Personæ

by Ezra Pound

La obra de Ezra Pound consta de dos grandes ciclos. El primero, de formación, aprendizaje, asimilación y renovación del lenguaje poético, y el segundo, de experimentación y aplicación de lo aprendido a un proyecto omnicomprensivo: The Cantos. La inflexión entre los dos ciclos la marca la publicación, en 1926, de Personae, una recopilación de la poesía escrita por Pound en sus años londinenses (1908-1920), que cerraba y resumía una etapa fundamental de su vida: la de estudio e incorporación de algunas grandes tradiciones poéticas (la latina, la provenzal, la china, entre otras) a través de la "traducción creativa", junto a los hallazgos de concentración de fuerza, economía de medios y hábito de análisis que consideraba necesarios para su renovación lírica.
De ahí la importancia de Personae, un texto clásico de la poesía del siglo XX, que con su aparición dio solidez al movimiento "modernista" y confirmó el papel fundamental que en él representaba su autor, junto a creadores como James Joyce o T.S.Eliot.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, American, 20th Century, Literature, The United States Of America

545 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
not shaking the grass"

More truth in these four lines than anything I have ever read.

Resolute and profound. I could read it over and over again.

[Adriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por dos razones me gusta hacer reseñas, muchas veces me sirve poner algo por escrito para aclarar mis impresiones sobre un libro y también como para que me quede el recuerdo de la experiencia de lectura, quizás desde una lógica de capitalización medio pedorra, pero bueno. Por eso reseño este libro del que no puedo decir mucho porque me super excede, que tardé un montón en leer, pero que realmente me dio momentos muy hermosos.

Ezra es un canchero pero querible, si querés a los cancheros, sobra a todos, o a muchos, pero desde una idea muy clara y justa de su propio valor, se la re juega por sus elecciones por más que puedan ser a veces extrañas y en definitiva para mí que tiene razón porque tiene poemas bellísimos, como este que tuve que marcar no sólo con corazón sino ya con carita triste (porque a los emo las cosas bellas nos ponen tristes):

BALLATETTA

The light became her grace and dwelt among
Blind eyes and shadows that are formed as men;
Lo, how the light doth melt us into song:

The broken sunlight for a healm she beareth
Who has my heart in jurisdiction.
In wild-wood never fawn nor fallow fareth
So silent light; no gossamer is spun
So delicate as she is, when the sun
Drives the clear emeralds from the bended grasses
Lest they should parch too swiftly, where she passes.

(Lo copio en inglés porque la traducción no está tan buena y además lo más lindo es el sonido, además de las imágenes).

Después tiene miles de referencias, algunas las cacé, otras las pude rastrear, en otras me perdí (quizás hubieran estado bien algunas notitas al pie), y una serie de poemas muy graciosos como ese en el que dice que le escribe a cuatro personas, qué lástima que no las conozcas (same, Ezra).

Quiero copiar uno más que me gustó mucho y además es programático así que me parece explicativo, va en castellano porque esta vez no es problema la traducción:

ICONO

La más alta tarea que hay en el arte es crear la imagen bella; para crear orden y profusión de imágenes con que poder proporcionar a la vida de nuestras mentes un entorno noble.

Y si, como dicen algunos, el alma sobrevive al cuerpo; si nuestra conciencia no es una melodía intermitente de cuerdas que recaen entre los intervalos en el silencio, entonces más que nunca deberíamos desplegar las imágenes de la belleza para que al salir a espacios deshabitados tengamos con nosotros todo cuanto es necesario- una abundancia de sonidos y pautas para entretenernos en este largo sueño; para sembrar nuestro camino hacia el Valhalla: para ofrecer, de paso, ricos presentes.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Silet"

When I behold how black, immortal ink
Drips from my deathless pen--ah, well-away!
Why should we stop at all for what I think?
There is enough in what I chance to say.

It is enough that we once came together;
What is the use of setting it to rime?
When it is autumn do we get spring weather,
Or gather may of harsh northwindish time?

It is enough that we once came together;
What if the wind have turned against the rain?
It is enough that we once came together;
Time has seen this, and will not turn again;

And who are we, who know that last intent,
To plague to-morrow with a testament!

