1 Ezra Pound’s ‘Reactionary Multilingualism’

Pound evidently wrote multilingual literature, or “polyglot poetry,” to use the expression Leonard Forster put forth in his groundbreaking 1968 lectures published as The Poet’s Tongues (1970). Pound and his friend and colleague T. S. Eliot not only used “polyglot quotation as a stylistic device” but went further and made it “an element of their personal style,” the result being “polyglot poetry, in which several different languages are used to form the texture of the poem” (1970: 74–75).

Pound has been given due attention by Forster as well as by prominent scholars such as Lawrence Venuti (1995), Steven Yao (2002), and Jahan Ramazani (2009), in their works within the fields of translation studies, modernist translation and translational poetics respectively. However, if we conceive of literary multilingualism as a field of study in its own right, we must conclude that Pound here tends to get no more than a cursory mention. This is surely not because his poetry is insufficiently multilingual. As every reader of Pound’s magnum opus knows, The Cantos is a poem profoundly marked by multiple bits and pieces of Romance languages accompanying or interrupting the English-language verses; as early as in the second canto, Greek orthography shows up—not to mention Pound’s more or less infamous deployment of Chinese written characters, the first instance of which, 信, transcribed as xin, is to be found at the end of Canto 34 (although, even if the canto in question was originally published as part of Eleven New Cantos in 1934, the xin character was not added until the 1956 edition of The Cantos). So why does not Pound play a greater part in discussions of literary multilingualism?

One reason that Pound is somewhat neglected in the field of literary multilingualism may be that he is politically controversial, with his support of Mussolini and his later straying far in the direction of white supremacism. The scholarship devoted to Pound’s work in general is extensive, but since he arguably represents some sort of original alt-right politics, it is not surprising if someone wishes to tone down his importance or simply offer him less attention. However, this is precisely what is problematic for such a field of study as that of literary multilingualism: A belated ‘no platforming’ is perhaps understandable when it comes to Pound, but it risks smoothing over the rougher edges of multilingual literary practice. If the studies of literary multilingualism at the very outset are limited to its assumed ‘progressive’ representatives, we risk missing out on important historical liaisons between such multilingual practices and reactionary politics.

In the 1980s, Jeffrey Herf wrote about “the paradox of reactionary modernism” (1984, 1). Admittedly, when using the term “modernism,” Herf was primarily referring to a sort of general civilizational and technological rationalism, rather than artistic modernism. However, even modernist art often went hand in hand with reactionary politics. In and of itself this may seem somewhat paradoxical, but as a factual observation it is hardly controversial. Even if we limit ourselves to the literary domain, we realize that Pound was not alone in combining reactionary political attitudes and modernist aesthetics. So did the likes not only of his brother-in-arms Eliot, but other central modernists as well— Gottfried Benn, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Ernst Jünger, Curzio Malaparte, and Luigi Pirandello, to name but a few. Still, would not reactionary multilingualism count as an all-out paradox, almost an oxymoron?

I will not deny that Pound’s political leanings are hard to square with his poetry’s openness for a multitude of cultures and languages. How does one reconcile Pound’s lifelong literary heterogeneity and what eventually became a segregationist stance on his part? Alec Marsh concludes that Pound’s Cantos is a work in which the poet “constantly brings together what his ideology concludes must be kept apart” (2015: 159). This may appear like an unsolvable paradox. How could Pound simultaneously embrace literary multilingualism and support ethnic segregation? In what follows, I will present a reading of Pound’s 1941 canto fragment “Addendum for C” that suggests a possible answer to these questions.

2 “Addendum for C” as Political Poetry

Pound originally published “Addendum for C” in 1942, in the New York–based magazine Vice Versa. The title Pound gave it at the time was “Canto Preceding (72 Circa)”. Pound later expressed a wish to name the fragment “From Canto C” (“C” as in the roman numeral for 100), but his editor James Laughlin ultimately persuaded him to title it “Addendum for canto c” when he included it as the penultimate piece in Drafts & Fragments of Cantos cx–cxvii (1968)—despite the title indicating that the book starts with Canto 110. In later editions, the title of the fragment has been simplified to “Addendum for C.” If we are to believe the dating given in Drafts & Fragments, Pound wrote the fragment in 1941.

