As a gondolier he may have not been that good… He did not lack physical strength or manual skills, or anything of the like. The pictures of his long and silent ageing have handed down to us an icon of frailty, a thin walking stick always on the point of breaking, but the image of Ezra Pound fighting a boxing match with Ernest Hemingway in early post-war Paris, carving marble and building his own bookcase, tables and chairs in his Montparnasse study, sweating and cursing before the astonished eyes of Prokosch on the Rapallo tennis fields in the ‘30s, was the glowing image of poetical liveliness, the warrior craftsman launching a soul-and-body attack against all the ugly and painful aspects of earthly life. No, it’s just that, long- and loose-limbed, as well as absent-minded and inattentive, as he was, it was not that easy for him to find his balance on that sinuous shell plying the lagoon.


“Penso che senza rimetterci in salute, per qualche settimana potrei farlo”, he wrote to his father. He also took a few lessons, after which he wisely gave it up. He lived on the corner of Fondamenta Nani and calle dei Frari: “Dunque, la mia finestra/dava sullo Squero dove Ogni Santi/incrocia San Trovaso/le cose hanno fine e principio”. That was the very spot where Frederick Rolfe had lived for quite a long time; he was the Baron Crovo of The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, the would-be priest, the morbid and decadent man who,among narrow Venetian streets and canals, had found his amoral and timeless heaven. There could not have been greater differences between the barbarous American young man who arrived in Europe to drink classicism and the mature and refined Englishman who fled his homeland enveloped in good manners to seek new virginity.

But on both Venice acted as a detonator, some sort of revelation, the other dimension compared to the one they had experienced that far. “O Dio, quale grande bontà/abbiamo compiuta in passato/ e scordata, /da donare a noi questa meraviglia, /o Dio delle acque?/O Dio della notte, /quale grande dolore ci attende, /da compensarci così/Innanzi tempo?”, Pound would be writing in his Night Litany dedicated to Venice. It was 1908, he was 23 years old, and as a poet he could already perceive the turmoil he would be going through. We owe Mary de Rachewiltz a gem called Venice through the Cantos, which the publisher Tallone printed as one would have expected of him: manually composed, Magnani ivory tissue paper, types designed by Alberto Tallone and printed in Paris by Ch. Malin, a limited edition comprising 560 copies, 250,000 liras, 142 pages, Italian-English bilingual edition. A filial homage paid to open the thirty-year anniversary since Pound’s death, as well as an acknowledgement in terms of criticism and poetry: no other town kindled the poet’s imagination more than la Serenissima; no other place grew so strongly intertwined with his life and poetics. It was in Venice he died, 2 days after his eighty-second birthday.
They had celebrated the party in his small flat, “il nido nascosto” in calle Querini, the extremely narrow alley running on one side of the Querini-Stampalia Museum: a tiny door, with a marble frame and the steps of number 253. The next evening he suffered from pains in his stomach and at midnight a boat-ambulance was called to take him to the Santi Giovanni e Paolo hospital. They would have wanted to take him on a stretcher, but he refused. If he really had to be admitted to hospital, then he would have walked in, and that’s what he did. Joan Fitzgerald, a sculptor who was friends with Olga Rudge, the poet’s partner, kept the couple company whilst they waited for the doctor to see him.

with Olga

Ezra was impatient and at a certain point whispered there was no reason to continue wasting time there. After a while, Olga asked Joan to pop home and collect one of her husband’s pyjamas, and give a ring to the daughter Mary, “just in case… you know, hospitals are hospitals”. She left and Pound dozed off and later passed away, due to a sudden intestinal bloc, with one of his sapphirine eyes still open. And here he was buried, in the cemetery of the San Michele Island, and in the same tomb, which is still covered in flowers and by a marble slab with the name engraved by Joan, Olga also rests. The funeral procession, which accompanied his remains, left from the island of San Giorgio, and those who witnessed it still hold in their memory the melancholic but not sad image of the last crossing of 20th century civilian poetry in a dim autumn morning.
“Rivedrò mai la Giudecca?”, he had wondered during the troubled times of his Pisan Cantos, “o la luce che riverbera, Ca’ Foscari, Ca’ Giustinian/ o la Ca’, detta di Desdemona/o le due torri dove i cipressi non ci sono più/ e i barconi ancorati lungo le Zattere/ e a nord il molo della Senseria”…
These prayers were answered. He had been there for the first time when he was thirteen years old, in 1898, on a voyage with his uncle, Frances A. Weston: “Uncle Frank”. He again visited Venice in 1902, when the San Marco bell tower collapsed, and he used to explain that disaster to his very young daughter Mary by slowly bending his knees. He then went in 1908, during the days of A lume spento, his first great collections of poems, and subsequently every year until the Great War broke out. He went again in 1920, after which it became a routine, through rented flats, pensions at le Zattere, holidays at the Lido, printing works and ice-creams, “the best in all Venice”, in campo Santo Stefano.
“Sedetti sui gradini della Dogana/Perché le gondole erano troppo care, quell’anno, /E non c’erano “quelle ragazze”, c’era solo un volto, /E la Bucintoro a venti metri gracchiava “stretti, stretti”, /E i travi illuminati, quell’anno, alla Morosini; E i pavoni nella casa di Core, o avrebbero potuto esservi”. This was the Venice of a penniless poet in love, who was however self-confident, aware of his mission, sure he would be leaving his mark, eager to refashion his language, to get rid of the old and open to the new, which only he would have been able to outline and finish off.
The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, near calle dei Fabbri, where another of his Venetian dwellings was, opens on one of the most enchanting places in town and imposingly met his eyes as the “più preciso significato del Quattrocento”: he saw it as the plastic representation of what he was to accomplish in poetry if he wanted to get rid of the Gothicism, symbolisms and Hellenisms with which the poetry of his times was fraught: “E Tullio Romano scolpì le sirene/ come dice il vecchio custode: da allora/nessuno è più capace di scolpirne/ per lo scrigno che è Santa Maria dei Miracoli”. Accuracy and perfection were the qualities he was looking for, both in painting and poetry.
“Davvero preferisco ancora il Carpaccio e il Bellini e in generale i quadri con contorni ben definiti a qualsiasi altro con bordi sfumacchiati. So perché questi contorni non servono per ogni pittura”.

