No More Learning

The whole of India and China and Greece ought to oppose this. The his- tory of mediaeval europe is that of a conflict between maniacs and sav- ages, with a dash of malevolence, greed of conquest, pollution.
Theremaybenorighteouswarsinthe"SpringandAutumn"butI have never heard of either Bhudists or Taoists using religion as a pretext for slaughter. Nor is it Confucian.
I wonder if Elmer Rice is an innocuous centenarian or at least a contem- porary whom I had thought extinct {that must have been Cole Rice).
I hope NO influence brought by that set of Pens will get into Tokyo. But give my cordial greetings to Rice, if it is the old relique, and to Fletch- er's widow, neither of whom will be carrying "influence. "
I dare say this will arrive after the conflict, but you can store it for next time.
? SECTIONIII: 1956-68 143
Hagoromo is a sacrament. And a glory. Tami Kume danced the tennin part before the Emperor at the age of six. And remembered it in London, where he showed us the movements in 1917 or about then. Later a Toku- gawa and some daimyo gave bits of Noh and Kiogen privately in his stu- dio in Paris. These are things to remember.
ever yours Ezra Pound
141: Ryozo Iwasaki to Ezra Pound
TLS-l Keio University, Mita, Minatoku, Tokyo, Japan. 9 September 1957
Dear Mr. Pound:
At your kind suggestion we have officially made an application to the Swedish Academy for Dr. Junzaburo Nishiwaki as a Nobel prize candidate, and we should be grateful if you could send us a word of recommendation for his work, which we might use as an important reference to be filed in among the necessary documents.
142: Ezra Pound to Ryozo Iwasaki
TLS-l St. Elizabeths, D. C. , 11 October 1957
Dear Ryozo Iwasaki
I am very glad to hear of your committee's decision. It would be presumptuous of me to express an opinion on the
qualities of a man's writing in a language which I am, unfortunately, un- able to read, or to have views as to his status among other writers whose work is whoJJy unknown to me.
From what I have seen [of] Dr. Junzaburo Nishiwaki's work in English there is no possible doubt of his sensibility and the range and quality of his culture.
I shouldbedelightedtohavemyguessconfirmedbythose competent, as seems to be indicated by your letter. And I should partici- pate in the pleasure of any honour that may be done him.
cordially yours Ezra Pound
Yours sincerely Ryozo Iwasaki
? 144 SECTIONIII: 1956-68
143: Shiro Tsunoda to Ezra Pound
TLS-1 1156 Karasuyama-cho, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. 13 January 1958
Dear Mr. Pound:
Excuse me for my rudeness in writing you a letter without anyone who introduces me to you. While I was studying modern poetry in the Univer- sity of Miami, Florida, as a Fulbright Exchange teacher under the sponsor- ship of U. S. Office of Education, I was much interested in and deeply appreciated your poetry and study of Noh. Now teaching English and American literature in a senior high school, I am going to publish my thesis on "The Influence of Chinese Poetry and Japanese Tanka and Noh on Mr. Pound's Poetry. " But I have come to several points on which 1 would like to ask you questions. You went to London in 1909 but did you study Noh from Mr. Fenollosa's manuscripts before that? You put the title Personae to the collection of your poems published in London in 1909. How did you think of the title Personae (etymologically Per = through, Sona = sound) mean- ing the mask or the role as was shown in Greek play. Did you not think of highly artistic mask of Noh plays, though you perhaps got a hint from Browning's Dramatis Personae? While you were absorbed by painting and sculpture, were you interested in any of Japanese or Chinese paintings?
As for your poem, "The Tree," whose first five lines run as follows: I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen be/ore;
Of Daphne and the JaureJ bow
And that god-/easting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
Did not you think of an old man and woman symbolized by pine-trees in Takasago, one of the best and most illuminating Noh plays, when you wrote "that god-feasting couple old"?
And as for "The Encounter," what is meant by the last two lines which run:
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.
If you kindly answer these questions, it will be a great help to a study of
the East and West flow of literature and I am much obliged to you.
If you are still interested in Noh plays, I will gladly send you the photos of the performances of Nohs recently presented by such schools as Umewa- ka, Kanze, Hohsho, Kongo, etc. Some of the Americans in Tokyo such as Dr.
Ulmann, Fulbright professor, are very eager to study Noh.
? SECTIONIII: 1956-68 145
I will translate into English any of the plays which you want and send it to you.
