Moscardino by Enrico Pea Page B

RRRobertson of the Scotch Church in Venice got so excited.”
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    The Reverend Robertson is mentioned in Canto 76:
    [. . .]
    â€œDawnt let ’em git you” burred the bearded Dottore when was the Scotch Kirrk in Venice to warn one against Babylonian intrigue
    [. . .]
    And the statue of the donkey with ancient rituals still exists in Verona, as does the “Volto Santo” in Lucca. But the translation of the entire text of Il romanzo di Moscardino which includes Il Volto Santo-Magometto-Il Servitore del Diavolo, 1944, is still unpublished, although it was Pea’s ardent wish to have it appear in English. Olga Rudge and John Drummond worked on it for several years, but I suppose the manuscript, unsolicited or rejected, like my Hardy translation, never reached the finished stage.

    Pea’s last letter to Pound at Saint Elisabeth’s is dated March 26, 1958:
    Mio carissimo Pound,
    The Italian radio t-day, March 26, 1 o’clock, has announced that the American government has finally expressed the good intention to set you free. Questa notizia ha messo in allegria la mia casa. [. . .]
    The joyful reunion, looked forward to, never took place. On August 11, 1958, Pea died. On that very day, we had addressed a card to the usual Bar Roma, Forte dei Marmi: “EZP a E.P. salutissimi. ”
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    In 1981, for Pea’s centenary, the province of Lucca sponsored a beautiful volume: il mondo di Pea. Pea’s world: richly illustrated and with many interesting articles by his friends. On pp. 118–19, right above Montale’s words “. . . The superb result is not surprising,” we find the reproduction of the Pesce d’Oro, 1956 cover of Moscardino, and a photograph of Ezra Pound, who had died in 1972. Whether a consequence of remarkable editing and layout or of chance, the two friends would have liked it.
    Mary de Rachewiltz
Brunnenburg, May 2004

Preface
    Before the war Ezra Pound was no more than a name to me. Later I was to learn from Luigi Berti, then his authorized translator, something of the nature of his poetry, with its sudden interpolations of reminiscences, at times parenthetically incorporated in the rhythm of the song, at times abruptly detached from it.
    â€œEzra Pound is the mysterious master of the best of our modern poets, as he was in the past of Eliot, and of many others in England, France, and America. His poetry is a poetry of imagery, and often of analogy: the word has significance in itself even if it is not always immediately clear how its ordinary meaning is to be understood in the context . . .”
    At the same time my curiosity began to be aroused by what I kept hearing of the man and his art. Giovanni Macchia, who was then teaching at the University of Pisa, spoke to me about him; so did G. B. Vicari, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and others. And with surprising simultaneity I also came across specimens of his poetry and repeated references to his name in print. “It happens like that,” Sinisgalli explained
to me: he was always prepared to see the working of occult forces in everything.
    â€œIt happens like that with ideas, discoveries, and inventions even with words: at a certain moment they begin to vibrate in the air, and will even cross the ocean in search of an ear tuned to receive them.
    â€œA few days ago, in fact (I’ve no idea for what strange symbolic reason), a word I’d never heard of before came under my eyes at least five times in the space of a week. I almost felt I was being persecuted by what seemed to me a diabolic word: nassa. Never before had I even heard the sound of it, though I now know that it’s the name for a kind of cigar-shaped, basket-work trap, made of canes or osiers, used for catching fish.”
    It was not long afterward, on reading an interview dealing with the American poet’s opinion of various Italian writers, that I learned that Pound considered me one of the few worthy of being made known