This may be old news, but I've recently come across Pound: Poems &
Translations (2003) in the Library of America series. For those who
don't know about them, the Library of America (a publisher with whom I
have no personal blah blah blah) is a nonprofit (NEH, Ford money)
organization putting out classic American literature in standardized
editions. The volumes are very well produced, handsome hardbacks,
usually with a huge number pages, printed on high-quality thin paper
so they all fit. Not cheap, but amazon.com (a vendor in which I have
no financial yada yada yada) seems to have them all discounted.
Anyway, the Ezra Pound volume might be something that those interested
in Pound will want to have, even if they already have most of his
books. At nearly 1400 pages, it claims to contain all of Pound's
verse outside the Cantos, including the plays, the translations, the
poems and translations by Pound included in his literary criticism,
and items previously unpublished or published in sources no longer
generally available. Particularly interesting is the year-by-year
chronology at the end of the book, which is so detailed that it
amounts to a capsule biography. Also included are terse but
informative notes, which often provide some surprising literary
miscellanea: for instance, in 1954 there was a dramatic reading at
New School for Social Research in New York of Women of Trachis, with
the role of Hyllus read by -- James Dean! And in 1960 there was a
production of the same play by The Living Theatre (what ever happened
to those guys?) with the Hyllus role played by -- Martin Sheen!
There's also a lot of prose included: Pound's translation of
Fenollosa on the Noh, and the Analects, though maybe they consider
the latter a prose poem -- was the original in verse?
All in all, a very handy collection.
--
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
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