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La filosofica famiglia : Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2010.499655

1470-1308

Ronald Bush,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound, Copyright ©2010 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents for the Trustees. All published material by Ezra Pound used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The following texts of Ezra Pound are indicated by abbreviation: C: The standard published edition of the Cantos is now the 13th Printing of the New Directions 1970 edition (New York: New Directions, 1995). Unless otherwise noted, citations from the Cantos below are taken from the this text and will take the form of Canto/Page Number. GK: Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970). I Cantos: I Cantos, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985). LC: Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Letters in Captivity: 1945-1946, Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (eds) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). LE: Literary Essays, T.S. Eliot (ed.) (New York: New Directions, 1954). MA: Machine Art & Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, Maria Luisa Ardizzone (ed.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). PC: Pound's Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes and Essays, David Anderson (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Pound's first and most important source for the filosofica famiglia is Ernst Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861). On Avicenna (Ibn Sina; d. 1038) and ‘the spiriti, spiriti of the eyes, of the senses’, see Pound's remarks in ‘Cavalcanti’ on the intelligence of the senses in Avicenna's De Almahad (LE, 176) and what he writes about Cavalcanti's Sonnet XIII (PC, 58: ‘Per gli occhi fiere un spirito sottile’) in LE, 177. On Avicenna's account of the angelic spheres, see Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul International, 1993), pp. 171–172. On Averroes (Ibn Rachd, d.1198) and the active intelligence, see Renan, 142ff. and Pound's gloss in LE, 186. On Ibn Baja (or Badjah, d.1138), a follower of al-Farabi who wrote of the emanation and return of the soul, see Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme, pp. 68–69, 94–95, 98–99, 144. For Pound's revisions, see Ronald Bush, ‘“Quiet, Not Scornful”?: The Composition of the Pisan Cantos’, in Lawrence Rainey (ed.), A Poem Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 169–212, and ‘Remaking Canto 74’, Paideuma 32 (2003), pp. 157–186. Pound announced the sequence's first terminus in a letter to his wife Dorothy from the Pisan prison camp on October 2, 1945 (i.e. before the opening lines to Mussolini were inserted): ‘I have done a Decad 74/83 … which dont seem any worse than the first 70’ (LC, 101). See Forrest Read, ‘The Pattern of the Pisan Cantos’, Sewanee Review 65.3 (Summer, 1957), pp. 400–419. Text as in The Pocket Book of Verse. Edited and with an Introduction by M.E. Speare, A.B., M.A., Harvard University Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University (New York: Pocket Books, 1940), pp. 59–60. On Pound's negotiations with Lovelace, see Ronald Bush, ‘Poetic Metamorphosis: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and Prison Poetry’, Rivista di Letteratura d'America (forthcoming). I Cantos, p. 1566. The full set of Pound's writings on Cavalcanti can be found in PC. For the broad outlines of Pound's interpretation, see Peter Makin, Pound's Cantos (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 186–195. Interested readers may also wish to consult the readings that Pound facilitated by excavating Dino del Garbo's medieval commentary on ‘Donna mi prega’: Otto Bird, ‘The Canzone d'Amore of Cavalcanti According to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo’, Part I: Medieval Studies, II (1940), pp. 150–203, Part II: Medieval Studies, III (1941), pp. 117–160; J.E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949); Maria Corti, La felicità mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Torino: Einaudi, 1983), esp. pp. 1–27; Antonio Gagliardi, Guido Cavalcanti: Poesia e filosofia (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’ Orso, 2001); and Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). The Del Garbo commentary has been recently included in Enrico Fenzi, La canzone d'amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti (Genova: Melangolo, 1999). See Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), which annotates Pound's interpretation of Cavalcanti (pp. 203–223) as a ‘key expression’ of his ‘Neoplatonic beliefs’ (p. 203), but discusses Avicenna only incidentally. For the texts that anticipated Avicenna's Neoplatonizing Aristotelianism, as for example the so-called ‘Theology’ of Aristotle (which was in fact an Arabic version of Plotinus's Enneads IV–VI), see Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme, p. 130, Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, pp. 