Poesia

by Ezra Pound, Augusto de Campos (Translator), Haroldo de Campos (Translator)

Traduções dos principais poemas do norte-americano Ezra Pound, autor de obras-primas da literatura do século XX, como Personae e The Cantos. Entre os tradutores, Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari e Mário Faustino.

Genres: Poetry, American, Classics

259 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection has 6-7 poems that I enjoyed and responded to--those were wistful and lovely. But many of the poems were too densely packed with classical Greek mythology references that I didn't have knowledge of. The introduction was very interesting and helpful in giving context to the poems.

[✥ Simy · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were poems in here that I adored! But it slugged towards the end and didn’t maintain the high energy I was hoping for. I will b reading Klara and the sun next, and I’m hoping to finish lovely bones soon too (then I will read metamorphosis)

[Dean Schabner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good place to start to get a sense of the range of Pound's poetry.

[jacmaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le plus grand poète américain (avec sylvia plath et ginsberg)

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: Soft 3. 2 1/2 for me, but with an admission that I have intellectual limitations.

Informative intro from Thom Gunn. Then the poems are placed chronologically, from 1908 to 1970. I don't care much for the early pieces: 1908 - 1912. The poems from Lustra and Cathay, both published in 1915, are a bit better. The selections from Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and the selected Cantos (ranging from 1925 to 1970) didn't do it for me.

The stand-out pieces:

[epigraph to Lustra] - four lines
"Liu Ch'e" - six lines
"In a Station of the Metro" - two lines
"The Jewel Stairs' Grievance" - four lines

I don't know if their brevity is a coincidence, or if he was just better at shorter poems. There are plenty of longer pieces in this collection.



Pound believed that literature was news that stays news - Gunn

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova - Pound, "The Garret"

[Thom Beckett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Pound's probably not a man you'd wanted to have met when he was alive, what with his support of Mussolini and rampant anti-semitism and such, he's certainly an interesting man.

This collection is a glimpse into a body of work so broad and often obscurantist to the point of being unintelligable, and it's not a bad one. You have to start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any.

A man who can influence the poetry of both Eliot and Bukowski must have been doing something right.

[Brian Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few nice poems at the start, but after a while I got so confused that I lost interest fast. I'm primarily a fan of prose, so I guess Pound is just one of those poets that doesn't do much for me.

[Samuel Flax · Rating 3 out of 5]

There has to be a better collection out there. His first twenty pages are magical, everything I expected Pound to be, but it gets into anachronistic Japanese pieces and middle-European canto excerpts and I lost interest.

[Damon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not relevant. This collection of boring poems did nothing for me. I imagine that it would be easier to chuckle through if this were written more recently by someone I know about things that are happening now.

[Hugh Treharne]

Feel pretty stupid after reading some of these poems