The Irish Time, Saturday, 23 July 2005. www.ireland.com
Article on 21st Ezra Pound Conference, Rapallo

view text/html version

The Irish Times July 23, 2005

SECTION: Opinion; An Irishman's Diary; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 774 words

HEADLINE: An Irishman's Diary

BODY:

The July heat proved a challenge to many of the delegates at the 21st International Ezra Pound Conference in Rapallo. This Italian Riviera town, about an hour by train from Genoa, is much associated with the American poet, who moved to Europe as a young man.

Pound's return to the US in 1945 was under indictment for treason, having sided with Mussolini and fascism during the second World War. His lawyer, Julien Cornell, managed to save the poet's life by pleading that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. In 1958, the indictment was dismissed but by then Pound had been detained for 13 years in a lunatic asylum in Washington. He returned to Rapallo with periods in Venice: between his wife, Dorothy and mistress, Olga Rudge.

Rapallo's Mediterranean bay is narrow, with a stony beach on both sides of the Antico Castello, a castle dating from the 16th century. Palm trees give little relief from the noonday sun unless you ramble through the narrow medieval lanes that lead on to the streets that are noisy with traffic, especially youths on mopeds. Above the town there is a pilgrim path where the hills are covered in trees below the electric blue sky. One of the high points is Montallegro, which has a church commemorating an apparition of the Virgin in 1557. A cable car can take 25 passengers at a time up the steepest slope, giving a bird's eye view of the locality, including another high point with a church, Sant' Ambrogio di Zoagli.

At night, visitors and locals parade along Rapallo's seafront or lounge in the open-air cafes and restaurants, some of which provide music played by small accordion bands. There is a bridge in the town, the Ponte Detto D'Annibale, named after Hannibal who came through on his way to Rome in 218 BC with elephants from Africa.

Pound is not the only writer associated with Rapallo. Max Beerbohm had a villa on the Via Aurelia, a road made by the Romans linking them to ancient Gaul. Nietzsche wrote Thus Sprake Zarathustra while staying on the seafront and Hemingway wrote his story Cat in the Rain at the Hotel Riviera. WB Yeats and his wife lived at 34 Corso Colombo for lengthy periods in the 1920s, maintaining their long-standing friendship with Pound and his circle. There is a plaque to Yeats that quotes from his esoteric book, A Vision, referring to Rapallo's, "thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water's edge".

This month's seminars and lectures took place close to the sea in the Teatro delle Clarisse, with delegates from eight countries and four continents. Among the organisers were Prof William Pratt and Massimo Bacigalupo, author of Ezra Pound, un poeta a Rapallo, whose father was the family doctor to the Pounds.

There was an international poetry reading, a concert featuring some of Pound's compositions for violin and piano, as well as a banquet to celebrate the 80th birthday of Pound's daughter, Mary Pound de Rachewiltz, translator into Italian of The Cantos of Ezra Pound. A sprightly woman, she mixed with delegates, escorted by her daughter, Patrizia. Among Mary's comments about her father was that "he still speaks to us from the silence and his Cantos".

Many themes emerged, such as Pound and fascism, discussed by historians and commentators. "Whether Pound was a traitor or not is still a matter of much controversy," Prof Pratt said. Massimo Bacigalupo chaired a discussion on Pound's influences from Italian literature, and said that "Pound's Italian was a version of his own, intelligible and eccentric".

Another theme was Pound as the editor of TS Eliot, promoter of James Joyce and helper of many other poets and writers; then there were his obsessions with economics, banks, money and usury.

At the Albergo La Vela, the owner recalled Pound walking in the town wearing his wide-brimmed hat. She gave me directions to the Pound plaque on an archway facing the seafront near Via Marsala, where the poet lived in an attic when he first came to Rapallo. The plaque is on a white marble slab with the words, "Il Poeta Americano Ezra Pound (1885-1972)", listing his years in the town from 1924 onwards, and a quotation: "To confess wrong without losing rightness:/ charity I have had sometimes,/ I cannot make it flow thru/ A little light, like a rushlight/ to lead back to splendour".

A few cafes and restaurants have photographs of the poet. The library has a collection of his works alongside books in English donated by many visitors and former residents. Pound's influence in literature endures but his murky dealings with fascism and anti-Semitism are an abiding slur on his genius as a poet.