206–207, and Olga Lizzini's commentary on Avicenna's ‘Metaphysics’ in Avicenna: Metafisica (Milan: Bompiani, 2002). Avicenna's reading of Aristotle, Lizzini notes, was undertaken ‘alla luce di quei testi del neoplatonismo che, per lo più sotto il nome di Aristotele, andarono a costituire una parte integrante del patrimonio filosofico in arabo; tra di essi spiccano la cosidetta Teologia di Aristotele e il Libro del pene puro’ (p. 124). For the origins of Pound's view of a separable agent or active intellect, see Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme, pp. 142ff. On the continuing controversy among Western and Arabic commentators about Aristotle's notion of the active intelligence, see Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of the Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Maria Luisa Ardizzone in Ezra Pound e la scienza: Scritti inediti o rari, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1987 identifies (pp. 31, 47 [fn.66] ) the edition of De Anima that Pound consulted: the Italian condensation, Aristotele, Dell’ Anima. Passi Scelti e comentati da Vito Fazio-Allmayer (Bari: Laterza, 1924). On Pound's early and continuing engagement with Plotinus, first through quotations in Shawcross's 1907 edition of Coleridge's Biographica Literaria, and then through G.R.S. Mead's edition of Thomas Taylor's translation, Selected Works of Plotinus (London, 1895) and finally (via Yeats) through Stephen MacKenna's translation of the complete Enneads (1917–1930), see Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 87–91 and more recently Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme, pp. 134–135, emphasis mine. Also cited by Jacqueline Kaye, ‘Pound and Heresy’, Paideuma 28.1 (Spring 1999), pp. 89–111, esp. pp. 98–99. LE, 164. Pound made two translations of this passage. In ‘Cavalcanti’, he gives the following (LE, 156): From form seen doth he start, that, understood, Taketh in latent intellect – As in a subject ready – place and abode, Yet in that place it ever is unstill, Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down By quality, but is its own effect unendingly Not to delight, but in an ardour of thought That the base likeness of it kindleth not. Several years later, in Canto 36/177, he translated the passage this way: Cometh from a seen form which being understood Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing, Descendeth not by quality but shineth out Himself his own effect unendingly Not in delight but in the being aware Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere. Fazio-Allmayer, the editor of Pound's edition of Aristotle, noted that the ‘intelletto passivo [è] legato come tutte le altre funzioni psiche all'organismo’ (p. 89). This identification of the what is alternatively translated as the passive or possible intellect accords with Del Garbo's commentary in Bird's translation, which holds that the ‘possible intellect … is the subject and place of the apprehended species of things’. Del Garbo thus is in agreement with Aristotle (De Anima III. iv, 429a27) and with Renan's assertion, already quoted, that the passive intellect is ‘individuel et périssable’. Pound registers a problem with the formula ‘intelletto passivo’ at LE, 184-5, but only because he does not wish to attribute the individual mind to a faculty that simply ‘recevoir les PHANTASMATA’ (LE, 185), not because he holds with Averroes, who, as Fazio-Allmayer (p. 100) notes, alone in this long tradition regards the possible as well as the active intellect to be separable from the individual organism. (It should be observed, however, that Maria Corti follows the Averroists on this matter in her commentary on ‘Donna mi prega’ (see esp. pp. 23–24) and consequently so does Margaret Fisher, in Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931-1933 (Boston: MIT Press, 2002), p. 274. Though I do not agree with Fisher on this point, I am much in her debt, both for the quality of the work she has done on these and similar subjects in Ezra Pound's Radio Operas and for related conversations over the course of the last several years.) As David Anderson (PC, 270) observes, ‘the subject of “ha” and the verbs following it is unclear: it is either the “veduta forma” of l.21 or an implied “Amor”’. Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. With an English Translation by W.S. Hett. (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library – Harvard University Press, 1936), 424a, pp. 136–137. (II. xii.) All further references to this volume, which includes ‘On Memory and Recollection’ in Parva Naturalia, will be abbreviated to Loeb, On the Soul. Del Garbo is in part translated by Bird as follows: ‘First, the species of the thing comes to the exterior senses, as sight, hearing, touch, taste or small; from these it goes to the interior powers of the soul, first to the fantasy, then to the cogitative power, and finally to the memorial power; thence it transcends the sensitive order and comes to the possible intellect which is the highest of the apprehensive