Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost
slightly shifty in Walter Mori’s
black and white photograph taken
on the Fondamenta Nani, Venice,
in the winter of 1963,
the ageing poet in overcoat and scarf.
The photographer was creating
a series of images of cultural
phenomena. He has his subject stand,
not in one of the usual settings,
like St Mark’s Square, but on this narrow path
beside the Rio San Travaso –
one the busiest, most direct walk ways
from the Grand Canal to the Zattere.
For cognoscenti, over Pound’s right shoulder,
dimly is the Squero di San Travaso,
one of the oldest gondola boatyards.
Caught in the image is a passerby
who has walked on then suddenly turned,
a man with startlingly large, black rimmed
spectacles, like a burlesque foreign agent,
who has stopped as if amazed or appalled
by what he has just seen – hence perhaps
Pound’s expression, his paranoia
overcoming his vanity. Like
some provincial tragic hero
in self-exile – his hubris, by his own
confession, ‘that stupid suburban
prejudice of anti-semitism’ –
he poses reluctantly in a city
of decaying labyrinthine passage ways,
surrounded by unending waters.
A much younger man, during the First World War,
he wrote about poetry, charmingly
and dogmatically denigrating
the Fin de Siècle’s ‘…rhetorical din…
luxurious riot…painted adjectives…’.
His reputation suffers, in retrospect,
from what might be termed the Wagner Syndrome.
Genius and fascist – how is it possible to
both approve and condemn?
By David Selzer