Hoping that I receive your answer, I remain,
144: Ezra Pound to Shiro Tsunoda
TLS-1 (fragment) St. Ehzabeths Hospital. 18 January 1958
Sincerely yours, Shiro Tsunoda
. . . I can't switch back to work on Noh this moment, but am having dif- ficulty in making some people understand that only the Minoru or some otherNohcompanywithwhichI amunacquainted,butnotBroadway, would be able to do Traxiniai as I want it done. . . .
145: Ezra Pound to Ryozo Iwasaki
TLS-1 [Schloss Brunnenburg] 18 November 1958
Dear Ryozo Iwasaki
I have at last got back to (my) archives
and yesterday opened Fenollosa's notes on Prof. Mori's lectures on the History of Chinese Poetry.
The damned sinologues who are trying to suppress all classical intelligence will be out with the trench tools to sabotage any revival of interest.
This is the first time I have been able to look at the Fenollosa heritage since learning a bit about the ideograms.
I am still fairly defenceless re/ equivalence of Jap and Chinese
names.
The work seems to be very lively. Would it incommode you to go thru my text a few pages at a time, as 1 dig it out from the pencil scribble, and try to get it into clear sentences?
Best wishes to Junzaburo yours cordially Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
? 146 SECTIONIII: 1956-68
146: Ezra Pound to Ryozo Iwasaki
TLS-1 [Schloss Brunnenburg] 6 December 1958
Dear Ryozo Iwasaki
The grandson of Leo Frobenius, whom I consider was the best mind in Europe for about 40 years, wants to get to Japan,
aim to continue Fenollosa's work.
It would give chance for correlation of the better thought of Europe with the Japanese heritage.
I don't know what chance of exchange could be developed with the Forschungs Institut founded by his grandfather in Frankfurt,
but in any case I hope he will call on you when (and/or if) he gets to Japan.
My daughter works on Junzaburo's poems, but with me on the premises and increased family, need to attend to house and farm, she cannot give all her time to literary studies. I hope our distinguished confrere will have patience, and also understand the harassments of publishers (Scheiwiller in particular) at the present time.
She has been so intent on my work that she has, for a decade, neglected to mention the importance of that of her husband. If there are any egyp- tologists in Japan, they might be interested in his latest publication.
I have only within the past weeks realized the amount of work he has done, and the importance of what is still unpublished, particular- ly in regard to agriculture and the work of Del Pelo Pardi (re/ plowing etc. )
cordially yrs. Ezra Pound
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147: Ezra Pound to Tomoji Okada
TCS-1 Brunnenburg, Tirolo di Merano. 22 [January or August] 1959
Dear Mr. Okada
To best of my memory, Mrs. Fenollosa was under impression that the Government wished to honour E. F. in manner stated. I shall of course insert your information if book is ever reprinted, though it rather de- tracts from government prestige. Thanking you for your letter. I wonder if the erroneous statement also occurs in the Heineman vol/ on Art? Battling against the cumulative falsification of history ancient and con- temporary, I cannot keep up with all details. After nearly half a century I can't be sure Mary Fenollosa made the statement, but I certainly did not invent it.
(Is it possible that the Government offered to provide transport? )
148: Ezra Pound to Sanehide Kodama
ALS-1 1 rue Grande Chaumiere, Paris. 9 September 1968
Librarian, University of Virginia
Please permit Professor Kodama to consult microfilms of Fenollosa man- uscripts from my collection.
Ezra Pound
Cordially yours, Ezra Pound
? 148
IV POUND'SCONTRIBUTIONSTOJAPANESE PERIODICALS: 1939-40
JJuRiNG THE YEARS 1939 and 1940, Pound enthusiastically wrote articles from Italy to Japanese newspapers on the European cultural, political, and economic events of the time. In 1940, he had become the Italian Correspon- dent of the Japan Times.
The Japan Times was founded in 1897 as the first and oldest English newspaper edited by Japanese in Japan. It wished, as the first editor, Motosada Zumoto, put it, to "endeavor to explain things and smooth the way between foreigners and Japanese. " Its "slogan" has been "All the News Without Fear or Favor. " In 1918 it merged with the Japan Mail and Times (originally started as the Japan Mail in 1870 but changed its name at the merger with the short-lived Japan Times which had been established in 1878). [For further reference see The Japan Times: A History from 1861 to the Present, ed. Shinichi Hasegawa (Tokyo, 1966]. ]
At the time Pound was contributing his articles to the newspaper, its official name was The Japan Times and Mail. Its chief editor, Yasotaro Mori, was a friend of Katue Kitasono.
