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This critical edition of Ezra Pound's Elektra marks the most significant appearance in twenty years of a "new" work by the controversial poet. Composed in the early months of 1949, while Pound was under indictment for treason and hospitalized by court order in Washington, D.C., this hitherto unpublished version of Sophocles' play documents a critical stage in the poet's writing career: with his subsequent rendition of Sophocles' Trachiniae and his ongoing translations from the Chinese classics, it signaled his return to sustained composition and his eventual decision to resume his life work, the Cantos. The success of Carey Perloff's Classic Stage Company debut of Pound's play in 1987 has already demonstrated the interest of the theatrical community in the work, and this presentation of the text, with critical apparatus, is a major event in Pound studies. The edition serves as a kind of practical workshop in translation, particularly in its exposition of Pound's discussions with his collaborator, Rudd Fleming.Richard Reid demonstrates in his introduction that Pound's choice of the Elektra was of crucial significance. In the play Sophocles confronts many of our most deeply held cultural assumptions: those concerning the family, the community, the claims of religion and justice, and language itself. As anyone familiar with the works of Pound will readily recognize, these issues are central in his own writings. The Elektra clarifies the formal, thematic, and psychological dilemmas seen in his work following the achievements recorded in the Pisan Cantos. This play and Pound's version of the Trachiniae can lead to a reassessment of his entire oeuvre in the context of this century's history. It will be essential reading for admirers of Pound's poetry, for students of the art of translation, and for directors and actors interested in performing the drama of ancient Athens on the modern stage. ... Read more

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Pound, Guide to Kulchur. an iconoclastic revision of culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Apparently, Ol' Ezra Was Right
For some reason, Ezra Pound looked about himself in the year of 1938 and thought that European culture was going to hell.His solution was to impotently rage against the coming of the night by publishing the screed, Kulchur (Ol' Ezra loved to spell words phonetically as he adopted the mask of Cranky Uncle Ez sitting on the front porch, chewingg tobaccy and dispensing cornpone).Kulchur has no internal coherence, as Ezra delightfully acknowledges: "[t]he hurried reader may say I write this in cypher and that my statement merely skips from one point to another without connection or sequence.The statement is nevertheless complete.All the elements are there, and the nastiest addict of crossword puzzles shd. be able to solve this or see this."Well, I don't know if we'd go that far.

Instead, let's acknowledge that Ezra, while decidely one of the world's greatest cranks, was also a man of deep erudition and also a great artist.So this work, while scattershot, is filled to brim with insight from a skewed point of view that I, at least, find refreshing.Here's just one observation to demonstrate his wisdom:"The supreme crime in a critic is dullness.The supreme evil committable by a critic is to turn men away from the bright and the living.The ignominous failure of ANY critic (however low) is to fail to find something to arouse the appetite of his audience, to read, to see, to experience."Ezra was many things--quite a few of them execrable--but dullard he was not.Is this book difficult?Crackpot?Infuriating?Enlightening?You can find the answer in the last words of James Joyce's Ulysses. ... Read more

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This Companion contains fifteen chapters by leading international scholars, who together reflect diverse but complementary approaches to the study of Ezra Pound's poetry and prose. They consider the poetics, foreign influences, economics, politics and publication history of Pound's entire corpus, and also situate Pound's work in the context of Modernism, illustrating his influence on contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Taken together, the chapters offer a sustained examination of one of the most versatile, influential and certainly controversial poets of the modern period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Essential to understanding Pound's poems
This was the key early (1951) study of Pound's poetry and Cantos upon which all subsequent studies built. The author found so much that sheds light on Pound's poetry from reading Pound's prose, at the time lost pretty much in out of print books and gone periodicals. Now, however, Pound's prose is pretty readily available in book form from New Directions and this through Kenner's pioneer work does make Pound's poems and Cantos far more comprehensible. ... Read more

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Ezra Pound's inspirational sway over twentieth century poetry remains unquestioned to this day. Ezra Pound Reads offers a rare opportunity to witness the vision of this awe-inspiring, intensely polemical artist.