In an article in Paideuma, the journal originally devoted to Pound scholarship, Ethan Lewis states that “Addendum for C” seems a “wholly arbitrary title chosen to accord with the symmetry of the Commedia” (1991: 65), that is, Dante’s Divine Comedy. This might indeed be the case. Pound saw Dante’s work as a primary model for his own, letting people imagine that he, at a certain point, himself would end up with a total of a hundred cantos, as would explain his wording in a letter to Eliot of January 18, 1940: Here, Pound stated that he still had “29 canters to write” (Redman, 1991: 194). Given such a clue, one can surely argue that the title “Addendum for C” suggests that this is a fragment that Pound wanted to assign an extraordinary importance. And in fact, it does contain some crucial keys both to Pound’s politics and his poetics, and to how he conceived of these as intertwined.

As a young man, Pound was much the aesthete, but he became increasingly concerned with economic theorizing and Realpolitik. The two final stanzas of “Addendum for C” testify to this change:

Sero, sero! learned that Spain is mercury;

that Finland is nickel. Late learning!

S…… doing evil in place of the R………

“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor

and no man learned anything from them

for their speaking in figures.”

All other sins are open,

Usura alone not understood.

Opium Shanghai, opium Singapore

“with the silver spilla …

amber, caught up and turned …”

Lotophagoi.

pound, Cantos Add/819¹

Some quick exegetical remarks may be of use. The “S” and “R” followed by dots are shorthand for “Sassoon” and “Rothschild” (Terrell, 1993: 725). The final word “Lotophagoi” is a reference to the lotus-eaters in the ninth book of the Odyssey, whom Pound here chooses to parallel with Asian opium smokers, while quoting his own Canto 20 in the antepenultimate and penultimate lines. Even in the earlier canto, there was talk of Lotophagoi, “Lotophagoi of the suave nails, quiet, scornful” (Pound, Cantos 20/93). This line was later to be contrasted with the paradisiacal line from Canto 74: “The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful” (Pound, Cantos, 74/445). Commenting on the ending of “Addendum for C,” Robert Casillo remarks that Pound here links usury to “poisonous drugs dispensed by Jewish opium racketeers, who have turned their victims into Lotophagoi, sunk in luxurious vegetable stupor” (1988: 237). Casillo also refers to “Addendum for C” as “hallucinatory” in itself (305).

What Pound does at the outset of the passage quoted is express some regretful “late learning.” Sero is also the Latin word for “late.” The expression “Sero, sero” was first used by Pound in Canto 25 (Cantos, 25/118). There it begins the lament of the Venetian stonecutters: These stonecutters complain about the parsimonious (and usurious) Venetian state, which owing to its greed has prevented them from continuing work on the Palazzo Ducale—as indicated in Canto 51, Pound saw Venice as having descended from its Renaissance greatness through usury. In the instance of “Addendum for C,” the expression “Sero, sero!” certainly brings this earlier passage to mind, as well as connoting what is arguably the locus classicus for such a redoubling of this specific Latin word, namely a passage from the Confessions of St. Augustine (X, xxvii): “Sero te amavi”; Augustine repeats the expression later in the same syntactical period, something that Pound echoes with his own repetition of the word “sero.” In Pound’s canto, “sero” implies, we might suppose, not late did I come to love you (God), as in Augustine, but rather something like late did I come to recognize the importance of Realpolitik. We should note the political importance ascribed to specifically economic concerns in “Addendum for C”: The poet indicates that countries tend to be treated as nothing but reservoirs for their natural resources, as betrayed in the expressions “Spain is mercury” and “Finland is nickel”—a correction in a typescript version of the fragment even suggests that “Spain equals mercury” (Ezra Pound Papers, Box 78, folder 3446). Pound’s poetry had become more explicitly political than ever.

3 Neschek and Τὸ καλόν as Icons of Cultural ‘Purity’

Even the first section of “Addendum for C” is political, although the specific political implications may need some additional uncovering. These are the opening lines of the fragment:

The Evil is Usury, neschek

the serpent

neschek whose name is known, the defiler,

beyond race and against race

the defiler

Τόκος hic mali medium est

Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,

The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,

Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms,

Wart of the common-weal,

Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things.

Darkness the defiler,

Twin evil of envy,

Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things,

Passing the doors of temples, defiling the Grove of Paphos,

neschek, the crawling evil,

slime, the corrupter of all things,

Poisoner of the fount,

of all fountains, neschek,

The serpent, evil against Nature’s increase,

Against beauty

Τὸ καλόν

formosus nec est nec decens

pound, Cantos Add/818

Readers of Pound will be familiar with his rant against usury in his famous “Usury Canto,” Canto 45, written six years earlier, where usury was portrayed as a force destroying the foundations of all true art. Commenting on this passage from “Addendum for C,” Richard Sieburth writes that it suggests that usury is in fact “the malevolent double or Other of poetry” itself (1987: 170).

