If I am to be of any use to you in establishing a better
communications
service between the Orient and the Occident you must let me speak very plainly.
Ezra-Pound-Japan-Letters-essays
The best writers are aware of problems that have lain unobserved in Dante and Shakespeare, problems of usury, of the just price, of the nature of money and its mode of issue.
It may interest you to know that the clarity of some paragraphs in The Japan Times on these subjects is, outside Italy, rather restricted to weekly papers and papers of special movements in England and America and in the rest of the Occident.
Lucid and incisive remarks of Hitler, Schacht and Funk do not get the wide and immediate publicity they deserve. They are however understood by writers of such divergent temperament as Wyndham Lewis and General J. F. C. Fuller.
Picture Post
As job lot items and notes on books worth reading: A current Picture Post acknowledges Wyndham Lewis to be the greatest portraitist of our time (even quotes Sickert as saying, "and of any time"--which is the generous exaggeration of an older painter for a younger one who has been too long denied his just place in contemporary art).
The best news from America is the edition of E. E. Cummings' collected poems, plus the publication of W. C. Williams' Passaic River (prose sketches).
Both the Criterion and Broletto have ceased publication, leaving my personal interest in current periodicals narrowed to The British Union Quarterly, for discussions of state organization, and to Townsman for very brief notices of books and the arts. The Examiner, published in Bethlehem, Connecticut, U. S. A. , contains some very well written and carefully thought articles.
There are valuable notes in several dozens of sectarian or group week-
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lies and quarterlies in which publications, however, the dross and one- sidedness often out-weighs the sound matter, at least to such a degree that one cannot recommend them to Orientals wanting a clear view of the west.
3 Study of Noh Continues in West
Pound Outlines New Approach to Drama Using New Media
The work initiated by Ernest Fenollosa for better comprehension of East and West is by no means ended. Whatever Fenollosa may have done in the way of awakening his Japanese friends to the need of more active preserva- tion of Japanese values must be set against the spark lit here by his unedited manuscripts.
W. B. Yeats was at once enkindled by the imperfect versions of Noh which I was able to make from Fenollosa's notes. He started writing plays in Noh form for his Irish theatre and for performances where no western stage was available.
We in the West want an adequate edition of all the Noh in two or more languages. A few of us have the sense to want an edition with the ideogram- ic text on one page large enough to convey the calligraphic beauty and the essentially untranslatable values of ideograms themselves.
I don't mean to say that you can't in time translate an ideogram, even the most beautiful, but you will never get into any one phonetically spelled word all the associative forces of the more interesting picture-words.
it, ^
Two Media Available
It may be argued that the actual seeing of the ideograms is more necessary in the study of philosophy and the classics than in reading the romantic Noh, but one can not do without it in the latter. Two media are at our disposal which were not at Fenollosa's disposal, namely the sound film and micro- photography.
Fenollosa could not, as I did by the kindness of Dr. Shio Sakanishi, head of the Japanese Department of the Congressional Library in Washing- ton, see and hear Awoi no Uye on the screen with the sound of the singing
is contained or summed up in f P^"
The whole of a philosophy is almost contained in the three characters: the clear definition of terms as necessary to all real thought, and to sincerity, and the knowing of one's own mind and one's own meaning.
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and the crescendo of excitement as the hero rubs his rosary with ever faster rattling of beads against beads.
Every western university should have the complete set of Noh plays on sound-film for study in its dramatic and literary courses.
That will come and will have to come for a dozen reasons as the old half-witted system of Western teaching wakes up (30 or 40 years after modern science has made photographic conveniences a daily accessory to our industries and to our commercial filing systems).
Microphotographic methods are still very little understood in Europe. The place to study them is in the Washington Congressional Library. Any- thing in that library can be reproduced and carried away on a reel of film in one's pocket a couple of days after one has requested it and paid the modest charge of 2 cents per page for whatever hitherto priceless and, in many cases, unduplicated and unduplicable matter one wanted.
With proper apparatus we or you could photograph all the most beauti- ful calligraphic editions and reproduce them as cheaply as we print our worst books.
In the case of most of the Noh plays even this is not necessary as you have a very excellent calligraphic edition which could be supplied for a few cents per play to an American firm and interleaved with the American text. These editions would allow our students to study the text before and after seeing the cinema-representation of your plays.
And this, I need not say, would get over a good deal of the difficulty that now exists for the simple-minded student. For 1200 years Japan has meant more than commerce and business wrangles. In fact irritations over trade concessions between our countries are only a man's life old and need not and (permit me the strong phrase) damn well should not and shall not be regarded as a permanent and everlasting barrier between the best minds of your country and my country and between your country and the best minds in a dozen European nations.
I don't in the least wish to detract from the merit of the Funa-Benkei edition sent me by Katue Kitasono but it does not satisfy the requirements: the ideogramic type is too small. The ideograms ought to be big enough to convey their intrinsic beauty whether in grass writing or block type, and they ought to be big enough to permit, say 7 point, gloze and explanations on the English page facing them, page per page.
When we come to the matter of what English or European texts should be used, we are up against a much thornier proposition. There must of course be a plain literal version somewhere available, with explanations and notes, however tiresome and unpoetic. There should also be the best
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available translation of the poetic values, in whatever European language this may have been attained. There are now American, English, French, German and Italian versions of Noh. And there is at least one Spanish text that is quite charming in the less vital parts of the play I read but falls down when it comes to the more intense passages.
Dr. Sakanishi caused me a good deal of anguish by insisting that something I had found in Fenollosa did not exist in the original. I am puzzled as to how it got into my text. Did it spring from Umewaka Minoru, or from Professors Mori and Ariga or did Fenollosa or I catch it out of thin air?
Fenollosa wrote that the Noh was in secret language; it was, for centur- ies, reserved for the Samurai and Nobles. You can not translate poetry merely by translating words. Some freedom (but not too much) must be left the poet who finds a new verbal manifestation for the original thought. He or she must in some way convey the feel and the aroma of the original play and of the inter-relation of characters.
Tami Koume had danced the Hagoromo before the Emperor, taking the tennin part when he was, as I remember, six years old. At twenty he still remembered the part and movements of the tennin's wings, which as she returns to the upper heaven, are the most beautiful movements I have seen on or off any stage. Tami knew something of Noh that no mere philologist can find out from a text book.
BUT when it came to the metaphysics he could not answer questions which seemed to me essential to the meaning. Very probably the original author had left those meanings in the vague. There may not have been ten men in Europe who would have asked those particular questions, but it so happened that Yeats, in my company, had spent several winters trying to correlate Lady Gregory's Irish folk-lore with the known traditions of var- ious myths, psychologies and religions.
Two or three centuries ago Catholic missionaries bothered the Chinese court with analogous questions, such as "Did the spirit of Confucius enter his cartouche," etc.
My own ignorance is very dense, but I have no wish to maintain it. I merely want to put other students on their guard against the needJess sacrifice of poetic values.
By all means let us have a prose translation, but where Umewaka Minoru or his friends have left a haze over the almond blossoms or the reflection of the moon in two buckets, let us be very much on our guard against any rumor that such and such a meaning is not in, or associated with, or associable with the Noh text.
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Background Necessary
When I quote /Eschylus, even if only to say "Thus was it" or "These are the facts," I do something more than state that certain things had occurred. It is that continual assertion of one set of acts in relation to a whole other set of acts, a whole series of backgrounds and memories, that enriches the Noh. The poetic translator must break his back to attain an English version that will keep at least part of this air and color. He must be allowed adequate, but not boundless, freedom toward this end, and only the finest critics and judges will be able to say when he reached it or how nearly he attains, or when he has sinned against the spirit of his original.
At any rate the news value of this article may lie in my stating that Dr. Arthur Hummel, head of the Oriental Department; Dr. Sakanishi, head of the Japanese division of the Congressional Library (Washington]; the head of Arrow Editions, New York; R. Duncan, editor of Townsman; Margaret Leona who has tried Noh effects, on a Noh basis for the London television; Edmond Dulac, who made masks for Yeats' Irish Noh experiments; and a few dozen or hundred more of us are interested in any and every attempt toward further diffusion of the plays, and that I personally will do all that I can to correlate the fine work done by the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai with whatever Western nuclei that exist or can be brought into being. The start had already been made in their (K. B. S. ) Funa-Benkei program and edition for Shigefusa Hosho's performance of August 6, 1937.
I am merely asking that more plays be printed in two or more languages, and hoping that so able a translator as Michitaro Shidehara will insist on the use of larger ideograms above or facing his English version. The inter- linear printing, first the Japanese spelled out phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the ideogram and then the English, is preferable to the interleaving when the publisher has the means at his disposal, for by it the musical value of Japanese text is also conveyed to the stumbling foreign student. Nevertheless both transliteration of sound and the European ver- sion could be printed on a page facing a calligraphic text.