The Cantos were Pound's most ambitious poetic project. He began writing this series of poems in 1913 and continued to work on them until his death. These complex and lyrical incantations explore the writer's disappointment in the imperfections of man. his hatred of war and commercialism, and his ongoing interest in economic concerns.

Pound's ideas and searing vision are beautifully showcased in this audio, portions of which were recorded at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C, where, Pound was as held after lie was accused of treason, but judged not to be of sound mind to stand trial.

Customer Reviews (4)

Fine service, Excellent shipping speed
This order met all my expectations and was delivered without delay. The recordings of Ezra Pound are fascinating and well worth the wait.

Extremely Helpful
Not until listening to Ezra himself reading from "The Cantos" did I begin to establish a toehold in the poem.There's no shortage of critical commentary about Pound's modernism, imagism, multilingualism, vorticism, influence, etc., but much of it doesn't necessarily help the reader with the specifics of Pound's poetry let alone provide a coherent pathway through it.Pound's obscurity is compounded, it seems to me, by those who keep insisting on seeing the Cantos as "cinematic collage."The problem is that the poem paints relatively few memorable images.Its poet was, above all, a troubador, inspired by the frequently coarse, frequently sublime and visionary music of Robert Browning's Sordello.To hear Pound's voice is to discover the musical basis of the poem.And as polytonal as the work is, Pound's relentless, frequently reactionary jeremiad begins to take on both narrative and thematic coherence because of the sound of his voice (which in parts of Canto 99 doesn't even have spoken word correlatives).

For anyone seeking either to further their understanding of Pound or simply to get into him, this recording is a better bet than most of the commentaries.It's useful if not essential in ways that the recordings of other poets--Eliot, Frost, Stevens, even Yeats and Dylan Thomas--are not.

Essential Listening
Ezra Pound has a deep, rattling, weird voice.It's one of those voices you'll never be able to forget.Even though this recording is completely unorganized - the tracks aren't really labeled at all and each one includes several poems - the selection of readings is very fine and won't disappoint a Pound enthusiast.

Songs, Speeches, Poems.
One of the amazing things about the Poetry of Ezra Pound is the emotional tonality of his works, which burst off the page with primal strength and grab you by the throat. Most of this is written in free verse but it has a inexplicable sense of rightness about it. It sings. I was surprised to find Pound reading. I did not think that the trajectory of his life would have allowed him to read his works on tape, but I found that he was recorded during his stay at the American mental institution that held him in his final years. Pound reads them with the emotion that I thought he might. The cantos are firm, hymnlike, religious, songlike. He recites them like a monk relating his dark and austere secrets of his studies. His voice is a little wobbly in his old age, and this unfortunately reduces some of the power. But Pound still feels furious, intent, fanatical, even here. One can feel the weight of his intensity in these readings, especially the two Cantos on Usury from the 40 - 50's range. This is well worth it. I would recommend this for anyone. The readings are unfortunately incomplete (there must have been unwillingness to record all or some sort of limitation on the part of the recorders or Pound), but so power and virile that they are moving both as prose and as song and as speech.
The Cantos are monolithic and can be like getting shouted at for an hour. Pound also finds sympathy and you feel his description as a close friend relating a nostalgic tale. He can also be grim, and his words seem the perfect eulogy for Western Civilization. The Cantos can be like getting pummeled! Yet with each struggle one comes out feeling a desire to know more about the world and to search out truth. When I first opened the Cantos, I felt that they were not well written, because the writing is choppy, in places it seems haphazard and sloppy. Pound gives the impression of writing with incredible haste and bluster, as if fighting with his life to complete this work before his death. You see the unfolding of Pound's wild and weird life as the Cantos unfold, and his intellect and passions fight against the world that would ultimately defeat him. The cantos are not written to be accepted technically; they are about teaching life (Pound would say wisdom; APPLIED knowledge) and about truth, and not about words.
Reading Pound, one feels the weight of civic responsibility. Pound rages at what he sees rending Western Civilization from its roots. He discloses history by mentioning it, using events as metaphors, as expressions, as examples of his points, and in doing this he expects you to know them. Pound's poetry convicts one to read Dante, to read Homer, to read the Troubadours. And if you took nothing more away from that Cantos than that, that isn't bad. But you see in his work someone who is absolutely dedicated to how he felt the world should be. There is no apathy here. We can all stand to nod to Pound's conviction. You can feel it here. ... Read more

