Pavannes and Divagations: Light Prose and Poetry

by Ezra Pound

The canon of Ezra Pound would be incomplete without a representative collection in the master’s lighter vein.  Pavanes and Divagations  seeks to meet this need. Included are Pound’s long essay ’’Indiscretions,’’ one of his rare autobiographical writings, an assortment of facetious verses, his superb translations from the dialogues of Fontenelle, causeries on topics ranging from religion to the mores of moneyed society, as well as a miscellany of editorials, denunciations, and literary masquerades. Pound’s barbed wit is displayed here to its best advantage. But more than a simple diversion, this volume presents an important but neglected aspect of the prime shaper of modern poetry in English.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddball essays & notations. Worth a look, especially for Pound freaks

[Jake Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pound's is the only translation of Fontenelle's Dialogues of the Dead into English since 1708. But it's no more modern or fluid than the older, and lacks the charm of age.

[Michael Whone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could not finish. The references are obsolete and it comes of as a pedant trying to hard to be brilliant. I've read good Ezra Pound and this isn't one of them, even though I have a first edition of this. There probably a few excellent quatables found throughout. Still not good.

[Russell Stamets · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's so interesting to herar his views on these classics.