Neschek is (Pound’s spelling of) the Hebrew word for “usury.” Jean-Michel Rabaté claims that in this passage Pound sets neshekh (Rabaté’s spelling) up against τὸ καλόν to thereby dramatize the antagonism between usury and wholeness. He adds that Pound dramatizes this antagonism “not for superficial (or ideological) and racialist reasons, but for a conceptual reason” (1986: 188), and that Pound’s use of the Hebrew term neschek “goes along with a refusal to identify usurers with a given race” (189). Since Rabaté published his monograph on Pound’s Cantos in 1986, studies have emerged that paint a clearer picture of Pound’s relation to antisemitism, making it very hard to deny that he, and certainly at some points, was an outright antisemite, such as Casillo’s The Genealogy of Demons (1988). Even so, and although he admits that Pound fell into “the trap of antisemitism” and became “more and more fanatical” in his denunciation of usury, Rabaté repeats essentially the same point he had made in 1986 in an article dating from 2010, saying that Pound “qualified” this denunciation of usury “by saying that usury came from the disregard of Jewish law by Jews themselves” (2010: 138). This must refer to a much-discussed passage in the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 23:19–21).² However, what is prescribed there is not a general law against usury, but a prohibition on taking usury from one’s brethren—not from Gentiles. This is made explicit in interpretations made not only by the likes of Martin Luther, whose vehement anti-Judaism is wellknown (and were to influence the Protestant Church under Nazi Germany; see also Probst 2012), but also by a Jewish philosopher such as Moses Maimonides, as Benjamin Nelson explains in his study The Idea of Usury (1969: xxi, 53–54). Pound was certainly aware that the said law in Deuteronomy did not apply to Gentiles, making it more than unlikely that he would see the later practice of usury as being dependent on any “disregard of Jewish law by Jews themselves.”

Not only Rabaté but also Carroll F. Terrell goes out of his way to defend Pound’s deployment of the Hebrew neschek in “Addendum for C,” partly with reference to what must be the same passage in Deuteronomy: “At the time this was written Pound was aware that he was being attacked for anti-Semitism, which he vigorously denied. Thus, he uses the Hebrew word to show that the Jews from the time of Moses had rules against usury” (1993: 724). How convincing is such an interpretation? Both Terrell and Rabaté give a clear answer—and more or less the same answer—to the question of why the poet chose to use a foreign-language term in the instance of neschek. They argue that it has to do with a simultaneous respect for ethnicity and a denial of the relevance of ethnicity—both a denial of any importance of the all-too-infamous connection between Jews and usury, and at same time a claim that an ancient Jewish prohibition on usury is somehow still relevant. But this is saying too little. If we look at the way the term works in the text, it seems much more double-edged than what Terrell and Rabaté account for. Theirs seem to me to be very sympathetic readings, as they avoid positing any essentialist belief on Pound’s part between usury as a practice and the Jews as a “race.” More sharply put, Terrell and Rabaté are unduly apologetic.

There is something striking about the use of neschek in the “Addendum.” It is not at all obvious that what the inclusion of the Hebrew term does is to invalidate any necessary link between Jews and usury. The passage bears witness to a sort of rage, and the use of the term neschek has among its functions to render all things “Hebrew” suspect. Read with specific attention to its sounds (most of all the alliterations, such as “canker corrupting,” “Darkness the defiler,” and, not least, the first line’s respectively voiced and unvoiced fricatives in “Usury” and neschek), “Addendum for C” can be labeled an exorcism, that is, a spell, a poetic attempt to get rid of evil by naming it. The idea of the passage being a spell is only enhanced by the following three lines, which appear shortly after the ‘exorcist’ passage:

pure light, we beseech thee

Crystal, we beseech thee

Clarity, we beseech thee

pound, Cantos Add/819

While the naming of neschek should be interpreted as a way of confronting usury head on, by naming it in all the names and guises, including foreign words, that it supposedly hides under, these three lines are striking in their traditional way of expressing sincerity, like a prayer, a litany.

