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STRANGE ATTRACTORS: EZRA POUND AND THE INVENTION OF JAPAN, II*

David Ewick

�e water by the shore is not shallow. �e man who bound himself to me Returned times out of mind in his thought To me and this cobweb of waters. —Kakitsubata

�e �rst part of this essay appeared in this journal in March 2017. It was divided into �ve sections. �e �rst, ʻ�e Orient from All Quartersʼ, traced the history of Ezra Poundʼs early acquaintance with Japanese sub-jects—important relations with Japanese friends and artists in London, Poundʼs avid reading of Japan, and his own primary-source references to Japanese art and literature—from his earliest meetings with Laurence Binyon at the British Museum Print Room in February 1909 through his earliest traceable references to work having begun on �e Cantos, May to December 1915. Section 2, ʻBlack Bough Red Herringʼ, argued that the scholarly commonplace that ʻhaikuʼ is the most important of Poundʼs debts to Japan is demonstrably wrong, and outlined some of the ways the inter-textual illiteracy of the point came about. Section 3, ʻ“Noh” reception and a volte-face, or twoʼ, overviewed the critical reception of Poundʼs work with Ernest Fenollosaʼs nō manuscripts, from contemporary reviews of the ear-liest book publications of 1916 and 1917 through what with a few excep-tions was the standard line in twentieth-century Pound scholarship, that the nō was for Pound of secondary value, that Pound himself ʻsense[d]ʼ he was ʻdoing something exotic, thin, appreciated rather than livedʼ, as Hugh Kenner had it; the plays were a ʻblind alleyʼ, Donald Davie wrote.1 �e sec-

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tion o�ered evidence from Pound himself that these are misreadings, de-spite doubts Pound himself expressed in 1917 and 1918 which have been cherry-picked from a wealthy orchard and repeated dozens of times by scholars privileging each other over reading Pound. Section 4, ʻTexts Mislaidʼ, accounted for some of this scholarly misunderstanding by noting the history of how and what of Poundʼs several important 1914–1917 texts on and related to Japanese subjects were lost for most of the twentieth century but now have been found, and re-embedded these into the history. Section 5, ʻKulcherʼ, demonstrated that by Guide to Kulchur of 1938 at the latest Pound unmistakably had returned to a sense that the nō represented a mode of conception and literary representation profoundly missing from the post-Homeric European tradition, one which had been and might just again be useful in structuring a long modernist poem.

�is second and concluding part of the essay will pick up from there, grateful to note with admiration and respect recent studies of Pound and Japan which have turned away from chasing butter�ies and chronicling petals on wet black boughs. Both the 2014 and 2016 Ezra Pound Society awards for the best article of the year on Pound, chosen under peer review from amongst many dozens, were on Poundʼs debts to Japan, and neither highlight a word Pound himself never wrote, ʻhaikuʼ. I shall be returning to these articles, by Andrew Houwen and Christopher Bush, below.2

1.　‘A new way of dealing with form’: Chronologies of a Vortex

I have noted elsewhere that Poundʼs earliest traceable references to having begun work on �e Cantos precisely overlap his work with Fenollosaʼs nō manuscripts.3 To be precise, Poundʼs earliest textual refer-ences to work on �e Cantos begun come in letters written between May and December 1915, to his mother 23 May (ʻI am working on a long poemʼ), to Alice Corbin Henderson 9 August (ʻI am working on a long poem which will resemble the Divina Commedia in length but in no other matterʼ), to Milton Bronner 21 September (ʻI am . . . at work on a crysele-phantine poem of immeasurable lengthʼ), to his father 25 September (ʻam at work on a very long poemʼ), and again to Homer on 18 December (in

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reference to the ʻbig long endless poem that I am now struggling withʼ).4 Pound told Donald Hall in 1960 that he ʻsuppose[d]ʼ he began �e Cantos ʻabout 1904ʼ, or had ʻvarious schemes, starting in 1904 or 1905ʼ,5 but he was being expansive in his de�nition of ʻbeginningʼ. Other than what he told Hall the earliest textual evidence available of Pound contemplating the idea of a ʻlong poemʼ is from December 1911—ʻI am certain I have no sugges-tions for your long poemʼ Dorothy Shakespear wrote to him on the 31st6—and Poundʼs own earliest traceable references to having begun writing the long poem, at least those found so far, are those noted above, beginning in May 1915.

�e chronology of Poundʼs encounter with and publication of Fenollosaʼs nō materials represents a luminous co-incidence. I do not be-lieve it has been noted before that Pound and Fenollosa themselves nar-rowly missed passing each other in what would have been mutual lack of recognition in the British Museum Print Room in the third week of September 1908,7 but near-miss aside Pound met Mary Fenollosa �ve years later to the week, 29 September 1913, she had sent to him at least some of her late husbandʼs nō manuscripts by 24 November, and by 29 December Pound had written to William Carlos Williams that he was in possession of ʻall old Fenollosaʼs treasuresʼ.8 Poundʼs �rst publication from the material was Nishikigi, without his name appended to it —ʻWe will not mention who did the extractingʼ9—in the May 1914 Poetry, followed by Kinuta, Hagoromo, and attendant material in ʻ�e Classical Drama of Japanʼ in the October 1914 Quarterly Review. Cathay, also of course from Fenollosaʼs manuscripts, intervened in April 1915, but publication of the nō material picked up again with Sotoba Komachi, Kayoi Komachi, Suma Genji, Kumasaka, Shojo (Shōjō), Tamura, Tsunemasa, and related commentary in ʻ�e Classical Stage of Japanʼ in the May 1915 Drama, then in April 1916 the �rst book, Certain Noble Plays of Japan, three previously-published plays along with Kagekiyo, in an edition of 350 published at Yeatsʼs request at his sisterʼs press in Dundrum, with an introduction by Yeats. In June and August 1916 Awoi no Uye (Aoi no Ue) and Kakitsuhata (Kakitsubata) fol-lowed in Quarterly Notebook and Drama, respectively. ʻNohʼ or Accomplishment, the work which collects versions of nearly all the previ-

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ously-published nō work other than Yeatsʼs Certain Noble Plays introduc-tion, and adds some new material, is dated 1916, but publication was delayed at Macmillan in London and Knopf in New York until early January 1917.10

Poundʼs shi� in self-identi�cation from ʻImagisteʼ to ʻVorticistʼ is not unrelated, and so for comparative purposes, Helen Carr, in by far the full-est study of the Imagist poets, has Poundʼs earliest reference to his own work as ʻImagisteʼ in an August 1912 letter to Monroe, and in any case it certainly was in the last week of September 1912, probably the 27th or 28th, probably in the tea room of the British Museum, when Pound removed his pince-nez and declared H.D. an ʻImagisteʼ.11 �e ʻVorticist Manifestoʼ with Poundʼs name appended to it appeared twenty-one months later, in the �rst issue of Blast, dated 20 June 1914 but delayed until 2 July, a month af-ter Nishikigi appeared in Poetry. Fi�een days later, the evening of 17 July, was Poundʼs most public break with Amy Lowell and the ʻAmygistsʼ, at the Dieudonné restaurant on Ryder Street, St. James.12 Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo 28 June, between the stated date and actual publication of ʻ�e Vorticist Manifestoʼ and nineteen days before Amyʼs ʻImagist dinnerʼ. She was anxious to get back to Sevenels and away from more trouble than Pound.

Much of this set of conjunctions has not gone unnoticed in scholar-ship. Christopher Bush correctly notes that in Pound studies ʻJapan has, with a handful of exceptions, been treated as a narrowly aesthetic inspira-tion for some of Poundʼs early work, soon le� behind for the more “solid” stu� of Chinaʼ, then generously cites my own much-earlier version of this essay, Christine Froula, Peter Nicholls, and Andrew Houwen in writing that ʻthe importance of the noh to the genesis and structure of �e Cantos is long established in Pound scholarship, but its signi�cance has come to be understood in much greater detail since several scholarly discoveries in the 1990sʼ.13 �is is correct, with a reservation. ʻEstablishedʼ, yes, unambigu-ously; widely understood or given general credence in Pound scholarship, well, that remains a question. Most of it still is largely in the ʻnarrowly aes-thetic inspiration for some of Poundʼs early workʼ stage, mainly the Metro poem and haiku, inevitably that when anyone writes anything with ʻImag-ismʼ or ʻImagistsʼ in the title, or even on some occasions in work on Pound

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and China. In many recent cases Pound-China scholarship is superb, and certainly has a deep well to draw upon, but a mouldier strain continues to go out of its way to remind repeatedly that alongside the treasures Pound received from China he also got a little haiku from the Japanese, sometimes accompanied by argumentation that the Japanese derived ʻhaikuʼ from the Chinese, anyway, and so it was always already China from the start.

Pound studies have been Kennerian for excellent reasons since 1951, with Kennerʼs publication of �e Poetry of Ezra Pound, and then this was cemented in 1971 with Kennerʼs magisterial and indispensible �e Pound Era,14 probably the most quoted single book in modernist studies, certainly in Pound studies. Both of Kennerʼs monographs on Pound devote more words to hokku than to nō. Kenner was brilliant and may never be sur-passed in his excellence of scholarly insight into Poundʼs work, the sheer delight of his style, and most of the rest of it, but he was not at his best when writing of Poundʼs Asia, and he had very little idea what nō was. If Pound studies is to reach a post-Kennerian age the point Christopher Bush addresses and that I am addressing now is the best example that the wings of the gods sometimes have feathers seriously enough out of whack to lead amidst �ight to missed connections, strange layovers, and disconcerting ar-rival times.

