WHAT’S NEW
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Dal naufragio di Europa. Scritti scelti 1909-1965. Introduzione di Giorgio Agamben. Venezia: Neri Pozza, 2016. ISBN 978-88545-0961-0
Questa ampia antologia degli scritti in prosa di Ezra Pound è la sola che l’autore abbia fatto in tempo ad autorizzare tre mesi prima della morte. Che tratti di poesia, di religione o di economia, la sua voce parla «dal naufragio di Europa», dalla «terra devastata» della cultura occidentale, che forse nessuno come lui ha attraversato con assoluta lucidità e altrettanto assoluta visionarietà. Solo Pound – ha detto una volta Eliot – è capace di vedere tutte le figure del passato come contemporanee: Omero e Cavalcanti, Dante e Mussolini, Mani e Browning, Persefone e Woodrow Wilson, Confucio e Arnaut Daniel sono per lui ugualmente vivi e ugualmente significanti. Per questo l’ABC dell’economia non è meno importante dei principi dell’arte della poesia e la critica, tuttora attuale, del sistema bancario, «che strozza i popoli attraverso la moneta», va di pari passo in queste pagine con una limpida introduzione agli assiomi della religione e della filosofia. Che il poeta che aveva percepito con più acutezza la crisi della cultura moderna abbia dedicato un numero impressionante di opuscoli alla critica della «denarolatria» e dell’usura è, in questo senso, perfettamente coerente. «Gli artisti sono le antenne della specie. Gli effetti del male sociale si manifestano innanzitutto nelle arti. La maggior parte dei mali sociali sono alla loro radice economici».
This comprehensive anthology of Ezra Pound’s prose writing is the only one that Pound was able to authorize three months before his death. Whether it is about poetry, religion or economy, his voice speaks of the “wreckage of Europe,” the "devastated earth" of Western culture which no one traversed quite like him, with absolute lucidity and absolute vision. Only Pound - Eliot said once - is able to see all the figures of the past as contemporary: Homer and Cavalcanti, Dante and Mussolini, Mani and Browning, Persephone and Woodrow Wilson, Confucius and Arnaut Daniel are for him equally alive and significant. This why The ABC of Economics is no less important than the principles of the art of poetry and the still valid criticism of the banking system “which strangles peoples through money” goes together in these pages with a limpid introduction to the axioms of religion and philosophy. It makes perfect sense that the poet who had perceived with such acuteness the crises of modern culture dedicated an impressive number of short works to the critique of money-worship and usury. “The artists are the antennae of the race. The effects of social evil are manifested first of all in the arts; the greater part of social evils are at the root economic.”
This is a translation into Italian of William Cookson's volume, Ezra Pound Selected Prose 1909-1965.
Find it on Amazon: here
New Online Resource developed at Princeton:
MAPPPING EXPATRIATE PARIS
MAPPING EXPATRIATE PARIS: The Shakespeare and Company Lending Library Project (MEP) is a digital humanities project, sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) at Princeton University, that examines the Lost Generation using the documents, books, and memorabilia in the Sylvia Beach Papers in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) at Princeton’s Firestone Library.
PROJECT HISTORY
MEP grew out of a graduate seminar taught by Professor Joshua Kotin in 2013. During a visit to RBSC, Jesse McCarthy, a student in the seminar, suggested that the Shakespeare and Company lending library cards would make an excellent dataset for a mapping project about the Lost Generation and interwar Paris.
In the spring of 2015, Princeton’s CDH awarded Kotin and McCarthy a one-year grant to digitize the lending library cards, and develop display and access tools. That summer, the Library’s Digital Photography Studio photographed the lending library cards, and a team of graduate students transcribed them.
When the grant began in the fall, Clifford Wulfman, Digital Initiatives Coordinator at Firestone, joined the MEP team and began to teach the team to use the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to encode the cards to capture names, places, dates, financial transactions, and book titles. Kotin began to develop a prosopographical database (personography) of the lending library members. The team soon discovered a second rich source of data in the Shakespeare and Company logbooks. These documents, too, were soon encoded. Together with the lending library cards, they constitute MEP’s textbase, the major outcome of the first CDH grant.
In the spring of 2016, the CDH renewed its grant to MEP. In the coming year, the MEP team will extend the library card encoding to include regularization of book titles and the representation of borrowing events, and the CDH will develop a robust and interactive website that the public can use to explore the textbase.