In the Cantos the very names of Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio, and then Tiziano and Canaletto, are those which often recur. In the conference proceedings “Ezra Pound in Venice” (published by Olschki), a beautiful essay by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi illustrates his relationship with visual arts and enlightens that passage from the canto XXVI, where the procession of the Lorenzo Tiepolo doge “can be compared to Gentile Bellini’s “Procession of the cross”, which can be found at the Accademia”. Rhythm, colour, the listed sequence of the various representatives of art, chromatic combinations: “Sfilaron barbieri, le teste imperlate, /conciapelli rozzi;/ maestri pellicciai rifiniti/Maestri di pellicce d’agnello/con coppe d’argento e fiaschi di vino; /E fabbri ferrai col gonfalone/et leurs fioles chargies de vin, /E maestri lanaioli/i vetrai in scarlatto/Reggendo fabbricazioni di vetro”… In the Homeric work represented by the Cantos there is no Ithaca to be reached and to settle in; Venice is the Ithaca you stop at every time that “a shift takes place from everyday life to the divine and eternal world” as noted by Massimo Bacigalupo in his work, which is the most comprehensive study on Venetian and Liguria referents in Pound (Liguria versus Venetia: Two Model’s in Pound’s Poetry)”.
It was ever since the beginning, when he sat on the “steps of the Customs House”, border of Italy, and border of Europe “and of all the space and time he had a first look at, at the beginning of the poem, a frontier he crossed in 1908, when he chose for himself the image of the expatriate, by abandoning America in order to rediscover it”.
On Punta della Salute, just a few steps from the San Vio bridge where he had chosen his dwelling, facing San Giorgio, which would be celebrating his final goodbye, Pound carved out his own Venice as the stem of a ship, with its sides stretching out on the Grand Canal and on the Zattere.

And a sign, the possibility of a light or of a signal, nevertheless came from here: “Ma seguendo il filo d’oro nella trama da Torcello/ al vicolo d’oro (Tigullio). /Ammettere l’errore e tenere al giusto:/ Carità talvolta io l’ebbi, /non riesco a farla fluire: /Un po’ di luce, come un barlume; /ci riconduca allo splendore”. Thirteen years in a criminal lunatic asylum, followed by the final decade in Italy: the more Pound retreated into silence, the more his essence became poetical. In 1961 the painter Giuseppe Santomaso decided to illustrate one of his Pisan Cantos related to Venice. In a sunny restaurant in Burano, the waiter, who had recognised the poet, introduced himself: “I am a poet too”, he produced a notebook and emphatically recited his verses. Later on, Olga Rudge asked Pound for his opinion. “He isn’t worse than many others”, was the reply. For his express wish, the gains from the Santomaso book were used to restore the chapterhouse of the Chiesa dei Frari, with its Donatellian Crucifix and Paolo Veneziano’s splendid lunette; this was the church which witnessed his poetry as a youth. In 1967 Ginsberg arrived at calle Quercini. He chanted some mantras for him, accompanied by a harmonica. They went to Cici’s, a restaurant in the neighbourhood, and they really looked a strange couple, some sort of Buddhist Father Christmas and one of Giacometti characters. “It is difficult for you to write a bad line”, the former said. “The difficult part is writing”, was the reply. Fragments of a conversation, flashes of interest, silent memories: “E il Canal Grande ha resistito fino ai giorni nostri/ anche se il Florian è stato rileccato”.
In Pound’s Venice, rearranged with love and care by Mary de Rachewiltz, our eyes meet excerpts from descriptions and shifts in centuries, the town where the artist is granted leisure and the threat of usury that kills talents and corrupts souls, the great commanders of a high society made of kindness and practicality and their failure in a ruinous sequence of bloodshed and destruction. “And I came here in my young youth,/and lay there under the crocodile./By the column, looking East on Friday,/And I said: Tomorrow I will lie on the South side,/(…)and in the barche with lanterns;/The prows rose silver on silver/taking light in the darkness”.
Translated by interpres sas