At the risk of repeating myself once too o�en, Pound himself was clear on the point:

1) September 1914:I am o�en asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. �e Japanese, who evolved the hokku, evolved also the Noh plays. In the best ʻNohʼ the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image, enforced by movement and music. I see nothing against a long vorti-cist poem;

2) before February 1915:I have been challenged as to whether ʻimagismeʼ was ʻany good for anything save very short poemsʼ . . . . Questioned as to ʻthe image itselfʼ,

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I have been able to reply that the Japanese ʻNohʼ plays seem to me in many cases to be built ʻout of the imageʼ. �at is to say their structure in many cases seems to me to be built from a single image, or from two or three images in dramatic relation. And the image, or the succession of images in relation, is in each case reinforced by the metric of the Noh speech, by the line of the movements and of the dancing;

and 3) May 1915, on ʻUnity of Imageʼ in Suma Genji:�is intensi�cation of the Image, the manner of construction, is very in-teresting to me personally, as an Imagiste, for we Imagistes knew noth-ing of these plays when we set out in our own manner. �ese plays are . . . an answer to a question that has several times been put to me: ʻCould one do a long Imagiste poem, or even a long poem in vers libre?ʼ15

Two years ago in the journal of the Pound Society I o�ered payment in the form of a public apology to anyone who could �nd reference to ʻhaikuʼ in Poundʼs hand anywhere or more than a few �eeting references Pound wrote of hokku noted,16 and have received by way of friends some over-heard rebukes but no invoices. Perhaps I could extend the o�er to login in-formation and account number at my bank to anyone who can �nd so much as a clause from Pound himself on either Imagism or Vorticism in relation to the beginning of �e Cantos which does not mention nō as the initial spark which got him past Divina Commedia and Sordello as the pos-sibility of a model.

Added to the above, from Pound, one more thing, already noted brief-ly in the �rst part of this essay, that time Pound wrote in 1915 (probably) or early 1916 that he believed his ʻJapanese thingsʼ not well understood, and then described his understanding of how ʻJapanese emotionʼ allowed for a ʻreconstructing of the pastʼ which o�ers essentially a map for the method-ology of important sections of �e Cantos. Remember the chronology. �is was written either between May and December 1915 or not more than a few months therea�er:

You tell me you do not want Japanese things, that . . . new plays must

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be European. Still it is a Japanese play [Nishikigi] that gives me the closest parallel to my thought. . . . No, I am not going to be oriental. I think you all have your heroes and heroines. You all have your peri-ods. . . . If you went to the Tuileries and really saw Marie Antoinette? If suddenly by the Tiber you saw re-acted, re-arranged, re-presented the events and heard the exact speeches on the morning a�er the Duke of Candia was murdered? Ah no, you would not complain about my giv-ing you Japanese emotion. And . . . the rational continent always says you English are mad about ghosts. . . .17

Poundʼs encounter with the nō and his beginning of �e Cantos was a remarkable co-incidence in which imaginative sparks from a old and long-loved �ame set o� a con�agration at a new hearth. �e important butter�y in the story of Pound and Japan is not the one which returned to Moritakeʼs branch in the sixteenth century but rather the strange attractor which pro-vided the central metaphor upon which Edward Lorenz founded our mod-ern understanding of chaos theory, the ʻextraordinary sensitivity of some non-linear dynamical systems to in�nitesimal di�erences in starting condi-tions called the “butter�y e�ect,” based on a joking reference to the notion that the �utters of a butter�yʼs wings in the Amazon might be enough to shi� the climate over the northern hemisphereʼ,18 and which also when plotted in two dimensions resembles a butter�y. �is was not a choux à la crème Japonaise but a conceptual vortex set in motion by an earlier one across space, time, and language, Poundʼs ʻradiant node[s] or cluster[s] . . . from which and through which, and into which, ideas [were] constantly rushingʼ.19 Before this Pound in two earlier essays, June and August 1914, had approached a de�nition of ʻvorticismʼ, in both cases allying it with his understanding of Japanese art and literature.20 But his most o�en-repeated de�nition of ʻvorticismʼ was published in September 1914, four months af-ter Nishikigi, one before ʻ�e Classical Drama of Japanʼ, and in the same month in which he �rst wrote to his father of work underway on his long poem. Perhaps it is a luminous detail itself that Pound was discussing and even o�ering up examples of ʻintensities of mathematical expressionʼ in the several pages before he fully de�ned ʻvorticismʼ for the �rst time.

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�e equation (x－a)2 + (y－b)2＝r2 governs the circle. It is a circle. It is not a particular circle. It is a circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull as ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come across a new way of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life.21

Pound himself, of course, could not have been aware of the complex math-ematical formulations Lorenz developed years later, but the metaphor is resonant:

Pound’s Japanese butterfly as I understand it is not Moritake’s returning to a sixteenth-century branch, but ‘the butterfly effect’, here represented in computer-generated fractal projections of three dimensional dynamic systems in linear time. In these illustrations of the density (in part) of the ‘strange attractor’ which sets the butterfly in motion, the pa-rameters are ρ = 28, σ = 10, β = 8/3. For most values of ρ the system is stable and evolves toward one of two fixed-point attractors, but when ρ is larger than 24.74 some points are drawn ‘in a very complex way’ to the ‘strange attractor’, and ‘the system evolv[es] without ever crossing itself’.22 The butterfly effect arises in lasers, dynamos, electrical circuits, chemical reactions, some water wheels, and �e Cantos.

2.　Pound and Japan in Post-Kennerian Scholarship, 1963–2017

�e line of counterintelligence Christopher Bush has in mind in writing that the ʻimportance of the noh to the genesis and structure of �e Cantos is long established in Pound scholarshipʼ began with a careful essay reading

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against the Kennerian grain by Myles Slatin in 1963, and the most lumi-nous threads which have followed come in work by Ronald Bush, James Longenbach, Wendy Stallard Flory, Akiko Miyake, Peter Nicholls, Peter Stoiche�, Andrew Houwen, and in Christopher Bushʼs essay itself.23 I earli-er have said most of what I have to say of all of this work except that by Houwen and Bush.24 Particularly regarding the relation of nō to the begin-ning of �e Cantos Houwenʼs essay is the most sharply detailed yet, and Bush opens horizons which intersect with and extend in the particular case the best of Pound and modernism studies today.

Near the heart of Houwenʼs argument are two letters. On 7 July 1915, between Poundʼs �rst two references in letters to having begun work on �e Cantos, he sent his edited translation of the Fenollosa-Hirata nō Takasago to Alice Corbin Henderson at Poetry along with a letter noting the ʻ�awless structureʼ, ʻperfect constructionʼ, and ʻsense of past time in the presentʼ (emphasis Poundʼs) which made it ʻthe very core of the “Noh”ʼ.25 �e earliest of Poundʼs cantos to see publication were the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ which appeared in Poetry in the summer of 1917.26 �ose arrived on Harriet Monroeʼs desk accompanied by a letter from Pound in which he told Monroe that the long poem he had started would have ʻroughly the theme of Takasagoʼ and that he ʻhope[d] to incorporate more explicitly in a later part of the poemʼ the ʻstoryʼ of that play.27

�e central image of Takasago, as Houwen notes, is that of two paired pine trees, 相生の松, Ai-oi no matsu, literally ʻthe pines of intermingled lifeʼ, or, as in Poundʼs version, the pines ʻgrowing togetherʼ, even though separated across space and time, one at Takasago, representing ʻthe old age of the emperorʼ and the other, across Osaka bay, at Sumiyoshi, representing ʻour own timeʼ, as the characters in the Fenollosa-Pound Takasago have it.28 �e play ʻis nearly intranslatable and . . . fairly incomprehensibleʼ, Pound wrote to Henderson, ʻuntil you get the clue, �rst to the “sense of past time in the present” [Pound quoting himself], second, . . . the symbolism of Takasago (the past age) and Sumiyoshi (the present)ʼ.29 Past and present in a single moving image, in other words.

�e primary characters of Takasago are an old woman and old man revealed in the play to be the spirits of the pines, seen �rst sweeping pine

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needles under the tree at Takasago, who have been joined by a travelling priest to whom they tell their story. �e central theme is the mystical pow-er and longevity of love (ʻWhat thou lovest well remainsʼ), built around the central image of the pines, a ʻsymbol of perpetuityʼ, Pound called it.30 And he did as he predicted to Monroe incorporate explicit allusion to the play into �e Cantos, in 4, �rst published in 1919, in the lyrical close of 21, �rst published in 1928 (these have been explicated before), and also in the close of 29, �rst published in 1930, this last of which will be explained, convinc-ingly and well, in a forthcoming article by Houwen. In each case the purity of love and harmony in Takasago is set in superposition, Houwenʼs word and insight in the context, to European tales of spiritual corruption and brutality.31

Several critics have noted Poundʼs letter to Monroe and allusions to Takasago in Cantos 4 and 21, but Houwenʼs essay is by far the most de-tailed and �nely tuned. It is based on readings of two extant versions of the Fenollosa-Pound Takasago,32 the nineteenth-century Japanese text from which Fenollosa and Hirata worked in the translation, early dra�s and pa-ratexts of Cantos 4 and 21, and Cantos 4 and 21 as they exist now in stan-dard editions of �e Cantos. Houwen shows that it was at least partly from Takasago that Pound discovered a way forward from the static ʻimageʼ as ordinarily understood, to the ʻvortexʼ, what Pound later would call the ʻmoving imageʼ or ʻphanopoeiaʼ, in an idiom adopted to replace ʻthe incom-plete statementʼ of ʻearlier imagist propagandaʼ and ʻirrelevant . . . connota-tions [of ʻimagismʼ] tangled with a particular group of young people who were writing in 1912ʼ.33

In Takasago the ai-oi of the pines, the intermingling of past and pres-ent in a ʻsingle imageʼ, Houwen writes, provided Pound the idea of ʻthe movements and processesʼ which would establish the relation of ʻtwo ideas and the vortex of their superpositionʼ apparent in Cantos 4 and 21, and in-deed in many other sections, as Houwen notes, elsewhere in �e Cantos.34 In its ʻstructural methodʼ Takasago ʻnot only functions as the “single im-age”ʼ to which Pound referred in his accounts of late 1914 and 1915, but it-self is, as Houwen puts it, ʻabout the creation of “single images”ʼ, ʻthe pair-ing, or superposition, of two entitiesʼ in which ʻtemporal, as well as spatial,

