WTF?

It’s in Italian. And no translation.

All I can tell you about this is that he’s using a lot enjambment, which also creates a lot of white space in the poetry… shall we say ‘column?’

I was little concerned when opened up to the new section and started in on LXXII because, well, it was in Italian.

Fortunately, Pound had the generosity to repeat the entire Canto in English.

This is a fairly self referential Canto, and not just because Pound writes:

But I will give you a place in a Canto
giving you voice. But if you want to go on fighting
go take some young chap, flaccid & a half-wit
to give him a bit of courage and some brains
to give Italy another hero among so many

It’s also not hard to see Pound, despite a bit of dismissal there, still remaining sympathetic to the WWII Italian (fascist?) cause. And he’s got to get in this little bit of anti-semitism:

Exuded the great usurer Geryon, prototype
of Churchill’s backers. And there came singing

I’m not sure how he reads Geryon as being relevant (I can’t help but think of Anne Carson’s great novel in verse about Geryon, though), but it’s easy to read ‘usurers’ and ‘Churchill’s backers.’

The tone of angry dismissal and disappointment runs throughout, but the sense of loss in Pound’s tone is also ever present.

Part way through, Marinetti enters the dialogue. Of monologue. Pound has a one sided conversation with an absent (and mourned for?) Marinetti, the great (and proto-fascist) futurist poet.

You can take the poet out of the modern financial system but you can’t… I don’t know where I’m going with this, but suffice to say Pound is still thinking about banking…

                                                  Funds and Banks I
never approved I abhorred ever our whole banking system
but an attempt to abolish all funding in the
present state of the world wd/ by as romantic
as any adventure in Oberon or Don Quixote.

It’s done in the form of a diary or rather as a sort of, shall we say, epistolary poem? Written as if a letter by a politically minded American who lived through the mid-eighteenth century through the first quarter or so of the nineteenth century.

As a poem in the style of eighteenth century prosody, with a touch of American spirit, it’s an amazing piece of work. Really amazing.

This is the end of a section. From what I’ve heard, it picks up after this, with the next section being what are popularly known as the Pisan Cantos.