Pound's articles, however, are his observations and his analyses of Europe in the pre-war and early war years. Some parts are somewhat biased, but scattered throughout are some quite illuminating passages. Collected here (under somewhat regularized revised headings] are:
1 Tri-lingual System Proposed for World Communications (15 May 1939]
2 Death of Yeats: End of Irish Literary Revival (5 June 1939) 3 Study of Noh Continues in West (10 December 1939]
4 An Ezra Pound Letter from Rapallo (8 January 1940]
5 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (4 March 1940]
6 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (18 April 1940]
7 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (13 June 1940)
8 Letter from Rapallo: In War Appear Responsibilities (22 July 1940) 9 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (12 August 1940]
10 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (26 August 1940]
11 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (2 September 1940) 12 From Rapallo: An Ezra Pound Letter (29 September 1940)
The original title for article 1 was in Pound's typescript "Communica-
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 149
tions, or Cultural Front. " and for article 2, "Cultural News: State of the Occident in April, anno xvii Era Fascisti (a. d. 1939). " Article 4 bore the sub-heading "Annual Music Week," and article 5, "Ezra Pound Asks Schol- ars Here to Solve Issues. " Articles 6 and 7 appeared in the Japan Times Weekly (published alsoby the/apan Times and Mail), and articles 9, 10, 11
and 12 were reprinted in it, respectively, on 22 August, 5 September, 12 September, and 10 October (1940).
I am indebted to the work done by Shiro Tsunoda on articles 1, 2, and 3 which appeared in "A Study of Some Articles Contributed by Ezra Pound to The Japan Times and Mail," Obirin University Studies of English and American Literature, nos. 23, 24, 25 (1983, 1984, 1985).
? 150
SECTION IV: ESSAYS
Tri-Lingual System Proposed for World Communications
Noted Scholar of Noh Suggests Bilingual or Trilingual Edition of Hundred Best Books on Japanese Literature
1
Note:
known in Japan, is one of the few foreigners who made enthusiastic introduction abroad of Japanese "Noh" plays and stands shoulder to shoulder with Ernest Fenollosa as a scholar devoted to the stud_v of Japanese culture. Mr. Pound has a brilliant literary record and is at present visiting the United States. --Editor, The Japan Times
The writer of the following article, Ezra Loomis Pound, although not well-
I AM READING The Japan Times with pleasure in the hope of getting some European or American news that hasn't been doctored to suit one interest or another. The difficulty in writing to a new public is to know what they have already heard. One doesn't want to bore the reader by telling him what his aunt Jemima has told him or what he has read in the week before last's picture supplement.
Perhaps I had better begin with what has not yet happened. The Italian papers are full of news of the cultural pact with Japan. I have three pro- posals for the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai. First: I respectfully ask considera- tion for a bilingual or trilingual edition of the hundred best books of Japanese and ideogramic literature.
The Leica grainless film and microphotographic processes now make such an edition commercial. It can be produced at the same price as the Loeb library of Greek and Latin texts (which has an English translation on the opposite page). With microphotography there is no reason for not using ideogramic pages taken direct from works of master calligraphers. We in the West now have only a few such pages, notably a few from ideograms written for Ernest Fenollosa by one of the Court masters.
Wanted: Noh Film
Secondly: The whole of the Noh could be filmed, or at any rate the best Noh music could be registered on sound-track. Your film Mitsuko filled me with nostalgia. It is 15 years since Tami Koume's friends sang me fragments of Noh in Paris but the instant I heard that all-too-brief reproduction here in Rapallo (in a simple village cinema) I knew whence it came. You have there a treasure like nothing we have in the Occident. We have our masterwork: Mozart, Purcell, Janequin, Dowland, but it is a different masterwork and one is not a substitute for the other.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 151
Thirdly: I propose a tri-lingual system for world communications. None of the schemes for esperanto or other universal languages is at all satisfactory. Ogden's proposals for basic English could be developed. He has not the necessary tact or humanity to apply them. The greatest practi- cal, that is possible, simplification would be a triple system: Ideogram, with the Japanese sound (syllabic) comment, Italian and English.
Culture in retrospect needs more languages, and no one wants to constrict it. Greek, Latin and as much else as you like: all very enjoyable.
Current culture could conceivably receive great aid from this triple basis. I am not proposing this with any intention of slighting French and German. The present political alliance would suggest German, Italian and Japanese. I sacrifice one party on either side of the immediate division of forces. I do this on strictly practical and linguistic grounds.