[Verona 1911]

[Lorena Beshello · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly not a fan of poetry, but had to read something from Ezra Pound. Too obscure/hermetic for me. It is pretty much annoying when I have to do research of words or expressions in order to understand few lines of poetry. Most of the poets have unique ways of conveying a message through their poems, and Pound is too complicated. It is like reading poetry in a language you don't know and you have to either learn it (research about it) or not understand anything. I have a simpler taste in poetry, I just want to enjoy it and wander freely, without any barriers. Gave it 3 stars because I liked it in general and I recommend it to the ones that are great fans of poetry. As for me, I don't think will read any other Pound's work.

[B. P. Rinehart · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Will people accept them?
(i.e. these songs).
As a timorous wench from a centaur
(or a centurion),
Already they flee, howling in terror.

Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes?
Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.

I mate with my free kind upon the crags;
the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo ofmy heels,
in the cool light,
in the darkness." - Tenzone


It has been awhile since I've read a modernist work like this. A decade ago, European High-Modernism made up a large part of the type of literature I read, but the 2010s saw a great diversification of my reading choices. Still, I consider modernism as one of my "homes" or "patria" as a book-reader. I was younger and more innocent in that way, but I felt that reading this type of literature with no pre-conceived notions built up my tolerance as a bibliophile now. Most folk complain about the difficulty and obscurity of Modernism, but I like the challenge and the experience of it. Others complain about the obscurity of the references and the formalism of it all, but that actually increased the curiosity for me. I don't worry about not getting some obscure refernce to a person or poem from Italian history, but I let the overall impression of the poem--as is--hit me.

I have already spoken my peace on Ezra Pound as a person in my review of Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, and I still stand behind my thoughts that if you had to only read one work by Ezra Pound or modernist literature in-abstract, then you read The Cantos of Ezra Pound. But this book is interesting because it is Pound at a time when his work was most purely artistic and devoid of the later ideological mess that would occur in the 1920s & onwards. It is a compilation that was released as a look-back at Pound's Imagist-era. Imagism was a sub-section of modernism that Pound and H.D. created in the 1910s as a response to the conservative Georgian movement in English literature. Imagism had three rules:

1.) Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective. 2.) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3.) As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

These rules would have a big impac on Enlish-language poetry in the years to come and Pound himself would eventually abandon them for other forms, but these rules ended the lingering Victorian/Edwardian-conservatism for poets in the English language. A lot of the poems in Personæ are in-fact translations or really a la Coleman Barks, "interpretations" of other poets. While many of these are very creative-based translations by obscure Italian or French poets, but for me the stand-out section was the Lustra & Cathay selections that featured Chinese and Japanese poetry and East Asian-inspired poetry. This includes Pound's most famous short poem In A Station of the Metro: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough."
But for me it was his translations of the poetry of Li Bai that have left the biggest impact on me. It is interesting, too, that while Pound could read Japanese, he could not read Mandarin Chinese. This meant that he had to read Chinese poetry translated into Japanese and he translated those into English (this is why you'll find Pound having listed Li Bai under his Japanese name Rihaku (though because of when this book was published, the editorial notes list Li Bai under his now obsolete Wade-Giles transliterated name Li Po instead of the now used Pinyin standard of Li Bai)). Despite the third-hand translation, I loved these poems and it is what helped fuel my interest in getting this book done. If I had known of the Cathay book earlier, I would have just gotten that book over this one.

Despite the subtitle, this compilation contains a few longer poems. The most famous of these poems is his "farewell" to London Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. It is a look-back at how he started as an up-and-coming poet freshly arrived in London from the United States. In the end, this is a look at Ezra Pound at his most "likeable" and idealistic. It gets a lot wilder and darker from here.

"O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?" - Coda

[Liv Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. Easily one of the best collections of poetry ever written. A euphoric chill in my bones.

