1As early as 1924, a mere two years after the BBC had started regular program-ming, Pound was already comparing the collage technique of his Cantos to the medley of voices produced by turning a radio dial: “Simplest parallel I can give,” he informed his father Homer in a letter, “is radio where you tell who is -talking by the noise they make.”‑1 A similar fascination with the radio informs his estimate of Lenin’s speeches in the Autumn 1928 issue of his magazine Exile: “…the Russian revolution owes its success to Marconi. You may verify this by reference to John Reed’s ‘10 Days that Shook the World.’ The bolshevik coup d’état could not have been effected without wireless; the other means of communication were sabotaged.” Lenin, he continued, “is more interesting than any surviving stylist. He probably never wrote a single brilliant sentence… but he invented… a new medium, something between speech and action (language as cathode ray) which is worthy of any writer’s study.”‑2
2Radio, this “new medium” of performative utterance, which opens up an entirely modern mode of revolutionary praxis situated “between speech and action” by demonstrating (to quote Austin) just “how to do things with words,” is of course the technology that sealed Pound’s conversion to the new Logos of Lo Stato Fascista (while in turn proving directly responsible for his subsequent incarcerations at Pisa and St. Elizabeths). In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound registers his apostolic moment of illumination upon listening to His Master’s Voice speaking on the radio from Milan: “On Oct 6th of the year current (anno XII, [i.e. 1934]) between 4 P.M. and 4:30 Mussolini speaking very clearly four or five words at a time, with a pause, quite a long pause, between phrases, to let it sink in, told 40 million Italians together with auditors in the U.S.A. and the Argentine that the problem of production was solved, and that they could now turn their minds to distribution” (Jefferson and/or Mussolini vii-viii). Language as cathode ray: with these few magical and wireless words the Boss, according to Pound, had managed to vaporize, at exactly 4:14 in the afternoon, the entire doctrine of Scarcity Economics, thereby bringing about, at one fell verbal swoop, the “end of poverty in the Italian peninsula.” “The more one examines the Milan Speech,” Pound goes on to comment in awe, “the more one is reminded of Brancusi, the stone blocks from which no error emerges, from whatever angle one looks at them”—Mussolini the avant-garde artifex echoing “Canto XXV”’s “as the sculptor sees the form in the air/before he sets hand to mallet,/and as he sees the in, and the through, the four sides/not the one face to the painter.”
3Radio makes its first appearance in Pound’s epic in “Canto XXXVIII” (a mere six pages after the “Donna mi prega” translation of “Canto XXXVI”) in the figure of its putative Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of wireless telegraphy and recipient of the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on electromagnetic waves. Marconi’s 1933 audience with Pope Pius XI is staged by Pound as an allegorical encounter between those immaterial radiances of form-giving energy shared by both modern science and medieval Christianity, radio here meeting religion:
Marconi knelt in the ancient manner
like Jimmy Walker sayin’ his prayers
His Holiness expressed a polite curiosity
as to how His Excellency had chased those
electric shakes through the a’mosphere.
4First published in the New Age in September 1933 (the very same year that Pound obtained his first personal audience with Il Duce), “Canto XXXVIII” moves ideogrammatically from modern communications technology into the reform of conditions of production with a quotation from Dexter Kimball’s 1929 work on Industrial Economics:
(thus cigar-makers whose work is highly repetitive
can perform the necessary operations almost automatically
and at the same time listen to readers who are hired
for the purpose of providing mental entertainment while they
work…)
5—the allusion here being to those professional readers (or lectores) employed to read aloud to the workers in cigar-manufacturing factories in Havana in order to occupy the minds and ears of the laborers as they set about their tedious tasks.3 In his 1927 essay on “Workshop Instrumentation” for the New Masses, Pound would similarly suggest, in Futurist fashion, that the very noise of industrial machinery might be composed or “harmonized” into musical tempi so as to aesthetically disalienate labor by transforming the entire factory floor into an operatic Gesamtkunstwerk.4