powers. The intellect is called possibile to differentiate it from the agent intellect, which is also in us [but not in our power] … [thus,] the apprehension that the lover has is not purely sensitive; for inasmuch as it comes to the possible intellect it partakes of the intellect’. Bird, however, notes that Del Garbo seems to have taken this account from a follower of Avicenna rather than from Avicenna himself or from Aristotle, since it is close to Avicenna's account of Aristotle, but not identical. Among the differences, he observes, is that in a crucial case Del Garbo takes leave of Avicenna when he ‘posits the agent intellect as existing within us, [whereas] … Avicenna … posits it as existing outside us in an Intelligence’. See Bird, ‘The Canzone d'Amore of Cavalcanti According to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo’, Part I:194, 196. (In reference to the agent intellect, Bird refers to Avicenna's Metaphysics IX.4.) ‘On Memory I’ in Loeb, On the Soul, 450b, pp. 294–295. Aristotle goes on to say that in older people affection is not sufficient and ‘owing to detrition like that of old walls in buildings, or to the hardness of the receiving surface, the impression does not penetrate. For this reason the very young and the old have poor memories; they are in a state of flux, the young because of their growth, the old because of their decay. … with the former the picture does not remain in the soul, with the latter it makes no impression’ (450b). ‘On Memory I’ in Loeb, On the Soul, 451a, pp. 296–297. Otto Bird, ‘The Canzone d'Amore of Cavalcanti According to the Commentary of Dino del Garbo’, Part I: Medieval Studies, II (1940), pp. 194–196. Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect, p. 89, referring to that portion of the Shifa concerning the De Anima. See also F. Rahman, Avicenna's Psychology (ed.) (London: 1952), pp. 245–248 and pp. 235–236. For further explication, see Davidson, pp. 89–94. (It is likely here that Pound inferred the interpretation from texts other than the long Metaphysics.) See Luigi Valli, Il Linguaggio Segreto di Dante e dei ‘Fideli d'Amore’ (Biblioteca di Filosofia e Scienza: Roma, 1928), esp. pp. 82–91. Loeb, On the Soul III.v, pp. 170–171 (430a). W.D. Ross, Aristotle: A Complete Exposition of his Works and Thought (New York, Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 146–148. In the translation of De Anima that Pound consulted, Vito Fazio-Allmayer explains in reference to De Anima III. ii. (426b.29-427 a.14) that the active intelligence actualises potential understanding just as light actualises the potential colors of objects (‘come la luce del sole fa passare in atto i colori potenziali degli oggetti’ (p. 90). For the differences, see Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna (London: Cornell University Press, Updated Edition 2006), pp. 166, 169. See Maria Luisa Ardizzone, ‘Pound's Language in Rock-Drill: Two Theses for a Genealogy’, Paideuma 21.1/2 (Spring/Fall 1993), pp. 121–148; ‘The Genesis and Structure of Pound's Paradise: Looking at the Vocabulary’, Paideuma 22.3 (Winter 1993), pp. 13–37; and ‘Pound as Reader of Aristotle and His Medieval Commentators and Dante's Commedia’, in Dante e Pound. A cura di Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Lungo: Ravenna, 1998, pp. 205–231. See especially ‘Genesis’, p. 31. (Ardizzone alludes to the discussion of accident in Carame's Latin Avicenna in ‘Pound as Reader’, p. 219, but without pursuing its significance.) See the discussion of Pound's unpublished notes associated with his radio opera, Cavalcanti, below, where he reminds himself that accidents are ‘not due to chance’. In the essay ‘Cavalcanti’ he notes that even in Aristotle these laws represents a kind of scientific knowledge different from but as respectable as the wisdom of the theologian. He notes: ‘Cf. Also Carlini's translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics (XI (K) I.1059 a, 29): ‘Che se diversa è la scienza che studia le sostanze e … quella che studia gli accidenti? E quale delle due è la sapienza? Poiché una diesse procederà dimostrativamente, quella intorno agli accidenti; l'altra, quella delle sostanze, riguarderà, invece, I primi principii’ (LE, 185). See Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in Coitu Phantasia”: Pound's “Cavalcanti” and Avicenna's De Almahad’, Paideuma 20.1&2 (Spring/Fall 1991), pp. 63–75. (Excerpt cited, p. 65). Matthew and Little identify the text Pound consulted as the collection Compendium de Anima. De Mahad i[d est], de Dispositione, seu Loco, ad quem Revertitur Homo, vel Anima eius post Mortem. Aphorismi de Anima. De Diffinitionibus, et Quaesitis. De Divisione Scientiarum, trans., with commentary by Andreas Alpagus of Belluno (Venice: Apud Juntas, 1546). And although Little and Babcock report that in the volume they consulted the text ‘contains no paragraph indentation at the words Pound quotes’ (p. 75), such is not the case for the volume possessed by Oxford's Bodleian Library. LE, 152, cited by Little and