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separation is overcomeʼ.35

In addition to the careful reading of Pound on the point as opposed to what others have read and repeated from others not reading Pound on the point, Houwenʼs is amongst the earliest essays to ally Poundʼs nō work with his later political understandings, for ʻif Takasago presents a harmonyʼ, Houwen writes, ʻit is a political harmonyʼ, the joining of an imperial past with a harmonious political present. �is represented for Pound an early model o�ering a shi� in ʻthe apparently apolitical aestheticism of the “unity of Image”ʼ toward a more political “symbolism of the center”ʼ, as Houwen calls it, echoing Richard Gardner, who himself was echoing Mircea Eliadeʼs conception of the axis mundi, from which and into which ontological planes, past and present, sacred and profane, are born, drawn back to, and reconciled, a vortex, in other words, which by the 1920s and beyond in-creasingly would become for Pound, in the well-chosen quote with which Houwen closes his essay, ʻthe sorting out, the rappel à lʼordre, . . . the new synthesis, the totalitarianʼ.36

Still image of a ‘moving image’, polychrome woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, ca. 1910, the spirits of the pines of Takasago, by Kōgyo Tsukioka/月岡 耕漁, 1869–1927, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.37

Christopher Bush in some ways picks up where Houwen leaves o�,

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and it is much to Bushʼs credit that he takes as given the importance of Japan and speci�cally nō in Poundʼs work. �is is a welcome �rst. Bush himself outlines three ʻdirectionsʼ his essay takes: ʻPoundʼs interest in and awareness of contemporary Japanʼ, ʻthe signi�cance of Poundʼs use of the noh as a model for “a long imagiste or vorticist poem”ʼ, and ʻthe place of Japan in Poundʼs fascist era vision of the world and its future, emphasizing [Poundʼs] engagement with what might be called a mediated Orientalism with respect to Chinaʼ.38

Regarding the �rst of these, Bush highlights the fact that with some few exceptions the scholarly treatment of Poundʼs Japan generally has seen it as Orientalist, a ʻdistant fairyland preserved from historical changeʼ, as Bush has it. ʻEven Sanehide Kodama, editor of the invaluable collection of primary sources Ezra Pound and Japanʼ, Bush writes, ʻtends to describe Pound as . . . “looking at Japan through the back end of a pair of opera glasses . . . as a far-away, beautiful country”ʼ.39 But Bush notes Poundʼs close personal relations with important living Japanese artists for more than half a century, in the second decade of the London twentieth century Yonejirō Noguchi, Michio Itō, Tamijūrō Kume (into the 1920s in Paris), and Torahiko Kōri,40 and from 1936 to 1966 in his correspondence with Katue Kitasono and indirectly in his repeated acclaim of the Japanese VOU poets and their modernist associates,41 including Junzaburō Nishiwaki, whom as Bush notes Pound in 1957 recommended be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which subsequently he was, seven times.42 Bush sets forth a convincing case that in the ʻwilful obliviousness to the contemporary reali-ties of the peoples and places [ʻconventional Orientalismʼ] claims to repre-sent . . . Poundʼs relationship to China can be criticized . . . far less so with Japanʼ, and that in relation to his engagement with Japan Poundʼs relation to China and Chinese ʻremained far more strongly marked by an Oriental-ist denial of Chinese contemporaneityʼ.43

Bushʼs second focus is a clear overview of Poundʼs engagement with nō, ranging from the predictive letters to Henderson and Monroe of 1915 and 1916 and the Takasago translation through material I shall address be-low, including the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ and Pisa. Bushʼs conclusions are well-studied and well-stated, recognising that nō for Pound ʻopen[ed] a network

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of textual associations and possibilitiesʼ not unlike that of his Greek, Ital-ian, and Provençal sources, and was at least a part of the complex which al-lowed him to ʻget past imagismʼ: ʻAs the “image” becomes the “vortex” in an e�ort to articulate its temporal and dynamic character (and the very short poem becomes a very long one)ʼ, Bush writes, for Pound ʻ“the image” . . . was not an isolated, much less solipsistic moment, but rather a conden-sation of collective aesthetic experience and traditionsʼ, and nō ʻwas not simply to be included in [Poundʼs] vision of world culture: In very impor-tant ways, it provided a . . . model for how the history of culture might be organized, kept alive, and remain politically vitalʼ.44

From this, Bushʼs third direction. Consolidating gains from his dem-onstration of Poundʼs interest in and sense of the contemporaneity of Japan as both aesthetic and historical presence, and of Poundʼs sense that nō was ʻnot merely exotic or anachronistic raw materialʼ but rather ʻmodern, like Homer or Dante[,] news that has stayed new and demonstrated how to make it newʼ,45 Bush turns to an outlandishly good analysis which is pre-dicted in the title of his essay, ʻ�e Geopolitical Aesthetic of Poundʼs Japanʼ. Drawing extensively on Poundʼs letters to Kitasono, Poundʼs articles as the unlikely 1939 and 1940 ʻItalian correspondentʼ for the Japan Times (a posi-tion arranged by Kitasono),46 and adroitly from modern scholarship on the relation of fascism and modernism and the nature of fascism itself, Bush shows that ʻby the late 1930s, Pound was very much thinking of Japan as a fascist ally, speci�cally doing so in the context of a world-scale vision of cultural fusion in which Japan had a special mission in relation to Chinaʼ, an ʻAxis vision . . . continuous with the earlier idea of an East-West fusionʼ based on Fenollosaʼs understanding of the need for and the inevitability of ʻ�e Coming Fusion of East and Westʼ, as Fenollosa had called it as early as 1898.47 �e role of Japan here, in short, is to preserve of China what the Chinese themselves cannot preserve, speci�cally Confucian China, and also to make some key phrases roll more easily o� the tongue: ʻ“Dai Gaku” is better than “Ta Tsü”ʼ (or Dà Xué as now we would Romanise 大學 or 大学 in pinyin), as Bushʼs third section header has it, quoting Pound, of course.48 ʻIt is neither the case that Pound hallucinated (based on Fenollosaʼs manuscripts) everything he thought he knew about East Asiaʼ,

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Bush writes, ʻnor that he somehow got something essential about it because of his poetic insightʼ, but

Poundʼs East Asia is a complex mixture of knowledge and ignorance, benevolence and racism, subtle precision and gross generalization, much like his Greece or his Provence. Such a conclusion is not as im-mediately satisfying as either admiring Poundʼs singular genius or condemning him as an Orientalist, but it is ultimately more interest-ing, more accurate, and of greater service to his work.49

Of greater service to a reading of �e Pisan Cantos and Dra�s and Fragments, most particularly, I would say, which I shall discuss below, but also to the whole of Poundʼs work from late 1913 forward, or however long it took manuscripts to get in the post from Church Street, Mobile, Alabama to Church Walk, Kensington, London, in the early mid-winter of 1913.

*

I have focused on Houwenʼs and Bushʼs essays because of their recog-nition by Pound scholars themselves as being amongst the best of recent Pound scholarship on any subject, and they certainly are amongst the best of post-Kennerian scholarship on Pound and Japan, but they are not alone. Perhaps a door has opened. Two books in Japanese which I do not believe have been mentioned in Anglophone Pound scholarship but which at least should be noted in an overview of the sort I want to attempt here are by the Korean scholar Hae-Kyung Sung, Seiyō no mugen nō: Ieitsu to Paundo (Western mugen nō: Yeats and Pound), published in 1999, which is impor-tant for bringing into Japanese a clear-headed account of the story as it could be told by 1999, and by Toshikazu Niikura, Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo (�e century of the poets: Nishiwaki and Pound), 2003, by far the most thoroughgoing account of the textual and intertextual relation of Nishiwaki and Pound.50

And within the past decade more Japanese shadows have been illumi-nated by people reading Pound than in the previous century before. Haiku noise continues, but the decade also has seen in addition to Houwenʼs and

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Bushʼs excellent essays other serious works by other serious scholars which make serious contributions to what we are able to understand.

In 2008 Akitoshi Nagahata tracked Poundʼs ʻaesthetic transitionʼ in the use of ʻvoicesʼ or ʻmasksʼ from amongst his earliest poems in A Quinzaine for �is Yule, his �rst book, 1908, and questions the degree to which Pound developed his ʻtranscendental cosmologyʼ from nō, but con-cludes that Poundʼs reception of nō became a part of what he ʻmade newʼ in ʻcreating a new poeticsʼ, and Miho Takahashi traced in Japanese the im-portance of the nō in Poundʼs 1954 translation of Women of Trachis, a ver-sion Pound wrote, ʻfor Kitasono Katue, hoping he will use it on my dear old friend Miscio Ito, or take it to the Minoru if they can be persuaded to add it to their repertoireʼ. Rupert Arrowsmithʼs 2011 Modernism and the Museum, drawing scrupulously on unpublished primary materials and the full range of earlier scholarship, contains two chapters which taken either separately or together represent the best work to date on Poundʼs early growing ac-quaintance with Japanese art and literature, largely by way of Binyon, and its e�ects in his work. In 2012 �e Hemingway Review of Japan included a special section on ʻHemingway, Yeats, Pound, and the Japanese Connec-tionʼ which included careful new looks at Poundʼs relation with Kume by Tateo Imamura and with Itō by Dorsey Kleitz, along with my essay on Pound and Kōri, and in 2016 this work was translated into and published in Japanese. In 2012 Réka Mihálka published a brilliant essay drawing on close analysis of the Hirata-Fenollosa dra�s, Poundʼs versions of them, Poundʼs own Plays Modelled on the Noh, and modern translation theory, focusing in particular on Nishikigi and Poundʼs Tristan (amongst the plays modelled on nō), which �nds that ʻthe foreignizing strategyʼ of Poundʼs nō translations demonstrate that for Pound ʻadaptation is done in order to open new territories for [a] national canonʼ, and that the results are amongst the texts which ʻhelp de�ne, rede�ne and sometimes erase the boundaries of translation and adaptationʼ. Also in 2012 Ce Rosenow cov-ered some familiar ground in ʻ“High Civilization”: �e Role of Noh Drama in Ezra Poundʼs Cantosʼ. In 2013 Takahashiʼs study of the nō methods of Poundʼs Trachis reached English, emended and expanded from the earlier Japanese version. In 2014 Diego Pellecchia drew on the Pound-Kitasono

