The Twenty-Third Canto is a mixture of high and low art. Some irritating colloquialisms (mimicking uneducated language by spelling ‘Italian’ as ‘Eyetalian’). But also some beautiful stanzas:
Leaf over leaf, dawn-branch in the sky
And the sea dark, under wind,
This one also had the most lines and stanzas in foreign languages of any Canto thus far. I identified (if didn’t always understand) French, Latin, and Greek.
the coffee philosopher 
Hey Coffee Philosopher,
I’m a linguistics student who was spurred that way by my knowledge and partial knowledge of several languages (English, French and Spanish I can speak, read, and write; Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Hebrew, Irish, and others I can translate and manage to read sometimes, mostly for etymological purpose) and by Joyce’s biography and works. Ezra Pound, as you know, was one of his comrades, until of course Pound’s antisemitism made Joyce denounce the poet for avoiding the responsibility of being an artist. However, I would like to offer my hand to help understanding the Cantos, always a curious article of poetry, and understandably one of my favourites of modernism.
I haven’t the Cantos in their entirety unfortunately, they are rare by convention of their unpopularity, the latter state can be equated as you like. However, I do have selections of Pound’s poetry, and I have the following Cantos, if you are interested in annotating them with me: 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 14, 45, 51, 79, 80, 81, 91.
As for the post you have made, I applaud you for extracting comedy and brooding from within the same section of a work mostly regarded as too difficult for most readers. Here is a germane selection from Canto XX that I find theatrically tragic in tone:
“Lotophagoi of the suave nails, quiet, scornful, / Voce-profondo: / “Feared neither death nor pain for this beauty; / If harm, harm to ourselves.”
In contrast, Joyce employed musical notation in his writing of Finnegans Wake, albeit in a comical usage:
“/Accept these few nutties!/ and /Take off that white hat!/, relieved with /Stop his Grog/ and /Put It in the Log and Loots in his/ (bassvoco) /Boots/”
Despite the parting of their partnership, it is obvious that each was the other’s contemporary by their employment of their genre’s literary devices.
One of the differences between Joyce and Pound – and one of the reasons for Joyce’s use of musical language – is that Joyce was going blind. That’s why many of his descriptions are sound and (especially) olfactory based.
Pound, like most of us, depends primarily on sight, hence his lovely descriptions of water and the ships coming on.
I would very enjoy going back over some of those earlier Cantos with you (I won’t be reaching Canto 45 for some time and am committed to going in order and not jumping ahead). I know I didn’t pull from them or learn from them all that I could have.
It’s pleasant that you recognize your lack of omniscience, not because I am trying to patronize you, but because I am in the process of reading Wake and doing simple research in books and online reveals to me my utter ignorance. But, as Joyce himself wrote, ignorance implies impression that knits knowledge. Your point on Joyce’s olfactory basis I concur withal, because I have taken the task of reading it aloud to myself whenever I do read because of myriad phonological puns. Being a student, you can imagine that I am younger than you are (no offence) and yet we may both plead ignorance even after having read the complex work(s). I believe understanding is comparable to comprehension in that short-term memory compares to long-term memory. The significant idea lasts until it is comprehended, everything else is understood.
I love that you are systematically going about coverage for The Cantos, because I offered Infinite Zombies (.wordpress.com) my hand to write fresh content for their website of my readings of Finnegans Wake, and having been turned down, revamped my ambition to open my own site, with my friend Davin Allan. I also ran jaydaily.com three years before, when I was in the middle of my high school career, so you may see how systematized I can be. I do not wish to force your backtracking in order to appease my curiosity, as I am in the thick of reading Pale King, Finnegans Wake, and guarding many other coals in the fire. I launched Literatured.com at the start of this month, and I haven’t ceased to improve its readership, accessibility, and content. However, if you’re keen on rereading any given Canto which you have already covered, I would be delighted to join you without reluctance, yet perhaps with need for a later date to read. The Cantos have, as I have earlier attested, always intrigued my mind and I intend to use Pound’s poetic conventions in my own work which I plan to begin serializing this year.
I’ve yet to meet someone omniscient.
Finnegans Wake is a rough one and I will admit my lack of omniscience again and confess to having only slightly understood (and to not having read it in over fifteen years – close to twenty, in fact). I was lucky enough to have taken a course in college exclusively on James Joyce that forced me to make a far greater effort at understanding Ulysses.
A friend of mine once described Finnegans Wake as a perfect ‘bathroom book.’ Pick it up, read a passage, put it down. Come back later, open it up to some other place and read a different passage. Don’t necessarily try and comprehend – merely enjoy the language. I always though that the opening to Lolita – the rolling, Lo lo Lolita – owed something Finnegans Wake’s rolling, undulating (indeed, river-like – because that is one metaphor I did at least pick up on) language.
I love what you’re doing with Literatured and will put up a link to it on my site.
I once downloaded some college’s syllabus of a Joyce course so that I could gain insight on how to study him. And yesterday my English teacher offered me consolation to my inertness in regards to reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, asking me to consider how I am a Joycean (I reluctantly affirmed the fact, and then told her that I read lots of contemporary sprawling novels, not just Joyce) and then, as much as she will never like Joyce’s work, she has to respect it, and somehow that the aforementioned undesired book deserved the same respect.
I began reading Wake as a bathroom book before picking up the slack. I plan to induce a sort of insomnia as it suggests the ideal reader of the work would do, though I feel well enough into it. About the visual imagery, Joyce has it, and I failed to mention it, blinded by zeal when previously commenting, and it shines in the first word “riverrun”. This word to me invokes an IMAX-style opening to a nature film, where the camera runs forward, the peripheral vision witnessing a picture blurred by speed, while dead centre is a natural stream, like in the film about the Nile, and it runs on and on as the narration introduces the movie. Nabokov alludes to Joyce in the foreword, and the court case he battled in regards to elements of curiosa in Ulysses. I smiled when I read the implicit reference, and Nabokov was well read. Yet, as influential as Joyce’s fictions seem, I have other recognitions of allusive structures and styles; like that I see a Brautigan sway in every collection of short stories. I can’t wait to see his ghost appear when I read Kerouac.
Thank you for mentioning the new website. To honour you, I will try to devise a fashionable way to mention yours,. I’d like to extend the offer of having you publish on Literatured about The Cantos sometime, because we’re constantly looking for solid contributors. Perhaps you’d even like a permanent post, and run parallel updates with your blog about Pound and your progress through his work.