For reasons that will become clearer (to myself) at a later date, I am reading Ezra Pound & Japan, a collection edited by Sanehide Kodama.
Ezra Pound & Japan collects over fifty years of correspondence between Pound and various Japanese poets and editors. The latter parts of the book also contains Ezra’s actual contributions to Japanese literary journals and newspapers.
But what I want to write – briefly – about are the letters. Ezra never went to Japan, stating that he’d either have to be earning far more than he was if he was to afford a trip there, or he’d have to be offered a professorship at a Japanese university. So the thing that makes the letters contained in Ezra Pound & Japan remarkable is that they document the forming, then the life of friendships - in full. This differs from other collections of letters that I’ve (tried to) read because these records are the extent of the relationship, all the words and the only words spoken between friends.
The Pound to Katue Kitasono correspondence is especially illuminating as it begins with a letter from Kitasono, a young Japanese poet and leader of an avant-garde collective called VOU Club. This first letter is, in essence, one from an admirer, written in the hope Pound will take some time to read his work. Soon, through his connections, Pound has VOU Club’s work translated and published in English.
However, in the middle years of their friendship, which also happen to be the years of WWII, Pound’s letters outweigh Kitasono’s four to one, with Pound expounding (!) on economic and political issues, and his financial situation – all matters literary receive less and less attention. Kitasono has by now gotten Pound a job as an international correspondent for Japan Times and it is clear from the letters spent discussing the types of articles he is writing and JT’s payments for them - he tells KK that a ‘Reporters Card’ would be useful to him as “poets have no civic status among other mere men” – how reliant he is on Kitasono, and on the job.
Or maybe it was just chatter between friends separated by land, brought together by poetry.
Lead Igloo
No related posts.
One Comment
This is interesting indeed!
You can’t really write to famous/established artists anymore. I wrote once to an author about a concept they had written about, and i swear she said to me that even she was unclear on what it meant exactly – asking me to let her know how i went in class when i presented my speech on the topic….