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

 

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From: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">David Bircumshaw

Sent: Friday, June 3, 2016 2:30 PM

To: [log in to unmask]" href="mailto:[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">[log in to unmask]

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.

 

On 2 June 2016 at 19:49, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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