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An Ezra Pound Letter from Rapallo
Annual Music Week Proposed to Introduce Each Year Insufficiently Known Composer
At the beginning of the war in Ethiopia, as we could not expect a concert audience, the Rapallo group resolved itself into a study circle with the immediate intention of hearing as many of the 310 concerti of Vivaldi as were available in printed editions and executable by one or two violinists and a piano. Having done that, two Americans, Olga Rudge and David Nixon, gave a concert in Venice, made up entirely from Vivaldi's Estro Armonico (Op. 3) and an abortive Vivaldi society was started in his own city. Miss Rudge then made the first thematic catalog of the unpublished Vivaldi lying in the Turin Library (309 concerti] and other works--which catalog has now been printed by Count Chigi of Siena in the Note e Documenti for the full-dress Vivaldi Week given there.
That festival marks a definite advance in the Italian official method in treating their music. We have for some time been insisting that the whole of an evening's program should have a form in itself, which need not be inferior in structure to that of, say, a fugue or any other art form. And we have insisted that the auditor can not get a clear or adequate conception of a great composer's meaning unless he hear a lot of that composer's work all at once.
Methods Suggested
We also, as Katue Kitasono noted some time ago in VOU, suggested various methods of contrast between musical compositions, intended to test their real value and to demonstrate what modern compositions could stand comparison with past master-work.
Yeats long ago pointed out that minor poets often show up very well in anthologies, but that the difference between them and the greater poets is quickly apparent if you contrast whole books of their work.
The Sienese Week was admirable in various ways. Their first program was a model of construction (due I think to Alfredo Casella). And as Mr. KitasonohascitedsomeRapalloexamples. I shallperhapsbepermittedto cite the Siena evening in detail, though the reader will have to verify what I say of it by future experiment on his own part. The program contained six items, five by Vivaldi and one transcribed from Vivaldi by his better known contemporary, J. S. Bach. Given in this order:
1. Sinfonia in Do. magg. 2. Concerto in Sol. min.
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3. Concerto in Si min.
4. Aria, from La Fida Ninfa
5. Bach's transcription from the Concerto in Si. min. reworked, that is, by Bach for four harpsichords, and in the key of La min. 6. ConcertoAliaRustica.
The Week's music was ably varied: there were instrumental works, a revival of the opera Olimpiade (probably the first performance since Vival- di's death in 1741], and choral works given in the Church of S. Francesco with full orchestra.
The Week amply testified to Vivaldi's being a major composer, not simply "another" Italian composer of his period to be remembered by the often reprinted "Cucco" movement from one of his violin concerti, or by the single aria, "Un Certo non so che," which had been the only bit of his vocal music available in a modern edition.
All this being in accord with the beliefs printed by the violinist Rudge and by Cobbett, who had said a few years ago that Vivaldi was a composer with a future. Of course this doesn't mean that one has "discovered" Vivaldi. His name has long been in every encyclopedia or dictionary of music, but it does mean that musical history is undergoing a revision in its estimate of him. A number of general questions rise and or have been raised.
Timeliness Pointed Out
There is a timeliness in all resurrections in art; whether it be in painting, literatureorinmusic. InMissRudge'sownrenderingoftheconcertoI have found a close kinship with the line of the surrealist Dali. I don't know whether this comes from the manuscript or from the executant. I have long blamed or at least teased the surrealists for their naive belief that they had invented something which had already been present in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry when Dante was 16 years old. There is plenty of surrealism in mediaeval poetry. The human spirit has recurring needs of expression.
Even before one knew the detail of Vivaldi's life, one could hear certain qualities in his music, and possibly one exaggerates one's own perceptivity when one learns the personal and human background from which the Venetian master produced his music. He was priest, professor of music to a girl's convent school, and then in later life ran an opera company, present- ing his own operas and traveling from Mantua to Vienna in company with a barber's daughter, whom he had taught to sing with great success, and with assistant nymphs or whatever. Goldoni describes visiting the old man who was scribbling musical phrases on his desk and dipping into his breviary.
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All of which is complementary to the qualities of his musical phrasing.
As composer his mind was furnished with the thoughts of Dante's Paradise and with the gaiety of his home city. At any rate the qualities registered in his music extend from one of these frontiers to the other. And the greatest of European composers, J. S. Bach, was sufficiently interested in six of his (Vivaldi's] concerti to transpose them for his own use, without perhaps having improved them. The work of fitting this music to modern orchestra for the Siena Festival was admirably performed by Casella, Fraz- zi, and Virgilio Mortari under the general direction of Casella. Count Chigi and the Italian authorities propose to proceed to an annual music week devoted each year to the work of one insufficiently known Italian creator or to a group of related composers. Possibly in 1940 we shall hear the two Scarlatti, and in 1941 possibly, on the bicentennial of Vivaldi's death, a second week of Vivaldi, amply justified by the results of this year's per- formance.
It all means a much more serious presentation of old Italian music than we have yet had. It means a much more intelligent study of the enormous treasure of Italian musical composition.
Both the eminent musicologue S. A. Luciani^ and the violinist Rudge^ have raised another basic issue, namely the distinction and proper criteria for "musica vocaJe and musica verbaie. "
Which merely means: can one understand the words when they are sung? And this question can be divided into two aesthetic questions, name- ly: Has the musician preserved or has he ruined the rhythm and phonetic qualities of the poetry?
Or, on the other hand, did the poet know his job well enough to write with such qualities of sound and movement that his words are worth preserving or illustrating and emphasizing? In the twelfth century the troubadours tried to fit words and music to each other. Dante animadverted on this subject.
When it came to a question of theater and sung drama, along about the year 1600 a. d. Vincenzo Galilei, Giulio Caccini and a literary circle in Firenze tried to make opera that would keep the verbal values as such. Then came stage music which used the voice mostly as an "instrument to rival the flute," etc. The words, then usually of no great interest in themselves, gave way to vocalization and the intellectual qualities of opera, or at any rate the literary values of libretti are often dubious. Rossini attained a very
' MiJIe Anni di Musica, volume I, published by Hoepli of Milan. ^ Article in Meridiano di Roma. 3 Sept. 1939.
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'^61
high degree of mastery; in fact I know of no opera where the words and orchestra are so well combined as they are in the Barhiere di SevigJia.
On the other hand the French cafe-concert songs usually emphasize their words and the sharp meaning of the phrases.
The ideal or an idea, or call it merely my desire, if you like, is an opera where the singer sings great poetry to a fine music which emphasizes and illuminates the significance of the words, and, to do this, makes them clearly audible and comprehensible to the listener.
I have made a few attempts in this direction. No one is compelled to like my music, but I have at any rate set some of the greatest European poetry, namely that of Villon, and of Guido Cavalcanti with a few bits of Sordello. When the Villon was transmitted by the London radio, 1 sat in the electri- cian's kitchen in Rapallo and could understand every one of the words.
Antheil and Tibor Serly both wanted to work on these lines: but it is very difficult to find poetry sufficiently well written to stand such musical treatment. Especially in English, the amount of poetry that can be sung without either distorting the words or damaging the musician's invention is limited. Shakespeare wrote for declamation. He wrote a few lyrics to be sung in his plays. He solved the problem of using the voice merely as instrument by writing in such meaningless syllables as "Hey, nonny non- ny" on which the singer could turn loose, without damaging the sense of the rest of the poem. The syllables have no meaning in themselves but have good sounds for the singer, and guide the musician in rhythm. In Italian there is a vast amount of libretto writing that is probably singable. But
literary snobbism may or may not have obscured it.
However all this battle field is now again laid open.
If the Italians start again listening to two kinds of singing it can hardly
fail to stimulate discrimination, and with the proper exposition of seven- teenth century and, let us hope, also of sixteenth and fifteenth century music, we should have a musical reform in Italy or a new and valid movement in which fine musical line and strongly active invention will replace the sloppiness of the XlXth century composition.
At any rate, thanks to Count Guido Chigi Saracini and his associates, the Sienese annual week of music has started something and opened up possibilities. It is to be followed with increasing attention by critics of music in general, from all countries.
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From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
There is one field of discussion in which the Japanese intellectuals can be of great use to us. I repeat "of great use" because you are outside the immediate effects of the problem and can discuss it with greater calm, as, indeed, a purely intellectual and aesthetic problem without coming down to political and economic implications. It is a question of the kind Fenollosa opened for us when he began about 50 years ago telling the Occident that Japan is not merely an inferior form of China. And he continued repeating that theme.
Firstly: Japan is different from China.
Secondly: As regards the Chinese elements in Japanese art and culture, Japan continued to preserve some of the best Chinese skills and customs when China had fallen into her decadence.
