Il Dante ritrovato di Ezra Pound (In Italian)

A lecture by Corrado Bologna, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Dante is one of 20th century’s great “discoveries”. Poets such as Pound, Eliot, Mandelstam and Borges helped us to understand him, rethink his poetry, and even in rewrite his work. Back in 1910, Ezra Pound, «il miglior fabbro», understood Richard of St. Victor’s influence over the structure of The Divine Comedy and pointed out the connection between Cavalcanti and Dante. He also gave an innovative interpretation of the “theory of light” in Paradise and interpreted the three kingdoms of the afterlife as a metamorphosis of human “states of mind”.

Many years later, while locked up in St. Elizabeth mental hospital, Pound wrote a letter to the young Italian publisher Vanni Scheiwiller, the son of Giovanni Scheiwiller, who had already published Pound’s poems. That letter shows Pound’s will to publish, with Scheiwiller’s help, a collection of texts that he considered useful to understand Dante’s poetry. That was the beginning of a long friendship between the two. Scheiwiller also planned to collect Pound’s essays on medieval Italian poetry, and especially on Dante and Cavalcanti.  He decided, with Pound’s consent, to publish this book – which he simply called Dante – in 1965. It was meant to celebrate both Pound’s eightieth birthday and the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. Even if the drafts were ready for the imprimatur, the book was never printed and remained just one of his publisher’s “editorial dreams”, until his death.

Corrado Bologna and Lorenzo Fabiani have recently discovered those drafts in Scheiwiller’s archives, in Milan. They finally edited and published the book, with the agreement of Pound’s and Scheiwiller’s heirs.  Pound’s Dante can now finally be read. It is a treasure chest of ideas on The Divine Comedy and on medieval Italian poetry. Pound amazes us because his understanding of Dante precedes what we think of this great author now. In fact, our ideas often come from his, as this book clearly demonstrates.

In ITALIAN. [Q&A in English or Italian]

From Casa Italiana – Zerilli Marimò.