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Ezra Pound: Poems & Translations

Edited by Richard Sieburth

“Richard Sieburth’s huge edition of Pound’s Poems and Translations for The Library of America devotes many pages to the young man ‘out of key with his time.’ … The first edition of Pound’s work with any claim to completeness…. to lovers of Pound’s work, Poems and Translations could not be more welcome.” — TLS

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News Herbert Leibowitz on William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound: Episodes from a sixty-year friendship
December 14, 2017

This Library of America volume is the most comprehensive collection of Pound’s poetry (excepting his long poem The Cantos) and translations ever assembled. Ranging from the text of the handmade first collection Hilda’s Book (a gift to the poet H.D.) to his late translations of Horace, and containing dozens of items previously unavailable, Poems and Translations reveals the diversity and richness of a body of work marked by daring invention and resonant music.

American literature’s modernist revolution is inconceivable without the catalyzing presence of Ezra Pound. With his advocacy of Imagism and Vorticism, his encouragement of writers such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, H.D., and William Carlos Williams, his transformations of older literatures (from Japanese Noh plays and the Anglo-Saxon lament “The Seafarer” to the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel), Pound was in the swirling center of poetic change. In such early volumes as Ripostes, Cathay, Lustra, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—as surely as in his later magisterial versions of The Confucian Odes and the Sophoclean dramas Women of Trachis and Elektra—Pound followed his own directive to “make it new,” opening fresh formal pathways while exploring the most ancient traditions. Before, during, and after the controversies and catastrophes of his public career (culminating in his long residence in a Washington mental hospital while under indictment for treason), Pound remained capable of rare technical brilliance and indelible lyricism.

Here are the lush early lyrics, echoing Browning and the Troubadours; the chiseled free verse of such masterpieces as “The Return,” “Near Perigord,” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius”; the dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” The Chinese verse translations are supplemented by Pound’s versions of the Confucian prose texts—The Analects, The Great Digest, and The Unwobbling Pivot—which he saw as crucial to his literary aims. An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound’s tumultuous life, and detailed notes clarify the many recondite allusions.

Richard Sieburth, editor, is professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University and the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont and editor of Pound’s A Walking Tour in Southern France.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

HILDA’S BOOK (1905-1907)

From A LUME SPENTO (1908)

From THE SAN TROVASO NOTEBOOK (1908)

A QUINZAINE FOR THIS YULE (1908)

From PERSONAE (1909)

From EXULTATIONS (1909)

From THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE (1910)

From CANZONI (1911)

Poems withdrawn from CANZONI

THE SONNETS AND BALLATE OF GUIDO CAVALCANTI (1912)

From RIPOSTES (1912)

From CATHAY (1915)

From LUSTRA (1916-1917)

‘NOH’ OR ACCOMPLISHMENT (1917)

From ARNAUT DANIEL (1917)

From PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS (1918)

From QUIA PAUPER AMAVI (1919)

HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY (1920)

From UMBRA (1920)

From PERSONÆ (1926)

From GUIDO CAVALCANTI RIME (1932)

ALFRED VENISON’S POEMS (1935)

From GUIDE TO KULCHUR (1938)

From PERSONÇ (enlarged version, 1949)

CONFUCIUS: THE GREAT DIGEST & UNWOBBLING PIVOT (1951)

THE CONFUCIAN ANALECTS (1951)

THE CLASSIC ANTHOLOGY DEFINED BY CONFUCIUS (1954)

ELEKTRA (ca. 1949-early 1950s)

SOPHOKLES: WOMEN OF TRACHIS (1956)

From PAVANNES AND DIVAGATIONS (1958)

From TRANSLATIONS (enlarged version, 1964)

UNCOLLECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

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ISBN: 978-1-93108241-9 1363 pages

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N° 144 Library of America Series

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