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correspondence, the Japan Times articles, texts of Poundʼs broadcasts for Radio Rome, and screenings of �lms Pound saw of or relating to nō, most importantly a 1935 video recording of Aoi no ue Pound saw in Washington, D. C. in April 1939, and argues convincingly that given Poundʼs prior expe-rience of nō as text, the �lms led him to recognise more fully ʻthe ethics of nōʼ, seeing its ʻpolitical value on the international stageʼ, and nō therea�er as a political as well as aesthetic ʻvehicle for the transmission of a high . . . civilizationʼ, possibly powerful enough to stop a war. In 2014 the pre- and early-modern Japanese literature scholar Michael Watson overviewed early translations of nō in English, French, and German, and accorded a close and sympathetic reading of the translational tactics Hirata and Fenollosa adopted from their source, the 1896 revised edition of Takeki Ōwadaʼs Yōkyoku tsūkai, and Poundʼs editions of the work, focusing closely on Takasago amongst other plays, and provides luminous details all along. Also in 2014 Tanja Klankert in an essay primarily addressing issues in trans-lation studies and Yeatsʼs Hawkʼs Well included a rare and resourceful sec-tion on Poundʼs 1916 ʻSword Dance and Spear Danceʼ, poems translated from the Japanese to accompany a Kensington dance performance by Itō, �nding in Poundʼs translational strategy a ʻreproduc[tion of] the foreignness of the source language in the translated text, thereby a�ecting and trans-forming the target languageʼ. In 2016 arguably the best chapter in Carrie J. Prestonʼs Learning to Kneel is a reading of Poundʼs nō which focuses particu-larly on Hagoromo and Takasago and the ways these worked their way through �e Cantos, and subsequently played a role in Poundʼs politics.51

Rather than enumerating further, though, I would like to revisit the primary texts the question under discussion primarily is about, not the nō translations themselves but the way they work referentially and structurally in �e Cantos. Houwenʼs insight into and demonstration that by way of nō Pound extended his understanding of ʻsuperpositionʼ beyond the static im-age into the vortex of spacio-temporal history, and Bushʼs concurrence that at least in part by way of nō ʻthe “image” becomes the “vortex” . . . to articu-late its temporal and dynamic character (and the very short poem becomes a very long one)ʼ, are central to much of �e Cantos, and extend the way we might read all of the poem, but as both Houwen and Bush and others be-

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fore them note, the nō is there in other ways, as well. �ere also was, one way to put it, the tout à coup that had been lacking: a ghost!52 Quite a few in fact, and they had histories.ʻ�ese plays are full of ghostsʼ, Pound wrote in 1915, clearly having

been arguing with Yeats, and giving some ground:

and the ghost psychology is amazing. �e parallels with Noh in West-ern spiritist doctrine are very curious. �is is . . . an irrelevant or most extraneous interest, and one might set it aside if it were not bound up with a dramatic and poetic interest of the very highest order.53

ʻGhost frightens no honest manʼ, Pound wrote three decades and a few years later in the last of the ʻChina Cantosʼ (61/338).

3.　‘Ghosts Patched with Histories’: ‘Three Cantos’, Nō, and a Revision

�e �rst of the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ, �rst published in Poetry in June 1917, opens with an invocation to Robert Browning about the historical method-ology of Sordello, and includes key lines about Poundʼs own methods which James Longenbach has well-equated with the methods of the nō: ʻGhosts move about me/Patched with historiesʼ.54 In each of the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ the voice of the Poundian persona, like the waki in the plays of the mugen nō, calls forth the spirits of the dead bound to a place sancti�ed in history and myth, Sirmio during the Italian Renaissance, the Dordogne Valley, the land of Circe and the underworld of the Nekuia, and as ʻPass each in his appropriate robesʼ, ʻAncient in various days, long years between themʼ, they emerge into the world of the poem, coming to life in what Peter Nicholls in 1995, anticipating and acknowledged by both Houwen and Bush, calls a ʻcompound tenseʼ,55 Poundʼs ʻsense of past time in the presentʼ which he had written underpinned the ʻperfect constructionʼ of nō. �e places themselves and the colours and tones associated with them provide the ʻunity of imageʼ Pound believed central to nō and had written opened

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the way for a ʻlong imagiste or vorticist poemʼ, and twice at key turns imag-es from the nō themselves inform the lines. In the address to Browning in canto I the narrative voice explicitly becomes the redeeming angel of Hagoromo: ʻWhatʼs le� for me to do? / Whom shall I conjure up; whoʼs my Sordello, / . . . / Whom shall I hang my shimmering garment on / Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo . . . ?ʼ; and in II, in a turn that foreshad-ows the use of the pines of Takasago in cantos 4 and 21, the nobility of the ghost of Kumasaka is set in counterpoint and in superposition to images of the corruption of El Cid and the Portuguese court of Afonso.56 In ʻ�ree Cantosʼ a representational principle deriving from Poundʼs work with nō provides a means to infuse the historical and mythological past into the imaginative present, and the nō itself is a part of the mythos, representing an ideal of redemption in art and a nobility of spirit set in superposition to manifestations of the gods of Tuscany, �gures rising from the dismantled castles of Valencia, and ʻnews of Troyʼ.

But the method of ʻ�ree Cantosʼ is not the method of �e Cantos which followed for many years. Houwen shows in his analysis of cantos 4 and 21, and soon will show in a revisiting of canto 29, that Pound did not abandon the extension of ʻthe form of superpositionʼ to the spacio-tempo-ral vortex of history, which marks the poem beginning to end. But in the 1925 �ree Mountains Press edition of A Dra� of XVI Cantos, a revision which with minor exceptions establishes the text we now know as the be-ginning of �e Cantos, the ghostly method and even allusion to the nō has disappeared from cantos 1–3. �e �rst-person voice, when it appears at all, but in passing at the beginning of canto 2 and the opening of 3, Pound sit-ting on ʻthe Doganaʼs stepsʼ in Venice, is not explicitly the ʻIʼ of the poet but rather of his characters, Odysseus, Acoetes, and others. �e setting forth of the voices, the rapid movement from one to the next orchestrated by a dis-embodied narrator, reminds more of Eliot than of nō. Of the ʻ�ree Can-tosʼ only the close of canto 3, the Nekuia section, remains largely intact, provided primacy of place as the opening of the poem (ʻAnd then went down to the shipʼ). �e sacred places remain but disparately so—Ithaca to Troy to �ebes to Venice and Burgos in nine pages, with a voyage toward Naxos on the way—and whilst the voices of the historical and mythical

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past still haunt the lines, the living voice in communion with them, which in nō redeems ancient passions in time present, largely has disappeared. �e voice of the speaker is subsumed in the text, and the distance of voice to setting in ʻ�ree Cantosʼ—ʻI walk Verona (I am here in England)ʼ—no longer is foregrounded.

It has been tempting to attribute this revision to Poundʼs dissatisfac-tion with nō, and perhaps this did �gure into it. As noted in the �rst half of this essay, shortly a�er publication of ʻNohʼ or Accomplishment Pound in one brief review of August 1917 and three letters written between January 1917 and June 1918 compared nō unfavourably with Chinese poetry.57 Christopher Bush did not need to gloss his passing reference to the ʻsolidi-tyʼ of China because Pound scholars recognise the line, the intertextual an-tioxidant in dozens of recyclings of the dismissal of nō in much of twenti-eth-century Pound scholarship: Japan was a ʻspecial interest, like Provence or 12–13 century Italy (apart from Dante)ʼ, ʻbut China is solid.ʼ58

But there is more to it than this, aside from the fact that both in the pe-riods before and a�er January 1917 to June 1918 one may �nd a dozen refer-ences from Pound himself about the virtues of nō in the highest of terms for each of the four times he found it somehow less ʻsolidʼ than Lǐ Bái (Poundʼs ʻRihakuʼ, a�er the Japanese pronunciation of 李白). Unlike the glowing re-views of Cathay in the right avant-garde journals, the reviews of ʻNohʼ were mixed, and between January 1917 and June 1918 Pound was in the midst of his most immoderate vexation in the �ve-year comedy of errors he su�ered trying to get anyone to pay enough attention to ʻ�e Chinese Written Char-acter as a Medium for Poetryʼ to publish it.59 Also, by the 1925 revision of A Dra� of XVI Cantos Pound had discovered other modernist models which could help in binding together the disparate spacio-temporal elements of a ʻlong vorticist poemʼ, vortices which worked, most notably in works Pound himself helped usher into print, in �e Waste Land and Ulysses.