French contains a great treasure but, as language, it is tricky. The foreigner cannot learn it. Its sounds are difficult and its letters are not uniform in connotation. You say: neither are the English. True! but English has attained a syntactical plainness that is nowhere exceeded save in ideogram.
There is also the question of actual present diffusion.
A great many Germans speak English. English is common to the U. S. A. and the British Empire. It is already a common tongue for dozens of Indians who speak different languages in India. Ideogram as a written communica- tion touches all Japan and China. Italian is the simplest of the Latin tongues. Its spelling is the clearest. (Both Spanish and French are full of tricks of
speech that are not clearly printed on the page. )
Language Simple
None of the proposed artificial languages can be more quickly learned by other Latin groups. A Spaniard understands Italian almost at once. Any one who has studied Latin can learn Italian in a few weeks. And whatever may be said of the fancy Italian styles that have pullulated since the sixteenth century, Duce Mussolini signified among other things a great drive for direct utterance, for clear and simple speaking.
I can argue my reasons for picking these three media. I could fill most of today's paper doing it, but I think the reader will save his own time by thinking about them, and weighing up the gains against the sacrifices. The quantity of cultural heritage should be set against the sacrifices. Latin contains the matter of a great deal of Greek. I mean it has been translated intoLatin. TherearegreatclaimsforGerman. I don'tthinkRussianhas much claim. The Latin treasure is fairly accessible to anyone who knows
? 152 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
Italian. Italy is a rising nation. South Americans speak a good deal of Italian as well as Spanish.
I will answer serious objections if anyone has the same set after a week's reflection that they have on first reading this note.
2 Death of Yeats: End of Irish Literary Revival
The death of Leo Frobenius last Summer is the severest shock to European cultural studies that we have had in a decade. Returning members of the Forschungsinstitut Australian expedition passed through Rapallo a few weeks ago with news of their discoveries. Mr. Fox had even found a drawing rather like the magnificent "Runner. "
The death of William Butler Yeats closes the great era of the Irish literary revival. That death will doubtless have been duly recorded in Japan. Someone in Tokyo may also know of Yeats' Japanese interlude or flirtation. He, at one time, thought he would be called to a Japanese pro- fessorship and did, I think, receive some sort of invitation. You have a "link" with Dublin in those plays of Yeats which were directly stimulated by Fenollosa's reports and translations of Noh. Having worked with Yeats during the three or four years of his intensest interest in the Noh, I know how much it meant to him.
Form Searched
"The form I have been searching for all my life" was one of his comments. (That would have been about 1917. )
A determination for a new poetic drama in Europe, not merely a Celtic twilight or a side show, but a poetic drama that will enter the main stream of our life is manifested both by Jean Cocteau (recent play Parents Terribies] and by T. S. Eliot (Family Reunion).
The present chronicler is Confucian and totalitarian. To him both these plays seem to be ends of a movement. So far as I am concerned they belong to the age of Ibsen wherein people's inner wobblings and fusses were very important.
I believe in, and I believe that there exists, a growing conscious- ness of the individual in the state. "The divine science of politics" (thought as to how people can live together in an organized or organic social system), interests me more than all the Freuds that ever existed. I consider this both a catholic (in the non-sectarian sense) and a classic Anschauung.
At any rate I think the great novelists and dramatists must henceforth
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 1 53
sort out the problems dependent on economic pressure from those which remain after this pressure is removed.
A few years ago P. Bottome wrote a novel about an insane asylum. On analysis one found a common denominator, nowhere stated by the au- thoress and not I think present in her consciousness. All the patients were there because of economic pressure. All the doctors and nurses were moved by monetary pressures.
Of the poets included in my Active Anthology, the best are all aware of monetary pressure, as something more clear and incisive than the vague "social" urges to be found in last century's literature. This is not to say that Trollope and, in his last years, Henry James hadn't come to such percep- tion. They were above and beyond their time. The keenest minds today can be grouped. They can be grouped along this axis. The best writers are aware of problems that have lain unobserved in Dante and Shakespeare, problems of usury, of the just price, of the nature of money and its mode of issue.
It may interest you to know that the clarity of some paragraphs in The Japan Times on these subjects is, outside Italy, rather restricted to weekly papers and papers of special movements in England and America and in the rest of the Occident.