6What is common to all these various elements I have been teasing out of “Canto XXXVIII” is a particular fantasy of “audience” that begins to mark Pound’s work in the late ’20s and early ’30s—one that imagines the “people” as a “listening crowd” (as Alice Kaplan has called it in her analysis of Fascist radio in France).5 It is to this crowd, as the juxtaposition of “Canto XXXVIII” and “XXXVI” suggests, that Pound’s opera Cavalcanti is addressed, as are indeed his later wartime radio speeches—the final one of which (entitled “Civilization” and broadcast on July 24, 1943) was, as Mary de Rachewiltz reminds us, appropriately enough devoted largely to Calvacanti and Del Garbo specialist Otto Bird.6 When Margaret Fisher’s book on Pound and radio is published by M.I.T. Press, we will probably know a great deal more about his dealings with the BBC.7 Suffice it to say that his opera Le Testament de François Villon, first performed live in Paris in 1926, was broadcast on the BBC’s National Programme on Oct. 26, 1931 and then repeated on the London Regional service the following night. Pound listened raptly to the broadcast on the wireless set in the electrician’s kitchen in Rapallo and was delighted at the clarity of the transmission. “E fa di clarità l’aer tremare”: “I not only knew who was singing,” Pound reported, “but I could distinguish the words, and the sense of the words” (Kulchur 366).8 Which seemed to prove that he had truly managed, via the sculpture of music and the medium of radio, to cut form into air with such precision that it could be now -translated to the masses, without distortion, across the globe.9
7As a result of the relative critical success of his Villon, Pound was encouraged by BBC producer E.A. Harding to compose another opera based on the poetry of Cavalacanti, especially conceived for radio though in the end never produced.10 Pound apparently responded with alacrity, for radio (etymologically rooted in the Dantescan radiare) seemed the perfect medium for Guido’s work. Already in his 1910 preface to his bilingual edition of the Sonnets and Ballate, Pound had insisted that in Cavalcanti the particular “virtù”, that is, “the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person” was akin to the “noble virtue of energy” that had recently been discovered in radium. Both “modern science” (that is, the the radioactive isotopes of the Curies), and “modern mysticism” (that is, the “emanations” of Blake and Swedenborg), he claimed, confirmed the “spiritual chemistry” at work in the the erotically charged force-fields of Cavalcanti’s universe, that “radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies.” Having in his 1932 edition of Rime attempted to arrange the optics of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega typographically on the page “in such a way that its articulations strike the eye” in Mallarmean fashion, Pound now undertook to trace out its “concrete or material sonority” for the listener’s ear (Anderson 13, 208, 216).
8In his preface to the libretto of this “Sung Dramedy in Three Acts,” Pound sets out the populist intentions of his radio opera: “As with his Villon the composer here continues to follow his intention, that is, to take the world’s -greatest poetry out of books, to put it on the air to bring it to the ear of the people, even when they cannot understand it, or cannot understand all of it at once. The meaning can be explained but the emotion and beauty cannot be explained.// The poems are left in the original, the dialog into English so that you can -follow the story of the play…”‑11
9Since most of you are probably unfamiliar with the opera, let me run through its story—I’ll leave the analysis of its music to more competent musicologists.12 The spare narrative framework on which Pound’s hangs his settings of eleven Cavalcanti poems and two songs of Sordello very much resembles the elliptical and somewhat fractured plot structure of the troubadour vidas that he used to such great effect in his early cantos. Each act, in Brechtian fashion, is preceded by a summary provided by an “Announcer.”
10“Milords, Miladies,‑etcetera!,” Act I begins, “You shall now see, or rather hear the voice of Guido Cavalcanti, the famous eyetalyan, the man that taught Dante his job. You shall hear him first melancholy, you shall hear him bored, like all baritones, at the voice of a tenor, you shall hear him jump over quite a large sculptural monument to escape the company of the tenor and the tenor’s friends, spongers or admirers, thirdly you shall hear him suggest to three of his friends that they the four of ‘em take on a gang of eleven as you might say Florentine gangsters, composed from the first families of the city, and his friends showing a grain of prudence, you shall hear him constrained and constructed to run like a rabbit, hoist himself over a wall covered with bottle-tops, finally escaping by kicking a sizeable flowerpot onto the head of his leading pursuer, Corso Donati Buendolmonti.”
11Pound’s source here is course the famous cemetery anecdote recounted by Boccacio (and quoted at length by Rossetti in the biographical sketch of the poet contained in his Dante and His Circle‑13) in which Cavalcanti leaps over a tomb to escape his Guelph attackers (an episode which Italo Calvino [10-16] sees as emblematic of the poet’s most cardinal virtue, namely, leggereza), here transformed by Pound into a rambunctious scene out of silent comedy (one thinks of Douglas Fairbanks as the acrobatic trickster François Villon), with Cavalcanti resembling less Boccacio’s noble atheist than such Poundian squadristi figures as Sordello, Ezzelino, or Malatesta, all of whom are characterized by that same feisty “robustezza” or “masculinity” which he ascribes to Guido.