Both Houwen and Margaret Fischer suggest that Poundʼs opera Le Testament de Villon, begun in 1919 and �rst performed in 1924, borrows from his understanding of nō;60 in Cantos 4 and 21, as Houwen shows (and 29, as he is soon to show), Takasago remains a part of the mythos; and can-to 7, �rst published in 1928, includes understated reference to Poundʼs

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1916 version of Kakistubata (7/26).61 Also in September 1927 Pound was contemplating a new edition of the nō plays, one which would be ʻcopper-bottomed and guaranteed correct in every wayʼ, to become the ʻ“standard work on the subject”ʼ, as he wrote to Glenn Hughes, soliciting Hughesʼs in-tervention for help from Hughesʼs friend and Poundʼs Japanese translator Ryōzō Iwasaki, so that no ʻsonvbitch who knows a little Nipponese can jump on it or say his �atfooted renderings are a safer guide to the style of that countryʼ, but that did not pan out.62

In any case, however, no one could deny on Poundʼs own evidence that he had waverings about the merits of nō in 1917 and 1918, although it might be noted also that at the worst of it, in his own mixed review of Certain Noble Plays and ʻNohʼ, in a line twentieth-century scholars tended not to note when writing of Poundʼs misgivings about the plays, he wrote that had he found nothing but ʻthe truly Homeric laughterʼ at the end of Kagekiyo he ʻshould have been well paid for the three yearsʼ he spent on Fenollosaʼs nō manuscripts.63

And so if nō had �gured no more in �e Cantos than the scattered predictive notes of 1915 and 1916 and the abandoned representational strategy of ʻ�ree Cantosʼ, with the occasional luminous Japanese detail in superposition to something beastly which had taken place in Europe, and counting or not whatever might have been pulled from the nō into the vor-tex of Le Testament de Villon, it would be a subject worth exploring. But there is more than this. At Pisa the invocatory voice returns, and the haunt-ed imaginative space within which the ghosts crowd around, and then again, more centrally than before as tone, theme, and the multiple strange attractors of the complex web of association of �e Cantos, the nō returns to Pound a�er he has returned to Italy, and to the possibility of a Paradiso, in the �nal Dra�s and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII.

4.　‘Beauty lost in the years’: The Pisan Cantos and Nō

�e return to the ʻcompound tenseʼ of the nō is marked in 74, the �rst of �e Pisan Cantos, by the re-emergence of Pound himself into the poem, and by the lines which characterized the method of ʻ�ree Cantosʼ, cut in the 1925 revision but recalled here, from the wreckage of Europe, and from

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memory, no text but that in his head, a�er thirty years:

　　　　　　　 Torquato where art thou? to the click of hooves on the cobbles by Tevere and ʻmy fondest knight lie deadʼ . . . or la Stuarda ʻghosts move about meʼ ʻpatched with historiesʼ (74/466)

�e sacred place is Taishan, �rst amongst the holy peaks of China, axis mundi, vortextual source of life and place to which the souls of the dead return, con�ated with a peak visible to Pound on the horizon, ʻfrom the death cells in sight of Mt. Taishan @ Pisaʼ. Even more than in ʻ�ree Cantosʼ the lines and the imaginative space from within which they arise are haunted. Earlier in the poem the story of Cunizza da Romano had been narrated (6/22–23), but at Pisa Cunizza appears in Poundʼs room, watching (74/463). �e mistresses of Sigismundo and Cavalcanti stand before him (76/472), Dionysus is hailed, welcomed, and directly addressed (79/510), Venus-Aphrodite invoked in his name (79/510–11), and a ʻnew subtlety of eyesʼ enters Poundʼs tent (81/540). And in this haunted space Pound re-turns to the world in which he discovered it. �e apparitions o�en are from the nō itself: Kannon, Buddhist goddess of compassion, whom Pound �rst encountered in Tamura (74/448; 77/492; 81/539); again the redeeming spirit of Hagoromo, come to Pound as a ʻcorona of angelsʼ at sunset in the clouds banked on Taishan (74/450; 79/505; 80/520); the ghosts of the war-riors Kagekiyo and Kumasaka (74/462; 79/505); the safeguarding man/god of Suma Genji (74/463); the hannya of Aoi no Ue (77/485). As earlier in the poem manifestations from the nō are set in superposition to European tales of deceit—ʻGreek rascality against Hagoromo / Kumasaka vs/ vulgari-tyʼ (79/505)—but more than before they are woven into the textual fabric of the poem. Kannon is con�ated with Venus-Aphrodite, Suma Genji with the gods of Eleusis (74/463), the ʻnymph of Hagoromoʼ presides over the central theme of divine incarnation and the central image of divine light. It is the imaginative space into which the apparitions enter, though, which most remarkably returns �e Cantos to nō. In a 1915 postscript to his ʻre-creationʼ of the Hirata-Fenollosa Suma Genji Pound wrote of the priest of

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that play that he sought ʻeven in a visionʼ to see ʻthe beauty lost in the yearsʼ and ʻthe shadow of the past in bright formʼ. Of the dramatic construction of the play he wrote that it relies on ʻthe suspense of waiting for a supernat-ural manifestation—which comesʼ. In both cases he might as well have been writing of �e Pisan Cantos.64

�e cantos which follow those written at Pisa, published in Rock Drill and �rones, were written at St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D. C. �ese consolidate historical and economic themes and twice in lyrical passages turn to nō (90/626, 106/775),65 but not in ways that I or anyone I know has known enough to explain well beyond the clar-ity of the allusions. Before returning to �e Cantos at St. Elizabeths Pound translated and published his nō-inspired version of the Trachiniae ʻfor Kitasono Katueʼ, in the hope that in Japan it would be added to the reper-toire of the Kanze nō family—that to which Fenollosaʼs teacher, Umewaka Minoru, had belonged—but beyond this it is �ttingly in the closing cantos, written a�er Poundʼs return to Italy, that the nō returns most importantly to his work.

5.　‘A light that does not lead on to darkness’: Drafts and Fragments and Nō

If �e Cantos has a Paradiso it is in the �nal Dra�s and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII, constituted of forgiveness, the redemptive power of love, awareness of the numinous in the natural world, and shot through with sorrow. Wendy Flory has argued convincingly that the spirit Kakitsubata is the ʻpresiding supernatural presenceʼ of the sequence,66 but beyond this little has been written about the relation of Poundʼs under-standing of nō and his tone and stance at the close of the poem. Much of Dra�s and Fragments reminds of the lyrical intermingling of beauty and sorrow which is called sabi in Japanese, and the related ʻdark beautyʼ of yūgen, both central to the aesthetic universe of nō. To say that Pound held these principles consciously in mind, or that they determine the outcome of �e Cantos, would be to claim too much, but the ʻunity of emotionʼ,

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which in 1915 Pound equated with the �nal slow dance in particular nō plays, and suggested could lead the way to ʻa long poem in vers libreʼ, in these lines combines loss with paradisal beauty, and one may point to the lyrical Japanese drama Pound had held in mind for half a century as a un-mistakable antecedent.

As in �e Pisan Cantos allusions to the nō are understated but reso-nant, allied in a vortex of association with central themes and meanings, a vital ʻstrange attractorʼ. �e collective e�ect of the presences from the nō in the Pisan Cantos was not determinative—the supernatural presences pre-siding at Pisa were Dionysus and the gods of Eleusis—but in Dra�s and Fragments even more than Greek and Dantean images and motifs the spir-its from the nō characterise the tone, Kakitsubata, ʻclad in memoryʼ come to tell her tale of loss and redemption, Aoi no Ue, haunted by a spirit of rancour so strong it was manifest as a demon, Ono no Komachi, symbol of the ephemerality of earthly beauty and the ravages of pride, and Kannon, Buddhist goddess of compassion.

An unfolding of the point even for the �rst of the Dra�s & Fragments, canto 110, requires a turn directly to four of the Pound-Fenollosa nō plays. �e 1915 versions of Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi usually are un-derstood to be unsatisfactory as translation, but they nonetheless capture the poignancy of the sorrow of the central character, the poet Ono no Komachi. �e young Komachiʼs legendary beauty is familiar to most in Japan, but her life ended in solitude and despair. Her manifestations on the nō stage are meditations on loss, the brevity of earthly beauty, and the rav-ages of vanity. In both plays, both in their Japanese manifestations and in Poundʼs, Komachiʼs spirit is released from its torment by acts of forgiveness and redemption.

In Aoi no Ue, the Pound-Fenollosa version of which appeared in 1916, the grave illness of the title character, the wife of Prince Genji, according to the beliefs of eleventh-century Japan would have been caused by the jeal-ousy of Aoiʼs rival and Genjiʼs lover, the Princess Rokujō. As the play pro-gresses the spirit of Rokujōʼs jealousy becomes manifest as a hannya, a de-monic spirit, and a�er a fearful struggle of wills �nally is exorcised by an attending priest. Poundʼs version confuses the spirit of Rokujō with a psy-

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chological projection of Aoiʼs own jealousy, and the error is compounded by a detailed introductory explanation of the ʻfactʼ.67 According to Seiichi Yamaguchi the error was Hirataʼs in the original translation,68 but more than any other lapse it has provoked reproaches about Poundʼs work with nō, even by writers ordinarily willing to forgive his transgressions. Arthur Waley wrote that there is nothing obscure or ambiguous in the situation and suggests that Fenollosa ʻmisunderstood the play and read into it com-plications and confusions which do not existʼ; Earl Miner �nds ʻno excuse for [Poundʼs] introduction . . . which muddles a �ne translationʼ; Nobuko Tsukui suggests simply that Pound ʻcompletely misunderstands the playʼ.69

�is Aoi may serve as a metaphor for much of Poundʼs work with the nō, however. It is erroneous as translation, but beautiful, psychologically complex, and recurs in unexpected ways in later work both by Pound him-self and by Yeats. Aoiʼs hannya plays hob in the tent �aps at the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa (77/485), and Aoi herself returns con�ated with Ono no Komachi and the moon at the lyrical close of canto 110; both Flory and Stoiche� �nd the exorcism of jealousy in Dra�s and Fragments trace-able to the play, and Miyake argues that the ʻinventionʼ of Rokujō as a man-ifestation of Aoi is consistent with themes traceable throughout the Pound canon, particularly ʻthe unity of Dantean mysteries of love and the Eleusin-ian Mysteriesʼ in �e Cantos.70 Yeatsʼs earliest direct reference to nō, October 1914, is to ʻthe exorcism of [the] ghost which itself is obsessed by an evil spiritʼ, recognizably Poundʼs Rokujō, and writers on Yeatsʼs ʻNohʼ have found the use of the square blue cloth representative of the well in At the Hawkʼs Well inspired by the folded kimono which represents the strick-en Aoi here,71 and that Poundʼs erroneous Rokujō is transformed into the jealousy of the women of the Sidhe in �e Only Jealousy of Emer.72

