Pound's "Villonaud For This Yule"

VILLONAUD FOR THIS YULE

Towards the Noel that morte saison
(Christ make the shepherds' homage dear!) 
Then when the grey wolves everychone
Drink of the winds their chill small-beer
And lap o' the snows food's gueredon
Then makyth my heart his yule-tide cheer
 (Skoal! with the dregs if the clear be gone!)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Ask ye what ghost I dream upon?
(What of the magians' scented gear?) 
The ghosts of dead loves everyone
That make the stark winds reek with fear
Lest love return with the foison sun
And slay the memories that me cheer
(Such as I drink to mine fashion)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Where are the joys my heart had won?
(Saturn and Mars to Zeus drawn near!) 
Where are the lips mine lay upon,
Aye! where are the glances feat and clear
That bade my heart his valor don?
I skoal to the eyes as grey-blown mere
(Who knows whose was that paragon?)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Prince: ask me not what I have done
Nor what God hath that can me cheer
But ye ask first where the winds are gone
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

--Ezra Pound

Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer"

One of my favorite poems in Old English is "The Seafarer," that melancholy lament with the wonderful setting of being adrift, physically and soulfully, in the sea, however much the speaker plies the oars. I often think of this poem at the end of a tough outing in my kayak.

Here is the translation by Ezra Pound, a translation known for its sonic fidelity and religious infidelity (or reworking). Pound approximates as best one can the rhythmic and alliterative style, the heroic and elegiac spirit, even as he substitutes, as another translator once said, the Angles for the original angels, holding to the underlying pagan culture instead of the specific Christianity of the poem as it has survived to this day.

THE SEAFARER

May I for my own self song's truth reckon,

Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days

Hardship endured oft.

Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

Known on my keel many a care's hold,

And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head

While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

My feet were by frost benumbed.

Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

Hew my heart round and hunger begot

Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

Deprived of my kinsmen;

Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

There I heard naught save the harsh sea

And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,

Did for my games the gannet's clamour,

Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,

The mews' singing all my mead-drink.

Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern

In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

With spray on his pinion.

Not any protector

May make merry man faring needy.

This he little believes, who aye in winsome life

Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business,

Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft

Must bide above brine.

Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then

Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now

The heart's thought that I on high streams

The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

Moaneth alway my mind's lust

That I fare forth, that I afar hence

Seek out a foreign fastness.

For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,

Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;

Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful

But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare

Whatever his lord will.

He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having

Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight

Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,

Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.

Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,

Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,

All this admonisheth man eager of mood,

The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks

On flood-ways to be far departing.

Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,

He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,

The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not--

He the prosperous man - what some perform

Where wandering them widest draweth.

So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,

My mood 'mid the mere-flood,

Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.

On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,

Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,

Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,

O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow

My lord deems to me this dead life

On loan and on land, I believe not

That any earth-weal eternal standeth

Save there be somewhat calamitous

That, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain.

Disease or oldness or sword-hate

Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.

And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after--

Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,

That he will work ere he pass onward,

Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,

Daring ado, ...

So that all men shall honour him after

And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,

Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast,

Delight mid the doughty.

Days little durable,

And all arrogance of earthen riches,

There come now no kings nor Cæsars

Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

Howe'er in mirth most magnified,

Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,

Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

No man at all going the earth's gait,

But age fares against him, his face paleth,

Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,

Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,

Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

And though he strew the grave with gold,

His born brothers, their buried bodies

Be an unlikely treasure hoard.