Babcock, ‘Amplius’, p. 72. SR, 94. Cf. the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay, where Pound speaks of the way ‘the senses … project for a few yards beyond the body’ (LE, 152). Avicenna, Metaphysices Compendium, translated by Nematallah Carame (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1926), pp. 5–7. (With thanks to Margaret Fisher for helping to obtain the text and for the generosity of her subsequent conversation. My translation would have been impossible without her aid and the support of subsequent conversations with Kenneth Haynes. Any errors, however, remain my own.) Carame's ‘Compendium’ in fact derives not from the long Kitāb al-Shifa, but, as the Arabic title reproduced on Carame's title page identifies, a redacted version of it, the Al-Najāt. (Henry Corbin, in A History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 385, locates the excerpts in the third book of the Al-Najāt.) Aristotle, Metaphysics V.vi. See Aristotle: Metaphysics I (Books I-IX) and II (Books X-XIV), With an English Translation by Hugh Tredennick. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press Loeb Classical Library, 1933, 1935), II.2-3 and I.228-29. For a treatment of the development of the concept of the formal integrity of a substance in Plato and Aristotle, see Theodore Scaltsas, Substances and Universals in Aristotle's Metaphysics, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1994). Scaltas argues that Aristotle's postulation of a substance consists not of ‘many components, but of ‘a single, unified whole’ …. The form unifies the components of a substance, not by relating them (which would leave their distinctness intact), but by reidentifying them, that is, by making them identity-dependent on the whole’ (3). Aristotle therefore argues that ‘there will be Forms of substances only, for example, the Form of Man, the Form of Tiger, Forms of Numbers, but not of the Large and of the Hot. …’ (p. 47). Aristotle, Metaphysics V.vi. See Loeb, I. 226–33. Avicenna may also have in mind Metaphysics VIII. ii.7–8 and iii.3 (1043a 12–21 and 1043b 5–8) here (see Loeb, I. 407–409 and I. 410–411), where Aristotle explains that when two kinds of matter combine ‘no one of them, nor the combination of any two of them, is substance’ (p. 407). He continues: ‘From this it is evident that the actuality or formula is different in the case of different matter; for in some cases it is a combination, in others a mixture, and in others some other of the modes which we have described. Hence in defining the nature of a house, those who describe it as stones, bricks, and wood, describe the potential house, since these things are its matter; those who describe it as “a receptacle for containing goods and bodies”, or something else to the same effect, describe its actuality; but those who combine these two definitions describe the third kind of substance, that which is composed of matter and form. For it would seem that the formula which involves the differentiae is that of the form and the actuality, while that which involves the constituent parts is rather that of the matter’ (p. 409). He then goes on to discuss the more complicated case of a true compound substance (which goes beyond the simple combination of stones, bricks and wood): ‘It appears then … that a syllable is not derived from the phonetic elements plus combination, nor is a house bricks plus combination. And this is true: for the combination or mixture is not derived from the things of which it is a combination or mixture … there must be something which exists besides these, if they are matter; but it is neither an element nor derived from an element, but the substance’ (p. 411). Charles Kahn, ‘Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy’ (1982), cited in David Burrell, ‘Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish thinkers’, in Norman Krezmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 63, 69. Burrell goes on to say that such a reading of ‘accident’ in Avicenna is both untenable and a misreading of the original, but acknowledges that the misunderstanding was longstanding and consequential. See Henry Corbin, A History of Islamic Philosophy, pp. 170–171. Avicenna: Metafisica, p. 124: ‘La sezione si chiude … con l'identificazione delle diverse divisioni della sostanza: corporea o incorporea; vincolata alla materia o, infine, totalmente libera da questa; a ciascuna di queste divisioni corrisponde, nel sistema avicenniano, un ‘grado’ … o ‘rango’ … dell'esistenza: quello dei corpi, quello delle anime e quello delle intelligenze’. Santayana answered Pound's letter by saying that although the subject was not frivolous, Pound was wrong to think he could ‘prove’ it philosophically. ‘Proofs’, he wrote, ‘must rest either on tautology, because you have granted the conclusions in conceiving your premises, or on stupidity, because you are incapable of conceiving anything different from what happens to suggest itself … any given essence has essential relations which are seen to be inevitable when once pointed