No More Learning

144. La Cara: amo: I, "the loved one"; L, "I love. "
"Prester John, 1476= Throne of gold set with gems, 7 tiers, gold, ivory, crystal,-to the rubys, for this stone giveth sleep. " The legend of Prester John derives from a letter, widely circulated in 16th? century Europe, in which he told of a Christian utopia he had founded. Among other great luxuries he listed his bed: "the bed I sleep on is entirely covered with sapphires, by virtue of which I maintain my chastity. I have many beautiful women, but I only sleep with them three months of the year . . . and then only for purposes of procreation" [Shuldiner, Pai, 4? 1, 72]. Pound appears to use this stone as a meta- phor for spiritual repose [74/426, 435; 74:37]. But the idea of 7 tiers is significant: it rhymes with the seven walls of Ecbatan
[4:32], which according to Herodotus were built seriatim up the side of a great hill. Each one was of a different color of ascending value; the next to the top was made of silver, and the last on the crest (within which was the king's treasury and home) was made of gold [Herodotus I, 98, Loeb, I].
146. hoi barbaroi: [cf. 140 above]. 147. pervenche: F, "periwinkle. "
148. et sequelae: L, "and the consequences. " 149. Le Paradis . . . : F, "Paradise is not
column in the Piazza di San Marco where the statue of St. Theodore stands on a crocodile
[26:1].
164. the Era: The Fascist era during which a number of public works which Pound approved of were completed. After WWI, a wooden bridge, Ponte dell'Accademia, reo placed the iron bridge of 1854 [Ivancich].
thus condemned her to lifelong weaving [74:457].
175. che mi porta fortuna: I, "who brings me good luck. "
176. Unkle
Holden Tinkham, congressman from Massa- chusetts whom Pound met at the Hotel Excelsior in Venice in 1936 and again at the Lido in Washington in 1939. Pound corre? sponded with him over a number of years
[M de R].
177. Brassitalo: Italian painter, Italieo Brass, 1870? 1943, who signed some of his work this way [Fang, II, 288] .
178. abbazia: I, "abbey. "
179. voi . . . via: I, "you who pass by this way. " Perhaps a paraphrase, in part, of Dante's "0 voi, che per la via d'Amor passate," from the second sonnet of Vita Nuova [Pound quotes the line in SR, 121] .
180. D'Annunzio: Gabriele D. [cf. 98 above; 93:134] . He did live at the Casetta Rossa on the Grand Canal in 1920 while he wrote of his war experiences as an aviator in a book entitled Nolturno. Thus Katherine Heyman and Pound may have visited him, or tried to, b that year [Ivancich].
181. K. H. : Katherine Ruth Heyman, a concert pianist for whom Pound acted as an impresario in 1908 [Bowers, Pai, 2-1, 53? 66].
182. Veneziana: I, "Venetian woman. "
183. Non combaattere: I, "Don't fight. "
184. Giovanna: Poss. the name of the "Veneziana. " Or the name of a servant in a Venetian house where Pound used to stay.
185. Arachne: [cf. 174 above].
186. Athene: From Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite. "
187. Ti, ix/il"E1: H, "Who wrongs [you]? " Reminiscent of Aphrodite's question to Sappho: Ti, T', <I, 'JIcarq! , ix/il"1]? l("Who is it Sappho that does them wrong? ") [Lyra Graeca I, fr. 1, 184, OBGV, No. 140].
. . .
167. Fonda, Fondecho: POSS. "Fonda," which means nothing, is an abbreviation of fondamenta ("foundation") or an attempt to speJl the Venetian sound of fondaco ("warehouse"), which is "fontego. " Two buildings on the canal have such a designa? tion.
168. Tullio Romano: T. Lombardo, ? 1455? 1532, Italian architect and sculptor who did the Vendramini tomb in Venice [cf. 165 above]. The sirenes are the four marble figures in Santa Maria Dei Miracoli also in Venice [Ivancich] .
169. custode: I, "guard. " 170. Santa . . . Miracoli:
145. Her bed
[Yale, 11] contain a note which says:
sapphire:
The notebooks
artificial"
[74 :292].
150. /iO! "puwv: H, "weeping" if pres. part. nom. masc. sing; if gen. pl. , "of tears. "
151. L. P. : Laval, Petain [RO].
152. gli onesti: I, "the honest ones" [7:14].
George: [74:180]
George
153. J'ai . . . assez:
others, probably not enough. "
Palazzo Vendramin?
156. Ia
of the swine. "
. . .
