Context: A few days ago I posted some words from and about Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXX and a video of myself reading Arthur Symons “Modern Beauty” http://dirk-johnson.com/wpblog/?p=792
For ease of reading, here again are the lines from “Canto LXXX”
La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly
Hence no more B-J in his product.
So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.
“I am the torch” wrote Arthur “she saith.”
in the moon barge Brododaktylos Eos
with the veil of faint cloud before her
Kuthera deina as a leaf borne in the current
pale eyes as if without fire.
(80/511:546)
The specific line I’m going to shine candle light on today is:
in the moon barge brododaktylos Eos
Rhododaktylos (“rosyfingered”) is the Homeric (Ionic) epithet of Eos, Dawn. Brododaktylos is the Aeloic form of the same word, used by Sappho as the (Doric) epithet of Selanna “Moon.” In this one line in “Canto LXXX” Pound looks back to both Sappho and Homer. The Cantos is an epic poem, but this section is lyrical. Homer and Sappho fused into a single line.
(Aside: For a lyrical stroll through The Cantos, read the enjoyable critical work:
The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode
Published by Johns Hopkins U.P., 1975
ISBN 080181703X, 9780801817038)
Earlier, in “Canto LXXIV,” were the following lines:
Time is not, Tie is the evil, beloved
Beloved the hours brododaktylos
as against the half-light of the window
with the sea beyond making horizon
le contre-jour the line of the cameo
profile “to carve Achaia”
a dream passing over the face in the half-light
Venere, Cytherea “aut Rhodon”
vento ligure, veni
“beauty is difficult” sd/ Mr Beardsley… (74/444:472)
Both of these passages were written in the “death cells” in Pisa, where Pound was kept in a cage in the middle of the American Army DTC: the place the U.S. Army put the most dangerous criminals immediately after WWII. Ezra Pound, poet, was considered the most dangerous man in the camp. The guards were instructed never to speak to him. It was feared that he could convince them to help him, to convert to his way of thinking.
He lived in a chain-link cage, at the center of four guard towers. At night, all four kept spotlights trained on him. As Hugh Kenner put it in The Pound Era (possibly the best book about Ezra Pound),
Irreparable death hung over the poet’s head, and there were no books but Legge’s Confucius and a Bible, and no sights but guards and prisoners and a sky and mountains and dust, and the Pisan Cantos invoked memory, seizing moments from the past “for those moments’ sake.” It was then that, reaching back to the time when Pound had poured over Greek fragments, memory yielded up, strangely, the splendid word of Sappho’s that Canto 5 had skirted: brododaktylos. The word presented itself amid a sense that his own personality was dissolving into recollections. “To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down” : so Pater had written in 1868, and so Pound felt in the summer of 1945.
From this situation, the Pisan Cantos, one of the most remarkable sequences of poems in the history of the English language.
For extension: Sappho, Fragment 96, translated by Anne Carson, Vintage, New York, August 2003 ISBN 0-375-72451-6. Here the lines will be flattened out along the left column because I won’t take the time to code them for word press to show the layout in Carson’s original. The papyrus on which this was found had no line breaks or spaces between words: it was a single string of letters. So I hope you don’t feel it too lazy of me not to bother with the presentation. But you will have it if you buy Carson’s book.
Brackets are used to indicate text missing in the papyrus from damage or decay — mostly, holes.
]Sardis
often turning her thoughts here
]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon
surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.
But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind
But to go there
] much
talks[
Not easy for us
to equal goddesses in lovely form
]
]
] desire
and [...........] Aphrodite
]nectar poured from
gold
]with hands Persuasion
]
]
]
]into the Geraistion
] beloveds
] of none
] into desire I shall come
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