12Act II continues in this same comic, populist vein, with Guido, as Pound notes, “at the apparent height of his fortunes,” seated pensively at a table in the courtyard of his townhouse, singing “Se m’hai del tutto obliato mercede,” and attempting to concentrate on a chess game, but then distracted when his friends burst into a rowdy rendition of his ballata “In boschetto trovai pastorella.” Drawing on an anecdote reported by the chronicler Sachetti (and also relayed by Rossetti), Pound has Cavalcanti irascibly smack his young cousin Ricco for making too much noise during his chess game, with the young boy then -taking his revenge by nailing Guido’s coat tails down to the bench. It is in this ridiculous posture, literally nailed down to his seat in a burlesque version of the cruci-fixion, that Guido is persuaded by his boisterous disciples to sing his “capola- voro,” “Donna mi prega,” amid off-color jokes about “cantus firmus” and the nail—a rather unexpected mise en scène for the performance of Cavalcanti’s most philosophical canzone, the abstruseness of which is underlined by its periodic interruption by the baffled or sarcastic comments of the various members of his entourage, Pound’s painstaking attention to the various scholastic shades of Cavalcanti’s terminology here submitted to a self-parodic Entfremdungseffekt:
1st White: An accident!
Orlandi: An effect. An effect does not enter a subject as a nail enters a wall.
3rd White: He will never know a nail from an effect, but he might understand a nail as an accident.
2nd White: SHHHH!‑14
13Guido never manages to sing his masterpiece to its conclusion, for toward the end of his canzone his baritone is interrupted by the mezzosoprano of the old servant Vanna (sic!) singing in Provençal: the tune is that of Sordello’s “Tos temps serai ves Amor,” an air that Guido immediately recognizes as a song Madame Cunizza used to sing when she lived at his father’s house and which provokes him to reflect “Damn, damn, damn, I ought to simplify”—as if to admit that the psychological and intellectual intricacies of the dolce stile nuovo pale beside what Pound terms the “felicity and cleanness” of Sordello’s motz el son. It is a pivotal (and wholly Poundian) moment in the opera and structurally parallels the Provençal aria (“Mère au saveur”) of the “Voice from the Church” in the 1931 radio production of Le Testament, for it dramatizes the crucial role that Cunizza da Romano and Sordello will assume in the Cantos from 1929 onward, first in the revised version of “Canto VI” (where the documentary evidence of her manumission of her brother’s slaves is first mentioned), then in “Canto XXIX”, and finally at the very end of “Canto XXXVI”, where the translation of “Donna mi prega” segues into the generous and sacred -sexuality of Cunizza (“sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu”) and then into the picaresque adventures her lover Sordello—who, for Pound, now replaces the earlier Arnaut Daniel as the central troubadour in Western tradition, providing as he does the most tangible link, via his love-affair with Cunizza, between the music of Pro-vence and the poetry of Cavalcanti and Dante. Cunizza’s erotic body and voice, witnessed first-hand (so Pound was convinced) by the young Dante and Guido during her residence in the House of the Cavalcanti, thus provide the precise historical locus where the “cult of Amor” of Provence (and behind it, the mysteries of Eleusis) is transmitted in a direct unbroken line from southern France to Tuscany.15 She is, in other words, the pure incarnation of translatio and (because of the manumission of her slaves) of compassionate caritas—and so she will appear in the Italian Sant’ Ambrogio fragments of January-February 1945 published by Bush (179-188) and Bacigalupo (36-37) and later in the Pisan Cantos. And here is how Pound in 1933 imagines her singing Sordello’s Provençal, her ancient voice channelled by the servant Vanna—all 46 seconds of it:
[“Tos temps serai ves Amor,” track 17 of the CD “Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound,” produced by Robert Hughes and Charles Amirkhamian and commercially available from Other Minds Music]
14After this brief aria, Act II comes to a swift and brutal close with a messenger arriving to inform Guido that “for the welfare and the tranquillity of the Florentine state,” he has been exiled to the swamps of Sarzana. Cavalcanti, arrogantly insouciant as usual, is “unable to contain his laughter” upon discov-ering his fate, and sarcastically refers to the man who has signed the decree as “that runty pig’s fledgling”—he turns out to be none other than his old friend, Dante Alighieri (a detail also mentioned by Rossetti).