: I, "the little
herdess
pastorella
F, "I had
pity for
154. I'enfer non plus: F, "heJl isn't either. " 155. Eurus: An east or southeast wind.
157. benecomata dea: L, "the fair-tressed goddess. " Circe [1 :1].
158. San Via: The Campo (field) San Vio, which runs to the Grand Canal of Venice, where the Church of San Vio is located
[Ivancich].
159. Salviati: A glass shop where they still blow glass [M de R].
160. Don Carlos: The Bourbon Don Carlos, Duke of Madrid (1848? 1909), who in 1908 was living at the Palazzo Loredan, Campo San Vio, Venice.
161. Ie bozze: I, "proofsheets. "
162. "A Lume Spento": I, "With tapers [lights] quenched," The title of Pound's first book of verse published in 1908. The 8 lines ending with "or wait 24 hours," concern a dramatic moment in Pound's life as well as a turning point. According to his own account, he sat on the bank of the Grand Canal trying to decide whether he should throw the proofsheets of his book into the water and give up poetry, or shift to the other side of the canal and walk "by the column of Todero" on the way to deliver the proofsheets to the printer (presumably) or do neither, but wait for 24 hours before
deciding [NS, Life, 47].
163. Todero: [Todaro]: "Theodore. " The
Christmas, 1939
[M de R] .
165. Vendramin:
Calergi, on the right bank of the Grand Canal, famous as the place where Richard Wagner died in 1883.
166. Contrarini: [Contarini]: Several grand buildings on the canal have Contarini as -part of their names. Also, Pound stayed at the Palazzo Contarini at San Trovaso during
Famous church: "the jewel box" [Fang, II, 276].
171. Dei Greci, San Giorgio: The Church of St. George of the Greeks.
172. Carpaccio: Vittore C. , ? 1455? 1525? , Italian painter [26:93].
173. San Marco: I, "St. Mark. " The cathe? dral on the square.
174. Arachne: I, "spider. " Arachne was the name of the girl who chaJlenged Athena to a weaving contest. Because of her effrontery, the goddess changed her into a spider and
V enetian
? 400
188. butterfly: Along with other flying insects. the butterfly is a wide-ranging metaphor for the soul in flight from the body, as well as for spiritual aspirations or feelings [cf. 48:42, 50, 53].
189. smoke hole: Old army pyramidal tents had a smoke hole through which the pipe of a crude, funnel-shaped stove could be fitted in the winter. The literal smoke hole of the tent may have evoked the thought of the smoke hole in Faust's laboratory later in the
canto [cf. 217 below].
190. Unkle George: [cf. 176 above].
191. Ct/Volpe: Count Giuseppe Volpi, 1877-1947, was finance minister under Mussolini who created him Conte di Misu- rata: "He'was supposedly responsible for the rural electrification of the Adriatic Coast and for the development of the port of Venice, where he was born" [Fang, III, 88].
192. Lido: Resort town on the N end of the island outside the Lagoon of Venice.
193. "Rutherford Hayes: The 19th presi? dent (1877. 1881) of the U. S. Besides the 3 times on this page, Tinkham is mentioned a number of other times in the Pisan Cantos, always with a V enetian setting [74:180; 80/509]. Either Pound himself said that Tinkham looked like some statue of Hayes, or he overheard the phrase in quotes.
194. princess: Prob. Princess Winnaretta
Eugenia (1870?
1943), widow of Prince Edmond Melchior de Polignac (1834? 1901), whom she married in 1893 after a previous marriage was annulled by the Holy See, Feb. I, 1892. She was the daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer, the wealthy inventor of the Singer sewing machine. She helped Pound obtain the Janequin music of Canto 75, for which he thanked her in a letter from Rapallo [L, 254]. He mentioned her in
another letter [L, 249].
195. Dafne's Sandro: Sandro Botticelli's
painting of Daphne, who while being chased by Apollo was turned into a laurel tree. Such a word inversion is a type of metonymy ("misnamer"),
76/461-462 196. Trovaso, Gregorio, Vio: The Church of
San Trovaso, the Abbazia San Gregorio, and
the Church of San Via are all on the canal-
Rio de San Trovaso-which is named after
the church [Ivaneich].
197. Dottore: I, "doctor. " Alexander Robertson, D. D. Cavaliere of the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Italy, was the bearded minister of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in Venice. Pound once told an anecdote in broad dialect about him [GK, 259]. He also mentioned him in a letter to Marianne Moore, dated Feb. 1, 1919: "I have seen/Savanarola still swinging a cruci- fix,/down from Sal6 for the week? end of exhorting/the back-sliders of Venice; and the Reverend Cavaliere Dottore Alessandro/ Robertson denouncing the Babylonian woman/and the Rrrroman releegion/with fervour:: ::" (the first half of the letter is
cast in verse [L, 147[).