[Deni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Personae, del latín máscaras. Esta mascarada con la que Pound se permite realizar una poesía anacrónica y descollante de su época implica un recorrido por todas sus obras de poesía breve, aquellas que después darán lugar a su magnánima obra: The Cantos. Arrancando por los poemas de 1908 a 1911 (Pound tiene VEINTITRÉS en 1908) donde ya vemos un manejo del idioma realmente extraordinario y ya se ha relacionado con sus estudios del provenzal que lo llevan a descubrir un universo que le estaba vedado a su siglo: el asombroso mundo medieval de los trovadores. Pound aprovecha este material de una manera sublime, lo vemos en poemas como Na Audiart, pero en ese afán por cantar a la tribu (que se verá directamente plasmado en los Cantos), trata de no dejar nada sin tocar. Homenajea a Villon, a su amado Browning, pero además demuestra una personalidad apabullante, sus poemas parecen provenir de esa mesura que ofrece la experiencia de la vida, el tono de un experimentado anciano que escribe rememorando. Sin embargo son sus poemas de pibito, aquí leemos In durance, traducido como En cautiverio, y que es para mí uno de sus mejores poemas donde se lee:

I am homesick after mine own kind

y ese es solo el primer verso que después también se hará estribillo, y lo que realmente me hace daño es que esté escrito en 1907. Hay un manejo del metro, de la rima interna, de la sonoridad, que es directamente soberbio. Pero Ezra no se olvida del universo dantesco, leemos una reescritura del soneto de Dante sobre Lapo y Guido, una sextina que piensa en Bertrans de Born (que obviamente es parte del Infierno dantesco), un poema sobre Piere Vidal y el que es quizá el mejor, y muy conocido, titulado Francesca que traduzco a continuación:

Viniste desde la noche
y había flores en tus manos,
ahora venís de una confusa muchedumbre
de un tumulto de charlas sobre vos.

Yo que te vi entre las cosas primordiales
me enojé cuando dijeron tu nombre
en lugares comunes.
Quisiera que las frías olas inundaran mi mente,
y que el mundo se secara como una hoja muerta,
o la vaina de un diente de león y fuera barrido,
para que pueda volver a encontrarte
sola.

No sé si lo hice bien pero hacía rato quería intentarlo.
De todas maneras, tras este poema increíble (ver Canto V de Inferno) hay muchísimos más de esta época juvenil que son alucinantes y se vuelve en vano enumerar.
Después vienen los de Ripostes, que son quizá su parte más solida en 1912, dedicado al entrañable William Carlos Williams y encabezado por una cita del buen Propercio. No exagero si digo que estos poemas me ponen mal de lo buenos que son. Recuerdo haber parado en el bar Saint Moritz sobre la calle Esmeralda con el único propósito de estar a resguardo y leerlos y que apareciera el Flaco Menotti en un claro acto de bendición.

The treasure is ours, make we fast land with it.
Move we and take the tide, with its next favour,
Abide
Under some neutral force
Until this corse turneth aside.

Igual más allá de los versos citados lo que realmente me parece más alucinante de esta pequeña parcela de genio es el poema The Alchemist, que lleva como epígrafe: Chant for the Transmutation of Metals.
Después los poemas de Blast que son jocosos y barderos, lick off the blacking tira Ezra, para llegar a Lustra (¿habrase visto nombre más hermoso para un libro de poemas?): aquí encontramos un poema que ya me encargué de traducir en su momento por devoción.

NUEVAS INSTRUCCIONES
Vengan, canciones mías, expresemos nuestras más bajas pasiones,
expresemos nuestra envidia al hombre con un trabajo estable y sin preocupación por el futuro.
Son muy ociosas, canciones mías.
Me temo que van a terminar mal.
Andan ahí por las calles,
merodeando en las esquinas y las paradas de colectivo,
haciendo nada o lo menos posible.
Ni siquiera expresan nuestras noblezas interiores,
ustedes van a terminar muy mal.
Y yo?
Yo estoy medio limado,
les he hablado tanto que
casi las veo a mi alrededor,
¡pequeñas bestias insolentes, desvergonzadas, desprovistas de ropa!
Pero vos, la más reciente canción del lote,
vos no sos lo bastante vieja para haber hecho tanto daño,
te voy a conseguir un abrigo verde de China
con dragones bordados,
te voy a conseguir los pantalones de seda escarlata
de la imagen del niño Jesús en Santa María Novella,
no sea que digan que no tenemos buen gusto
o que no hay nobleza en esta familia.

No me queda más que agradecer a Ezra por esta desfachatez.

