Alfredo Valenzuela I Seville, (EFE).- Ezra Pound’s intervention was crucial for the publication of “Ulysses” by James Joyce, one of the most revolutionary works of universal literature, but that was more than an act of generosity or of a good literary nose, as revealed by the publication of the poet’s letters and essays on the narrator.
“About Joyce. Correspondence and Essays” is the title of the half-thousand-page volume that, published in Malaga by EDA Libros with the collaboration of the Unicaja Foundation, brings together Pound’s critical work on Joyce. And the correspondence that both giants of literature maintained since their first contact in 1913. And that was not interrupted until Joyce’s death in 1941.
That correspondence became more nourished in 1924 when “Ulysses” had reaped an early triumph. And Pound had already spent a decade fighting for the literary values of the Irish genius to be recognized.
A specialist in Pound’s work, the American professor Forrest Read, who published this work in the United States in 1971, also grouped in this volume other letters that the American poet sent to Joyce’s editors, censors, critics, and protectors. As well as all the articles and essays that he wrote about “Ulysses” and its author. All of them contextualized in the historical and biographical moment of the two authors.
The Nobel Prize Petition
Among the most curious texts are some of the addresses that Pound dedicated to Joyce in his radio program “Here is the voice of Rome”. And the article in which he asked for the Nobel Prize for the author of “Ulysses.” Article that was published the same year that the Nobel was awarded to Yeats, so Pound’s request raised the ensuing dust.
In that same article Pound writes that “a malicious voice” reminded him that this prize -then- had never been awarded to an American. In other words, a compatriot of his, to which the poet responds that “there has only been one American of appropriate magnitude since the award was created.” But who could imagine Henry James “noticing the existence of Sweden”.
Following Professor Read’s notes, one understands the energy, generosity and ingenuity that Pound put into demonstrating, when no one believed in Joyce, that the Irishman was the best writer of his generation. Hence, he fought a thousand battles to find him a publisher. He and to clear the path to literary modernity in the jungle of “contemporary nonsense.”
Eliot, Frost, Hemingway…
The publisher Francisco Javier Torres, director of EDA Libros, told EFE that “’On Joyce’ is a very important work -now in translation by Alicia García Ferreras and David Alcaraz Millán-. Because it allows readers to witness first-hand the vicissitudes of the development and enhancement of ‘Ulysses’ to the public”.
“It is moving to see how Pound puts the defense of the work of other great writers first. Not only Joyce but also Eliot, Frost, Hemingway, Cocteau or Louis Aragon. Of those that we also know today that they are also thanks to Pound- to his own work ”, Torres has pointed out about the work of Pound, of whom he has recalled that he put the economic interests of these authors before those when necessary. their own.
“He sent money to Joyce from his pocket, he sought official and private help, he sent her clothes, shoes, he gave her financial advice, even medical advice. And no less literary advice that has made ‘Ulysses’ what it is. Due in large part to comments and corrections suggested by Pound. As Joyce was sending him the chapters of his work ”, he added.