gold lines, and ballasts toss.
The mind of sky brightens canvas shoes.
Since then a system of necktie became milkwhite colour.
A single sound of cloud has dissolved.
When came out a sound of lens.
Finger tops of a boy who praises verdure, stepping emergency stairs of
afternoon.
--Katue Kitasono
--Koichi Kihara
? 206
APPENDIX
YOUNG SWAN
One stamp is going down on the white canal Along its side the red cuhure tosses chairs and its a pageant
In this time the dahlia venerates my mind But high steady forest Enjoy this tablet Many windows are more beautiful than the goods Take care I'm nothing But at last I'm a blue manifesto for her.
THE END OF EVIL FORTUNE
Summer falls crushing
My dear jar of champagne
Your love affair is dispersed over the sky, and in vain, So the empty conception
Which has now burnings the perfume, colour,
And there grows the white empty grass
And it is a dream of one cigarette only
oblivion, all must he reject on the ground
Now glistening the valley, so bitter the slips of glasses Nor shabby the shining sun
Death is ugly
Tomato is crashing too
Tomorrow is not so good as aujourd'hui In broad day camouflages the clothings 1 am sorry to feel the Zephyr Cucumber drifts
Silhouette of present state
OI honouryourfortunelight.
GLASSY HOUR
--Tio Nakamura
Coming back from the sea, the morning after a long absence. Training the gymnastics, a sun-dial and a priest.
In front of the theater, a clipping-man is standing.
Aiding by a swallow, an envelope, from a hospital, is gnawing the
apples, and runs after the side of Obelisk.
--Toshio Sasajima
--Takeshi Koike
? APPENDIX 207
James Laughlin, Modern Poets of Japan
Thk pokms that follow are the work of a group of young Japanese poets, members of the Vou Club, translated into English by themselves. I am particularly glad to be able to publish them because of two dissociations which they can effect. They will show first of all that militaristic imperial- ism has not wiped out artistic activity and secondly that there is live poetry in Japan. We might not have known it, as little, apart from the classics, filters through to the Occident except the very bad modern imitations of the classics--such as the poems written by the emperor's third cousin's grand- mother for his birthday.
The first thing to think about in stating these poems is the fact of the ideogram. The Japanese language, derived from the Chinese, is still very much a picture language. In spite of the intrusion of the phonetic characters the Japanese can still see in many of the words which he writes the picture of the thing itself. What is the result in terms of poetry? Naturally there is more verbal reality, a closer relationship between the thing and its name, some of the essence of the thing in the name.
But of course that quality is not carried over into a translation. So we can only surmise that the oriental poet and poetry reader are, in this respect, "better off" than we are, and let it go at that.
Whatwecan,tosomeextent,judgeisthegreatertension. IfI under- stand Japanese syntax aright it has, to an even greater degree than an inflected language like Latin, a minimum of dead words--that is, words which have no charge of meaning apart from their purely grammatical function--articles, prepositions, etc. --all the useless little words which clutter up a positional language like English and thin out the vigour of the poetic line.
I think anyone must concede that one of the most important factors in poetry is verbal inter-activity--word working upon word, the sense-aura of one word fusing and contrasting with those of the words near it. The dead little words of English lessen this activity by separating the meaning- bearing words. Thus in English we only get in small segments of the line--in adjectival and adverbial phrases for the most part--the kind of tension that we often get in a whole line of Latin, where there will be perhaps only one word out of seven that does not carry a meaning. The same sort of thing, I think, is possible in Japanese; certainly these poems confirm that thesis.
And the poets of the Vou Club are very well aware of the rich possibili-
? 208 APPENDIX
ties of their medium. They would not perhaps use the word "tension" but they have coined the word "ideoplasty" to express the esthetic effects which the close juxtaposition of verbal images makes possible. Here is what the leader of the group, Katue Kitasono, has to say about ideoplasty and about the group's general conception of poetry. Occidental poets will not waste any time they may spend studying Kitasono's statement, so I print it in full.
[seJection from Kitasono's previous "Notes"l
There is one other fact that the American reader should know before he applies himself to these poems--that there is a very strong French in- fluence in Japan. Tokyo knows a great deal more about what is going on in Paris than New York does. All of the important books of Eluard have been translated into Japanese ideogram. None have been published in New York.