Lucid and incisive remarks of Hitler, Schacht and Funk do not get the wide and immediate publicity they deserve. They are however understood by writers of such divergent temperament as Wyndham Lewis and General J. F. C. Fuller.
Picture Post
As job lot items and notes on books worth reading: A current Picture Post acknowledges Wyndham Lewis to be the greatest portraitist of our time (even quotes Sickert as saying, "and of any time"--which is the generous exaggeration of an older painter for a younger one who has been too long denied his just place in contemporary art).
The best news from America is the edition of E. E. Cummings' collected poems, plus the publication of W. C. Williams' Passaic River (prose sketches).
Both the Criterion and Broletto have ceased publication, leaving my personal interest in current periodicals narrowed to The British Union Quarterly, for discussions of state organization, and to Townsman for very brief notices of books and the arts. The Examiner, published in Bethlehem, Connecticut, U. S. A. , contains some very well written and carefully thought articles.
There are valuable notes in several dozens of sectarian or group week-
? 154 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
lies and quarterlies in which publications, however, the dross and one- sidedness often out-weighs the sound matter, at least to such a degree that one cannot recommend them to Orientals wanting a clear view of the west.
3 Study of Noh Continues in West
Pound Outlines New Approach to Drama Using New Media
The work initiated by Ernest Fenollosa for better comprehension of East and West is by no means ended. Whatever Fenollosa may have done in the way of awakening his Japanese friends to the need of more active preserva- tion of Japanese values must be set against the spark lit here by his unedited manuscripts.
W. B. Yeats was at once enkindled by the imperfect versions of Noh which I was able to make from Fenollosa's notes. He started writing plays in Noh form for his Irish theatre and for performances where no western stage was available.
We in the West want an adequate edition of all the Noh in two or more languages. A few of us have the sense to want an edition with the ideogram- ic text on one page large enough to convey the calligraphic beauty and the essentially untranslatable values of ideograms themselves.
I don't mean to say that you can't in time translate an ideogram, even the most beautiful, but you will never get into any one phonetically spelled word all the associative forces of the more interesting picture-words.
it, ^
Two Media Available
It may be argued that the actual seeing of the ideograms is more necessary in the study of philosophy and the classics than in reading the romantic Noh, but one can not do without it in the latter. Two media are at our disposal which were not at Fenollosa's disposal, namely the sound film and micro- photography.
Fenollosa could not, as I did by the kindness of Dr. Shio Sakanishi, head of the Japanese Department of the Congressional Library in Washing- ton, see and hear Awoi no Uye on the screen with the sound of the singing
is contained or summed up in f P^"
The whole of a philosophy is almost contained in the three characters: the clear definition of terms as necessary to all real thought, and to sincerity, and the knowing of one's own mind and one's own meaning.
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 155
and the crescendo of excitement as the hero rubs his rosary with ever faster rattling of beads against beads.
Every western university should have the complete set of Noh plays on sound-film for study in its dramatic and literary courses.
That will come and will have to come for a dozen reasons as the old half-witted system of Western teaching wakes up (30 or 40 years after modern science has made photographic conveniences a daily accessory to our industries and to our commercial filing systems).
Microphotographic methods are still very little understood in Europe. The place to study them is in the Washington Congressional Library. Any- thing in that library can be reproduced and carried away on a reel of film in one's pocket a couple of days after one has requested it and paid the modest charge of 2 cents per page for whatever hitherto priceless and, in many cases, unduplicated and unduplicable matter one wanted.
With proper apparatus we or you could photograph all the most beauti- ful calligraphic editions and reproduce them as cheaply as we print our worst books.
In the case of most of the Noh plays even this is not necessary as you have a very excellent calligraphic edition which could be supplied for a few cents per play to an American firm and interleaved with the American text. These editions would allow our students to study the text before and after seeing the cinema-representation of your plays.
And this, I need not say, would get over a good deal of the difficulty that now exists for the simple-minded student. For 1200 years Japan has meant more than commerce and business wrangles. In fact irritations over trade concessions between our countries are only a man's life old and need not and (permit me the strong phrase) damn well should not and shall not be regarded as a permanent and everlasting barrier between the best minds of your country and my country and between your country and the best minds in a dozen European nations.
I don't in the least wish to detract from the merit of the Funa-Benkei edition sent me by Katue Kitasono but it does not satisfy the requirements: the ideogramic type is too small. The ideograms ought to be big enough to convey their intrinsic beauty whether in grass writing or block type, and they ought to be big enough to permit, say 7 point, gloze and explanations on the English page facing them, page per page.
