“It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it.”

Borealis‚ the story which follows, was written by the French short-story writer/academician Paul Morand (1888-1916) and translated in 1922 by Ezra Pound.

Hast thou 2 loaves of bread
Sell one + with the dole
Buy straightaway some hyacinths

The scientists are in terror
                                           and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis accepted blindness

Came Neptunus
                               his mind leaping like dolfins,
These concepts the human mind has attained,

 

We have the intention of joining you.¹ How is it? What do you pay? What is the hotel? Can I, like Northcliffe² on the Rhine, preserve my incognito among your fascist pals? or are they liable to give Hadley castor oil?³ Mussolini told me at Lausanne, you know, that I couldn't ever live in Italy again. How the hell are you any way? e sua moglia? How long are you going to stay? Answer any of these that seem important.

Ezra Pound was obsessed with language. Quotations from seventeen languages, from hieroglyphics to the dialect of the Na-Khi tribe of China are scattered through the Cantos. Two cantos were written completely in Italian: numbers 72 and 73. It is not perfect Italian, though Pound had lived in Italy, off and on, for thirty years when he wrote the poems in Rapallo in 1944 toward the end of the war. There are minute errors of syntax and a few slight slips in verbal tone. But Pound’s ear was so keen, the finest of his generation according to Yeats, it was nearly impossible for him to write a line that was not melodic.

Entered U.P. Penn at 15 with intention of studying comparative values in literature (poetry) and began doing so unbeknown to the faculty. 1902 enrolled as special student to avoid irrelevant subjects. 1903—5 continued process at Hamilton College under W.P. Shepard, “Schnitz” Brandt and J.D. Ibbotson. 1905—7 P.G. at U. of Penn. Chiefly impressed by lack of correlation between different depts, and lack either of general survey of literature or any coherent interest in literature as such (as distinct for example from philology). 

The remarkable document here published for the first time is an explanatory note to the censor at the Pisa Detention Camp where Pound was held after the war.