198. Babylonian intrigue: From 1309 to 1378, the popes, all French and supported by France, resided at Avignon, rather than Rome, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity because of its parallel with the 586-536 captivity of the Jews after the fall of the Temple. Before, during, and after this period intrigue of both the Italian and French factions in the dispute became pandemic.
199. Squero: I, "shipyard. "
200. Ogni Santi: A canal in Venice. In 1908
Pound lived near the conjunction of the San
Trovaso and Ogni Santi canals [Ivaneich].
201. ends and beginnings: Based on Pound's
interpretation of a Confucian text in The Great Digest: "Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet"
[CON, 29]. The theme recurs at 77/465 and other places in the later cantos.
202. cassoni: I, "treasure chests. " Here, bas-relief panels at Rimini.
203. the hidden nest: A large abstract painting done for Pound by Tamiosuke
76/462
Koume [Michio Ito: 77: 86], which Pound
called "Tami's dream. " In a letter to Katue Kitasono [May 24, 1936], Pound said: "I had all Fenollosa's notes and the results of what he learned. . . . But since Tami Koume was killed in that earthquake [1923] I have had no one to explain the obscure passages or fill up the enormous gaps of my ignorance" [L, 282]. When Pound vacated his Paris studio, he sent the painting to a friend in Auteuil. In 1931 it was brought to Venice, but it was sequestered as alien enemy property during WWII and disap. peared as did "the great Ovid" [Ivaneich].
204. the great Ovid: Ovid's Fasti, printed by a successor of Bodoni, which Pound bought from Sig. Cassini, seller of rare books, and had bound in wooden covers.
205. bas relief of Ixotta: Yriarte attributes a bas? relief of Ixotta [9:59] (now with Olga Rudge) to Agostini di Duccio [9:78]. A picture of the bas? relief with a picture of Ixotta's tomb in the Tempio Malatestiano was published in 1761 [Fang, II, 250].
206. Olim de Malatestis: L, "Once of the
Malatestas. "
207. Fano: A city near Rimini once under
control of the Malatestas [9:3].
401
dichotomy concerning the creation of the universe. One side said, "ex nihilo, nihil fit" ("out of nothing, nothing is made"); the other, "ex nihil ens creatum" ("out of nothing, being is created").
215. la concha: S, "conch. "
216. IIOIKIA08PON' . . . : H, "richly en? throned, immortal. " Opening words of Sappho's hymn to Aphrodite [Lyra Graeca, 182; OBGV, No. 140].
217. that butterfly . . . smoke hole: [cf. 188 above]. The source for the smoke hole here and the German quote 7 lines later is the laboratory scene [11. 6819? 7004], Part Two, Act II of Goethe's Faust. In that scene, Mephistopheles and Wagner, amidst fantastic medieval alchemical apparatus, are busy making a human being. According to the notes that Passage, the translator, derived from Witkowski's edition o f the German text, to create a human being was the "supreme objective of the alchemists. " For a few years (1768 and in the late 1790s), Goethe was a passionate student of the history of alchemy, particularly the work of the previous three centuries. Passage trans- lates lines from the opening of the scene thus: "In the retort a fire dot grows, / And like a living coal it glows. " He has a note that says: "To the alchemists, 'living coals' took fire from their own inner spark. " What
for the alchemists may have been scientific fact becomes for Pound a metaphorical rhyme with all the other fire and light images in The Cantos. Wagner continues: "Yes, like a splendid ruby's spark / It flashes lightnings through the dark. / A clear white light begins to brighten! " With a loud rattling of the door, Mephisto comes in and asks: "~at are you making there? " Wagner says: " A human being! " Mephisto: "A human being? And what loving pair / Have you got hidden in the smoke hole there? " ("Habt ihr in's Rauchloch eingeschloffen,"
[1. 6837]). Wagner says, "none," and keeps
on with his work in a scene evocative of Frankenstein movies. Within a few minutes he has completed a nine months' process and created a homunculus, following somewhat
208. 64 countries . . . sargent:
mark of one of the DTC cadre overheard by Pound, who may be estimating the number of countries involved in WWII. He also men- tions his prewar occupation-, the illegal nature of which strikes an ironic note.