When we come to the matter of what English or European texts should be used, we are up against a much thornier proposition. There must of course be a plain literal version somewhere available, with explanations and notes, however tiresome and unpoetic. There should also be the best
? 156 SECTION IV: ESSAYS
available translation of the poetic values, in whatever European language this may have been attained. There are now American, English, French, German and Italian versions of Noh. And there is at least one Spanish text that is quite charming in the less vital parts of the play I read but falls down when it comes to the more intense passages.
Dr. Sakanishi caused me a good deal of anguish by insisting that something I had found in Fenollosa did not exist in the original. I am puzzled as to how it got into my text. Did it spring from Umewaka Minoru, or from Professors Mori and Ariga or did Fenollosa or I catch it out of thin air?
Fenollosa wrote that the Noh was in secret language; it was, for centur- ies, reserved for the Samurai and Nobles. You can not translate poetry merely by translating words. Some freedom (but not too much) must be left the poet who finds a new verbal manifestation for the original thought. He or she must in some way convey the feel and the aroma of the original play and of the inter-relation of characters.
Tami Koume had danced the Hagoromo before the Emperor, taking the tennin part when he was, as I remember, six years old. At twenty he still remembered the part and movements of the tennin's wings, which as she returns to the upper heaven, are the most beautiful movements I have seen on or off any stage. Tami knew something of Noh that no mere philologist can find out from a text book.
BUT when it came to the metaphysics he could not answer questions which seemed to me essential to the meaning. Very probably the original author had left those meanings in the vague. There may not have been ten men in Europe who would have asked those particular questions, but it so happened that Yeats, in my company, had spent several winters trying to correlate Lady Gregory's Irish folk-lore with the known traditions of var- ious myths, psychologies and religions.
Two or three centuries ago Catholic missionaries bothered the Chinese court with analogous questions, such as "Did the spirit of Confucius enter his cartouche," etc.
My own ignorance is very dense, but I have no wish to maintain it. I merely want to put other students on their guard against the needJess sacrifice of poetic values.
By all means let us have a prose translation, but where Umewaka Minoru or his friends have left a haze over the almond blossoms or the reflection of the moon in two buckets, let us be very much on our guard against any rumor that such and such a meaning is not in, or associated with, or associable with the Noh text.
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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.
4
? SECTION IV: ESSAYS 159
3. Concerto in Si min.
4. Aria, from La Fida Ninfa
5. Bach's transcription from the Concerto in Si. min. reworked, that is, by Bach for four harpsichords, and in the key of La min. 6. ConcertoAliaRustica.
The Week's music was ably varied: there were instrumental works, a revival of the opera Olimpiade (probably the first performance since Vival- di's death in 1741], and choral works given in the Church of S. Francesco with full orchestra.
The Week amply testified to Vivaldi's being a major composer, not simply "another" Italian composer of his period to be remembered by the often reprinted "Cucco" movement from one of his violin concerti, or by the single aria, "Un Certo non so che," which had been the only bit of his vocal music available in a modern edition.
All this being in accord with the beliefs printed by the violinist Rudge and by Cobbett, who had said a few years ago that Vivaldi was a composer with a future. Of course this doesn't mean that one has "discovered" Vivaldi. His name has long been in every encyclopedia or dictionary of music, but it does mean that musical history is undergoing a revision in its estimate of him. A number of general questions rise and or have been raised.
Timeliness Pointed Out
There is a timeliness in all resurrections in art; whether it be in painting, literatureorinmusic. InMissRudge'sownrenderingoftheconcertoI have found a close kinship with the line of the surrealist Dali. I don't know whether this comes from the manuscript or from the executant. I have long blamed or at least teased the surrealists for their naive belief that they had invented something which had already been present in Guido Cavalcanti's poetry when Dante was 16 years old. There is plenty of surrealism in mediaeval poetry. The human spirit has recurring needs of expression.
Even before one knew the detail of Vivaldi's life, one could hear certain qualities in his music, and possibly one exaggerates one's own perceptivity when one learns the personal and human background from which the Venetian master produced his music. He was priest, professor of music to a girl's convent school, and then in later life ran an opera company, present- ing his own operas and traveling from Mantua to Vienna in company with a barber's daughter, whom he had taught to sing with great success, and with assistant nymphs or whatever. Goldoni describes visiting the old man who was scribbling musical phrases on his desk and dipping into his breviary.
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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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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.