A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Pound does not survive scrutiny by any standards.

  Piera’s book

  Bunting may not have enjoyed ‘literary society or literary conversation’ but he certainly involved himself in the high-octane artistic community that gathered around Pound in Rapallo. A contemporary article, ‘Prominent Literati Arriving at Rapallo to Pass Winter Season’, catalogues the poet’s illustrious neighbours:

  Gerhardt Hauptmann, venerable figure of the literary constellation, is shortly due from Switzerland …

  Ezra Pound is here busily working upon his new opera, which should shortly be completed. He is living with his parents at the beautiful home of William B. Yeats, who is in Dublin arranging for the presentation of one of his dramas. Nancy Wilcox McCormick, Chicago sculptor, recently stayed with Mr and Mrs Homer Pound, parents of the poet, after coming from London where she completed a bust of Gandhi …

  The poet, Basil Bunting, whose wife is from Wisconsin, is rejoicing in the arrival of a baby daughter born in the Protestant Hospital at Genoa. The daughter was christened Bourtai Bunting in honor of Genghis Khan. Since this happened Mr Bunting has given birth to two lines of inspired verse each month.

  … Edmond Dodsworth, Italian translator of William Blake and W. H. Hudson, recently moved here

  … Max Beerbohm, with his wife Florence Khan, former actress from Tennessee, is busy in his white villa on the Ambrogian Hill.330

  The transatlantic review in Paris, Kleinfeldt’s in London’s Fitzrovia, Rapallo with the cream of Europe’s artists; for someone who didn’t enjoy literary company Bunting certainly knew how to find it. Massimo Bacigalupo describes ‘Il libro di Piera’, a unique record of cultural Rapallo:

  Here [Caffè Aurum, on the ground floor of the Pounds’ apartment block] Ezra and Dorothy took their meals, entertained guests, and EP met his associates to launch ventures like the Supplemento Letterario del Mare (1932–1933) and the concert seasons of the Amici del Tigullio (1933–1939). EP was friendly with the hotel proprietors, the Majerna family, and gave their young daughter Piera a leather-bound autograph book on the first page of which he wrote ‘Il libro di Piera’.331

  ‘Piera’s book’ contains a stave from Pound’s opera, Villon, signed in April 1929 by Pound and George Antheil. Yeats, too, contributed a stanza to Piera’s book:

  Much did I rage when young,

  Being by the world oppressed,

  But now with flattering tongue

  It speeds the parting guest.

  W B Yeats, April 17, 1929

  As Bacigalupo says, Piera’s book is a ‘document of the lively and creative Rappalo milieu during the EP era’. After Yeats’ poem: ‘we find the signatures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and many others, among them the co-editor of the Literary Supplement of Il Mare, Gino Saviotti, and three younger contributors: the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, the German Eugen Haas, and the Spaniard Juan Ramon Masoliver, who was to become an important critic and translator’.332 Saviotti was the author of Mezzo matto, a novel which Pound admired and which won the 1934 Viareggio Prize. Haas was an accomplished watercolourist and Masoliver (who later became Pound’s secretary) was a pioneer of Surrealism.

  In the way that it records an artistic milieu Piera’s book is similar to the Fitzroy tavern’s guestbook. The patron and hostess, Pima Andreae, kept a Rapallo guestbook that performs a similar function. She entertained the local artistic community at her home, Villa Andreae. The villa’s guestbook was signed on 28 July 1932 by Ezra, Dorothy, Homer and Isabel Pound and by Basil and Marian Bunting. It records that they listened to a concert that day by the composer and violinist, Tibor Serly, and the pianist, Geza Frid.333

  Bunting certainly used his own music criticism to advance his credentials. In the summer of 1933 Pound organised performances of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano in the Teatro Reale in Rapallo. Bunting confusingly previewed the concerts, which had already taken place on 26, 27 and 28 June ‘under the auspices of the Fascist Institute of Culture’, on the front page of Il Mare on 1 July.334 The public response was sufficiently enthusiastic to encourage Rapallo’s authorities to allow Pound to use, free of charge, the local town hall. The organising committee – Bunting, Pound and Eugen Haas – according to advertisements, ‘had been professional music critics on journals in large European cities and offered their guarantee of the high quality of performers and programmes’.335 According to Victoria Forde Bunting insisted that ‘his connection was quite incidental. His selfeffacement or perhaps his feelings about the “overpowering” Olga Rudge, Pound’s mistress, who had a part in it may have kept him from associating himself with this project closely.’336 In fact Bunting had been an ‘active participant in the early concerts’, according to R. Murray Schafer.337

