Posts Tagged ‘Ezra Pound’
SLOW DOWN QUICKLY
And then went back to the book, into confrontation with styles of cognition fading, past?
IMMEDIATELY SO DREAMLESS
On the way to Santa Prassede, following the detour of buses, running into a truck whose emblem is a head inside a gear marked “San Precario” or “Saint Precarious”: A spirited, nearing joyous, parade against (re)becoming minds in flight: the demonstrations of precari, workers, researchers without security, enact their part of the “manifestazione continua” rising [...]
UNTIMELY
“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” —Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen Betrachtungen=observation: consideration: speculation. As to translation [...]
ABLUTION/NULLITY
In thinking through the title of Ezra Pound’s A Lume Spento, which cites Dante’s imagination of the unlit transmission of a heretic’s bones to the Verde River, the past days have been full of tides, startled by Lila’s dream of San Clemente full of water: the river Tevere, its eels and desecreated bodies, its healing [...]
“NEOAVANTGARDISTIC PRODUCTS” (PASOLINI/POUND ENCOUNTER)
The measured, fatigued ol Ez sez, syllables, as they’d say in Italian, to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legible amusement & faint stupefaction: “Lei dice nazioni industrializzate e quindi culturalmente avanzate. È questo quindi che non mi va. Difficile per me rispondere a questa sola domanda perché non è solamente in Italia industrializzata dove ci sono nuovamente [...]
ANTITHETA/COMPASSION
Discussion over lunch about abstraction and concretion in translation one day and about translation of mental illness the next: learning from Anne Carson not to remove from words the objects lodged inside them in favor of a clearer semantic “point”; learning from one’s brother not to dismiss the phantoms inside another’s head. Discussion of Zukofsky’s [...]
FESTINA LENTE
“Hurry up slowly”—motto of Aldus Manutius, Venetian typographer, grammarian and humanist, turn of the sixteenth century. “City of Aldus”: it’s this figure that’s cited by the puerile author of A Lume Spento who wants to boast about where he’s self-published his first 72 pages of verse.