Established as an opposition to neschek in “Addendum for C,” we find the Greek expression “Tὸ καλόν.” Where neschek is said to be neither formosus nor decens, i.e., neither “shapely” nor “decent,” this contrasts with “Tὸ καλόν.” The latter takes on a moral dimension that is not so obviously present in the English word “beauty.” Pound seemingly preferred the translation “order” (suggested in Jefferson and/or Mussolini as well as in Cantos 58 and 59). In his Guide to Kulchur (1938) he also describes H. Rackham’s translation of the term as “nobility” in the Loeb library edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as “a brilliant translation” (1970: 316). In “Addendum for C,” the Greek concept is presented as endowed with an almost innate ‘decency.’ One should also note, when comparing the Hebrew and Greek used in “Addendum for C,” that the Greek term is rendered in Greek letters, the Hebrew one in Latin letters. Why? Is it because the reader is supposed to be able to sound out the Greek ones, but not the Hebrew ones? Or has it got to do with the poet’s own competence? Whatever the motivation Pound may have had for latinizing the orthography of the Hebrew word for “usury” but not of the Greek for “beauty,” using the original letters of the source language seems a sign of respect, a respect that consequently is denied the Hebrew language. It is even possible to interpret Pound using neschek transliterated into Roman script as in itself a form of ‘contamination,’ as if the concept has already ‘infiltrated’ the English language.

I stress that neschek is Pound’s spelling, in contrast to neshekh as employed by for example Rabaté. This is worth remarking on, since Rabaté’s spelling seems more accurate (not that this is the only case where Pound’s philological exactitude in The Cantos may be questioned). In Hebrew, the word is written נשֶֶךְ, something that indicates a soft, guttural sound at the end. This word is derived from a root meaning “to bite” or “a bite,” as Rabaté also notes (1986: 189). Pound’s neschek, while undoubtedly intended to represent the same word, would seem to indicate a pronunciation with a hard k and the end, thus changing the meaning of the word, inadvertently referring to a different root. Pound’s neschek seems not to refer to “usury” but to the Hebrew word נשק, which has an entirely different meaning, namely, “a weapon.”

Even more striking is that the Hebrew language is used when the point is to name “usury,” which must be said to be somewhat of the ultimate ‘sin’ in Pound’s thinking about morality, while the Greek and Latin words come in to designate “the beautiful” (or “order”) and “the decent.” This risks being a bit unfair—for the poet does also include the Greek term for “usury,” Τόκος. Still, there is no instance of any positive Hebrew word to be pointed out in “Addendum for C.” Even if one can conceivable posit that Pound had a pious intention when using the Hebrew term neschek, is it not likely that the reader will associate some sort of disgust with it, compared with the use of Greek and Latin in the same fragment? This is possibly how Pound’s editor interpreted Pound’s Canto 52, the one other canto where the term neschek appears. Here it appears numerous times, but one passage is of special interest, since Pound’s publishers, New Directions in the United States and Faber in the United Kingdom, managed to have some of the lines crossed out in the published editions of The Cantos.³ Laughlin had originally suggested Pound remove the lines completely, but Pound insisted on them being printed in a crossed-out version (up to 1986—the later editions have removed the crossing out; see Barnhisel, 2005: 83). This is the passage in question:

Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews

or yr/ grand children will curse you

jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek

also super-neschek or the international racket

specialité of the Stinkschuld

bomb-proof under their house in Paris

where they cd/ store aht voiks

fat slug with three body-guards

soiling our sea front with a pot bellied yacht in the offing,

government full of their gun-swine, bankbuzzards, poppinjays.

pound, Cantos, 52/257–8

Ben is Benjamin Franklin, while “chazims” is a version of the Yiddish word for “pigs.” Earlier in the same canto, a passage, also crossed out by Laughlin, goes on about “poor yitts paying for Stinkschuld / paying for a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim,” that is, poor Jews paying the price for rich Jews’ ‘revenge’ on the ‘Gentiles.’ “Stinkschuld” is again a codeword for Rothschild. The transliteration “aht voiks” for “art works” is Pound imitating supposedly ‘Jewish’ pronunciation. According to Hugh Kenner, Pound’s fury stems in part from a “pot bellied” Rothschild yacht anchored in the harbor of Rapallo, where Pound was living at the time (Casillo 1988: 260).