Kakitsubata, the Hirata-Fenollosa-Pound version of which appeared in 1916, like other plays from the nō depends for its e�ect on the conjoin-ing of beauty with the memory of great loss. A travelling priest approaches a �eld of yellow irises, ʻKakitsubataʼ in classical Japanese, and meets a ʻsim-ple girl of the localityʼ. In time she is revealed to be the spirit of the irises, who tells a tale of the ancient times, when the poet Ariwara Narihira, in ex-ile from the Imperial court and its glories, had passed the place, recognized

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in the beauty of the irises the beauty of all that he had lost, and composed an acrostic poem in which he equated the irises with the beauty of a cour-tesan whom he had loved. In the climax of the play, the slow dance, the ap-parition becomes compound, a vortex, at once the spirit of the irises, of the courtesan whom Narihira loved, and in the voice of the chorus even of Narihira himself. Poundʼs version of the play rises to a poignant lyricism in passages which lament the loss of love and youth, but he also recognized in Kakitsubata, rightly, in 1916, and again as he was nearing the end of his life, the central theme of salvation:

It is by memory that this spirit appears [Pound wrote in 1916], she is able or ʻboundʼ to appear because of Narihiraʼs . . . thought of the iris. �at is to say, the �owers as well as the . . . bright apparition are the outer veils of her soul. Beauty is the road to salvation, and her appari-tion . . . is part of the ritual.73

�e spirit is, in the Pound-Fenollosa version of 1916, ʻa light that does not lead on to darknessʼ who ʻclad in a memoryʼ dances and sings of the ʻan-cient splendoursʼ of the love which had passed so long before.74

A�er half a century Kakitsubata becomes manifest again, in the open-ing of Dra�s and Fragments in a simple reference to ʻYellow iris in [a] river-bedʼ (110/798). �is image is followed immediately by a transliterated Chinese poem: ʻyüeh4•5 / ming2 / mo4•5 / hsien1 / pʼeng2ʼ (110/798). �e standard gloss, by Poundʼs grandson, who likely consulted Pound himself, is ʻ�e brightness of the moon . . . there are no former friendsʼ,75 but in the absence of the homophonic characters many readings are possible, as Pound by then knew. He chose not to use the Chinese characters. His deci-sion to provide only the transliteration indicates either an emphasis on po-etic sound alone or more likely that he intended multiple and inter-related meanings. Flory notes that the standard gloss of the poem is consistent with Narihiraʼs response to the irises in Kakitsubata, but o�ers another reading as well: ʻNo moon . . . No luxuriant growth [spring] as in the past. No longer, as in the past, strong and handsome. No brightness [glory] as in former timesʼ (ellipsis and brackets Floryʼs).76 Read in this way the poem

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becomes Poundʼs own lament for the diminution of his powers, and echoes elegiac lines of the 1916 Pound-Fenollosa Kakitsubata, as the spirit dances and the chorus chants, ʻ“No moon! / �e spring / Is not the spring of the old days, / My body / Is not my body, / But only a body grown old. / Narihira, Narihira, / My glory comes not again”ʼ.77

Floryʼs reading relies on the homophone pʼeng2, ʻfriendʼ in the stan-dard gloss, but also, in other characters of the same pronunciation and tone, both ʻto be strong and handsomeʼ and ʻluxuriant growthʼ. �e num-ber of possible readings of Poundʼs transliterated poem extends much fur-ther than this, however. Each of the �ve homophones may refer to several characters, and in di�erent combinations to many more compounds and meanings. ʻYüeh4.5 ming2ʼ, to take but one example, is a conventional collo-cation for ʻmoonlightʼ or ʻthe brightness of the moonʼ, but in di�erent com-binations of characters may mean also ʻto overcome darknessʼ or ʻof sur-passing fameʼ. In the absence of the characters themselves all which may be said with certainty is that Pound was playing on the homophones, intended multiple and layered meanings, and that several of these are consistent with Floryʼs reading. Canto 110 clearly echoes Narihiraʼs lament, and in this way, alongside yellow irises in a riverbed, introduces a resonant trace of the universe of Kakitsubata into the sequence.

�is trace echoes and conceptually rhymes with images and motifs which recur in 110 and those cantos which follow. �e Kakitsubata lines intervene in 110 in a series of images derived from the expiation of the sui-cide spirits of the Na-khi, which Pound knew from the work of Joseph Rock. Several commentaries have noted the resonance between Poundʼs Na-khi spirits and his understated allusion to the Dantean lovers Paolo and Francesca, but little notice has been taken of the conceptual rhyme be-tween the Na-khi belief Pound draws upon and nō. According to Rock, the Na-khi believe that unless expiated the soul of one who dies unattended ʻbecomes a roving spiritʼ, and is ʻdestined to remain for ever restlessʼ.78 �e resonance with the restless spirits of nō is clear enough, and by the frag-ment of canto 115 the echo of Kakitsubata is made explicit. �ese lines call to mind Poundʼs sense of the failure of the European tradition (ʻ�e scien-tists are in terror / and the European mind stopsʼ), and re�ect upon failure

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personal, familial, and collective, but maintain a paradisal vision: �e Poundian persona is

A blown husk that is �nished 　　　but the light sings eternal a pale �are over marshes (115/814).

�e ʻblown husk that is �nishedʼ echoes the departing lines of the spirit Kakitsubata in Poundʼs version of 1916 as she fades and ʻreturns to the etherʼ, ʻthe cracked husk of the locust, / �e withering husk of the irisʼ.79 �e ʻpale �are over marshesʼ is the bright apparition which Narihira saw, and which reminded him of the beauty he had lost, ʻthe �owers Kakitsuhata / �at �are and �aunt in their marshʼ.80 ʻBut the light sings eternal.ʼ �is central line, the paradisal vision intact, emerges also from Poundʼs memo-ry of Kakitsubata, the spirit ʻcome to enlightenʼ, and the incarnation of a ʻlight that does not lead on to darknessʼ.81 �e image is central to the close of �e Cantos, echoing and reinforcing the theme of divine light which res-onates in the poem early and late, and returns in the �nal trace of Kakitsubata in Poundʼs work, in the closing lines of the last complete canto: ʻal poco giorno / ed al gran cerchio dʼombra [in the small hours, with the darkness describing a large circle] / But to a�rm the gold thread in the pattern / . . . / To confess wrong without losing rightness: / Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it �ow thru. / A little light, like a rush-light / to lead back to splendourʼ (116/817).

At the end of �e Cantos, to borrow lines from Poundʼs version of Kaki stubata, ʻ�e iris Kakitsubata of the old days / Is [once again] planted anew / With the old bright color renewedʼ,82 and she is compounded and rare�ed here further than Pound or anyone else could have imagined in 1916.

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The spirit Kakitsubata, ‘clad in memory’, ‘a light that does not lead on to darkness’ in the 1916 translation, ‘the light [which] sings eternal’ in �e Cantos (115/814).Sōichirō Hayashi (林宗一郎) as the spirit of the iris Kakitsubata, photograph by Stéphan Barbery, © Stéphan Barbery, 2014.83

Other presences from the nō inhabit canto 110 as well, and like the spirit of Kakitsubata call to mind a rich web of association which Pound condenses into a single image: ʻ�at love be the cause of hate, / something is twisted, // Awoiʼ (110/800). In three lines and one name the universe of Aoi no Ue is introduced into the sequence, and the expiation of jealousy and rancour in that work resonates and conceptually rhymes with images, half lines, and understated meanings, drawn from a disparate vortex of tra-ditions and times, throughout the close of the poem. Likewise the closing lines of the canto, as Aoi returns, with Komachi, con�ated with the moon: ʻLux enim [Light itself]— / versus the tempest. / . . . / pray 敬 [Chinese-Japanese character＝ʻreverenceʼ] pray / There is power / Awoi or Komachi, / the oval moonʼ (110/801). �e lines are set in post-position to all which has come before, evoking the theme of jealousy which must be expiated in Aoi no Ue, the associations of loss, light, and salvation in the Pound-Fenollosa versions of the Komachi plays, and indeed the earlier and

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following cantos. �e movement is quick but certain: it is in nō that canto 110 and those which follow �nd their themes: the ephemerality of beauty and the ravages of vanity, the expiation of jealousy, the redemptive power of forgiveness, and the possibility of ʻa light that does not lead on to dark-nessʼ.

Together these and other associations from nō are central to the close of the poem, and ultimately, retrospectively, instrumentally, to the larger universe of �e Cantos itself. Stoiche�, in the most detailed study yet of Dra�s & Fragments, is aware of the point. At the close of �e Cantos and nearing the close of his own life, Pound identi�es with the spirits from the nō, Narihiraʼs ʻMy body / Is not my body, / But only a body grown oldʼ, Kakitsubataʼs contemplation of her own apparition on earth as ʻthe cracked husk of a locustʼ, the longing to rectify the past of Nishikigi, the ʻbeauty lost in yearsʼ of Suma Genji, the exorcism of jealousy of Aoi no Ue. Stoiche�ʼs comment on the closing lines of 110 summarizes the point: they return to

the belief that respect and ritualistic prayer can transcend the pains of darkness, jealousy, self-recrimination, sin, and old age, as in their Noh counterparts, not beneath the poemʼs foreseen paradisal culmination in the eternal light of the sun, but beneath the Noh moon that is its symbolic reversal, as Dra�s & Fragments is �e Cantosʼ.84

In the last complete canto Pound calls his poem a ʻpalimpsestʼ (116/815). It is a perfect metaphor. Seen in this way—texts inscribed upon texts, one erased to make room for the next—the nō must be seen to have been there all along, informing in its crucial way the beginning of the poem, put under partial erasure in 1925, and then re-inscribed, visible again through the pages and the years, transformed but unmistakably rec-ognizable at Pisa, and then again, come full circle, at the poemʼs close. In this regard one may take small exception to Stoiche�, or rather to his choice of a word, or rather to put his word itself under erasure and to in-scribe over it another: the symbolic reversal of Dra�s and Fragments at least in regard to nō, and perhaps in other ways yet unexamined, also is a symbolic return to the place the poem began half a century before.