From the fragmentary notes he has left us we can at any rate see that Kumasaka is basically Japanese. The ghost in that play carries admiration to every western romantic. The gist of what three or more races have meant by chivalry, Ritterschaft and bushido finds concentrated expression in that Noh drama.
Homeric Passage
Kagekiyo contains the one Homeric passage in such part of the Noh as remains in the Fenollosa manuscript. This is akin to our classic epos, whether of Greece or the Nordics. It binds in with the episode of Confucius' father holding the portcullis on his shoulder while the men under him escape. These things are the universals of heroism.
If I am to be of any use to you in establishing a better communications service between the Orient and the Occident you must let me speak very plainly.
I believe that the ^ ^ of one nation finds it quite easy to converse with the j|, -)- of another. And the form of those characters suggests to me that the ^ ^ is the ancestral voice speaking through the mask of the child of the present. Though I do not find this explanation in available dictionaries. The better the child of the present's quality and the more up to date he is, the more does he seem to me to be the edge of a very old sword.
He converses with the /^ -^ of another nation not by effacing his racial characteristics but by intensification of them,
I ask you not to mistake the amiability of my tone of voice. 1 find with many of my young compatriots that when I try to speak clearly and with proper precision, they think I am scolding them. Nothing of the sort. There
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are plenty of occasions for being correctly indignant without being sup- posed to be indignant on other occasions.
Not Detracting
If 1 tell you that you can use Confucius and Mencius in talking to Occidentals to better advantage than by talking Buddhism I am not detract- ing from the virtues of Zen concerning v^hich I know very little, save from the great charm of some of the Noh into which I believe Zen is infused.
To cut the cackle, Tami Kume had very great personal charm; he wanted to save us by Zen and plastic abstractions. But on the other hand Occidental Buddhists are nearly always a bore, at any rate they have been invariably so in my personal experience of them.
The ethic of Confucius and Mencius not only inspires respect but it serves as a road map through the forests of Christian theology. I don't know that the sage Jesuit translators intended it for that use, but that use can be made of it. At no point can the Christian find in it anything opposed to the best of his own doctrine. The Chinese imperial councilors on the other hand and I believe your own dignitaries, found Christianity helplessly immoral, anti-statal and anti-familial. And they have thereby given con- siderable satisfaction to the few Occidentals who know of the said dis- approval. Voltaire, you may remember, said: "I admire Confucius. He was the first man who did not receive a divine inspiration. "
Men with less gift for verbal incision but with my kind of mind are apt to think that both Buddhists and Christians make positive statements about things of which very few men can have any certainty. At any rate they offer two different sets of positive teachings about heaven, about souls, survival after death, etc. , which are in quite apparent contradiction.
As to that very clever and somewhat westernized author Lin Yutang I do not think he knows his Confucius. He has quite obviously been annoyed by silly and stilted Confucians, who are, I doubt not, as much a nuisance in the East as are stale Christians with us. But I cannot blame St. Ambrose for today's archbishop of Canterbury.
It is quite possible that I over-simplify, but it is also possible that from the greater distance I get a glimpse of some main proportions.
Greek Philosophy
It is with regard to similar main proportions that I now appeal to the Japanese historian and philosopher. If you take Francisco Fiorentino's Storia deIJa Filosofia (by which he meant Occidental philosophy] or any other good Western summary, you will find "Greek philosophy" fairly clear
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in its guesses and then quite elaborate in its details. You will find "mediaev- al philosophy and/or theology" somewhat more puzzling. Usually consid- ered rather inferior to the Greek, now rather out of favor. I can't think it deserves total neglect. There was a lot of hard mental work done in the millenium between St. Ambrogio and St. Antonino but I don't think our historiographers have yet given us a competent analysis of the period. I don't know how far the subject enters your system of study. But as a Japanese lexicographer, Dr. Motoichiro Oguimi, had started making a Greek-Japanese dictionary at the age of 79 and completed it at the age of 94 (incidentally a form of courage which we can admire), I don't see why I should despair of effective collaboration.
In reply to T. S. Eliot's speculation as to what I (personally) believe and in opposition or at least deprecation of Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society (published by Faber, London), I have taken leave to doubt whether we Europeans and descendants of Europeans in America really believe anything that is not at root European. We kid ourselves into "accepting" or saying that we believe certain formulae, or we refrain from attacking them, because, like George Washington we believe that they are useful for keeping the lower classes in order. "The benign influence" and that sort of thing. It is therefore my wish that if the Japanese student starts browsing among rare Latin theologians, he would try to sort out which parts of their writing are due to Greek thought, which parts to Roman, and which parts to the Jewish scriptures. He will also find, a little later, a number of fine minds from the north of Europe, as John Scotus of Ireland, Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, or Albertus of greater Germany. At the present moment I have a definite bias. I find the Platonics enthusiastic, the Latins orderly and I enjoy the contact with such minds as the three Europeans just mentioned as with Ambrogio or Antonino (Italian). But I also find an element of disorder and obfuscation.
These quite good minds indulge in all sorts of contortions to get sense out of nonsense, they (as the men of Athens most emphatically did not) spent a great deal of time inventing allegorical meanings, often very in- genious, for statements about winged-bulls and strange animals never encountered in ordinary farming or hunting. There is also a tendency to shift and to avoid civic responsibility.
There is the "pie in the sky" offer, sometimes in our time derided. I quite sincerely wish some dispassionate Oriental would look into this matter and try to sort out these four elements and put fair values upon them.
Did the total European mind lose 1200 or 1500 years in these exercises,
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say from the fall of Rome down to the day Signor Galileo invented his telescope?
And if so, why did the Europeans do it? And who and for what cause planted this seed of Confusion, and why for that matter did the races of Europe after Luther and Calvin take to giving Near Eastern names to their children?
With Calm
You, far from our immediate struggles, can treat this matter with calm and distinction; if I start going into it I might fall into the snares of power psychology or even of monetary psychology, and this, your admirable poet KitasonoKatuewouldfind,I fear,unpoeticonmypart.
Two other points occur to me that are not exactly part of this article and are, yet, kindred to it. Firstly: Very few young men get round to thinking that the idea of good government is perhaps the highest idea that we can ever translate into action. At the age of 23 no one was less given to thinking of such subjects than was the present author.
Secondly: If your students take to KuJturmorphoiogie in the wake of Leo Frobenius or of your present correspondent they might find signifi- cance in the fact that Aristotle began his list of intellectual faculties with TEXNE, that is the skill that enables a man to paint a good picture or make a good pair of shoes. Poor "Arry" was scarcely cold in his grave before the professors had removed that faculty from their edition of his works.
Note the text of the Nicomachean Ethics, and then that of the Magna MoraJia wherefrom I observed the discrepancy. Thence, as I see it, dates the decline of Western thought and the inferiority of our writings on ethics when compared to those of Confucius and Mencius. A paragraph to this effect disappeared from my Kulch in the printing house. My publishers thought it would do me no good at Oxford.
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From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I FEEL a little lost writing for an unknown public which must, in some sense, be a "newspaper public. " Most of my criticism has been written for a nucleus of writers and I have to considerable extent known their beliefs or known when I was infuriating them by attacking particular literary im- becilities. I know the Japanese reader must be friendly or he wouldn't be finding me in print at all, but I haven't the least idea when I may tread on his toes or when I am likely to bore him to death by repeating what he has already read six times.
Back in 1917 or thereabouts 1 received and replied to a Dadaist greeting from Switzerland. Then Picabia printed magazines in New York. Then in Paris, about 1922, he printed a unique issue of PiJhaou-Thibaou, saying good-bye to Dada. By 1923 all the Surrealists were lined up in The Little Review, so that neither these movements nor their particular terminologies can now have for me any great news value.
From 1912 for a decade I did my best to tell the ignorant Britons and Yankees that there had been some very good French poetry, and that English poetry, so far as the technique went, had mostly stopped along about the state of Gautier's Aibertus, and never caught up with his Emaux et Camees.
I doubt if anybody gave the frogs more conscientious free advertising than your present correspondent. And, with that past, I claimed, and still claim, a right to be judged impartial in saying that at a given date poetry in English (largely by American writers) began to be "more interesting" or to have, at any rate, an interest which contemporary French poetry had not. This is not to say that Eliot is a better writer than Cocteau.
I might, however, get round to claiming that Cocteau is an exception and a survival. And on the other hand, to be just, I shall also claim, or admit, that Cocteau shows awareness to certain contemporary pressures, extend- ing in his mental range from moods contemporary with Barbey d'Aurevilly to moods contemporary with Mr. Cummings. In his Antigone he is quite aware of economics, though he doesn't use up many words on the topic.
