WHAT'S NEW
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Sean Mark Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis (Cham: Palgrave, 2022)	Jonathon Ullyot Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources: The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

 

Sean Mark, Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis. 

Cham: Palgrave, 2022. ISBN: 978-3-030-91948-1, 392pp, HB €99.99

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.

Jonathan Ullyot, Ezra Pound and his Classical Sources: The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN: 9781350260245, 312pp, HB $153

This book uses Ezra Pound's The Cantos as a lens to understand modernism's ambition to revolutionize literature through mythical and scientific methods. Homer's Odyssey plays a unique methodological and structural role in The Cantos. The Cantos translates, interprets, abridges, adapts, critiques, parodies, trivializes, allegorizes, and “ritualizes” the Odyssey. Partly inspired by Joyce's use of different literary styles or “technics” in Ulysses, and partly inspired by medieval classicism and 19th century philology, Pound uses a plethora of methods to translate Homer and other classical texts. This book argues that The Cantos is a modernist vision of the Matter of Troy, a term used by medieval authors to designate the cycle of texts based on the Trojan war and its aftereffects, including the nostoi (returns) of the Greek heroes.

This is the first study to explore how medieval classicism and translation informs Pound's mythical method and to systematically outline the variety and evolution of Pound's Odyssey translations in The Cantos.