The Temperaments

Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and something approaching a rape
Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend Florialis,
And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in demeanour
That he passes for both bloodless and sexless.
Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and writes of nothing save
copulation,
Has become the father of twins,
But he accomplished this feat at some cost;
He had to be four times cuckold.

Ezra Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

Lesser men

De vez em quando lembro-me daqueles versos de Pound em que ele diz ser um poeta que bebe da vida como homens menores bebem vinho. Lesser men. Durante muito tempo pensei nisto como a negação de uma metafísica para a poesia da parte de Pound, o que é uma ideia, se não evidentemente idiota, pelo menos limitativa. O vinho, que te tolda os sentidos e te entaramela a fala, e que é, como a poesia, uma invenção dos Gregos, aponta afinal para esse contacto com o irracional que é uma das formas por excelência do que quer que possa existir de metafísico - e para mim existe - em usar da vida para escrever. Uma coisa e a outra são a mesma. Uma face da moeda corrobora a outra.

The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
aaaaaaaaaAs far as Chō-fū-Sa.

Ezra Pound, Cathay, 1915.

Thomas a Ezra

My dear Pound,

I have been reading some of your work lately. I enjoyed the article on the Vortex (please tell me who Kandinsky is). I distrust and detest Aesthetics, when it cuts loose from the Object, and vapours in the void, but you have not done that. The closer one keeps to the Artist's discussion of his technique the better, I think, and the only kind of art worth talking about is the art one happens to like. There can be no contemplative or easychair aesthetics, I think; only the aesthetics of the person who is about to do something. I was fearful lest you should hitch it up to Bergson or James or some philosopher, and was relieved to find that Vorticism was not a philosophy.

Continuar a ler aqui.

The rest

O helpless few in my country,

O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,

A-stray, lost in the villages,

Mistrusted, spoken-against,

Lovers of beauty, starved,

Thwarted with systems,

Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out

By persisting to successes

You who an only speak,

Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,

Broken against false knowledge,

You who can know at first hand,

Hated, shut in, mistrusted:

Take thought:

I have weathered the storm,

I have beaten out my exile.

Ezra Pound, Poems of Lustra, 1913-1915

ΔΏΡΙΑ (Dória)

Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are —
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.

Ezra Pound in Imagist Poetry, Penguin Books, 1972

The 'Image'

There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech. There is another sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as it were 'just coming over into speech'. The first sort of poetry has long been called 'lyric'... The other sort of poetry is as old as the lyric and as honourable, but until recently, no one named it. Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the 'Image'. Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. The 'Image' is the furthest removed from rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of dressing up some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being... As a 'critical' movement, the 'Imagism' of 1912 to '14 set out 'to bring poetry up to the level of prose'.

Ezra Pound, The Fortnightly Review, 1914, p. 468.

Feliz aniversário, Ezra

Ezra aos 22

An object

This thing, that hath a code and note a core,
Hath set acquaitance where might been affections,
And nothing now
Disturbed his reflections.

Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

I suppose, when poetry comes down to facts,
When our souls are returned to the gods
and the spheres they belong in,
Here in the every-day where our acts
Rise up and judge us;


I suppose there are a few dozen verities
That no shift of mood can shake from us:

Ezra Pound, in "Au Salon", Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

Το καλόν (o belo)

Even in my dreams you have denied yourself to me
And sent me only your handmaids.

Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

Erat hora

"Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

As lesser man

but that I
Am here a Poet, that doth drink of life
As lesser man drink wine

Ezra Pound, in "And thus in Nineveh", Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

I'm homesick after mine own kind

Por um efeito de redundância fazer descair todo o peso de uma emoção para um verso, deixá-lo em desequilíbrio, para que saibamos que foi escrito em suspenso, como Ezra Pound, quando escreveu "I'm homesick after mine own kind." (In "In durance" [1907], Personae: Collected Shorter Poems).

Dois versos de "De Aegypto"

I, even I, am he who knoweth the roads/ Through the sky, and the wind thereof is my body.

Ezra Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, Faber & Faber, 1990.

IV

Scattered Moluccas
Not knowing, day to day,
The first days end, in the next noon;
The placed water
Unbroken by the Simoon;

Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;

Or through dawn-mist
The grey and rose
Of the juridical
Flamingoes;

A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
of intermittences;

Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforecasted beach:
Then on an oar
Read this:

"I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist"

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Kissinger Publishing (s.d.)