A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions

Main Article Content

Ronald Bush
David Ten Eyck

Abstract

If for no other reason the fact that all published editions of the Pisan Cantos have been unable to execute Ezra Pound’s instructions for the insertion of Greek and have omitted over fifty sets of Chinese characters that he directed his publishers to include would be sufficient cause to re-edit the poem. But the case for a new edition is stronger than that. Owing to the extraordinary conditions of its composition and transmission, approximately five hundred corruptions of Pound’s typescript text survived into the poem’s first English and American publications. Pound’s typescript of the Pisan Cantos was prepared during his incarceration in the US Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) an American military prison camp near Pisa during the summer and autumn of 1945, and was the product of the harsh conditions of his imprisonment (his wavering memory following a mental breakdown, his lack of books, and the many errors he inevitably produced typing at odd hours on unfamiliar typewriters). Just as seriously, many of Pound’s emended carbons never reached his editors at New Directions and he was forced during his continued incarceration in the U.S. to delegate responsibility for many kinds of correction he would normally have made himself. He was also denied access to his originals at every stage proofing. Although there can never be a definitively “corrected edition” of the Pisan Cantos because Pound made inconsistent emendations on different typescript leaves and kept his publishers in the dark about which instances of idiosyncratic spelling, quotation, and punctuation he wished them to correct, this does not mean that an edition cannot be established that eliminates the corruptions that later crept into the text and that carries out Pound’s implicit and explicit expectations for producing the poem, many of which his first editors never fully understood. A critical edition based on the typescripts Pound produced at Pisa and including a complete historical apparatus is currently in preparation with Oxford University Press and will not only achieve these aims but also make it possible to understand the deficiencies of the poem’s currently circulating texts.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

Section
Articles

References

Byron, Mark. 2003. “‘This Thing that Has a Code + Not a Core’: The Texts of Pound’s Pisan Cantos”. Ezra Pound and Referentiality. Edited by Hélène Aji,225–38. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne.

Cornell, Julien. 1966. The Trial of Ezra Pound. New York: The John Day Company.

Eastman, Barbara. 1979. Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text 1948–1975. Orono: National Poetry Foundation.

Maharaj, Ayon. 2010. “Why Poetry Matters: The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Expe-rience in Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos”. Arizona Quarterly 66.4: 71–92.

Olson, Charles. 1975. Charles Olson and Ezra Pound, An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Edited by Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman Publishers.

Pound, Ezra. 1948. The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions.

———. 1949. The Pisan Cantos. London: Faber and Faber.

———. 1969. Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. New York: New Directions.

———. 1999. Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, edited by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2003. The Pisan Cantos. Edited by Richard Sieburth. New York: New Direc-tions.

Taylor, Richard. 1996. “Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos”. In Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Edited by Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and War-ren Chernaik, 223–57. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

———. 1997. “The History and State of the Texts”. In A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos. Edited by Lawrence S. Rainey, 235–66. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Witemeyer, Hugh. 1969. The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press.