  Bunting later claimed a much more significant role in this than was at the time apparent, and, indeed, if the following story is broadly true (which I take it to be) his accidental discovery of some Scarlatti and Vivaldi manuscripts affected significantly the listening tastes of the twentieth century. Asked about Vivaldi in an interview primarily about Pound in 1982 he said:

  I don’t suppose he [Pound] even knew the name of Vivaldi when I first met him. Now, Vivaldi came up in the most peculiar way. I was living in a house in Rapallo, close to where the daughters of an Italian musicologist lived … He had been in the Italian diplomatic service, and wherever he went he went into all the libraries and copied out, and otherwise got hold of, all the ancient music he could. His name was Chilesotti. One day the Chilesotti girls came into my house, three of them, and we fooled about, as we often fooled about. And they found on my desk some manuscript where I was busy transferring to stave some music that was in the tablature for the lute. And they said, ‘Why, that is just what Daddy’s old chest is full of !’ This electrified me, and I begged them to fetch Daddy’s old chest around to me. Which they did. And there was I, and got Gerhard Münch and his wife in by that time, and the three of us opened Daddy’s old chest. And the very first thing on the top of it we came on, was an opera by Alessandro Scarlatti that nobody had ever heard of before or knew existed. And then, under that, other things and other things. Various stuff from lute tablatures in Italian and in Spanish and in what not. And finally, a trio sonata or two by Vivaldi. Nobody had ever heard of these bloody things! We took them round to show Ezra, in great excitement. Münch and his wife turned some of the stuff into piano and violin, piano and voice. Ezra rushed off to Rome, to tell Mussolini that he had got a glorious find of some sort, and he wanted money to start a series of concerts, which he did. Mussolini produced the money, and the concerts were founded. And year by year they played a good lump of Mozart and a good lump of what we put out from the Chilesotti manuscripts. And that was where Vivaldi came from. And Pound very rightly told Olga, who had this job in Siena on the musical Academy there, to look up everything that she could about Vivaldi, and press it as far as she could. So that in fact the mechanics of the great Vivaldi revival came entirely from Olga Rudge, urged on by Ezra Pound, but Ezra was put on the track by the sheer accident that put them my way.338

  Bunting’s exact role in the discovery of this treasure is unclear, although here he clearly puts himself centre-stage. In his account of the discovery published in the Musical Times it is interesting that he made no such claim, nor does he mention Vivaldi.339 In any event Pound, of course, effortlessly took the credit for it and assumed responsibility for managing its dissemination, culminating, as Humphrey Carpenter says, in a Vivaldi week in Siena in September 1939 in which well-known Italian musicians performed the ‘works that Olga and Ezra had discovered’.340

  A few weeks before Bunting left Rapallo Zukofsky arrived.341 Bunting, resplendent in a red jacket, met him at Genoa to take him to Rapallo, which they reached in time for lunch at the Albergo Rapallo with the Pounds. Zukofsky stayed with Homer and Isabel Pound, in Yeats’ old apartment on the Via Americhe. He was supposed to eat his meals, for which Pound paid, with the Buntings but sometimes,
according to Charles Norman, ‘when he tried to slip out to have breakfast by himself, Homer Pound, towering above him, would bar the exit. ‘“In Idaho,” he would say, “if anyone tried to refuse hospitality –.” He left the sentence unfinished. But it sufficed. Zukofsky usually breakfasted with Homer and Isabel Pound.’342

  ‘Tea with Ezra and Dorothy which lasted for hours every afternoon became a ritual for these two younger poets. Money had poured in after the birth of Bourtai, especially from Margaret de Silver, so that Bunting had bought a crude sailboat which Zukofsky enjoyed sharing some days.’343 Sometimes they saw Pound out in the ocean ‘rowing strenuously seaward on a pontone, a raft consisting of two pontoons and a board for seat. He liked to swim by himself.’344