You are all, doubtless, tired to death of "red" poetry, and Marxist dogma laid out in bad verse. We have had socially conscious poetry or near-beer or crass propaganda, etc. , etc. , and no one has better dis- tinguished between it and the real thing than has Kitasono Katue. Neverthe- less in 1933 I managed, despite the hostility of the British fool and the diffidence of my publishers, to get the Active Anthology printed. Opening
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it now, after seven years, I can still take satisfaction in having got 49 pages of Basil Bunting printed where only the book-worm can efface him.
Mr. Cummings has said, "You can't sell the moon to the moon. " I believe the above mentioned anthology contains more poets who are aware of money, as a problem, than any other anthology ever has, though the better the poet (in Europe] the more certain you can be to surprise the old fogies and Aunt Sallies of my generation by dragging up passages definitely concerned with the ethics and tragedy of money.
Ovid, Propertius, Dante, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare, and notably Byron, are all perfectly good browsing ground for the economist, for the student of money as distinct from the bloke who has got a floating kidney from psychology or sociology.
Dante swats Philippe le Bel for debasing the currency, Shakespeare turns his phrase onto usury not in the Merchant of Venice alone. Catullus alludes to his purse and puns on a mortgage. Hood cursed gold and Lanier, trade. Nothing of this kind, so far as I have [seen], occurs in Fenollosa's notes on Japanese poetry.
Nevertheless, for what it is worth, since 1928 in English, the better the poet, the more certain you are to find him considering the age-old infamy of the money monopoly, of monopoly, of attempts to starve mankind in general, by the trick of trapping and withholding the power to buy.
In Bunting's case this sort of sensibility has broken into some of the strongest verse of our time. Perhaps the poems are too long for quotation in full, so I give a few strophes of the "Morpethshire Farmer. " Bunting sees him on the railway platform, driven from his land and compelled to emigrate into Canada.
Must ye bide, my good stone house To keep a townsman dry?
To hear the flurry of the grouse
But not the lowing of the kye* Where are ye, my seven score sheep Feeding on other braes!
My brand has faded from your fleece Another has its place.
Canada's a bare land
For the North wind and the snow, Northumberland's a bare land
For men have made it so.
Sheep and cattle are poor men's food.
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Grouse is sport for the rich,
Heather grows where the sweet grass might grow For the cost of clearing the ditch.
A liner lying in the Clyde
Will take me to Quebec.
My sons'll see the land I am leaving
As barren as her deck.
note: * Dialect for cattle.
No one since Burns has used the old simple meters with such force. Bunting is aware not only of the tragedy and the infamy back of the tragedy but of the mode in which it works.
His range is not limited to the "old style," as can be seen from the ultra modern "They say Etna" ending in the idiom of newspaper headlines:
MAN IS NOT AN END-PRODUCT MAGGOT ASSERTS
Bunting has learned to write a most elegant hand in Persian in process of translating Firdusi, and among his longer poems is a condensation of "Chomei at Toyama. " A man's adventures are not necessarily part of his writing, though the figure of the poet may gain popularity from them. In this respect Bunting is all that the romantic can desire. He has been jailed in three countries for never having done any harm. Once in Paris, because two corners back of Mt. Parnasse cemetery that confused him at two o'clock in the morning are so exactly alike, complete with cafe and awning, that 1 mistook the one for the other in broad daylight when trying to gather evidence of his character. And as the concierge of the wrong one said: "It is very lucky that his key did not fit the door on the second floor, because the gentleman in that room is very nervous and always has a revolver under his pillow. "
Bunting is, so far as I know, the only pacifist who did six months after the last war was over. As a Quaker he would not even say that he would fight if there was a war for him to fight in. He has an unfailing flair for excited areas. Years ago he left Italy in search of peace and arrived in the Canary Islands where a special little revolution broke out even before Spain at large was enkindled. Last May he had, I heard, left America for his native England. Some people's luck is like that.
I suspect him of being the best English-born poet of our time, though J. P. Angoldisrunningaclosesecond. Fromwhichyouwillfindmyelderly taste differing from the London tea party fashions.
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When I want the gist of what is being done in England in the mind and the arts, I wait for the next copy of Ron Duncan's Townsman.
I take it that reformers' papers, such as Action, the Social Creditor, and the British Union Quarterly are outside the scope of this correspondence, but I believe that the more active young writers in England are reading them. All this is a long way, or a long time, from the day a Russian philosophical student with undigested Germany in his insides, said to me (about a. d. 1910) "Boundt, haff you gno Bolioigal easshuntz? " (Anglice: Have you no political passions? ) I hadn't.
And now my old friend Doc Williams (Wm. Carlos) can hardly tolerate my existence because I am not a bolshevik, and I find it hard to excuse Wyndham Lewis' last volume from sheer difference with the opinions expressed. And Mr. Joyce is no longer with us, in the sense those words would have conveyed in 1917, and Johnnie Hargrave calls Mr. Eliot's Christianity, "A lot of dead cod about a dead god. " All of which goes to show that the Tower of Ivory "has gone West. " At any rate temporarily, both for us old duffers of the 1910's and for the youngsters.
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter Why There Is a War in Europe
Kumasaka's ghost returns from a fine sense of honor. When the men who made wars led them in person, risking their own person in battle, the point of honor remained, but after two centuries or more of mercantilism, we must seek other motives. To this end I would placard every school room with three lines from the Hazard circular of 1862.
"the great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of war, must be used to control the volume of money. to accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis. "
The present war in Europe has, in one sense, been going on for a hundred and ninety years. In another sense it was wholly unnecessary. It may date from the day when Paterson held out the bait for shareholders of the proposed bank "of England" in the words: "The bank hath profit of the interest on all the moneys that it creates out of nothing. " The war dates certainly from England's interference with American colonial paper money in 1751.
In 1723, the Pennsylvania Assembly had authorized the issue of 15,000
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pounds in paper bills, to be loaned on security of land or silver. As the Pennsylvania system developed, such issues were redeemable in a given time at so much per year. A farmer could get money up to half the value of his land, but had to pay it back in 10 years or in 16, after which he could have a new loan.
David Hume errs in saying "the land itself is coined. " What was "coined" was not the land but the triple components--land, farmer's capac- ity to work and his likelihood of doing so, and a ready market. That is, the colonists needed the product of the soil. The paper money was a useful ticket or handy means of reckoning and recording how much work had been done or how much grain (or whatever] grown and delivered to market, hence of recording how produce ought ethically to be handed over to whomever held the ticket.
This did not suit the game of the London monopolists. But, until W. A. Overholser issued his 61 page brochure, the histories neglected this item. London's attempt to reassert money monopoly led to the first American revolution (1776).
American history for the following 90 years should be considered as a series of revolutions and set-backs. John Adams conceived a sane republi- can (or statal) system. America freed herself from the British Crown; the loose confederation of colonies was (a second revolution) cemented under a sane constitution. The revolution was betrayed by the financial corrup- tion of members of Congress in Washington's time. These swine bought up depreciated certificates of pay due to the soldiers of the revolution, and then passed national laws forcing the Government to pay them the full face value of this paper (out of the pockets of the people).
Banking and funding systems were set up, whereon John Adams wrote in his old age:
"Every bank of discount is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals' gain.
And if I say this in my will the American people would pronounce I died crazy. " (Citation from my Canto 71).
Jefferson warned us that "If the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation and then by defla- tion, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up home- less on the continent that their fathers conquered. "
Jackson and Van Buren led the people against the monopolists. Jackson delivered the nation from debt. That is, the people beat the banks between
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1830 and 1840. Record of this decade has, or had, almost entirely dis- appeared from American text books.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the nation was betrayed by a ganglia of Sherman, Ikleheimer, etc. , working with foreign (mainly English and Jewish) financiers.
The so-called democratic (or statal system] intended by the founders of the republic was killed. Very few people noticed its death. Jefferson's prophecy was largely but imperceptibly fulfilled. The American people are only now lifting one torpid eyelid. Schemes for the nomadic life had already gone into effect, people wandering about landless sleeping in motor-trailers.
This was brought about by a system in which the Government bor- rowed the nation's credit and paid interest on it to private concerns. Ikleheimer's circular calculated there would be from 28 to 33 per cent profit. The usury in some banking systems amounts to 60% and so fecund was the new continent that the traffic stood it; with cycles of crash and crisis, which were, nevertheless, followed by recoveries and partial re- coveries.
We hear little, and you at a distance certainly hear less of these internal rumblings. When the swindle becomes international. Rota's condemnation of half a century ago covers the situation; he said:
"The mercantilist system placed the happiness of nations in the quan- tity of money they possess. And it consisted in a clever strategy for stealing the greatest possible amount of money from other nations. "
Italy, having benefitted by Rota's Storia delle hanche may have pre- ceded other nations in realizing the force of this sentence. At any rate she was, in our time, the first Occidental nation to believe that among the first rights of a man, or a country, is the right to keep out of debt.