15Act III finds Guido in exile and on the verge of death in Sarzana, “a man on whom the sun has gone down” (“Canto LXXIV”), now confined to a terrace beneath the fortress wall. Beyond the wall, one of the stragglers from the French army sings Sordello’s “Ailas e qu’em fau miei huelh,” (“What use are eyes that see not my desire,” quoted in “Canto XXIX”), to which Guido (shades of Pound at Pisa) half-replies by the plangent ballata “Quando di morte mi convien trar vita,” (“Since I must drag life out of death”). Ricco, his young nail-driving cousin has followed him into exile as his page, and in the following scene the two, baritone and tenor, sing “Perch’io non spero di tornar già mai.” Modern Cavalcanti scholarship of course dismisses the legend that this ballata was written during Cavalcanti’s exile: this is a biographeme that Pound inherits from Rossetti’s Dante and His Circle, where the translation of the poem was subtitled “Exile in Sarzana.” Be that as it may, Guido is anxious to teach the poem to young Ricco, so that he may “Get it through” and irritably tries to correct the boy’s pronunciation of its words. Judging from his notes, Pound apparently felt that this deathbed scene of instruction was the most important episode in the opera, turning as it does (once again) on the crucial question of transmission and translatio. As the Announcer explains at the beginning of the act, “The ‘Perch’io non spero’” is all important to Guido as it is the last cypher message to his party in Florence. The cypher is not in the words but in the music where only another musician can find it.”‑16 But alas Guido dies in the course of the song and Ricco, sobbing, exclaims at the end “Guido, I haven’t learned it”—i.e. although Guido’s words may survive in written form, their music, as Pound often lamented, has been irretrievably lost:
[“Perch’io non spero,” track 20 of “Ego Scriptor Cantilenae”]
16It is tempting to read this setting of the “cypher message” of “Perch’io non spero di tornar” as Pound-Guido’s reply to Eliot-Dante’s equally encrypted version of this ballata in “Ash Wednesday,” published only two years earlier:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
17But Pound’s insistence that this ballata is in “cypher” and that its music carries some sort of secret message that Ricco must carry back to the Ghibellines in Tuscany would seem point far more uncannily ahead to the Pisan Cantos. Except for its occasional appearance in his Cavalcanti essays (where it occurs in the discussions of Luigi Valli’s cryptographic readings of Il linguaggio secreto di Dante), the word “cypher” is so rare in Pound’s vocabularly that one cannot help associating it with his “Note to Base Censor” of November 1945: “the Cantos contain nothing in the nature of cypher or intended obscurity… they contain nothing seditious” (Pound and Spoo 199). But of course, as recent readings have shown, these cantos are in fact profoundly seditious, -containing much that can be construed as Guido-Pound’s dying “cypher message” to his Ghibelline/Fascist comrades from Sarzana/Pisa—indeed, the DTC psychiatrist Captain Richard Fenner, interviewing Pound after his mental collapse in the “cage,” reported that “patient worries a great deal that he’ll forget some message which he wishes eventually to tell others” and that he “states he is having a great difficulty keeping in mind some facts which he wants to deliver at some time” (Carpenter 663). In any event, as far as the pedagogic -dimension of this staging of the ballata is concerned, the “pargoletta” of “Canto LXXX” (sometimes thought to be Pound’s daughter Mary) can be seen as structurally homologous to the young boy Ricco in this scene of the opera. The -injunction to both is the same: “Remember that I have remembered,/mia pargoletta, and pass on the tradition.”
18Act III of the opera closes with another song strangely proleptic of Pound’s imprisonment at Pisa (and reminiscent of Villon’s final arrest and execution in Le Testament). The previous scenes between the dying Guido and Ricco had been played out on a terrace behind which lies a garden containing what Pound describes as “an image of Fortune not very clearly seen.” As Guido dies, this statue of the goddess Fortuna now enters in the guise of a “Deus ex Machina”—one is reminded of the statue of the Commandatore at the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni—and takes possession of Guido’s prison guard, a burly seneschal or “castelan.” “Possessed by the spirit of the statue,” and “losing himself, losing his sense of his own personality” (so Pound describes him in the libretto), the seneschal literally becomes a medium through which the spirit of the statue sings—an direct echo of “To Guido Cavalcanti” (1910) in which the twenty-five-year-old Pound, comparing himself to Dante seeking inspiration from his illustrious friend and predecessor, asks that Guido confer on him the pentacostal gift of tongues: “Grant! by thy might and hers of San Michele/Thy risen voice send flames this pentecost” (King 142). In a similar trance of -translation, the prison guard in this final act proceeds to channel “Io son la donna che volgo la rota” in baritone before the statue then steps in to replace him, reprising this same canzone in soprano and bringing the opera to a close in a baroque—or, more precisely, a Noh—apotheosis not unlike that of Herakles in Pound’s later Women of Trachis: “What SPLENDOUR it all coheres” (50). In his preface to the libretto, Pound notes that this apotheosis of divine splendour at the opera’s finale marks the imagistic moment when, ideally, the listener’s ear would be transfigured into a visionary eye, were the modern technology readily available: “The seneschal possessed by the spirit of the statue may lose something or rather reserve something; it [may] be mislaid until we have television to help us/the rest of the work has been done with consideration of the radio from the beginning.”‑17
19Significantly enough, this Canzone of Fortune, “Io son la donna,” attributed to Cavalcanti by Rossetti but now generally considered a later Renaissance composition, first appears in Pound’s work in the 1910 Spirit of Romance. Praising its cyclical rhythms, he offered his own translation of its first five lines:
I am the woman who turneth the wheel,
I am who giveth and taketh away.