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This series collects together the best-known aphorisms, epigrams and reflections of a wide variety of figures from antiquity to our own age: humorists and novelists, poets and philosophers, politicians and playwrights. ... Read more

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Long at the centre of the modernist project, from editing Eliot's The Waste Land to publishing Joyce, Pound has also been a provocateur and instigator of new movements, while initiating a new poetics. This is the first volume to summarize and analyze the multiple contexts of Pound's work, underlining the magnitude of his contribution and drawing on new archival, textual and theoretical studies. Pound's political and economic ideas also receive attention. With its concentration on the contexts of history, sociology, aesthetics and politics, the volume will provide a portrait of Pound's unusually international reach: an American-born, modern poet absorbing the cultures of England, France, Italy and China. These essays situate Pound in the social and material realities of his time and will be invaluable for students and scholars of Pound and modernism. ... Read more

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Written in 1910 when Pound was only 25 years old, and later revised by the author, this critical work has long stood as an important stage in the development of Pound's poetics, and a dramatic revaluation of Europe's literary tradition. Pound surveys the course of literature from the fall of the Roman Empire through the dawn of the Renaissance, paying special attention to the Provençal poets and to Dante. Now with an introduction by Richard Sieburth, this work illuminates a great period in European literature and one of America's greatest poetic minds. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Underappreciated early Pound
Humorous, to my mind, that my prior review of Pound's Cantos, which I do not much care for, inspired a touch of vitriol from some impassioned fans of his work.So, perhaps to atone for that, I will say how much I enjoy this earlier work of his, where he gets to display his encyclopedic knowledge of Western European culture in an appropriate vehicle.While this book is essentially out of date now, having been written in the 20s, its general conclusions regarding the birth of the modern lyric in Europe are always fascinating and insightful.His wit is present and pertinent, and his later gross arrogance and stubborn refusal to organize his thinking nowhere to be found.So, I highly recommend this book, and while a knowledge of the Cantos is required to be fully literate, this work is far better and actually far more important and relevant to modern letters.The writer of this book is a man I would have liked to have known, while I would not say the same regarding the writer of the Cantos.Another possibly indefensible critical paradigm, I suppose, but there you have it in any case. ... Read more

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Drama / Asian; ... Read more

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An Essential Introduction
This is an excellent companion to Pound. Anyone who has tried to crack Pound knows it is difficult going with all of his allusions and his affinities for retelling stories of old troubadors, etc. Froula gives the context for the New Directions edition of Pound's Selected Poems and has informative notes on many words, phrases, and lines that contain more meaning than is possible to grasp otherwise, even after several readings. I consider this a must read for getting acquainted with the various projects of Pound's early poetry. ... Read more

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This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR?d book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Pound's 800 page Cantos, written over a period of more than fifty years (1917-1969), invites the reader to join the poet on a journey from darkness and despair towards light and positive activity. In this book, George Kearns addresses the reader approaching The Cantos for the first time. He examines the poem's aesthetic and political-ethical-didactic dimensions and shows that despite its complexity and the many objections which can be raised to its poetics and politics, its study can be greatly rewarding. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A masterpiece, quite simply
Agree with Pound's political views or not, this body of work is a masterpiece. Ezra Pound, the founder of the school of Imagisme, exhibits true mastery with poetical form, language and symbolism, writing inEnglish, French, Chinese, Greek... this is an immense body of work withhundreds of poems to feast your mind on. This book changed my life, and Irecommend it to anyone willing to invest the time to THINK about poetry andAPPRECIATE the craftsmanship of what some call a madman and others, amaster. ... Read more