And so the thoughtful reader will think about the relation of ideogram to Surrealism. He will also want to think about the following statement, which I quote from Kitasono's last letter: "The experiment we are now making on poetry is to express our polygonal ideas vividly as by painting. The poetical movement of the Vou Club might be defined as directed to natural-scientific realism. "
The name "Vou," by the way, means nothing special. Kitasono writes that it is "not even so significant as a single grape-leaf. The word Vou shall be bestowed its quality and its value by the club's strong will and its solid action. "
"Strong will and solid action" sounds rather bad, sounds like Fascism and poets in uniform. But this is not the case. The real outlook of the poets can be appraised from a few of the biographical notes which accompanied the manuscript: "Haruki Sohu . . . walks with a stick as slender as a feeler. Tio Nakamura . . . she raised the most charming voice when she was near being drowned in the sea last summer. Eiko Sirota . . . so poor at sums that she cannot add up the money she must pay for the cakes she had. but very proud of that. Syuiti Nagayasu . . . when tired of work he goes to the street and enters a lonely coffee-house, and sometimes goes home from there. "
[The above introduction, accompanied by a selection of poems hy VOU poets, appeared in New Directions 1 938. In New Directions 1 940, poems by Kitasono and Ueda Toshio further appeared. ]
? APPENDIX 209
Katue Kitasono, The VOU Club
The VOU Club was born in 1935. The members at the start were Kitasono Katue, Iwamoto Shuzo, Miki Tei, and eleven other poets. The initial num- ber of the magazine VOU was issued on the 5th of July in the same year, containing four essays on poetry, fifteen poems and the translation of a letter of Jack Vasse.
I can remember the moment in which the strange name VOU was adopted by us. It was on the table of a small coffeehouse on the Ginza street. We had been satisfied with none of the names introduced there, each of them having its own meaning restrictive to our activities, when we hit upon the meaningless spell[ing] which Iwamoto was scribbling automatically on a scrap of paper, and thus we became VOUists.
The VOU poets wanted to create a new trend of art in Tokio entirely different from those which were already born after the First World War. To begin with, we needed to break up every traditional and conventional art in Japan. We decided that we should be as ironical in our artistical attitude as Erik Satie who fought for modern music.
In VOU's third issue we printed Abstraction-Creation Art Non Figura- tive, and Boethy's essay in the fourth issue. I specially mention this, because I wish to suggest the direction of art of the VOU group at this time.
In the beginning of 1936 the members of our group counted 21, several composers, painters, and technologists having joined us. In May of the year we held the VOU Club demonstration at the hall of the Denki Club, in which we read eight manifestos and recited poems of our own. This attempt was rather a failure as there came up only a few opponents.
I had sent copies of VOU to Ezra Pound, who soon sent to me from Rapallo a copy of Guide Cavalcanti and a letter with his affectionate hail that the VOU group would remain forever in the youth of twenty-one. He gave us as many opportunities of touching the avant-garde of England and America as he could. If VOU still keeps the youth of twenty-one (as I am sure of it), it's much indebted to his sensible suggestions.
In 1937 through Ezra Pound I knew D. C. Fox, member of Forschungsin- stitut fiir Kulturmorphologie supervised by Leo Frobenius, and I published the very interesting essay "Paideuma" in VOU's sixteenth issue. It was in this same issue that the VOU poet Fuji Takeshi treated of T. E. Hulme's Speculations in his article "The Direction of Poetry as a View of the World. "
In February 1937 I sent to Pound sixteen VOU poems with my notes, which were printed the next year in the first number of Townsman started
? 210 APPENDIX
by Ronald Duncan, with Pound's introductory notes for them. This was the first appearance of VOU poems in Europe, and the next year James Laughlin in America printed fourteen VOU poems with his notes in New Directions. The war between China and Japan already began in July 1937. We hoped it would soon be finished, but on the contrary it was marching to the death fight of the Pacific War. The government began to stiffen even on art. Some of the surrealists were imprisoned. In 1940 we were forced at last to abandon publication of the magazine. I succeeded somehow or other in keeping VOU poets from arrest.
On December 8th 1941, I heard, in the library of the Nippon Dental College (the librarian of which I have been from then till now), the radio news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fortunately there came an interval in which the pressure on culture was a little slacked, and I could reissue the magazine under the title New Technics, with the contents just the same as before. It lasted four numbers and then ceased as the army persecuted again every movement of international tendencies. We diverted ourselves in cultivating the classical field of Japanese literature. I began printing the literary pamphlet Mugi [Wheat), which was continued until the beginning of 1945 when Tokio was exhaustively bombed out.
InAugustJapansurrendered. I caughtontheradiotheEmperor'svoice in the Ichijoin Temple in Sanjo, a small town three hundred kilometers from Tokio. VOU poets came back from the war by twos and threes, and in 1947 we revived the magazine VOU. After numbers 31 and 32, the inflation in this country forced us to give up the next issue.
It was by the backing of [the] Asagi Press that we could begin publica- tion of the newly titled Cendre, which was put out six times until 1949 when Asagi got into depression. In January of this year [1950] we again put the title back to VOU and published the thirty-third and thirty-fourth issues aided by the Shoshinsha Press.
VOU's orientation: everything humanistic is a boredom. Tears, cryings, loves, crimes, ironies and humors, all attract us in no ways. We only find a little of aesthetic excitement in erasing every humanistic vestige from art.
"Everything tends to be angular"--T. E. Hulme.
? APPENDIX 211
Michael Reck, Memoirs of a Parody Perry^
Nearly a hundred years after Admiral Perry hove into Tokyo harbor, I myself landed in Japan--with no letter from the U. S. President, like Perry, but at least some notes of introduction from the American "minister of the arts without portfolio. " 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.