Once again Terrell is highly apologetic when commenting on this canto: He says that “Pound’s apparent intent is to deplore the way anti-Semites in the 1930s blamed all Jews, including poor ones, for the destructive financial practices of a very few” (1993: 200). This is quite a stretch. Even if one accepts this highly dubious explanation of Pound’s intention, seeing the way the poem actually stands on the page, one realizes that the Yiddish and Hebrew terms hardly function to give any positive connotation to anything Jewish whatsoever—on the contrary, it is as though they are linked to something sinful and unclean. Any attempt at denying that Pound was thinking along these lines is easily disproven. Let us for example look at a passage from Pound’s article “Race or Illness” (originally titled “Razza o malattia”), printed on March 12, 1944, in Il Popolo di Alessandria, one of the most important newspapers of the Salò Republic:

It is time to make an analysis. Hebrewism isn’t race, it’s illness. When a nation dies, Jews multiply like bacilli in carrion. Like an illness, there can be severe cases and lesser cases. The same Jews suffer from it in differing intensities, almost measles or smallpox. When aryans or half-aryans like Roosevelt and Churchill or Eden are stricken, they are real lepers. Analysis of blood can demonstrate the results.

Quoted from redman, 1991: 243⁴

Rather incredibly, and although he considers this the “worst example of Pound’s anti-Semitism,” Tim Redman still claims that if “judged within the context of his time,” Pound was “not a racist” (1991: 158). Casillo strikes me as closer to the mark when he says that even if racism and antisemitism “were far less significant in Italian Fascism than in Nazism,” from the later 1930s on “Pound stands closer to the Nazi than to the Italian Fascist position on the issue of race,” that is, in seeing race as “a biological fact of paramount importance” (1988: 136–7). Redman’s point must be that Pound was not actively racist in the sense that he deemed people with colored skin to be less worth, or that he was not a proponent of “race hatred,” as Burton Hatlen says, in his article on “Racism and Anti-Semitism” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, that he was not:

Although blacks are the principal object of racism in America, Pound never displayed animus against blacks, seeing them rather as simple, happy, natural folk, with a heightened mythic consciousness. We now regard such stereotyping as racist; but if racism implies race hatred, Pound’s attitude toward blacks is not racist. In fact, Pound’s views on blacks were relatively progressive: He denounced lynching and contributed money to a defense fund for the Scottsboro boys, the most famous victims of American racism during the 1930s.

2005: 252

Reading a passage such as this, one may wonder when merely denouncing lynching made someone “relatively progressive.” The fact is that, although perhaps not under the spell of “race hatred,” Pound held strictly segregationist views. This is evident in a letter he wrote on January 18, 1940, also quoted by Redman. In this letter it says:

By RACE I do not mean what’s printed on a passport. The melting pot has been tried and FAILED. Some blends are O.K. but the others rot in three generations even when the mulatto happens to be good. […] We want our Italians Italian; french french; ang/sax ang/sax; Dutch dutch. That is enough for any man, with a very occasional hybrid.

redman, 1991: 196

In his study John Kasper and Ezra Pound (2015), Marsh quite simply treats Pound as a racist. One could of course argue that he thereby uses the term in a present-day sense, but this is contentious, since Marsh quotes Pound to the effect that “each race has its qualities,” that “no race can fully perform the function of another,” and that “any attempt to obscure racial character is anti-scientific” (2015: 10). Admittedly, such views do not necessarily constitute race hatred as such. But they certainly show how important the question of race was for Pound.

4 Ethnic and Eugenic Racism

In his aborted, half-page long essay “For the African=American Language” [sic], probably written in the 1940s, Pound wrote the following: “One race and one race only has fostered in America a speech softer mellower and fuller than the South midland and having a charm not inferior to the 18th cent[u]ry phonetics preserved and tempered in our land, and that is the Negro race” (Marsh, 2005: 21). This statement is as such positive to the language of African Americans. The argument may be linked to Pound’s earlier admiration for the language of traditional societies, as evidenced for example in his 1930 essay “How to Write” (1996: 87–109). In both instances, the admiration seemingly implies that the languages in question sound beautiful. But as in the 1930 essay, this evidently does not mean that its practitioners are endowed with the ability to generalize, for example.