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About the origins of Anglo-American poetic modernism, one thing is certain: it started with a notion of the image, described variously by Ezra Pound as an ideogram and a vortex. We have reason to be less confident, however, about the relation between these puzzling conceptions of the image and the doctrine of literary positivism that is generally held to be the most important legacy of Imagism. No satisfactory account exists, moreover, of what bearing these foundational principles may have on Pound's later engagement with fascism. Nor is it clear how figures such as the vortex and the ideogram might contribute generally to our understanding of modern visual culture and its compulsive appeal.

Radio Corpse addresses these issues and offers a fundamental revision of one of the most powerful and persistent aesthetic ideologies of modernism. Focusing on the necrophilic dimension of Pound's earliest poetry and on the inflections of materiality authorized by the modernist image, Daniel Tiffany establishes a continuum between Decadent practice and the incipient avant-garde, between the prehistory of the image and its political afterlife, between what Pound calls the "corpse language" of late Victorian poetry and a conception of the image that borrows certain "radioactive" qualities from the historical discovery of radium and the development of radiography. Emphasizing the phantasmic effects of translation (and exchange) in Pound's poetry, Tiffany argues that the cadaverous--and radiological--properties of the image culminate, formally and ideologically, in Pound's fascist radio broadcasts during World War II. Ultimately, the invisibility of these "radiant" images places in question basic assumptions regarding the optical character of images--assumptions currently being challenged by imageric technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography.

Customer Reviews (8)

Not a good place to start studying Confucianism
I bought this book because I had heard some people say it was more poetic than other translations.I did not find this to be true.If you are a beginner in Confucianism, "The Unwobbling Pivot" is usually referred to as the "Doctrine of the Mean." "The Great Digest" is usually referred to as "The Great Learning". I read Pound's translation of the Analects and I was disappointed.I think Waley's translation is closer to being poetic than Pound's translation.I have studied many translations of the Analects and I found Pound's translation to seem off-mark.The language was usually clumsy rather than poetic.I eventually put it aside.

I do applaud Ezra Pound's love of Confucianism and his intention to promote Confucianism for Westerners.In this vein, I recommend "Achieve Lasting Happiness" by Robert Canright, which is a version of the Analects updated for modernity.Canright's book also presents a vision of how Americans can embrace Confucianism as a system of universal ethics.

One of the other reviews said "no one knows how much Chinese Ezra Pound knew".I recommend "Ezra Pound and Confucianism" by Feng Lan.The author discusses Pound's translation in a way that is accessible and interesting.Dr. Feng Lan goes beyond the issues of translation.He also discusses Ezra Pound's "political polemic" in chap. 3 and Pound's spiritual beliefs in chapter 4.

Whether or not you buy this book by Pound, I encourage you to buy Robert Canright's book and Feng Lan's book.

Confucius say
This book was my first introduction to Confucius and I was very pleased. Other reviewers have made critical reference to the translation. While not a Chinese scholar, I am aquainted with the literature and this volume has been the most useful in introducing me to Confucius.
Ezra Pound seems to have captured the essense of these writings, as this translation confirms many ideas contained in other more scholarly works. Highly recommended!