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6.　Pound as Japanese Influence

In the literary history of Poundʼs relation with Japanese aesthetics an-other reversal presents itself compellingly. It has to do with the degree to which Poundʼs Japan became the Japan of later poets and others in the An-glophone world and beyond. �e record in the matter is clear. Regarding nō, in likelihood even now Kodamaʼs contention of 1994 remains true, that the versions of the plays that appeared in ʻNohʼ or Accomplishment are ʻthe most widely read and in�uential translationsʼ of the form in any language other than Japanese,85 despite the errors and oversights and omissions, de-spite Waley and a dozen later editions which are ʻcopper bottomedʼ, even if we no longer believe that a translation can be ʻcorrect in every wayʼ. Poundʼs understanding of the ʻunity of imageʼ in nō has returned even to the source-language, in the most in�uential Japanese-language accounts of nō, as in, for example, Jinʼichi Konishiʼs magisterial Nihon bungeishi, amongst others.86 And it is Poundʼs nō which is mediated in Yeats, and then via Yeats passed along to Gordon Bottomley, Laurence Binyon, Sturge Moore, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Je�ers, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth, Ulick OʼConnor, Derek Walcott, and others, and from each of these on to others, so that intermingled with the ʻin�uence of nōʼ on the European stage is Poundʼs nō, with the slant of light which came to him from Fenollosa, who himself could not read Japanese, slanted further, and then further, and then again and again, until the in�uence of one literary tradition on another appears to be little but a variation on the concept of intertextuality.

Likewise the non-dramatic poetry. At least one clever Japanese scholar has denied that the ʻform of superpositionʼ has anything at all to do with Japanese verse tradition,87 but Poundʼs technique, discovered in what prob-ably was a French translation of hokku, mediated by who knows how many degrees of separation, became Japanese poetry for writers and readers of English. It was adopted intact, and in verse which has been argued to be ʻin�uenced by Japanʼ (and who could disagree?), by Conrad Aiken, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and many

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others, including thousands of ʻhaiku poetsʼ who have written in English. Beyond this Poundʼs undecorated free-verse line characterizes to this day the style and tone even of the most scholarly English translations of Japanese classical verse. Compare, for example, two translations of a famous tenth-century tanka by Minamoto no Muneyuki, poem 28 in the Hyakunin isshu. Muneyukiʼs poem in Japanese reads: 山里は冬ぞ寂しさ まさりける 人目も草も かれぬと思へば, yamazato wa fuyu zo sabishisa masarikeru hi-tome mo kusa mo karenu to omoeba. For William N. Porter in 1909, in the widely-admired Hundred Verses from Old Japan, the English for this was:

�e mountain village solitude In winter time I dread; It seems as if, when friends are gone, And trees their leaves have shed, All men and plants are dead.88

But for Stephen D. Carter, in a widely-admired modern English anthology of Japanese verse, Muneyukiʼs poem in English is di�erent:

In a mountain home the loneliness increases in the winter time— when one knows that people too will vanish with the grasses.89

It would be impossible to trace a text-by-text link between Pound and Carterʼs Muneyuki, and it is possible even that Carter has not read Pound, but who cannot hear Poundʼs voice in Carterʼs representation of Mune yukiʼs? �e point could be made in regard to the English versions of any classical Japanese poem pre- and post-1915. Porterʼs style was carried forward for a few years by stalwarts for whom poetry in English, even if it represented poetry in Japanese or Chinese, meant rhyme and conventional metre, in the case of Japanese by E. Powys Mathers and Miyamori Asatarō, mainly, but the style was rendered archaic by Pound in a few months in

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1914 and 1915, and what little resistance was mounted therea�er, which would have disappeared soon enough anyway, was dispatched quickly by Waley, who adopted Poundʼs line in his translations of Chinese verse, and then in 1919 in Japanese Poetry, and then in verse passages in �e Nō Plays of Japan and �e Tale of Genji, and that was that.

It would not be wrong in this regard to extend T. S. Eliotʼs famous line about Cathay. Pound invented Japanese poetry for our time, too. I �nd it impossible not to be amused by and in agreement with the spirit of Houwenʼs smart twisting of Eliotʼs tail when he writes that ʻChina and Japan “invented” Poundʼ.90 But the point may be put di�erently yet now that we know more about, or at least write more about, intertextuality and translation. An accurate way to put it also is that Ezra Pound has been amongst the major Japanese in�uences in Anglophone verse and in the wider universe of European modernist literature, having become a strange attractor himself, and will remain so at least as long as our time lasts.

Notes

* �is is the second and concluding part of a longer essay, the �rst part of which ap-peared in this journal in March 2017. An earlier version lacking reference to signi�cant mate-rials which have come to light recently appeared in 2003 in Japonisme, Orientalism, Modern-ism: A Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse of the Early 20th Century. Parenthetical page references to Poundʼs Cantos are to the 13th printing of the New Directions Cantos of Ezra Pound and follow standard practice in noting canto and page number in that work. Page references to Poundʼs work with nō and the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ ordinarily are double: for the sake of chronology they note the earliest publication, for the sake of accessibility the most readily available, the New Directions Classic Noh �eatre of Japan (CNTJ) and Massimo Bacigalupoʼs recent edition of Posthumous Cantos (PC), which includes ʻ�ree Cantosʼ. In these cases the double citations are separated by a slash, as in (ʻClassical Stageʼ 211 / CNTJ 12). Where the texts vary I have preferred the former. With some hesitation, for ʻ 能 ʼ I have adopted the strictly correct ʻnōʼ rather than ʻNohʼ, the Romanization Pound (and Yeats) used and which until recently has been conventional in Pound scholarship, including in the earlier part of this essay. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean names uniformly appear in standard European-language order, given name followed by surname, to avoid confusion, since most of those mentioned have published in English or are at least known in Anglophone scholarship. Along with stan-dard Romanizations I have provided in Japanese names of authors and titles of works when the work has not been published in English or when the name itself is in question.

I am grateful to Dorsey Kleitz, Tateo Imamura, Michael Lewis, and several others who know who they are for conversations and correspondence which have helped with the essay.

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Errors and indiscretions, of course, are mine alone. 1.　Kenner, Introduction, �e Translations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1953), 13–

14; Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 47. 2.　Houwen, ʻEzra Poundʼs Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasagoʼ, Review of

English Studies 65 (2013): 321–41; Bush, ʻ“I am all for the triangle”: �e Geopolitical Aesthetic of Poundʼs Japanʼ, Ezra Pound in the Present, eds. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 75–106 (herea�er cited as ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ).

3.　Ewick, ʻImagism Status Rerum and a Note on Haikuʼ, Make It New: �e Ezra Pound Society Little Mag 2.1 (2015): 52–53; ʻEzra Pound and the Invention of Japan, Iʼ, Essays and Studies in British and American Literature / Eibeibungaku hyōron 63 (2017): 15.

4.　Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, eds. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 347 (herea�er cited as EP/P); �e Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) 120 (herea�er cited as EP/ACH); qtd. in Noel Stock, �e Life of Ezra Pound (Lon-don: Routledge and Paul, 1970), 184; EP/P 353; EP/P 360.

5.　ʻEzra Pound: An Interviewʼ, Writers at Work: �e Paris Review Interviews, 2nd ser., ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1963), 38.

6.　Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: �eir Letters, 1909–1914, eds. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), 82 (herea�er cited as EP/DS).

7.　Poundʼs near miss with Fenollosa at the Museum may be pieced together from Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: �e Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), 97–98; Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: �e Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 201–11; A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work / 1: �e Young Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68; and Rupert Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Paci�c Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 60. Pound arrived in London from Venice ʻwith £3 knowing no oneʼ on 14 August 1908, and applied soon therea�er for a readerʼs card at the Museum (Carpenter). Fenollosa a�er a tour of Germany and France arrived in London early in September to work at the Museum. At ��y-�ve he seemed ʻin excellent healthʼ, but on Monday morning 21 September su�ered a heart attack, and that evening a fatal second one (Chisolm) at his lodgings in Bloomsbury. Poundʼs residence was two kilometres away at a boarding house on Duchess Street, Marylebone (Moody), and he was waiting for his readerʼs card, which the ʻByzantine . . . procedureʼ of applying for and receiving prevented him from having in hand until 8 October (Arrowsmith). So a living Fenollosa and a twenty-three-year-old Pound coincided in central London by two or three weeks in September 1908 and missed each other at the Museum by nineteen or twenty days. I am told by Andrew Houwen that Basil Hall Chamberlain checked out of the Imperial Hotel on Russell Square in the inter-im, but that is another story.

8.　Pound to Shakespear, EP/DS 264; Mary Fenollosa to Pound, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan, 1987), 6 (here-a�er cited as EP&J); Pound to Williams, �e Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Page (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 27 (herea�er cited as LEP). Pound was not in fact in December 1913 in possession of ʻallʼ old Fenollosaʼs treasures. Mary Fenollosa in her letters to him was cagey about what she had and when she would send what, and in what order, and some confusion remains about the matter. Probably Pound had all of what he would receive

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by the time he wrote the letter to Williams in December 1913, but on present knowledge in publications and archives this is by no means certain. Miyake notes with characteristic care, drawing on Yamaguchi, that some Fenollosa manuscripts which Mary Fenollosa did not send to Pound were sold in 1920, and ʻdiscovered in 1972 in the basement of the Weidner Libraryʼ at Harvard University (xxxiii).