And I am blamed alway
And wrongly, for my deeds, by ye mankind. (111)
20Although he had to omit it for purely technical reasons from his 1932 -edition of Cavalcanti’s Rime, Pound was extremely excited when in 1929 he discovered the Sienese Canzoniere (MS. I.ix.18) in the Bibliotheca Communale degli Intro-nati, for the manuscript seemed to provide irrefutable proof that this canzone, or at least its first strophe, was indeed by Cavalcanti—and in 1949 Olga Rudge published a monograph, Tre Canzoni de Guido Cavalcanti, to bear out Pound’s findings. At any rate, Pound noted that its “[first] strophe, or Rossetti’s translation of it, stays in the memory” not only because of its strong anaphoric rhythms but because it suggested that “Fortune might speak or sing the whole [poem] in a mask”—this idea of the poem being “used as a mask” clearly inspiring Pound’s dramatization of it as a singing (and potentially, tele-visable and tele-pathic) statue reminiscent of Noh theatre.18
21Were there time, one could follow the radioactive traces of the goddess For-tuna in Pound’s later work. Her rhythmic isotopes (“Io son la Luna”) can be heard in the Italian Sant’ Ambrogio fragments of January-February 1945 and in the Pisan Cantos, often associated with Cunizza, and she appears again in “Canto LXXXVI” of Rock-Drill, via Couvreur, to admonish the wise ruler:
but man is under Fortuna
? that is a forced translation?
La donna che volgo
Man under Fortune,
22followed the ideogram for “Chên,” sometimes translated by Pound as “timing the thunder,” and indicating divine punishment for deviation from the processes of natural justice.
23But if my reading of Pound’s Cavalcanti opera as an uncanny rehearsal of the Pisan Cantos is at all plausible—this “sung dramedy” after all tells, in its barest outline, the story of an an arrogant, irascible and largely misunderstood poet who “at the apparent height of his fortunes” is then cast down into exile, imprisonment, and death, whereupon he is vouchsafed a theophanic glimpse of the goddess Fortune—then I wonder whether it might not also just be possible to hear the voice of Fortuna in the most celebrated passage of the Pisans, “Pull down thy Vanity.” This passage evolves directly out of the complex Cavalcant-ian epiphany of “there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent/whether of spirit or hypostasis”—and as Ronald Bush has shown, these eyes of “Canto LXXXI” owe much to Cunizza’s, glimpsed by Pound in a vision on the cliffs of Sant’Ambrogio several months earlier. As for the “Pull down thy Vanity” passage itself, there has of course has been much discussion as to who exactly the addressee here might be—Pound himself or his vainglorious American captors? Perhaps too little attention, however, has been paid to the identity of “I” who utters this powerful series of imperatives, “Pull down… pull down… I say pull down.” Could it not be, as at end the Cavalcanti opera, the goddess Fortuna herself, here speaking through the male poet in an “impersonal” mask? In the original Italian, the key line of the canzone “Io son la donna” runs: “Dico che chi monta convien che cali”—which might be translated as, “I say that he who rises is fated to fall” [or, as it were, be “pulled down”]. Here is Rossetti’s translation from Dante and His Circle, which Pound wanted to include in his edition of Rime simply because “it stays in the memory” (“dove sta memoria”):
Lo! I am she who makes the wheel to turn;
Lo! I am she who gives and takes away;
Blamed idly, day by day,
In all mine acts by you, ye humankind.
For whoso smites his visage and doth mourn,
What time he renders back my gifts to me,
Learns then that I decree
No state which mine own arrows may not find.
Who clomb must fall;—this bear ye well in mind,
Nor say, because he fell, I did him wrong.
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