Marsh says that “Pound always sees African Americans as the truest Americans, that is to say as American as himself” (2005: 22). In short, according to Marsh, Pound had a “paternalistic fondness for black people” (154). Still, he must count as a supporter of “ethnic racism,” that is, the “belief that a race has certain distinguishing features and in-bred cultural practices” (73). Pound did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, and instead became influenced by Louis Agassiz, whom Marsh calls “the most influential scientific racist of the nineteenth century” (64) and whose views he compares to Hitler’s. Under the influence of Agassiz, Pound believed that “dark skin and joyful physicality go together,” that “Aryans” have “an innate sense of justice,” while “Jews have big noses and […] specialize in usury” (73). Subscribing to this line of thinking, Pound was, according to Marsh, of the opinion that people of African descent “were predestined to be farmers, not legislators,” and that they were subservient to the “master races,” namely, the Greeks (and their European descendants) and the Chinese (64). What singles Pound out from simply being an all-out white supremacist, Marsh argues, is that he saw not only “Aryans” but even the Chinese as a “culture-bearing race” (151).

As a contrast to ethnic racism, Marsh introduces a second form of racism, namely, “eugenic racism.” He concludes that Pound’s early antisemitism “is above all ethnic and cultural, not primarily prejudice on eugenic grounds” (75), and that this remains the case up through the 1930s. But by 1942, after having read the second volume of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Italian, Pound was, says Marsh, “converted […] to eugenics” (85). Marsh maintains that Pound’s “main objection to Jews was cultural,” at the same time admitting that “‘culture’ easily slides over to ‘racial’” (86). The way I read “Addendum for C,” it is a locus for precisely such a sliding, from the denunciation of usury as a cultural practice to a demonization of Jews as spreaders of illness. This illness could be read metaphorically, but Pound himself goes a long way to prevent such an interpretation by, in the “Addendum” itself, pointing to the need for poets to speak without using symbols or metaphors. All in all, “Addendum for C” seems much in line with the antisemitism present in Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts from Rome, contemporary with the composition of the fragment.

Even in later cantos, Pound would seem to advocate “antisepsis,” that is, racial segregation, and avoidance of race-mixing, for example in Canto 94: “maintain antisepsis, / let the light pour” (Pound, Cantos, 94/635). When Pound in a letter to William Cookson, possibly from 1959, makes a remark on unesco, we can observe a similar idea on what is arguably a more ‘cultural’ level:

Even the Victorian era with its formula: Greece for the arts, Rome for law, the Hebrews for religion was trying to preserve elements, the main elements of different cultures, not à la unesco, trying to melt out all distinctions and reduce the whole to a dull paste of common inhumanity (? and/or nucleosity?).

1991: 232

Importantly, Pound seems to be indicating that segregation is not solely important when it comes to race, but in all matters, as when he states that “nothing is more damnably harmful to everyone, black and white than misceg[e]nation, bastardization and mongrelization of EVERYthing” (quoted from Marsh, 2005: xi–xii). This denial of the value of hybridity is what is of special interest here. My claim is that this denial is operative not only at a political level but in Pound’s poetry as well.

Linguistic hybridity is a central characteristic of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), a work Pound expressed deep reservations about—referring to it as “unimportant” on account of it being “an aimless search for exaggeration” (1978: 129)—after having been an important ally of Joyce’s when it came to agitating for Ulysses (1922) and getting the latter novel published. In The Poet’s Tongues, Forster makes the important observation that keeping the different languages distinct was more pressing for Pound than for Joyce. This I interpret as meaning that the language of Joyce’s late work seems to be some sort of hybrid on the morphological microlevel, while the languages used in The Cantos largely remain combined in unaltered form. It is as if Joyce created his poetic prose in any possible language, while Pound created his poetry in English, equipping it with borrowings from foreign languages, making The Cantos, as Michael Lee Warner suggests, “a work which does not seek a utopian reunification of language, but leaves languages as they are” (1986: xiv). We do not need to go to the lengths Warner does when he describes Finnegans Wake as a work where Joyce was “merely pasting together morphemes and phonemes in multilingual clusters, a cute, but extravagant relative of chinoiserie” (57) to see that where Joyce for example would construct words such as “mammamuscles” (2012: 15) or “meandertale” (18), to give but two example from the work’s first section, Pound on his part would let Greek and Chinese scripts stand there by themselves in his texts alongside his (admittedly often ‘slangy’) English.

Pound tended to splice together already existing text from various sources, where Joyce on his part kneaded each morpheme into new, composite words. In contrast to the multilingualism of Finnegans Wake, the multilingualism of The Cantos is in most cases better described as examples of Pound juxtaposing different languages in what is arguably a collage-like manner or having a sort of mosaic effect. The ‘Universal Language’ or inverted Esperanto of Joyce is fundamentally different from Pound’s multilingual work. While the multilingualism of Finnegans Wake is essentially hybrid, the languages in The Cantos remain in an important manner unmixed: The elements retain their independence even when put together.