  Sweatin’ away at Firdusi

  In 1930 Bunting began his lifelong affair with the tenth-century Persian poet, Hakīm Abu’l-Qāsim Ferdowsī Tūsī Ferdowsi. He had found a copy of part of Ferdowsi’s epic, the Shahnameh, in a stall on the quays in Genoa, a book

  tattered, incomplete – with a newspaper cover on it marked ‘Oriental Tales.’ I bought it, in French. It turned out to be part of the early 19th century prose translation of Firdausi, and it was absolutely fascinating. I got into the middle of the story of the education of Zal and the birth of Rustam – and the story came to an end! It was quite impossible to leave it there, I was desperate to know what happened next. I read it, as far as it went, to Pound and to Dorothy Pound and they were in the same condition. We were yearning to find out, but we could think of no way. The title page was even missing. There seemed nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so, I undertook that. Pound bought me the three volumes of Vullers and somebody, I forget who, bought me Steingass’s dictionary, and I set to work. It didn’t take long. It’s an easy language if it’s only for reading that you want it. It’s difficult to speak.345

  The ‘somebody’ who bought him the Steingass was, according to Forde, his wife, who had acquired it in New York, although Dorothy Pound was also involved.346 Bunting wrote to Dorothy from Rapallo in September 1932 while she was staying with her mother in London to ask her to visit a dealer in oriental books in Great Russell Street to price a good classical Persian dictionary and a copy of the seven volume 1880 French edition of the Shahnameh. Not that he had any money to pay for them.347 By then he had acquired a grammar and was finding it ‘amazingly easy’ to master classical Persian, although the heavy borrowing from Arabic was causing him problems.

  Pound wrote to the Morning Post to showcase Bunting’s Persian credentials, with a little Poundian exaggeration: ‘With all due respect to Mr. Drinkwater as an outstanding representative of English letters, I suggest that the English poet most qualified to represent your country at a celebration of Firdausi should be a young man who reads Persian, who writes Persian, and who is actually engaged in the almost impossible task of translating Firdausi into a suitable English metre. Perhaps Mr. Drinkwater could find a post in his suite for Basil Bunting.’348

  In fact, however, far from being ‘in the same condition’ Pound was dismissive of this enthusiasm. While he immortalised Bunting’s enthusiasm for Ferdowsi in ‘Canto 77’:

  If Basil sing of Shah Nameh, and wrote

  … Firdush’ on his door349

  he dismissed it privately, writing to William Carlos Williams on 16 February 1935: ‘Buntin’ sweatin’ away at Firdusi, which he aint yet found a way to make readable. Dirty dumb middle eastern fat heads.’350 As far as Pound was concerned Bunting was still struggling with it three years later. He wrote to Otto Bird from Rapallo on 9 January 1938: ‘Bunt’n gone off on Persian, but don’t seem to do anything but Firdusi, whom he can’t put into English that is of any interest. More fault of subject matter than of anything else in isolation.’351

  Pound didn’t have a clue about the ‘subject matter’ of course, and Bunting would not have agreed with him even if Pound had understood Persian. His work on Persian translation continued during his time in the Canary Isles, and proved a serious irritant to Pound. Some of it was light-hearted, such as Sa‘di’s:

  Powder and lipstick and lace on their drawers

  Are all very well for young women and whores,

  They look a bit more human in that sort of stuff;

  But for a man, cock and balls are enough.

  Which doesn’t seem likely to get a place in my collected works but is worth at any rate oral preservation. Literal, nearly: last line word for word.352

  Within twelve months Pound told Bunting he was ‘bored’ by the Persian translations. He wrote to Bunting on 17 January 1935:

  You bloody bullheaded ape …

  All this snotten and shitten belly-button gazing etc … no fkn/USE.

  Wot I feel about yr/ persins, is tha shucks wot does it matter if some nigger knifed a few others … You av/ a rty TELLING the fukn STORY in the simplest possbl langwidg/ and then see if you help it by fussin with the ornaments and oriental currleywigs.353

  Bunting seems to have taken only mild offence at this nuanced critique, but the disagreement prefigured a much more serious rift a few years later.