This point of view both pained and shocked the international usurers.
It may interest you to know that the clarity of some paragraphs in The Japan Times on these subjects is, outside Italy, rather restricted to weekly papers and papers of special movements in England and America and in the rest of the Occident.
Lucid and incisive remarks of Hitler, Schacht and Funk do not get the wide and immediate publicity they deserve. They are however understood by writers of such divergent temperament as Wyndham Lewis and General J. F. C. Fuller.
Picture Post
As job lot items and notes on books worth reading: A current Picture Post acknowledges Wyndham Lewis to be the greatest portraitist of our time (even quotes Sickert as saying, "and of any time"--which is the generous exaggeration of an older painter for a younger one who has been too long denied his just place in contemporary art).
The best news from America is the edition of E. E. Cummings' collected poems, plus the publication of W. C. Williams' Passaic River (prose sketches).
Both the Criterion and Broletto have ceased publication, leaving my personal interest in current periodicals narrowed to The British Union Quarterly, for discussions of state organization, and to Townsman for very brief notices of books and the arts. The Examiner, published in Bethlehem, Connecticut, U. S. A. , contains some very well written and carefully thought articles.
There are valuable notes in several dozens of sectarian or group week-
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lies and quarterlies in which publications, however, the dross and one- sidedness often out-weighs the sound matter, at least to such a degree that one cannot recommend them to Orientals wanting a clear view of the west.
3 Study of Noh Continues in West
Pound Outlines New Approach to Drama Using New Media
The work initiated by Ernest Fenollosa for better comprehension of East and West is by no means ended. Whatever Fenollosa may have done in the way of awakening his Japanese friends to the need of more active preserva- tion of Japanese values must be set against the spark lit here by his unedited manuscripts.
W. B. Yeats was at once enkindled by the imperfect versions of Noh which I was able to make from Fenollosa's notes. He started writing plays in Noh form for his Irish theatre and for performances where no western stage was available.
We in the West want an adequate edition of all the Noh in two or more languages. A few of us have the sense to want an edition with the ideogram- ic text on one page large enough to convey the calligraphic beauty and the essentially untranslatable values of ideograms themselves.
I don't mean to say that you can't in time translate an ideogram, even the most beautiful, but you will never get into any one phonetically spelled word all the associative forces of the more interesting picture-words.
it, ^
Two Media Available
It may be argued that the actual seeing of the ideograms is more necessary in the study of philosophy and the classics than in reading the romantic Noh, but one can not do without it in the latter. Two media are at our disposal which were not at Fenollosa's disposal, namely the sound film and micro- photography.
Fenollosa could not, as I did by the kindness of Dr. Shio Sakanishi, head of the Japanese Department of the Congressional Library in Washing- ton, see and hear Awoi no Uye on the screen with the sound of the singing
is contained or summed up in f P^"
The whole of a philosophy is almost contained in the three characters: the clear definition of terms as necessary to all real thought, and to sincerity, and the knowing of one's own mind and one's own meaning.
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and the crescendo of excitement as the hero rubs his rosary with ever faster rattling of beads against beads.
Every western university should have the complete set of Noh plays on sound-film for study in its dramatic and literary courses.
That will come and will have to come for a dozen reasons as the old half-witted system of Western teaching wakes up (30 or 40 years after modern science has made photographic conveniences a daily accessory to our industries and to our commercial filing systems).
Microphotographic methods are still very little understood in Europe. The place to study them is in the Washington Congressional Library. Any- thing in that library can be reproduced and carried away on a reel of film in one's pocket a couple of days after one has requested it and paid the modest charge of 2 cents per page for whatever hitherto priceless and, in many cases, unduplicated and unduplicable matter one wanted.
With proper apparatus we or you could photograph all the most beauti- ful calligraphic editions and reproduce them as cheaply as we print our worst books.
In the case of most of the Noh plays even this is not necessary as you have a very excellent calligraphic edition which could be supplied for a few cents per play to an American firm and interleaved with the American text. These editions would allow our students to study the text before and after seeing the cinema-representation of your plays.
And this, I need not say, would get over a good deal of the difficulty that now exists for the simple-minded student. For 1200 years Japan has meant more than commerce and business wrangles. In fact irritations over trade concessions between our countries are only a man's life old and need not and (permit me the strong phrase) damn well should not and shall not be regarded as a permanent and everlasting barrier between the best minds of your country and my country and between your country and the best minds in a dozen European nations.
I don't in the least wish to detract from the merit of the Funa-Benkei edition sent me by Katue Kitasono but it does not satisfy the requirements: the ideogramic type is too small. The ideograms ought to be big enough to convey their intrinsic beauty whether in grass writing or block type, and they ought to be big enough to permit, say 7 point, gloze and explanations on the English page facing them, page per page.
When we come to the matter of what English or European texts should be used, we are up against a much thornier proposition. There must of course be a plain literal version somewhere available, with explanations and notes, however tiresome and unpoetic. There should also be the best
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available translation of the poetic values, in whatever European language this may have been attained. There are now American, English, French, German and Italian versions of Noh. And there is at least one Spanish text that is quite charming in the less vital parts of the play I read but falls down when it comes to the more intense passages.
Dr. Sakanishi caused me a good deal of anguish by insisting that something I had found in Fenollosa did not exist in the original. I am puzzled as to how it got into my text. Did it spring from Umewaka Minoru, or from Professors Mori and Ariga or did Fenollosa or I catch it out of thin air?
Fenollosa wrote that the Noh was in secret language; it was, for centur- ies, reserved for the Samurai and Nobles. You can not translate poetry merely by translating words. Some freedom (but not too much) must be left the poet who finds a new verbal manifestation for the original thought. He or she must in some way convey the feel and the aroma of the original play and of the inter-relation of characters.
Tami Koume had danced the Hagoromo before the Emperor, taking the tennin part when he was, as I remember, six years old. At twenty he still remembered the part and movements of the tennin's wings, which as she returns to the upper heaven, are the most beautiful movements I have seen on or off any stage. Tami knew something of Noh that no mere philologist can find out from a text book.
BUT when it came to the metaphysics he could not answer questions which seemed to me essential to the meaning. Very probably the original author had left those meanings in the vague. There may not have been ten men in Europe who would have asked those particular questions, but it so happened that Yeats, in my company, had spent several winters trying to correlate Lady Gregory's Irish folk-lore with the known traditions of var- ious myths, psychologies and religions.
Two or three centuries ago Catholic missionaries bothered the Chinese court with analogous questions, such as "Did the spirit of Confucius enter his cartouche," etc.
My own ignorance is very dense, but I have no wish to maintain it. I merely want to put other students on their guard against the needJess sacrifice of poetic values.
By all means let us have a prose translation, but where Umewaka Minoru or his friends have left a haze over the almond blossoms or the reflection of the moon in two buckets, let us be very much on our guard against any rumor that such and such a meaning is not in, or associated with, or associable with the Noh text.
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Background Necessary
When I quote /Eschylus, even if only to say "Thus was it" or "These are the facts," I do something more than state that certain things had occurred. It is that continual assertion of one set of acts in relation to a whole other set of acts, a whole series of backgrounds and memories, that enriches the Noh. The poetic translator must break his back to attain an English version that will keep at least part of this air and color. He must be allowed adequate, but not boundless, freedom toward this end, and only the finest critics and judges will be able to say when he reached it or how nearly he attains, or when he has sinned against the spirit of his original.
At any rate the news value of this article may lie in my stating that Dr. Arthur Hummel, head of the Oriental Department; Dr. Sakanishi, head of the Japanese division of the Congressional Library (Washington]; the head of Arrow Editions, New York; R. Duncan, editor of Townsman; Margaret Leona who has tried Noh effects, on a Noh basis for the London television; Edmond Dulac, who made masks for Yeats' Irish Noh experiments; and a few dozen or hundred more of us are interested in any and every attempt toward further diffusion of the plays, and that I personally will do all that I can to correlate the fine work done by the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai with whatever Western nuclei that exist or can be brought into being. The start had already been made in their (K. B. S. ) Funa-Benkei program and edition for Shigefusa Hosho's performance of August 6, 1937.
I am merely asking that more plays be printed in two or more languages, and hoping that so able a translator as Michitaro Shidehara will insist on the use of larger ideograms above or facing his English version. The inter- linear printing, first the Japanese spelled out phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the ideogram and then the English, is preferable to the interleaving when the publisher has the means at his disposal, for by it the musical value of Japanese text is also conveyed to the stumbling foreign student. Nevertheless both transliteration of sound and the European ver- sion could be printed on a page facing a calligraphic text.