out. Proofs are therefore interesting because the[y] deepen apprehension; but they prove nothing about matters of fact. I don't know how you define ‘substance’: Spinoza could prove that there was only one substance because he conceived it as the essence and truth of all things lumped together’ (MA, 151–152). For the intricacies of Avicenna's extension of Aristotle and Plotinus on this subject, see Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna, pp. 70–74. For the provenance of this idea in Plotinus, Ennead V.9, see Dominic J. O'Meara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 34ff. See O'Meara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, p. 91. See Plotinus: Ennead V.3, in A.H. Armstrong, ed. and trans., Plotinus: Ennead V, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 90–91, 94–95. For example p. 91: ‘But since we have come to be here below again and in soul, we seek for some kind of persuasion, as if we wanted to contemplate the archetype in the [ikon]’. In a late letter to Wyndham Lewis, Pound reports that he is still ‘mugging along with Plotinus’ and reminds Lewis of the key distinction between ‘EIDOS, form, shape ϵι’̑δoς/and Eikon, likeness ϵι’κω´v’. See Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Timothy Materer (ed.) (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 301 (with thanks to Mark Byron). O'Meara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, p. 89. See Fisher, Ezra Pound's Radio Operas. The note is reproduced in Fisher, Ezra Pound's Radio Operas, p. 155. With thanks to Margaret Fisher for calling it to my attention. Orlando's authority, as Pound writes in ‘Cavalcanti’, derives from the fact that it was his sonnet (‘Onde si move e donde nasce Amore/qual è suo proprio luogo, ov'ei dimora/Sustanza, o accidente, o ei memora?’) ‘which is supposed to have incited Cavalcanti's Donna mi prega’. (LE, 198). Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound. (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003), II. 113. Radio Operas, pp. ix, 154. Fisher notes (p. 154) Pound's earlier translation: ‘And fashions a new person from desire’ – placed (with ironic effect) at the beginning of Canto 27 (C27/129). See Pound's Calligrafia notebook, held in the Beinecke Library Yale, YCAL MSS 53 Box 29, Folder 624. Not unusually, Pound revised as he went on, without deleting his first attempts: ogni besato porta con sé il cielo di [c]ui dipende di [c]ui proviene la letizia sua forza – letizia a che conviene la sua forza [???] congiu. in sé congiunto nel suo dovunque il raggio di Citera si fa stella in quel punto dove converge [translation] every blessed bears within himself a heaven on which he depends from which stems his joy force - joy to which ……. his force [???] in himself joined in his everywhere the ray of Cythera becomes a star in this point where [it?] converges TS in the Beinecke Library, MSS43, Box 76, Folder 3387. For the full text of Pound's unpublished Italian Cantos 74 and 75, see Ronald Bush, ‘Quiet, Not Scornful?’ Pound's 1944–1945 unpublished Italian drafts are discussed in Ronald Bush, ‘Towards Pisa: More From the Archives about Pound's Italian Cantos’, Agenda, 34 (1996/1997), pp. 89–124; ‘Towards Pisa: Ezra Pound's Roman “Emperors”’, Rivista di Letteratura d'America, 23 (2003), pp. 135–159; and ‘The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos’, Rivista di Letteratura d'America, 25 (2005), pp. 27–43. An echo and revision of Paradiso IX.9: ‘E già la vita di quel lume santo/rivolta s'era al Sol che la rïempie/come quel ben ch'a ogni cosa è tanto’, along with Paradiso XXVIII. 404ff: ‘Da quel punto/depende il cielo e tutta la natura’. In Pound's version the heavenly good that inspires the blessed is inside rather than outside the soul. The phrase telescopes and paraphrases two others in Paradiso IX: lines 32–33 (‘Cunizza fui chiamata, e qui refulgo/perché mi vinse il lume d'esta stella’) and lines 66–69: (‘l'altra letizia … mi si fece in vista/qual fin balasso’). TS located in the Olga Rudge Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale (YCAL MSS 53, series ii, Box 29, Folder 627). How come I hear the ancient voices clearer than ever before and more frequently even though I desired them before in no small measure? strong already before but stronger now, and beyond all my powers [E]geria: (Polyhymnia) Erato The periplum that your great sun makes brings the fleet under our cliffs now the ship approaches Earth now Mars, now the son of Maia gay leads a scouting party to our plain you hear the singing, as Anchises at Lemnos heard the girl wail[ing] for spring: either for Pan, or for another God who sleeps/ Adonis is dead, and does not die as at Tolone near the Azores now in the mist; now in the clear light astronomers will tell you how circles graze now one, now another the way a tangent does a circle surrounds or almost, or approaches/ praetor propter [Latin: beyond, beside.] Plotinus: Ennead V, (Loeb Classical Library), V.1, pp. 50–53. See also Plotinus: Ennead V (Loeb Classical Library), V.8, p. 