  In his preface to Omar Pound’s Arabic & Persian Poems in 1970 Bunting explained the misunderstandings that have surrounded the classics of Persian literature, on the way making a prescient point about the symbiosis of Islamic and Western culture:

  Persian poetry has suffered badly, Arabic rather less, from neo-Platonic dons determined to find an arbitrary mysticism in everything. You would think there was nothing else in Moslem poetry than nightingales which are not birds, roses which are not flowers, and pretty boys who are God in disguise … There are difficulties in the way of a more satisfactory account of Persian poetry. Hafez, for instance, depends almost entirely on his mastery of sound and literary allusion, neither translatable. Manuchehri’s enormous vigour and variety expresses itself often in patterns as intricate as those of a Persian carpet. Even dons are put off by the vast size of Sa‘di’s Divan, and fail to find the key poems … Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anaemia. It will not be done by futile attempts to trace Maulavi symbols back to Plotinus or by reproducing in bad English verse the platitudes common to poetry everywhere.354

  The mysticism, nightingales and roses, he considered, got you as close to Persian poetry as you would be to English if you had only read Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Fitzgerald was the only translator who ‘got the hang of even a quarter of it’.355

  Bunting applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 ‘to translate Ferdausi’s Shannameh into English verse. Its eight times as long as the Illiad and will take most of my lifetime, but the Guggenheim would enable me to get a start on it. I don’t know another poem as good except Homers.’356 Bunting’s application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, stamped 1 December 1932, describes his project as ‘ultimately, to translate the whole of the epic poem, the “Shahnamah” of Abu’l Kasim Mansur Firdausi into verse. Immediately, to make a beginning of this enormous task and to complete my preparation for the undertaking by further study of Persian literature and poetry.’ He estimates that the work would take at least fifteen years but that a Guggenheim would get him started, and ‘My ultimate purpose? To make a respectable contribution to civilisation as I understand it.’357 His application, though unsuccessful, had an impressive list of sponsors – Yeats, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Harriet Monroe.

  Bunting’s Persian translations, including some previously unpublished material, have recently been collected by Don Share.358 Bunting’s earliest surviving translation from Persian, ‘When the sword of sixty comes nigh his head’, is from Ferdowsi and was written in 1935, but he also translated from Rudaki, Manuchehri, Sa‘di, Hafiz and Obaid-e Zakani. Today’s classical Persian scholars and translators regard Bunting’s translations with respect. Parvin Loloi suggests that Bunting’s ‘versions from Hâfiz are free, but perceptive and vivid accounts of their originals, and confer more of Hâfiz’ poetry than many more pedantically a
ccurate versions … one can only regret that [they] should be so few in number, since they speak eloquently of the possibilities of this kind of translation.’359 Dick Davis is more cautious in his admiration but finds Bunting’s translations ‘fresh and strong … vivid in their feeling’.360

  Now that sea’s over that island

  Bunting’s Persian translations were outshone by a burst of intense poetic creativity in the early 1930s. Marian Bunting’s claim in 1968 that ‘domestic troubles, plus no money, put poetry in the background after our first child was born’, is not borne out by Bunting’s preserved output of the time. Marian thought that poetry did not return to Bunting until 1936, when ‘in London … Basil read some poems to Helen Egli in our apartment, the old excitement and thrill came back. The trouble was he could not & would not work at his poetry, or at journalism as he called all other kinds of writing.’361 Marian’s memory, as we shall see, was not entirely reliable when it came to the decade or so she spent with Bunting.

  In fact 1930 was a fertile year for the poet. He completed some of his most anthologised poems, and the ones by which he was best known until the publication of Briggflatts, including ‘Gin the Goodwife Stint’ and ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’. Bunting correctly said in an interview many years later that ‘the attempt to transliterate dialect is a disaster’,362 and although these poems only flirt with dialect they do so sufficiently to damage them irretrievably in my view. His justification was that they were ‘attempts to make use of the ballad form for ballad purposes’, an enterprise that had become entirely irrelevant in the intervening years as the ballad form effectively no longer existed in popular consciousness.363 The ballad form has indeed become dated but in these poems it is not just the form that seems locked in a vanished age. ‘Gin the Goodwife Stint’ and ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ fail to reach beyond their limited subjects to some universal truth. They don’t quite work as poems and it is an unhappy irony that they should be seen as exemplars of Bunting’s early poetry.