The Sixtieth Canto continues with the theme of a cosmopolitan and worldly China, but from a first person perspective, as if by a Chinese official. Nonetheless, the language is very American colloquial. For example, the Dutch are described as ‘poifik tigurs‘ (“perfect tigers”).

Referencing the previous Canto, four Jesuit fathers are given credit for introducing Galileo to China (though that seems odd, since this is supposed to be the year 1693).

Ironically, the narrator ends by musing if China should not, in fact, begin to close itself off from the West.

The Chinese history involved in this Canto struck me as bearing interpretation as a rejoinder to the misperception of China as being a closed and insular society that was later forced open by Western powers.

Within the Fifty-Ninth Canto are diplomatic meetings with the Tsarist Russia, the reading of Galileo’s works, and an emperor playing Bach (‘who played the spinet on Johnnie Bach’s birthday‘).

The opening struck me a little:

De libro CHI-KING sic censeo
wrote the young MANCHU, CHUN TCHI,
less a work of the mind than of affects
brought forth from the inner nature
here sung in these odes

The phrase ‘less a work of the mind than of affects‘ struck me as something I wished to have thought of, as an apt description, not so much of books, than of certain people.

P.S. I have  kept my promise to read and write about three Cantos but I will publish them over the course of three days (perhaps giving me time to get off my butt and read some more over the next couple of days and start to seriously catch up).

I did not know this, but the publisher, New Directions (which has done great and unselfish work in keeping the writings of Pound and other twentieth century alive and in print for decades), has been publishing volumes of Ezra Pound’s correspondence, with each volume being dedicated to his letters to a particular person.

The article that alerted me to this focused on the publication of his letters to his parents.

It’s odd seeing the idiosyncrasies of the Cantos appear in the excerpts of these letter, especially his occasional offbeat spelling. I had taken it for an effort to reflect a broader colloquial language, but now I don’t wonder if it isn’t just a particular tic of Pound to have his own, private written language.

And the sentences varying between short, incomplete fragments and long sentences containing only vaguely connected thoughts in its clauses.

You can also see Pound’s obsession with money – mainly inspired by his lack of it (though his parents were apparently generous in supporting their self-proclaimed ‘genius’ son).

This one bounces around a bit, making the narrative (such as it is) hard to follow.

The Canto‘s opening setting is Japan under the Shogunate. But it gets confusing from there. Firstly, it appears to be, at least in part, about the early trading contacts with Europe. Certainly, there is some conversation about the introduction of Christianity to the island:

And because of the hauteur of
         Portagoose prelates, they drove the Xtians out of the Japan
till were none of that sect in the  Island

But it quickly moves back the mainland, with switches between Korea (‘Corea’) and China (and the ‘Tartars’ get mentioned again – though I have been assuming that this word is used simply to refer to those viewed as barbarians by the Chinese).

The intermittent story of a Père Ricci and his work in the East (the historical Ricci was a Jesuit Father) also features, though in a very fragmentary fashion.

Perhaps it is my limited understanding of Chinese history. I know where incidents in the Italian renaissance fit into the larger story of western civilization. I cannot say that I understand how events in Chinese history fit into a larger narrative.

But, to make some vaguely useful comment on this particular Canto, he shows some particular enmity towards the eunuch or the ‘castrat.’ They seem especial villains here.

Seeing as how Pound rarely wrote of love or intimacy, it seems odd that these figures would be the target of such prominent dislike. Unless he was uncomfortable with sexuality and eunuchs reminded him of sex by the very absence of theirs.

I can’t say. Truly I don’t know enough about his personal history here to say with anything like certainty.

The Fifty-Sixth Canto, even more than in earlier ones, juxtaposes depictions of history (still Chinese) with American slang: licked ’em, swat, gimcracks, damned rascals, etc.

One line that stuck out for me was this:

And litterati fought fiercer than other men to out the mogul

Was this how Pound saw himself? A ‘litterati’ (sic) standing against the ‘mogul?’

And who were the mogul?

The illiterate and uncultured hoi poli?

Or are these moguls the moguls of finance? The bankers and financiers Pound blamed for so many ills?

This Canto is very much like the previous one – a history of Chinese rulers with a focus on economics (viewed from the top, of course – no Marxian social history for Pound). In fact, it picks up with the other one left off: LIV ended at 756 a.d. and this one picks up at 805 a.d.

I am beginning to see some sense in how Pound arranges his stanzas here. To a limited extent, the Canto is broken into stanzas that represent incidents or mini-themes within it.

Much of the economic discussion is about taxes.

He also throws in some little futurisms – at least relative to the topic of medieval Chinese history – such as:

Y TSONG his son brought a jazz age HI-TSONG

I’ll admit it. This Canto is intimidatingly long. Fifteen pages isn’t much for a piece of prose, but for a dense work of poetry on a topic I know little about…

The topic is, much as before, Chinese history. One of the conceits (also used in Canto LIII) is to put in the margin the date at which an event or conversation occurred. More than a thousand years are covered.

Pound is playing with lines much more than in the past: with length and indentation. I won’t say it is random because I will play with indentation myself and it is not random for me, but what gives it meaning is not form, so far as I can tell, but the unique artistic, literary, and historical inclinations of Pound himself.

He also plays a lot with capitalization. The names of rulers are typically in all caps, but he also throws a few curves our way. For example, the one time he also capitalizes ‘OUT’:

a.d. 444, putt ’em OUT

‘OUT’ takes on the form of something pun-ish because, we also have ‘OUEN TI’ and ‘OU TI.’

There is also what could be a pun in the line:

Then OU went gay and SUNG ended.

I don’t know for certain this is a pun, because I don’t know if  ‘out’ was used to refer to making one’s homosexuality public when Pound wrote this one. Certainly, if it was, we would have to consider this a bit of word play by the poet.

We also see Pound using at a times kind of rat-a-tat-tat style that I associate with movies from the 30s and 40s – a hyper stylized rendition of the speech patterns from an old gangster movie.

We still see a lot on the development of financial instruments, taxes, and payments, but less so than in the past. Like some of his earlier meditations on Renaissance Italy, we read a lot about the uses of power – and in my reading, what I see as abuses of power. Particularly the discrepancies between how a peasant or ordinary citizen experiences government policies and how an emperor imagines his policies will act out in the world at large.