Y ahora me tengo que ir a la marcha y perdón por haber salteado tanto, es imposible (o demora muchísimo) hacer una review digna y detallada pero bueno, ojalá haya podido contagiar algo de lo que me representa Ezra Pound.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pound embodied the work of the great naturalists Linnaeus and Agassiz, and he believed in what he had described as 'the intelligence working in nature and requiring no particular theories to keep it alive: a respect that is reborn in a series of sages, from Confucius, through Dante, to Agassiz. 'Respect for the kind of intelligence that enables grass seed to grow grass; the cherry-stone to make cherries.'

'And that the universe is alive', Pound wrote in Canto XCIV. This sense of numinous nature, 'of wood alive, of stone alive', is everywhere present in his greatest poetry and particularly in the later cantos-it is a similar quality which makes the world of The Tempest so profoundly poetic. As Pound wrote in Psychology and Troubadours: 'this sort of mind is close on the vital universe; and the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.' Pound's belief in Greek deities is as strong as was Hölderlin's.

Pound, channelling his energies through a series of masks and forms gathered in Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Japan, Anglo-Saxon England, Provencal France, makes poetry which is at once ancient and entirely new. The sheer variety here is staggering, but so is the absolute clarity of image in all of his poetry - the sense that any adoption of the past is not fuzzy nostalgia but a rescuing of its luminous energies and forms to renew modern poetry. Thus the alliterative rhythms of Saxon mesh with the fresh clearwater images of Chinese lyrics and the fragmented beauty of Sappho to create something alive with lightning power. Pound is self-consciously (and often self-deprecatingly) aiming at a new poetics, more intellectually and artistically r(/v)igorous than the staid formalities of Victorian verse, at once absolutely transparent and hermetically obscure (but only in its breadth of learning - with Pound, unlike Eliot, if you understand his references he could not be more didactically clear). The method of The Cantos, to gather a cluster of 'Luminous Details' from history and poetry to explain where and why we are, is already evident by the time Pound is in England - what governs the structure and imagery of In a Station of the Metro in two lines (two gorgeous images contrapunto working off one another to create a subject rhyme) is the the same impulse that works across decades of verse in the Cantos - the LUMINOSITY of clear thought, the rhymes across history of moments of great possibility and salvation. Very Benjaminian, almost. In his own words:

COMMISSION


Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,
Go to the women in suburbs.
Go to the hideously wedded,
Go to them whose failure is concealed,
Go to the unluckily mated,
Go to the bought wife,
Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,
Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,
Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;
Go with your edge against this,
Strengthen the subtle cords,
Bring confidence upon the algæ and the tentacles of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,
Go with an open speech.
Be eager to find new evils and new good,
Be against all forms of oppression.
Go to those who are thickened with middle age,
To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-
Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.

Go out and defy opinion,
Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.
Be against all sorts of mortmain.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pound's poetry is intricate, dense, lyrical, and passionate without being sentimental. He is not as emotionally evocative as some other poets, but I kind of like that about him. Poetry for him was about cutting through the dross of decadence and emotionalism and recapturing the primitive roots of poetry as distilled truth-telling. His work has a ruthless integrity to it; Pound does not suffer ignorance of the humanities gladly.

[Laura Wetsel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sleep with this under my pillow.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poems from Cathay were some of the greatest things I've ever read. Pound's actual poetry was too dense for me. He frequently alluded to history and literary characters that I had no clue about, Pound is too smart for me. There were a few gems that popped up, but there were too few. By all means he was probably the greatest teacher to have ever lived, and had a knowledge of the poetic tradition that is unrivaled. Unfortunately I found a lot of his poems not very moving to say the least. Probably worth buying for Cathay alone.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bashful Arides
Has married an ugly wife,
He was bored with his manner of life,
Indifferent and discouraged he thought he might as
Well do this as anything else.

Saying within his heart, "I am no use to myself,
Let her, if she wants me, take me."
He went to his doom.

(1915)

[Neha · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cathay is charming. The other volumes are very good in places despite a whiff of cultivated obscurity.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emotions, objects you can feel and touch but never see, peaks crashing headfirst into valleys, desperate clinging to an ego that is already half dissolved, split mind, linguistic dirt stains on the poet’s tongue, old substances reappearing in new forms, the profound inescapability of truth, the future and the past joining hands to trap us in recursion, shadows slipping through the door into the ordinary, no more for us the wine of the lips.