5 Segregation in Theory and Practice

I do not agree with Marsh when he claims that Pound’s “eclectic Cantos” is a poem where Pound “constantly brings together what his ideology concludes must be kept apart” (2005: 159). It is of course true in one sense that Pound “brings together” a variety of different languages and cultural expressions in The Cantos. But it seems to me that he does this precisely in order not to mix them. Even in his poetry, at least his mature poetry, he avoids hybridity. In other words, Pound’s poetry is segregationist not only in its statements but also at the morphological microlevel.⁵

In her study Learning to Be Modern (1993), Gail McDonald sees Pound’s youthful embracement of linguistic, literary, and cultural difference as a strategic maneuver: “As Pound gained confidence, he chose the strategy of celebrating difference. Having committed himself to study of foreign language and to the cosmopolitanism they reinforced, Pound felt superior to classmates content to live in only one culture” (2003: 14). Pound might have chosen to “celebrate difference” to enhance his career at a certain point. In fact, we may ask: Did he ever cease celebrating difference? Perhaps not. What is striking is that this celebration at a later stage went hand in hand with segregationist attitudes. Even Casillo, who generally pulls no punches in his analysis of Pound’s antisemitism, grants that antisemitism was not important in Pound’s thought before the late 1920s (1988: 5). When we come to the early 1940s, however, Pound’s use of the Hebrew term neschek in “Addendum for C” is clearly testimony to an ethnic racism, and even arguably sliding over into a eugenic one.

There is a striking co-presence of segregationist theory and practice in Pound’s work: In his prose he sees cultures as something that needs to be kept apart to be preserved; in his poetry he moves away from experimenting with a linguistic “melting pot” instead stressing the need to “leave languages as they are,” as Warner puts it in his study of Pound’s multilingualism (1986: xiv). Whereas the previous inclusions of foreign languages in The Cantos could convincingly have been interpreted as signifying appreciation for Otherness, in “Addendum for C” they now serve as emblems or icons for cultural and racial ‘purity.’

“Addendum for C” represents what is probably the clearest expression of a shift in Pound’s poetics, introducing a phase where his poetry has clear affiliations with a segregationist idea of avoiding hybridity. One may ask whether there is not a danger that I am projecting Pound’s ideas about a segregationist political culture onto a text that continues to be a celebration of literary and cultural difference. I think not. This does not mean that I consider a defense of the value of reading Pound’s poetry to be impossible. But such a defense is dependent on an admission that Pound was a segregationist. Given such an admission, a defense could focus on what should be an obvious fact: Segregation in poetry and in society are two entirely different things.

Conclusion

This article suggests a solution to the paradox that Pound simultaneously embraced literary multilingualism and endorsed ethnic segregation. I have argued that even if the early Pound may have experimented with linguistic hybridity, the later Pound actively did not want to mix languages. “Addendum for C” marks a development in Pound’s multilingual poetry, approaching the antisemitic propaganda of his infamous radio broadcasts. This is not so much a question of how Pound’s poetry presents a stated opinion, but of how it presents the Hebrew term for “usury” as a parasitical term that has infiltrated the English language and needs to be exorcised. What this suggests is that multilingual poetry need not be only a cosmopolitan celebration of cultural and linguistic difference but may just as well be intimately linked to racist ideas.

When L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein said that “Pound’s work contradicts his fascism” (1999: 158), what he was referring to was not the multilingual character of Pound’s poetry but its paratactic and fragmentary character. In Bernstein’s opinion, this ‘un-fascist’ way of composing poetry stands in stark contradiction to Pound’s explicitly stated political opinions. One could easily imagine a similar defense of Pound’s poetry on account of its many multilingual aspects. Yet my analysis shows that Pound’s use of multilingual terms in a poem such as “Addendum for C” must count as instances of ethnic racism, if not also of eugenic racism.

Was Pound celebrating multilingualism as a cultural fact? No. A premise that multilingual literature represents such a celebration is, in my view, too often presupposed in present-day studies of literary multilingualism. The literary multilingualism often celebrated today might need to be regarded more critically than is sometimes done. Even as much as we may appreciate multilingualism as a sign of an ethnically diverse society, a multilingual poem is not necessarily a celebration of such a society.