Moscardino by Enrico Pea

EP/EP: Ezra Pound — Enrico Pea
    I think it’s fair to say that Ezra Pound preferred novelists who at heart were poets. As for contemporary Italian writers, he was mainly interested in prose flavored by the earth: speech he heard from peasants, descriptions of people he met in the street; irrational, violent, yet wise characters mostly, as we find them in Tozzi and in Enrico Pea. Nothing abstract. E.P. and E.P. have both left us vivid descriptions of each other and their meetings, so we need not embroider.
    I remember well the enthusiasm with which my father encouraged me to translate Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. He said he had met the best Italian writer and that as soon as I had a presentable chapter typed up, he would show the manuscript to him, because his opinion would count more than his own and he might have some good advice. Pound had already obtained Pea’s permission to translate Moscardino, but he did not know who owned Hardy’s copyright, or how one might secure it. However, the main thing was to get the job done, almost like running a race, as well as to learn the profession since I could not go to school. (In 1941, I had to leave school because of the war.)

    The humility and the gentleness, the fun and the efficiency of Pound’s behavior in his family circle is too often overshadowed by his public imperatives and even more so by the misreadings of outsiders. He knew that my language skills were insufficient for the task, just as he knew that there was no chance of getting his own translation published with the war going on.
    In his first letter to Pea he addresses him as colleague:
    Egregio Collega —
    If you have no better offer, I ask permission to translate Moscardino into English. I am almost convinced of the impossibility of finding a publisher either in England or in the USA, but the book interests me and I am ready to give it a try.
    The logistic problems seem to me purely theoretical, nevertheless I would like to know your feelings about it. I don’t foresee a lucrative business either for author or translator. Mah!
    Anyway, accept my sentiments, etc. I did not know that narrative art had reached Italy . . .
    Cordialissimi saluti . . .
    In general I have believed that the earnings should, if any there be, go approximately ¾ to the author and ¼ to the translator.
    Pea answered promptly on June 13, 1941:
    Caro amico —
    You will have noticed that my work presents some difficulties also because of certain idiomatic words and ways of speaking in Versilia. Nevertheless I am glad for the request you make because Moscardino can be translated only by a man with a lively and modern spirit like yourself.[. . .]
    And thus the work began and, in time, I learned a new word: redola, etymology uncertain, which I had never heard from my Italian teacher in Florence, but which fits Hardy’s “lane,” in disaccord with the general terms in the dictionary. One of my most cherished typescripts remains that first chapter with penned corrections by E.P. and E.P. At sixteen it held promises of future glory. Now I can laugh about the absolute inadequacy of my translation, which of course was never fit to be published. But the awareness of how deeply concerned Pound was not only with good writing, but also with my education, moves me deeply.
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    It was thanks to the publisher, Vanni Scheiwiller, that Enrico Pea wrote his “ grazie, Ezra Pound” for STAGIONE, 1955, a number dedicated to Ezra Pound on his seventieth birthday, with contributions
solicited from the best Italian writers, who were concerned about Pound’s detention at Saint Elisabeth’s, from Accrocca and Anceschi to Bartoolini, Bertolucci, Betocchi, Bigongiari, Caproni, Carrieri, Falla-cara, Giudici, Guidacci, Jahier, Luzi, Montale, Prampolini, Prezzolini, Quasimodo, Sereni, Soffici, Spaziani, Traverso, and Valeri. Scheiwiller himself, in his editorial, quoted Giovanni Papini’s