Hi, Dave.
Yeah, the slippery meanings of “virtu”, and the whole modernist/politics
business ...
What’s surprised me is just how *much* Pound was involved with
Cavalcanti. Also, as well as the Villon and Cavalcanti operas you mention,
there are at least a couple of late-published Cantos – they’re in the current
Collected, but not in the sixties edition that I bought as a child – that are
*written* in Italian, that maybe Jamie could translate.
I wish there were more accessible datings of the Cantos – I’ve just checked
Terrell’s _Companion_, but it doesn’t seem to be much help ... So the
original composition of the Cavalcanti second translation dates from 1934, but
Canto XXXVI as a whole?
Argh!!!!
Robin
Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 2:30 PM
Subject: Re: names
Thanks for those 'Mr Prynne' links Robin.
Pound also wrote an
opera on Cavalcanti, didn't he? In response to a BBC commission.
I
have seen it wonderfully described as 'lacking the obnoxious charm of Le
Testament' (Pound's previous commission) but have never heard it - I think - I
once heard a few bars of something terrible that was described to me as Pound's
music but have tried to shut it out of mind.
Has anyone here heard
them? I don't DARE check on YouTube.
One matter that does disquiet
me a little re the Cavalcanti is exactly what Pound had in mind by 'virtu'. It
would I believe be in the vicinity of 'potenza' rather than the upright English
moral 'virtue'. And, although Canto XXXVI is still pre-Benito it is the same EP
who has already written of Artemis complaining against the rotting qualities of
pity. I think with all these neo-conservative Anglophone modernists of the 1920s
you have to be very careful of what's in the wrapping. I don't like to think of
Eliot's Coriolanus might have done with the swords in Rome, while the worst who
are full of a passionate intensity in would probably bear more of a resemblance
to a Dag Hammerskjold than an A.Schicklegruber.
I suspect Ezra
Cavalcanti may have seen 'virtu' as that which takes hold of power. Like a
certain literary mythological swan. It certainly 'cometh of
Mars'.
Odd cross - Zen and the Art of the Motorbike takes a long
look at virtu.
