The 'forthcoming publications' list is up at Giramondo. TASTY, especially the Gig Ryan collection and the short fiction collection from Jess Huon later in the year.
The last book I read from this press was Judith Beveridge's latest collection, Storm and Honey. I am pleased to see that it will not be long before I read another.
I have been enjoying an essay by Barry Hill in the latest HEAT mag on Pound and his pseudo-sinology, and am very pleased to see a fragment of it online:
...the paradox then was that Pound’s voice was not connected with ‘life’ in any direct way – not like Lawrence’s, for instance. It was still the product of a masking, an immersion in an act of projecting himself into something else. The Metro poem was an omen. It pointed to the extent to which Pound’s life and work, his angry heart and visionary yearnings, would be close to an enactment of Eastern aesthetics and philosophy, a translation voyage that would shape his modernism.
This paradox is deepened by the fact that Pound never travelled East: in 1914, he passed up a chance to go to China and was thereafter out of touch with crucial events as they unfolded. His China was a construction: what he got out of it was always literary and thus partially dead, even as he could breathe a life into it for aesthetic and political purposes. He hoped that China – or his Confucius, at least – would save Europe from itself, but it no more did that than his Chinese dictionary saved him from a crack-up when he was caged at Pisa in 1945.
A shame more of it is not there, as there are some penetrating remarks on the tone of Cathay, a book of translations from the Fenollosa archive which Pound published in 1915:
he sent a copy of two poems to his friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska who was in the trenches. The 'Lament' begins:
By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time till now!
Trees fall, the grass grows yellow with autumn,
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out over the barbarous land;
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert,
There is no wall left to this village
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High leaps, covered with trees and grasses;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and kettle drums?
Barbarous kings...
and sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning...
'They depict our situation in a wonderful way,' Gaudier told him. The whole book was organised to do so.
Hill states that a recent biographer, Moody,
'rightly praises Cathay as brilliantly ahead of its time - anti-war poems that jumped the gun on Wilfred Owen and others. Pound, who never went to the front, did not out of respect for the soldiers attempt to render the war directly. Cathay is momentously strong partly because it provided a godsend of deflection for Pound, a grand way of making an impersonal art, its classical mode, matter.' I was surprised to learn that Pound could not read Chinese when he produced this collection.
HEAT 22: The Persistent Rabbit is in independent bookshops now.
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