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An Ezra Pound Letter from Rapallo
Annual Music Week Proposed to Introduce Each Year Insufficiently Known Composer
At the beginning of the war in Ethiopia, as we could not expect a concert audience, the Rapallo group resolved itself into a study circle with the immediate intention of hearing as many of the 310 concerti of Vivaldi as were available in printed editions and executable by one or two violinists and a piano. Having done that, two Americans, Olga Rudge and David Nixon, gave a concert in Venice, made up entirely from Vivaldi's Estro Armonico (Op. 3) and an abortive Vivaldi society was started in his own city. Miss Rudge then made the first thematic catalog of the unpublished Vivaldi lying in the Turin Library (309 concerti] and other works--which catalog has now been printed by Count Chigi of Siena in the Note e Documenti for the full-dress Vivaldi Week given there.
That festival marks a definite advance in the Italian official method in treating their music. We have for some time been insisting that the whole of an evening's program should have a form in itself, which need not be inferior in structure to that of, say, a fugue or any other art form. And we have insisted that the auditor can not get a clear or adequate conception of a great composer's meaning unless he hear a lot of that composer's work all at once.
Methods Suggested
We also, as Katue Kitasono noted some time ago in VOU, suggested various methods of contrast between musical compositions, intended to test their real value and to demonstrate what modern compositions could stand comparison with past master-work.
Yeats long ago pointed out that minor poets often show up very well in anthologies, but that the difference between them and the greater poets is quickly apparent if you contrast whole books of their work.
The Sienese Week was admirable in various ways. Their first program was a model of construction (due I think to Alfredo Casella). And as Mr. KitasonohascitedsomeRapalloexamples. I shallperhapsbepermittedto cite the Siena evening in detail, though the reader will have to verify what I say of it by future experiment on his own part. The program contained six items, five by Vivaldi and one transcribed from Vivaldi by his better known contemporary, J. S. Bach. Given in this order:
1. Sinfonia in Do. magg. 2. Concerto in Sol. min.
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3. Concerto in Si min.
4. Aria, from La Fida Ninfa
5. Bach's transcription from the Concerto in Si. min. reworked, that is, by Bach for four harpsichords, and in the key of La min. 6. ConcertoAliaRustica.
The Week's music was ably varied: there were instrumental works, a revival of the opera Olimpiade (probably the first performance since Vival- di's death in 1741], and choral works given in the Church of S. Francesco with full orchestra.
The Week amply testified to Vivaldi's being a major composer, not simply "another" Italian composer of his period to be remembered by the often reprinted "Cucco" movement from one of his violin concerti, or by the single aria, "Un Certo non so che," which had been the only bit of his vocal music available in a modern edition.
All this being in accord with the beliefs printed by the violinist Rudge and by Cobbett, who had said a few years ago that Vivaldi was a composer with a future. Of course this doesn't mean that one has "discovered" Vivaldi. His name has long been in every encyclopedia or dictionary of music, but it does mean that musical history is undergoing a revision in its estimate of him. A number of general questions rise and or have been raised.
Timeliness Pointed Out
There is a timeliness in all resurrections in art; whether it be in painting, literatureorinmusic. InMissRudge'sownrenderingoftheconcertoI have found a close kinship with the line of the surrealist Dali. I don't know whether this comes from the manuscript or from the executant. I have long blamed or at least teased the surrealists for their naive belief that they had invented something which had already been present in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry when Dante was 16 years old. There is plenty of surrealism in mediaeval poetry. The human spirit has recurring needs of expression.
Even before one knew the detail of Vivaldi's life, one could hear certain qualities in his music, and possibly one exaggerates one's own perceptivity when one learns the personal and human background from which the Venetian master produced his music. He was priest, professor of music to a girl's convent school, and then in later life ran an opera company, present- ing his own operas and traveling from Mantua to Vienna in company with a barber's daughter, whom he had taught to sing with great success, and with assistant nymphs or whatever. Goldoni describes visiting the old man who was scribbling musical phrases on his desk and dipping into his breviary.
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All of which is complementary to the qualities of his musical phrasing.
As composer his mind was furnished with the thoughts of Dante's Paradise and with the gaiety of his home city. At any rate the qualities registered in his music extend from one of these frontiers to the other. And the greatest of European composers, J. S. Bach, was sufficiently interested in six of his (Vivaldi's] concerti to transpose them for his own use, without perhaps having improved them. The work of fitting this music to modern orchestra for the Siena Festival was admirably performed by Casella, Fraz- zi, and Virgilio Mortari under the general direction of Casella. Count Chigi and the Italian authorities propose to proceed to an annual music week devoted each year to the work of one insufficiently known Italian creator or to a group of related composers. Possibly in 1940 we shall hear the two Scarlatti, and in 1941 possibly, on the bicentennial of Vivaldi's death, a second week of Vivaldi, amply justified by the results of this year's per- formance.
It all means a much more serious presentation of old Italian music than we have yet had. It means a much more intelligent study of the enormous treasure of Italian musical composition.
Both the eminent musicologue S. A. Luciani^ and the violinist Rudge^ have raised another basic issue, namely the distinction and proper criteria for "musica vocaJe and musica verbaie. "
Which merely means: can one understand the words when they are sung? And this question can be divided into two aesthetic questions, name- ly: Has the musician preserved or has he ruined the rhythm and phonetic qualities of the poetry?
Or, on the other hand, did the poet know his job well enough to write with such qualities of sound and movement that his words are worth preserving or illustrating and emphasizing? In the twelfth century the troubadours tried to fit words and music to each other. Dante animadverted on this subject.
When it came to a question of theater and sung drama, along about the year 1600 a. d. Vincenzo Galilei, Giulio Caccini and a literary circle in Firenze tried to make opera that would keep the verbal values as such. Then came stage music which used the voice mostly as an "instrument to rival the flute," etc. The words, then usually of no great interest in themselves, gave way to vocalization and the intellectual qualities of opera, or at any rate the literary values of libretti are often dubious. Rossini attained a very
' MiJIe Anni di Musica, volume I, published by Hoepli of Milan. ^ Article in Meridiano di Roma. 3 Sept. 1939.
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'^61
high degree of mastery; in fact I know of no opera where the words and orchestra are so well combined as they are in the Barhiere di SevigJia.
On the other hand the French cafe-concert songs usually emphasize their words and the sharp meaning of the phrases.
The ideal or an idea, or call it merely my desire, if you like, is an opera where the singer sings great poetry to a fine music which emphasizes and illuminates the significance of the words, and, to do this, makes them clearly audible and comprehensible to the listener.
I have made a few attempts in this direction. No one is compelled to like my music, but I have at any rate set some of the greatest European poetry, namely that of Villon, and of Guido Cavalcanti with a few bits of Sordello. When the Villon was transmitted by the London radio, 1 sat in the electri- cian's kitchen in Rapallo and could understand every one of the words.
Antheil and Tibor Serly both wanted to work on these lines: but it is very difficult to find poetry sufficiently well written to stand such musical treatment. Especially in English, the amount of poetry that can be sung without either distorting the words or damaging the musician's invention is limited. Shakespeare wrote for declamation. He wrote a few lyrics to be sung in his plays. He solved the problem of using the voice merely as instrument by writing in such meaningless syllables as "Hey, nonny non- ny" on which the singer could turn loose, without damaging the sense of the rest of the poem. The syllables have no meaning in themselves but have good sounds for the singer, and guide the musician in rhythm. In Italian there is a vast amount of libretto writing that is probably singable. But
literary snobbism may or may not have obscured it.
However all this battle field is now again laid open.
If the Italians start again listening to two kinds of singing it can hardly
fail to stimulate discrimination, and with the proper exposition of seven- teenth century and, let us hope, also of sixteenth and fifteenth century music, we should have a musical reform in Italy or a new and valid movement in which fine musical line and strongly active invention will replace the sloppiness of the XlXth century composition.
At any rate, thanks to Count Guido Chigi Saracini and his associates, the Sienese annual week of music has started something and opened up possibilities. It is to be followed with increasing attention by critics of music in general, from all countries.
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From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
There is one field of discussion in which the Japanese intellectuals can be of great use to us. I repeat "of great use" because you are outside the immediate effects of the problem and can discuss it with greater calm, as, indeed, a purely intellectual and aesthetic problem without coming down to political and economic implications. It is a question of the kind Fenollosa opened for us when he began about 50 years ago telling the Occident that Japan is not merely an inferior form of China. And he continued repeating that theme.
Firstly: Japan is different from China.
Secondly: As regards the Chinese elements in Japanese art and culture, Japan continued to preserve some of the best Chinese skills and customs when China had fallen into her decadence.
From the fragmentary notes he has left us we can at any rate see that Kumasaka is basically Japanese. The ghost in that play carries admiration to every western romantic. The gist of what three or more races have meant by chivalry, Ritterschaft and bushido finds concentrated expression in that Noh drama.