more griping, I'm afraid, but this is rubbish
Let's put things in perspective:
you wouldn't ask a fellow how to explain Saint Thomas Aquinas, if he:
a)knew no Latin,
b)wasn't a Catholic,
c)knew no Catholics, and
d)had a long history of spouting rubbish about languages, belief systems, and peoples he knew nothing about.
Now, if getting the right dope on Aquinas might be a bit difficult under these circumstances, how much more difficult would it be to get the truth on a far more foreign culture speaking a far more foreign language from a lot longer ago?
If you've read Ezra Pound's silly and ill-tempered diatribes on literary matters (e.g. ABC of Reading, or the Guide to Kulchur) you'll recognize the rhetorical style.
If you like Pound's literary style, fine, then read his own discombobulated verse or perhaps his "Cathay", which is a purely imaginative work derived from Earnest Fenellosa's notes (who didn't know Chinese either, by the way, just Japanese) which purports to render Li Po's great poems into English.It's about as Chinese as a tearoom in Las Vegas but that's allright.
This man does NOT know anything about China or Confucious. You cannot just wing it when you translate an ancient text. Even if you're blindly convinced that the text is a transcendent work of genius which would cure all the evils of the world, which is more or less the tenor of Pound's dementia when he ground out this screed.
Use Arthur Waley's readable translation with its excellent introduction, or, for that matter, just about anything else. You'll reach a better conclusion about Confucious. Was he the sanest and most humane of all the philosophical system builders, or was he just a sententious reactionary, a lunatic to rank with all the others who thought they knew how society should be governed?

Not for the novice
If you have never read the Analects in a more contemporary translation, then stay away from the Ezra Pound version, because you will most likely not understand the text (for example, compare verse 2.4 versus any other translation out there).The Pound version is much more interesting after you have read the Analects at least once and have a view of what the verses mean.

Those who know aren't up to those who love...
One of the worst problems in our world is that it is infested with'experts,' 'experts' of every variety from the diploma-wavers through to the self-appointed.The main aim of these 'experts' seems to have been to convince the world that only 'experts' have a right to say anything about anything.In this they have been extremely successful, and the mature, intelligent, and well-informed adult who may have a lot to contribute, but who is not an 'expert,' has been pretty well reduced to silence.

His mouth has been shut.He has been convinced that his own God-given brain is worthless.Even if there's something he'd like to say, he or she is afraid of being shouted down by the 'experts' and their groupies.A reading of the great Chinese thinkers would soon convince anyone ofhow dangerous and damaging to society 'experts' can be, but most of us don't read the Chinese.We have been conditioned to think of them as alien and to forget that they were human like us.

Ezra Pound may have been a bit crazy in some ways (who isn't?), andhis Chinese readings have come in for a lot of flak, but anyone who,like Pound, loved Asian thought and set out to bring it to a West thatis desperately in need of it, certainly deserves our gratitude whether they be 'expert' or non-expert.

Nobody knows how much Chinese Pound knew anyway.He certainly knewsome.And anyone who knows anything at all about the complexities of Classical Chinese realizes that all readings or translations from that language, whether by professional linguists or enthusiasts such asPound, must always be personal.There are just too many ways ofvalidly interpreting a given line.

And as Burton Watson, who is one of the USA's foremost scholars of Ancient Chinese has pointed out in his 'Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,'since there can be no definitive interpretation neither can there beany such thing as a definitive translation.Watson, incidentally, was perfectly happy to approve Thomas Merton's readings of another great Chinese thinker, Chuang Tzu, even though Merton knew no Chinese at all.He feels that the more translations, whether expert or non- expert (when done with sincerity and love), the better.But expertssuch as Burton Watson, sadly, are rare, perhaps because they are theonly true experts.

My own copy of Pound's 'Confucius' was purchased many years ago.It's very well-thumbed and heavily annotated, and I often return toit.I've also studied Arthur Waley's more exact translation carefully, and a few others.But the Confucian lines that stick in my mind always seem to be those of Pound, lines such as: "If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed" (page 33).

The "root" today is certainly "in confusion."And those who dismiss Pound on the basis of a few howlers are simply adding to the confusion.To let you in on a secret, there are many howlers - up toand including the omission of whole lines - in the translations of evenreputable and well-known scholars of Chinese (though I've never foundany in Burton Watson).

My advice would be to ignore the gripers, most of whom don't havedirect access to the Chinese text anyway, and to read Pound's version of Confucius.He was a literary genius and got it right most of the time, and you'd learn a great deal from it.

Pound's 'Confucius' has always found and will continue to find readers. I think it's because, as Confucius says: "Those who know aren't up to those who love..." (page 216). ... Read more