Tuesday, April 28, 2020
The Smell of Peace
Massimo Bacigalupo, "Ezra the Troubadour," in Claire Davison et al. edd., Provence and the British Imagination (Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere,
Facoltà di Studi Umanistici,
Università degli Studi di Milano, 2013), pp. 175-192 (at 178):
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In any case, Bertran was an early major persona for Pound, who scored one of his irst successes with his 'Sestina: Altaforte', an extrapolation from Bertran in the sestina form (which Bertran himself never used), and a vibrant invocation of war: "Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace". It is remembered that Pound's friendship with another artiste maudit, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, began when Gaudier heard Pound recite the 'bloody sestina' and understood the first line as 'all this South stinks piss'!
