The Cantos

luka

luka

Well-known member
Linebaugh said:
What Ive read about Canto 1 is a little unclear- is Pound directly translating a passage from the odyssey or is it just heavily based on that passage?
Click to expand...
Pretty much the former. I think I put pope and chapmans version in this thread somewhere?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Linebaugh said:
The spring time killing sentiment and the merchant vignette in the 4th stanza relates to what I've read about primitive feasts. that outside whatever cultural/religious/social function the feasts had, they also did the work of preventing a surplus of goods becoming capital, which would corrupt the direct nature of power dynamics in the village. China followed the same logic more knowingly when they would close down mines before letting them produce a surplus in the 13th century.
Click to expand...
You've already got a sense of how the economics works in the poem, the system of values and the understanding of society and nature its a part of.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
I think if something is a worthwhile piece of art or literature, it will normally have something in it that can be approached totally cold.

And I enjoy that encounter with things, when you don't fully know what's going on with them, but you know there's something there, cos they make you think.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
catalog said:
I think if something is a worthwhile piece of art or literature, it will normally have something in it that can be approached totally cold.

And I enjoy that encounter with things, when you don't fully know what's going on with them, but you know there's something there, cos they make you think.
Click to expand...

I think The Cantos have that. Not all of them, but a lot of them and as a collective body. The form and the freedom and the way language is used is really exciting and inspiring, at least to me. But that's only one part of it, which is fine.

I mean Pound probably agreed with you because he was very defensive about it and ludicrously claimed you didn't need any external reference books because the text explained itself. He even said stuff like, "the ideograms are all translated in the poem!"
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
like i said i wrote a whole "analysis" of canto I on these grounds but I can't find it now
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
This is just an arbitrary prejudice and doesn't work for modernist literature which designed to be plugged in to larger bodies of knowledge and tradition.
Click to expand...

Well then its not modern enough. This is why Joyce far excels pound, his literature is all about shagging.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
every good absurdist is fundamentally modern but i'm not gonna rule out eliot, for example, on these polemical grounds
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
I’ve just got the big red brick of the complete Cantos through the post. I’ve decided to read them all during this latest lockdown. I’ve read quite a few over the years but I’m going to try and methodically make my way through them all.
I read all three volumes of the Moody biog of Pound and would recommend it for the detail he goes into about the poetry as much as he does about the life.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top