281. Cf. Aristotle: Selections, W.D. Ross (ed.) (New York: Scribners, 1927). In the ‘Topics’, Aristotle differentiates a thing's accidents from its properties: ‘An accident’ is ‘something which may possibly either belong or not belong’ to a thing, for example, ‘“whiteness”, for there is nothing to prevent the same thing being at one time white, and at another not white’. An accident, Aristotle notes, is etymologically related to ‘what happens (accident) to be true’ of something. A ‘property’ on the other hand, is ‘a predicate which does not indicate the essence of a thing, but yet belongs to that thing alone …. Thus it is a property of man to be capable of learning grammar, for if A be a man, then he is capable of learning grammar, and if he be capable of learning grammar, he is a man’ (pp. 17–18, 16). On the Hypostases, see, e.g. Ennead V.1, Loeb, p. 39 and Liebregts, Pound and Neoplatonism, pp. 24–25. Liebregts attempts a gloss on C76/478-9 and suggests a parallel between Pound's syntax and that of the opening sentence of Ennead III.5: ‘What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind?’ (p. 280). (In the original: a theos, a daimon, or an affection of the psyche.) Pound's MS and the primary (Fitts) set of his own typescripts of the Pisan Cantos can be found in the Beinecke Library, Yale, under the classifications YCAL MSS 183 and ZA Pound. Then: ‘your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly I may the beauté of them nat susteyne’ Ed ascoltando al leggier mormorio there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent whether of spirit or hypostasis saw no entire face but what the blindfold hides or at carneval nor any pair showed anger but as unaware of other presence Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes colour, diastasis careless or unaware it had not the whole of the tent's space nor was place for the full EIDOS but if each soul lives in its own space and these interpass, penetrate as lights not interfering casting but shade beyond the other lights nor loses its own forms keeping its cosmos, interlaced, free passing that can cross and intercross [*************************] Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? for the full eidos, the form to pass and intercross each space full of its formal life that moves and keeps defined its clarity, demarcations what thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross First came the seen, then thus the palpable elisium, though it were in the halls of hell, Letter from Dudley Fitts to James Laughlin, April 25/6 1946, Houghton Library, Harvard, bMS Am2077 (576), folder 7. Houghton Library, Harvard, bMS Am2077 (576), folder 7. Houghton Library, Harvard, bMS Am2077 (576), folder 7. The first carbon (setting copy) of the clean typescript has been lost for Canto 81, requiring us to infer Fitts's insertion from the New Directions galley proofs. In the Hymn, Anchises is said to couple with Aphrodite at line 167 oυ’ σα´ϕα ϵι’δω´ς – not clearly knowing what he did (1914; rpt. Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. With an English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, M.A. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Loeb Classical Library. pp. 416–417). This gloss was spelled out by Carol H. Cantrell in ‘Quotidian to Divine: Some Notes on Canto 81’, Paiduema 12.1 (Spring 1983), pp. 11–20 and is accepted by Peter Liebregts (see Pound and Neoplatonism, p. 280). Given the vision of Anchises and Aphrodite at C76/476 (‘or Anchises that laid hold of her flanks of air/drawing her to him/Cythera potens’), the gloss has real plausibility, but the textual evidence weighs against it. It is remarkable, meanwhile, how few of the Cantos’ annotators grapple with this crux. D.S. Carne-Ross, a master classicist, does not address it directly in his reading of the Pisan Cantos, ‘Pound in the Classroom’, Boston University Journal, 21.1 (1973), pp. 25–41. Carroll Terrell, in his A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, revised 1993), turns for guidance to one of Pound's habitual references, John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, and follows a note in Burnet's index to Pythagoras (See Early Greek Philosophy (1897, 1920, 1930; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1957), p. 309), observing that ‘Pound was a devotee of the Pre-Socratics’. Terrell comments that it in ‘some of its forms the word may mean either “know” or “see”’ (Companion, p. 453). Subsequent scholars tend to follow Terrell's lead. William Cookson, in A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Anvil Press, 2001), gives ‘knowing and seeing conjoined. The word has its roots in Pythagoras and the pre-Socratic philosophers’ (p. 159). George Kearns, in A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), glosses: ‘usually given as “knowing”, but, as it also means “having seen, a better English word may be “vision”’ (p. 171). Demetres Tryphonopoulos in The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 1992, p. 107) gives ‘seeing knowledge’.