Rosella Mamoli Zorzi It required the love of a daughter and the art of a publisher-printer to bring Ezra Pound back to the city whose discrete guest he was for many years. Mary de Rachewiltz has translated the Cantos of her father Ezra Pound (1885-1972) that are centred on Venice, and Enrico Tallone has published them in an elegant edition. This act of love is entitled Venice in the Cantos, a precious volume for literary history and for the Venice so admirably described here. The book signals the American poet’s virtual return to Venice through literature. A famous poem from early Pound enriches the book, Venetian Night Litany, the only one featured in his Personae: The Collected Poems (1926). It is a thanksgiving to God for the gift of the beauty of Venice; important too for its plurilingualism and for those indications of tone or voice that were a prelude to that of the so-called “beat generation”: it was not by chance alone that Allen Ginsberg came on a pilgrimage to Venice. Pound considered all his other youthful poems stale cream puffs (not republished until 1976), and with reason: they are traditional in language and form, though innovative in their positive vision of Venice. For Pound and Venice, 1908 is an important date, not because it was the first time, but because this trip was in a certain sense the definitive one when the poet chose Europe: Venice first, then London until 1920, then Paris and Rapallo. And it was to Venice that the poet returned after his terrible experience at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington where he was detained from the end of the war until 1958. Before being interned, Pound was kept at Pisa, in a cage lit night and day, and then tried in America for high treason because of his radio broadcasts for the American Hour on Radio Roma in favour of Fascism. Released thanks to the intercession of illustrious writers, the great poet - who suffered much for his errors - took up residence in Venice. And here he could be encountered on his walks, a solemn blue-eyed figure. He passed away in November 1972 and lies in repose at San Michele. If we look for the “Venice in the Cantos” we must in fact search for it in all the Cantos, and only after reading it through will we see that the different references to the city gains significance. This is true of any subject that we wish to trace in the Cantos: Venice is only one of many “golden threads in the plot” - Pound, Canto 116 - that emerge and founder in the course of the Cantos (begun in 1917). Each fragment as it appears enriches what came before and after it, in a continuing crescendo. TALE OF A HIERATIC HEAD Philip Rylands Direttore Collezione Peggy Guggenheim In the gardens of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, there is a strange head, a white sculpture placed on a round base, looking like a small Easter Island carving. It is a portrait of Ezra Pound. Pound met Henri-Gaudier Brzeska in London in 1913 while visiting an exhibition in the Albert Hall. Gaudier was a 22-year old French artist and Pound was immediately struck by his talent: in extreme poverty but with a restless inquiring mind he was mastering and interpreting modernism (Cubism, Brancusi, Modigliani, as well as Polynesian art in the British Museum and so forth) like almost no other sculptor in England at the time-only the older Jacob Epstein was doing similar things. By early 1914, Gaudier had begun a marble portrait of Pound-for which Pound himself bought the marble, though he could hardly afford to do so. According to Epstein “Pound had asked him to make it virile,” and Gaudier took him at his word: his friend and biographer Horace Brodzky confirmed that “the purpose and beginnings were entirely pornographic”. The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, as it came to be called, turned out a masterpiece. Its simplified volumes and shifting faceted surfaces hardly resemble Ezra Pound: its phallic shape is unmistakable, but mainly it gives the impression of potent primitive force. Encouraged by Pound, Gaudier became involved with the Vorticist movement, of which Wyndham Lewis was the leading figure (as theorist and critic, Pound was to Vorticism as Apollinaire was to Cubism). Gaudier contributed two remarkable essays to the movement’s journal Blast, the second of which was sent from the Great War front, where Gaudier had enlisted to fight in the French army. On June 5, 1915 he was killed by a German bullet, aged 24. Pound wrote: “His death is, to my mind, the gravest individual loss which the arts have sustained during the war.” Pound wrote a biography and tribute to Gaudier in 1916, and this was the basis for Ken Russell’s film Savage Messiah. The sculpture at San Giorgio is the only copy of the original to have been made, authorized by Pound himself. He intended it to be placed over his grave at San Michele. His lifelong company Olga Rudge arranged for this after Pound’s death, but when the time came, the grave was not ready, and the copy was ‘parked’ on San Giorgio. Olga Rudge asked Isamu Noguchi, her friend and Pound’s, to make the wide, circular base for the work. She was so pleased with the result that the sculpture has remained there ever since. EZRA, A LONG LOVE Mary de Rachewiltz Ezra Pound fell in love with Venice at first sight in 1898, at the age of thirteen. In 1908 he wrote to his mother: “If Venice did not have the most beautiful face....” trying to justify a prolonged stay. Apparently he was doing nothing “useful” in her eyes. He was just looking and listening. Absorbing the sea and the sky, listening to the water and the water and the singing in the gondolas. And yet, because of all he saw and heard and felt he made great poetry, after more than a century his presence is still tangible, sitting on the Dogana’ steps or at the edge of San Trovaso, slowly walking along the Zattere, looking at San Giorgio and the Church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, or crossing the Accademia Bridge to go to the house of his friends Alice and Giorgio Levi for an afternoon of music. In the late Thirties Giorgio at the piano and the violinist Olga Rudge usually played Vivaldi and Mozart. Whether trying to keep up with his brisk pace in my childhood or slowing down during his later years, his numinous silence pervades every step taken, his formed figure is simply there, a component of the city, indelible as is his name on the marker of his grave at the Island of San Michele where he is at rest since 1972. But underneath the silence there are also the little mundane sounds of the tapping cane and footsteps in Calle Querini, after the shopping in Calle Larga and the chocolates at Moriondo’s; the laughter in Campo Sant’Agnese where Gennaro Favai would lean out from the top floor window, waving his arms to encourage our climbing the stairs to see his paintings, the pale colors of the churches, the strong lines of an unfinished self-portrait. And then the tall blond poet and the thin white-haired painter played long games of chess.