Homeric Passage
Kagekiyo contains the one Homeric passage in such part of the Noh as remains in the Fenollosa manuscript. This is akin to our classic epos, whether of Greece or the Nordics. It binds in with the episode of Confucius' father holding the portcullis on his shoulder while the men under him escape. These things are the universals of heroism.
If I am to be of any use to you in establishing a better communications service between the Orient and the Occident you must let me speak very plainly.
I believe that the ^ ^ of one nation finds it quite easy to converse with the j|, -)- of another. And the form of those characters suggests to me that the ^ ^ is the ancestral voice speaking through the mask of the child of the present. Though I do not find this explanation in available dictionaries. The better the child of the present's quality and the more up to date he is, the more does he seem to me to be the edge of a very old sword.
He converses with the /^ -^ of another nation not by effacing his racial characteristics but by intensification of them,
I ask you not to mistake the amiability of my tone of voice. 1 find with many of my young compatriots that when I try to speak clearly and with proper precision, they think I am scolding them. Nothing of the sort. There
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are plenty of occasions for being correctly indignant without being sup- posed to be indignant on other occasions.
Not Detracting
If 1 tell you that you can use Confucius and Mencius in talking to Occidentals to better advantage than by talking Buddhism I am not detract- ing from the virtues of Zen concerning v^hich I know very little, save from the great charm of some of the Noh into which I believe Zen is infused.
To cut the cackle, Tami Kume had very great personal charm; he wanted to save us by Zen and plastic abstractions. But on the other hand Occidental Buddhists are nearly always a bore, at any rate they have been invariably so in my personal experience of them.
The ethic of Confucius and Mencius not only inspires respect but it serves as a road map through the forests of Christian theology. I don't know that the sage Jesuit translators intended it for that use, but that use can be made of it. At no point can the Christian find in it anything opposed to the best of his own doctrine. The Chinese imperial councilors on the other hand and I believe your own dignitaries, found Christianity helplessly immoral, anti-statal and anti-familial. And they have thereby given con- siderable satisfaction to the few Occidentals who know of the said dis- approval. Voltaire, you may remember, said: "I admire Confucius. He was the first man who did not receive a divine inspiration. "
Men with less gift for verbal incision but with my kind of mind are apt to think that both Buddhists and Christians make positive statements about things of which very few men can have any certainty. At any rate they offer two different sets of positive teachings about heaven, about souls, survival after death, etc. , which are in quite apparent contradiction.
As to that very clever and somewhat westernized author Lin Yutang I do not think he knows his Confucius. He has quite obviously been annoyed by silly and stilted Confucians, who are, I doubt not, as much a nuisance in the East as are stale Christians with us. But I cannot blame St. Ambrose for today's archbishop of Canterbury.
It is quite possible that I over-simplify, but it is also possible that from the greater distance I get a glimpse of some main proportions.
Greek Philosophy
It is with regard to similar main proportions that I now appeal to the Japanese historian and philosopher. If you take Francisco Fiorentino's Storia deIJa Filosofia (by which he meant Occidental philosophy] or any other good Western summary, you will find "Greek philosophy" fairly clear
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in its guesses and then quite elaborate in its details. You will find "mediaev- al philosophy and/or theology" somewhat more puzzling. Usually consid- ered rather inferior to the Greek, now rather out of favor. I can't think it deserves total neglect. There was a lot of hard mental work done in the millenium between St. Ambrogio and St. Antonino but I don't think our historiographers have yet given us a competent analysis of the period. I don't know how far the subject enters your system of study. But as a Japanese lexicographer, Dr. Motoichiro Oguimi, had started making a Greek-Japanese dictionary at the age of 79 and completed it at the age of 94 (incidentally a form of courage which we can admire), I don't see why I should despair of effective collaboration.
In reply to T. S. Eliot's speculation as to what I (personally) believe and in opposition or at least deprecation of Mr. Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society (published by Faber, London), I have taken leave to doubt whether we Europeans and descendants of Europeans in America really believe anything that is not at root European. We kid ourselves into "accepting" or saying that we believe certain formulae, or we refrain from attacking them, because, like George Washington we believe that they are useful for keeping the lower classes in order. "The benign influence" and that sort of thing. It is therefore my wish that if the Japanese student starts browsing among rare Latin theologians, he would try to sort out which parts of their writing are due to Greek thought, which parts to Roman, and which parts to the Jewish scriptures. He will also find, a little later, a number of fine minds from the north of Europe, as John Scotus of Ireland, Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, or Albertus of greater Germany. At the present moment I have a definite bias. I find the Platonics enthusiastic, the Latins orderly and I enjoy the contact with such minds as the three Europeans just mentioned as with Ambrogio or Antonino (Italian). But I also find an element of disorder and obfuscation.
These quite good minds indulge in all sorts of contortions to get sense out of nonsense, they (as the men of Athens most emphatically did not) spent a great deal of time inventing allegorical meanings, often very in- genious, for statements about winged-bulls and strange animals never encountered in ordinary farming or hunting. There is also a tendency to shift and to avoid civic responsibility.
There is the "pie in the sky" offer, sometimes in our time derided. I quite sincerely wish some dispassionate Oriental would look into this matter and try to sort out these four elements and put fair values upon them.
Did the total European mind lose 1200 or 1500 years in these exercises,
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say from the fall of Rome down to the day Signor Galileo invented his telescope?
And if so, why did the Europeans do it? And who and for what cause planted this seed of Confusion, and why for that matter did the races of Europe after Luther and Calvin take to giving Near Eastern names to their children?
With Calm
You, far from our immediate struggles, can treat this matter with calm and distinction; if I start going into it I might fall into the snares of power psychology or even of monetary psychology, and this, your admirable poet KitasonoKatuewouldfind,I fear,unpoeticonmypart.
Two other points occur to me that are not exactly part of this article and are, yet, kindred to it. Firstly: Very few young men get round to thinking that the idea of good government is perhaps the highest idea that we can ever translate into action. At the age of 23 no one was less given to thinking of such subjects than was the present author.
Secondly: If your students take to KuJturmorphoiogie in the wake of Leo Frobenius or of your present correspondent they might find signifi- cance in the fact that Aristotle began his list of intellectual faculties with TEXNE, that is the skill that enables a man to paint a good picture or make a good pair of shoes. Poor "Arry" was scarcely cold in his grave before the professors had removed that faculty from their edition of his works.
Note the text of the Nicomachean Ethics, and then that of the Magna MoraJia wherefrom I observed the discrepancy. Thence, as I see it, dates the decline of Western thought and the inferiority of our writings on ethics when compared to those of Confucius and Mencius. A paragraph to this effect disappeared from my Kulch in the printing house. My publishers thought it would do me no good at Oxford.
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From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter
I FEEL a little lost writing for an unknown public which must, in some sense, be a "newspaper public. " Most of my criticism has been written for a nucleus of writers and I have to considerable extent known their beliefs or known when I was infuriating them by attacking particular literary im- becilities. I know the Japanese reader must be friendly or he wouldn't be finding me in print at all, but I haven't the least idea when I may tread on his toes or when I am likely to bore him to death by repeating what he has already read six times.
Back in 1917 or thereabouts 1 received and replied to a Dadaist greeting from Switzerland. Then Picabia printed magazines in New York. Then in Paris, about 1922, he printed a unique issue of PiJhaou-Thibaou, saying good-bye to Dada. By 1923 all the Surrealists were lined up in The Little Review, so that neither these movements nor their particular terminologies can now have for me any great news value.
From 1912 for a decade I did my best to tell the ignorant Britons and Yankees that there had been some very good French poetry, and that English poetry, so far as the technique went, had mostly stopped along about the state of Gautier's Aibertus, and never caught up with his Emaux et Camees.
I doubt if anybody gave the frogs more conscientious free advertising than your present correspondent. And, with that past, I claimed, and still claim, a right to be judged impartial in saying that at a given date poetry in English (largely by American writers) began to be "more interesting" or to have, at any rate, an interest which contemporary French poetry had not. This is not to say that Eliot is a better writer than Cocteau.
I might, however, get round to claiming that Cocteau is an exception and a survival. And on the other hand, to be just, I shall also claim, or admit, that Cocteau shows awareness to certain contemporary pressures, extend- ing in his mental range from moods contemporary with Barbey d'Aurevilly to moods contemporary with Mr. Cummings. In his Antigone he is quite aware of economics, though he doesn't use up many words on the topic.