Pound’s poems carry an unexplainable weight. I often find his words accidentally appearing in my writings. Very difficult, but Pound’s writing could not be any other way. It is difficult to pull the reader into a world that breathes, that rattles hyperreal imagery around the mind for weeks on end.

I am not original in this statement, but I think time with Pound and his creations is necessary for anyone looking to understand our postmodern world. Some gifted writers can see tensions in our systems long before they manifest themselves. I am not even sure if the rest of us have caught up to Pound just yet.

[Daniel Ocón · Rating 5 out of 5]

At sometime in my life, I want to be as beautiful and savage as this wonderful man.

[Lucas Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad poems from a bad guy.

[AlexVicious · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vitalista de cojones. Vaya genio.

[justin, the geezer]

“Rest me with Chinese colours, / For I think the glass is evil.” encapsulates Pound and his poems pretty well.

[Alyosha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ezra’s poetry is a challenge, to be sure, but one that is well worth it. Beautiful work.

“PHOEBUS shineth ere his splendour flieth Aurora drives faint light athwart the land And the drowsy watcher crieth,"ARISE." O'er cliff and ocean the white dawn appeareth It passeth vigil and the shadows cleareth.”

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading Pound, off and on, in various editions, for something like fifty years. This time I was specifically interested in Homage to Sextus Propertius, but read through Personae. Some has not worn well; a number of poems were topical, literary polemics of the time, etc. These are now of interest only to literary historians. But there are still many good poems. The Provençal translation no longer appeal, but the Chinese in Cathay remain fresh. And there are old favorites such as the "The Tree," The Ballad of the Goodly Fere," and many others. Pound is at his best in the striking image, such as "In a Station of the Metro:"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

And nothing is as trenchant as "Salvationists I":

Come my songs, let us speak of perfection,
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

True then and true now.

[Rob Woodard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wrestling with Pound for years, and I've finally come to the conclusion that in regards to pure ability he's the best poet I've ever read. His understanding of language, meter and melody in verse is simple unbelievable. When he's rolling, his lines have so much life and are so much fun that they put the work of most poets to shame. Often, though, he erudition gets the best of him and he seems to confuse personal obsession with cultural worth, which creates a lot of needless obscurity and blunts his impact severely. This collection, though, avoids these problems and overall is quite accessible. Highly recommended for those looking for a way into the work of this difficult, cranky, wildly talented master.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Pound's early poetry gives no clue that he will become one of the leading lights of the first generation of modernist poets. "In Durance" is by far one of my favorite poems of the last century, it's almost gnostic, but it looks back to the past. By the end of the volume you are smack dab in the middle of a literary revolution, with something like Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, that is still playing out. This volume also contains Cathay which are his translations of Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty, Li Po for the most part. The only thing missing that I would have like to have been included is the initial draft of the first few of the Cantos.

[Rah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't read it from cover to cover in fact, I guess I need a more profound background in order to understand it better , I'll read it when i'll improve my language and my Latin culture :p But I loved what i managed to understand! i discovered great lines !
(I sough and sing / that love goes out/ leaving me no power to hold him/ Of love i have naught ) :'(
( Even in my dreams you have denied yourself to me, and sent me your handmaids ) <3
(But from where my heart is set/ No message I get / My heart all wakes and grieves/Defeat/Or luck, I must have my fill.)
(O Atthis.. I long for thy lips/ I long for thy narrow breasts / Thou restless , UNGATHERED) <3 ..

[Rachel Smalter Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has one of my favorite lines of poetry ever. It's from Pound's poem about the river-merchant's wife. Observing pairs of butterflies as she thinks of her departed husband, she says simply, beautifully:

"They hurt me. I grow older."

Oh, Ezra Pound, you were such a kook. A stodgy old brilliant kook. I never would have wanted to know you in real life. But I guess I can say that about a lot of crotchety old writers.

[Peter Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doria

Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness 5
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus 10
Remember thee.

[Janel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Specifically I read Homage to Sextus Propertius, which I believe is in this edition of this book. I have a much older copy. Although I don't think I "got" a good percentage of the Greek references, I did love it for the sound and rhythm. I found myself readng it aloud.

[Talbot Hook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk
But seems like a person just gone.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stuff. Mauberly, Propertius, Cathay...superb