209. vino rosso: I, "red wine. "
210. mountain oysters: A locution some-
times used to label a dish made from sheep
testicles.
211. lisciate con lagrime: I, "smoothed with tears. "
212. politis polished] tears. "
"elegant
[or
lachrymis: L,
213. LlAKPY[2N: H, "tears. "
214. ex nihil: L, "out of nothing. " Prob.
meant to evoke phrase from scholastic
Prob. a
re-
? 402
76/462-463
77/464
403
the recipe of Paracelsus's work De genera? tionibus rerum naturalium, Book 1. A note by Passage says in part: "Allow male sperm to putrefy for forty days in a covered jar until it visibly stirs with new life and some- what resembles a man's form . . . ; keep warm for weeks (9 months) and feed daily with arcana sangUlnlS humani . . . after which time it will become a . . . homunculus"
[Passage, 238]. Shortly, Wagner has spirited one up out of the retort and free of the smoke hole. The homunculus then talks to him and Mephisto.
churches have paintings by Fra Angelico [45:12].
224. po'eri di'ao1i: I, "poor devils. " RO's text has a marginalium (presumably given by Pound) which says "Favai," but this word, unless it is slang, means nothing in Italian. Fava, ("bean") is used in slang expressions such as "not worth a bean. " Perhaps, "beans," in this sense, is intended.
225. Knecht [eJ gegen Knecht [eJ: G, "Slave against slave. " From Faust [cf. 217 above]. Continuing the Faust scene, Wagner, Mephisto, and the homunculus come to talk about such things as destiny, pleasure, struggle, and fate, until Mephisto says, "Spare me / That clash of servitude with tyranny' . . . The struggle is, they say, for freedom's rights, / Look closer, and it's slave with slave that fights" [11. 6962-6963].
226. MET A8EMENnN. . . . : H, "chang- ing. " Key word of quote from Aristotle's Politics concerning the results o f changing one currency from another [74:343].
227. NHLON'AMYMONA: H, "a noble island. " From lines in which Odysseus is telling of his approach to the island where his companions killed the cattle of the sun
[20:69].
Background
EP, GK, 188,79,93,89,127; SP, 172,339,96,408,230-231,
179,341,448; GB, 17;PD, 115;LE, 288;PE, 129;Voltaire,Le siecie de Louis XIV, 1751; New Age, Oct. 16, 1913, 728; Dial, Dec. and Oct. 1920; W. B. Yeats, Plays and Controversies, London, Macmillan, 1923 [Plays]; J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, New York, Philosophical Library, 1962 [Cirlot]; Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafes, Studios, Philadelphia and London, 1928, [SH, Paris]; James Wilhelm, Dante and Pound, Orono, 1974; James Legge, The Four Books, Shanghai, 1923
[Legge1; Francis Trevelyan Miller, History of World War11, Philadelphia and Toronto, 1945; Helen Caldwell, Michio Ito: The Dancer and His Dances, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press, 1977; T. S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality"; Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos," Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958, II, III, IV; James G. Fraser, The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster, New York, 1959; CFT, Basil Bunting: Man & Poet, Orono, 1980; M de R, Discretions, 35-37, 194-196,44, [M de R]; Lord Byron, Works, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, London, I, 173; Leonard Doob, ed. , Ezra Pound Speaking, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1978
[Doob, Speaking].
Exegeses
Sieburth, Pai, 6-3, 382; Anderson, Pai, 6-2, 235-250; Nassar, Pai, 1-2,211; Riccardo M. degli Uberti, "Ezra Pound and Ubaldo degli Uberti: History of a Friendship," Italian Quarterly, XVI, 64, Spring 1973, 95-107.
Glossary
refused to allow an international
tion, but Pound had reliable inside informa- tion that told him that the Russians directed and carried out the massacre [M de R].
5. Ie beau monde gouverne: F, "society governs. "
6. toujours: F, "always. "
7. Chung: [MI504] "the middle" [76:54].
8. "and having got 'em . . . ": "He said: How can one serve a prince along with these village-sized (kinky) minds? Until they get on they worry about nothing else, and, when they have, they. worry about losing the advantages. When they are afraid of losing
218. saeva: L, "cruel. "
219. Leonello: [24:17].
Prob.
Lionello
d'Este
220. Petrus Pisani pinxit: L, "Peter Pisano painted [it]. " Poss. Antonio Pisano [26:78], a painter employed by Sigismundo and patronized by Lionello d'Este. He was
also known as Vittare Pisano.
221. cameo should remain: Focuses Pound's interest in seals, cameos, and fragments [GK, 159]. .