You are all, doubtless, tired to death of "red" poetry, and Marxist dogma laid out in bad verse. We have had socially conscious poetry or near-beer or crass propaganda, etc. , etc. , and no one has better dis- tinguished between it and the real thing than has Kitasono Katue. Neverthe- less in 1933 I managed, despite the hostility of the British fool and the diffidence of my publishers, to get the Active Anthology printed. Opening
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it now, after seven years, I can still take satisfaction in having got 49 pages of Basil Bunting printed where only the book-worm can efface him.
Mr. Cummings has said, "You can't sell the moon to the moon. " I believe the above mentioned anthology contains more poets who are aware of money, as a problem, than any other anthology ever has, though the better the poet (in Europe] the more certain you can be to surprise the old fogies and Aunt Sallies of my generation by dragging up passages definitely concerned with the ethics and tragedy of money.
Ovid, Propertius, Dante, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare, and notably Byron, are all perfectly good browsing ground for the economist, for the student of money as distinct from the bloke who has got a floating kidney from psychology or sociology.
Dante swats Philippe le Bel for debasing the currency, Shakespeare turns his phrase onto usury not in the Merchant of Venice alone. Catullus alludes to his purse and puns on a mortgage. Hood cursed gold and Lanier, trade. Nothing of this kind, so far as I have [seen], occurs in Fenollosa's notes on Japanese poetry.
Nevertheless, for what it is worth, since 1928 in English, the better the poet, the more certain you are to find him considering the age-old infamy of the money monopoly, of monopoly, of attempts to starve mankind in general, by the trick of trapping and withholding the power to buy.
In Bunting's case this sort of sensibility has broken into some of the strongest verse of our time. Perhaps the poems are too long for quotation in full, so I give a few strophes of the "Morpethshire Farmer. " Bunting sees him on the railway platform, driven from his land and compelled to emigrate into Canada.
Must ye bide, my good stone house To keep a townsman dry?
To hear the flurry of the grouse
But not the lowing of the kye* Where are ye, my seven score sheep Feeding on other braes!
My brand has faded from your fleece Another has its place.
Canada's a bare land
For the North wind and the snow, Northumberland's a bare land
For men have made it so.
Sheep and cattle are poor men's food.
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Grouse is sport for the rich,
Heather grows where the sweet grass might grow For the cost of clearing the ditch.
A liner lying in the Clyde
Will take me to Quebec.
My sons'll see the land I am leaving
As barren as her deck.
note: * Dialect for cattle.
No one since Burns has used the old simple meters with such force. Bunting is aware not only of the tragedy and the infamy back of the tragedy but of the mode in which it works.
His range is not limited to the "old style," as can be seen from the ultra modern "They say Etna" ending in the idiom of newspaper headlines:
MAN IS NOT AN END-PRODUCT MAGGOT ASSERTS
Bunting has learned to write a most elegant hand in Persian in process of translating Firdusi, and among his longer poems is a condensation of "Chomei at Toyama. " A man's adventures are not necessarily part of his writing, though the figure of the poet may gain popularity from them. In this respect Bunting is all that the romantic can desire. He has been jailed in three countries for never having done any harm. Once in Paris, because two corners back of Mt. Parnasse cemetery that confused him at two o'clock in the morning are so exactly alike, complete with cafe and awning, that 1 mistook the one for the other in broad daylight when trying to gather evidence of his character. And as the concierge of the wrong one said: "It is very lucky that his key did not fit the door on the second floor, because the gentleman in that room is very nervous and always has a revolver under his pillow. "
Bunting is, so far as I know, the only pacifist who did six months after the last war was over. As a Quaker he would not even say that he would fight if there was a war for him to fight in. He has an unfailing flair for excited areas. Years ago he left Italy in search of peace and arrived in the Canary Islands where a special little revolution broke out even before Spain at large was enkindled. Last May he had, I heard, left America for his native England. Some people's luck is like that.
I suspect him of being the best English-born poet of our time, though J. P. Angoldisrunningaclosesecond. Fromwhichyouwillfindmyelderly taste differing from the London tea party fashions.
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When I want the gist of what is being done in England in the mind and the arts, I wait for the next copy of Ron Duncan's Townsman.
I take it that reformers' papers, such as Action, the Social Creditor, and the British Union Quarterly are outside the scope of this correspondence, but I believe that the more active young writers in England are reading them. All this is a long way, or a long time, from the day a Russian philosophical student with undigested Germany in his insides, said to me (about a. d. 1910) "Boundt, haff you gno Bolioigal easshuntz? " (Anglice: Have you no political passions? ) I hadn't.
And now my old friend Doc Williams (Wm. Carlos) can hardly tolerate my existence because I am not a bolshevik, and I find it hard to excuse Wyndham Lewis' last volume from sheer difference with the opinions expressed. And Mr. Joyce is no longer with us, in the sense those words would have conveyed in 1917, and Johnnie Hargrave calls Mr. Eliot's Christianity, "A lot of dead cod about a dead god. " All of which goes to show that the Tower of Ivory "has gone West. " At any rate temporarily, both for us old duffers of the 1910's and for the youngsters.
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter Why There Is a War in Europe
Kumasaka's ghost returns from a fine sense of honor. When the men who made wars led them in person, risking their own person in battle, the point of honor remained, but after two centuries or more of mercantilism, we must seek other motives. To this end I would placard every school room with three lines from the Hazard circular of 1862.
"the great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of war, must be used to control the volume of money. to accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis. "
The present war in Europe has, in one sense, been going on for a hundred and ninety years. In another sense it was wholly unnecessary. It may date from the day when Paterson held out the bait for shareholders of the proposed bank "of England" in the words: "The bank hath profit of the interest on all the moneys that it creates out of nothing. " The war dates certainly from England's interference with American colonial paper money in 1751.
In 1723, the Pennsylvania Assembly had authorized the issue of 15,000
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pounds in paper bills, to be loaned on security of land or silver. As the Pennsylvania system developed, such issues were redeemable in a given time at so much per year. A farmer could get money up to half the value of his land, but had to pay it back in 10 years or in 16, after which he could have a new loan.
David Hume errs in saying "the land itself is coined. " What was "coined" was not the land but the triple components--land, farmer's capac- ity to work and his likelihood of doing so, and a ready market. That is, the colonists needed the product of the soil. The paper money was a useful ticket or handy means of reckoning and recording how much work had been done or how much grain (or whatever] grown and delivered to market, hence of recording how produce ought ethically to be handed over to whomever held the ticket.
This did not suit the game of the London monopolists. But, until W. A. Overholser issued his 61 page brochure, the histories neglected this item. London's attempt to reassert money monopoly led to the first American revolution (1776).
American history for the following 90 years should be considered as a series of revolutions and set-backs. John Adams conceived a sane republi- can (or statal) system. America freed herself from the British Crown; the loose confederation of colonies was (a second revolution) cemented under a sane constitution. The revolution was betrayed by the financial corrup- tion of members of Congress in Washington's time. These swine bought up depreciated certificates of pay due to the soldiers of the revolution, and then passed national laws forcing the Government to pay them the full face value of this paper (out of the pockets of the people).
Banking and funding systems were set up, whereon John Adams wrote in his old age:
"Every bank of discount is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals' gain.
And if I say this in my will the American people would pronounce I died crazy. " (Citation from my Canto 71).
Jefferson warned us that "If the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation and then by defla- tion, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up home- less on the continent that their fathers conquered. "
Jackson and Van Buren led the people against the monopolists. Jackson delivered the nation from debt. That is, the people beat the banks between
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1830 and 1840. Record of this decade has, or had, almost entirely dis- appeared from American text books.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the nation was betrayed by a ganglia of Sherman, Ikleheimer, etc. , working with foreign (mainly English and Jewish) financiers.
The so-called democratic (or statal system] intended by the founders of the republic was killed. Very few people noticed its death. Jefferson's prophecy was largely but imperceptibly fulfilled. The American people are only now lifting one torpid eyelid. Schemes for the nomadic life had already gone into effect, people wandering about landless sleeping in motor-trailers.
This was brought about by a system in which the Government bor- rowed the nation's credit and paid interest on it to private concerns. Ikleheimer's circular calculated there would be from 28 to 33 per cent profit. The usury in some banking systems amounts to 60% and so fecund was the new continent that the traffic stood it; with cycles of crash and crisis, which were, nevertheless, followed by recoveries and partial re- coveries.
We hear little, and you at a distance certainly hear less of these internal rumblings. When the swindle becomes international. Rota's condemnation of half a century ago covers the situation; he said:
"The mercantilist system placed the happiness of nations in the quan- tity of money they possess. And it consisted in a clever strategy for stealing the greatest possible amount of money from other nations. "
Italy, having benefitted by Rota's Storia delle hanche may have pre- ceded other nations in realizing the force of this sentence. At any rate she was, in our time, the first Occidental nation to believe that among the first rights of a man, or a country, is the right to keep out of debt.
This point of view both pained and shocked the international usurers.