9.　LEP 3110.　ʻNishikigiʼ, Poetry 4 (May 1914): 35–48; ʻ�e Classical Drama of Japanʼ, Quarterly

Review 221 (Oct. 1914): 450–77; ʻ�e Classical Stage of Japan: Ernest Fenollosaʼs Work on the Japanese “Noh”ʼ, Drama 5 (May 1915): 199–247; Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Man-uscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, Chosen and Finished by Ezra Pound, with an Introduction by William Butler Years (Churchtown, Dundrum: Cuala, 1916); ʻAwoi no Uye: A Play by Ujinobuʼ, Quarterly Notebook 1 (Jan. 1916): 9–16; ʻKakistuhataʼ, Drama 6 (Aug. 1916): 428–35; ʻNohʼ or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan (London: Macmillan, 1916 [i.e., 1917]). �e nō plays also appear without emendation from the ʻNohʼ versions, although lack-ing Appendix 4, ʻAn Attempt to Record Some of the Music of Hagoromoʼ, in Kennerʼs 1953 edition of �e Translations of Ezra Pound, and are reprinted, with a few slight variations from the ʻNohʼ versions, Appendix 4 still lacking but Yeatsʼs Certain Noble Plays Introduction re-stored as an appendix, in �e Classic Noh �eatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959) (herea�er cited as CNTJ). Amongst the variations in CNPJ is a tweaking of authorial prove-nance: ʻNohʼ was ʻby Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Poundʼ, CNPJ ʻby Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosaʼ.

11.　Carr, �e Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Cape, 2009), 485. �e story of Pound declaring H.D. an ʻImagisteʼ has been told in too many sources to enumerate; the accounts by those who were there are in H.D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, eds. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York: New Directions, 1979), 18, and Richard Aldington, Life for Lifeʼs Sake: A Book of Reminiscences (New York: Viking, 1941), 134–35.

12.　Again a tale which has been told in dozens of books, with wildly contradictory de-tails. Of the thirteen in attendance at the dinner �ve recalled the occasion in print, both Pound and Lowell in poems, 77/469 and ʻ�e Dinner Partyʼ, Men Women and Ghosts (New York, Macmillan, 1916), 338; Ford Madox Hue�er in the vicious ʻHenri-Gaudier: �e Story of a Low Tea Shopʼ, English Review 29 (1919): 297–304; and John Cournos and John Gould Fletcher in autobiographies which are not in agreement about what happened: Autobiography (New York: Putnam: 1935), 271–72, and Life is My Song: �e Autobiography of John Gould Fletcher (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 147–52.

13.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 77, 86.14.　Kenner, �e Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951);

Laughlin, ʻSome Irreverent Literary Historyʼ, Introduction to Kennerʼs Poetry of EP, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), xii; Kenner, �e Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1971).

15.　Pound, ʻVorticismʼ, Fortnightly Review NS 96 (1914): 471; ʻA�rmations VI: �e “Image” and the Japanese Classical Stage (1915),ʼ Princeton University Library Chronicle 53.1 (1991): 17; ʻ�e Classical Stage of Japan: Ernest Fenollosaʼs Work on the Japanese “Noh”ʼ, Drama 5 (1915): 45n / CNTJ 27n.

16.　ʻImagism Status Rerumʼ 53.

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17.　ʻDe Mussetʼs “A Supper at the House of Mademoiselle Rachel” (May 29, 1839)ʼ, Plays Modelled on the Noh (1916), ed. Donald Gallup (Toledo: Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1987), 23.

18.　Robert U. Ayres, Information, Entropy, and Progress: A New Evolutionary Paradigm (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 10.

19.　Pound, ʻVorticismʼ 471.20.　Pound, ʻVortexʼ, Blast 1 (1914): 153–54; ʻEdward Wadsworth, Vorticistʼ, Egoist 1

(1914): 306–07.21.　ʻVorticismʼ 469.22.　�e ʻLorenz equationsʼ in certain cases—i.e., when the so-called ʻRayleigh numberʼ

( ρ in the coordinates given above) is greater than 24.74—predict and describe the ʻdetermin-istic chaosʼ of the ʻstrange attractorsʼ which give rise to the ʻbutter�y e�ectʼ. �ey �rst fully were explained by Edward N. Lorenz in �e Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washing-ton Press, 1993) and are described in relatively straightforward lay terms by Colin Sparrow even before Lorenz fully �ushed them out, in �e Lorenz Equations: Bifurcation, Chaos, and Strange Attractors (New York: Springer, 1982), 1–2. �e butter�ies in the illustrations above were generated by ʻWikimolʼ and António Miguel de Campos, respectively, and kindly have been set free into the public domain.

23.　Slatin, ʻA History of Poundʼs Cantos I-XVI, 1915–1925ʼ, American Literature 35 (1963): 183–95; Ronald Bush, �e Genesis of Ezra Poundʼs Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 101–11, and ʻ�e “Rhythm of Metaphor”: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Unity of Image in Postsymbolist Poetryʼ, Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloo-m�eld (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), 371–88; Longenbach, Stone Cot-tage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 197–250; Flory, �e American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 193–98; Miyake, ʻEzra Pound and Nohʼ, Kōbe joshigakuin daigaku ronshū 36.3 (1990): 67–102, reprinted slightly emended and more readily available in A Guide to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosaʼs Classic Noh �eatre of Japan, eds. Miyake, Sanehide Kodama, and Nicholas Teele (Orono, Maine: Na-tional Poetry Foundation, 1994), xvii–lv; Stoiche�, �e Hall of Mirrors: Dra�s & Fragments and the End of Ezra Poundʼs Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 96–122; Nicholls, ʻAn Experiment With Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of Japanese Nohʼ, Modern Language Review 90 (1995), 1–13; Houwen, ʻEzra Poundʼs Early Cantosʼ; Bush, ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ.

24.　ʻJaponisme, Orientalism, Modernism: A Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse of the Early 20th Centuryʼ, themargins.net, 2003, BK108, BK145, BK161, BK183, BK186, BK191, BK202, BK204, web, accessed 25 Dec. 2017.

25.　EP/ACH 110.26.　Pound, ʻ�ree Cantosʼ, Poetry 10 (1917) nos. 3 (June): 113–21; 4 (July): 180–88; and

5 (Aug.): 248–54. As noted above the ʻ�ree Cantosʼ recently have been made readily available in Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester: Cancanet: 2015), 2–24 (herea�er cited as PC).

27.　Pound, qtd. in Slatin 186.28.　EP/ACH 113.29.　Ibid. 111.30.　Ibid. 110.

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31.　4/15; 21/99. �e pines in cantos 4 and 21 are at Takasago and Ise, not, as in the play, at Takasago and Sumiyoshi. Miyake argues plausibly that this is Poundʼs intentional con�ation of Isis with Kannon, who appears at Ise in the Noh play Tamura (ʻEP and Nohʼ xli).

32.　One of these, still unpublished, was amongst several manuscripts donated anony-mously to the Princeton University Library in 1991, and along with the other materials from the donation is held at the Ezra Pound Collection on Japanese Drama amongst the Princeton Rare Books and Special Collections; the other appears in EP/ACL 111–17.

33.　Pound, A B C of Reading (London: Routledge, 1934), 52.34.　Houwen 329–330.35.　Ibid. 330, 334.36.　Ibid. 335, 341; Pound, Guide to Kulchur [1938] (New York: New Directions, 1951),

95, qtd. in Houwen 341. Poundʼs ʻrappel à lʼordreʼ is in general reference to Retour à lʼordre, ʻreturn to orderʼ, the anti-avant-garde movement in European art which emerged in the years following the First World War, and in speci�c reference to Jean Cocteauʼs Le rappel à lʼordre (Paris: Stock, Delamain et Bouttelleau, 1926).

37.　Kōgyo Tsukioka, ʻScene from the Noh Play “Takasago”ʼ, ca. 1910, Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org (noted there as public domain), web, accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

38.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 78.39.　Ibid. 81; EP&J xv. To be fair, in the sentence Bush quotes Kodama is clear that he is

writing of the Pound of 1911, before he began corresponding with and then meeting Yonejirō Noguchi, but I am in sympathy with Bushʼs point, and do not see Noguchi to have been much of an antidote, in any case. In the paragraph from which Bush quotes Kodama goes on to write that even a�er meeting Noguchi Pound ʻdoes not seem to have changed his basic view of Japan. �e image of the dream-like Japan had been so strongly imprinted on his young mind that it could not easily be changed or removedʼ. Noguchi would not have been the one to do it, caught up in his own dreams and ʻadvertisementsʼ—Hiroaki Satōʼs perfect word in ʻYone Noguchi: Accomplishments & Rolesʼ, Journal of American and Canadian Studies 13 [1995], 8—about the ʻfar-away, beautiful countryʼ, but Itō, Kume, Kōri, and others of their friends, and later Kitasono and the VOU poets and Nishiwaki worked well enough.

40.　To his credit again Bush for only the third time in any English-language study of Pound has the important Shirakaba-ha writer Kōriʼs name right. Even Kodama in the Intro-duction to EP/J has it ʻJisoichi Kayanoʼ (xv), amongst Japanese Pound scholars one of the more common misreadings either of Kōriʼs name, 郡虎彦, or, in this case, pen name, Hatakazu Kayano, 萱二十一. ʻJisoichi Kayanoʼ is amongst ��een discrete Romanizations of one or the other, all wrong, which led to years of variations on the refrain in English scholarship that ʻnot much is known of himʼ. I am grateful to Bush for citing my essay which explains the story, ʻNotes Toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in Modernist Europe, 1910–1920, With Special Reference to Kōri Torahikoʼ, Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (2012): 19–36.

41.　Any account of Poundʼs relation with Kitasono must note, as Bush does, John Soltʼs superb Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: �e Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), particularly chapter 5, ʻKit Kat and Ez Poʼ, 111–35; the Pound-Kitasono correspondence appears in EP&J 25–128; for biblio-graphical reference to Poundʼs repeated fulsome praise of Kitasono and the VOU poets see ʻKitasono Katue and VOUʼ, themargins.net, 2003, web, accessed 6 Jan. 2018.

42.　Pound to Ryōzō Iwasaki [岩崎良三], 21 Aug. 1957, EP&J, 141; ʻNomination Data-

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base: Junzaburō Nishiwakiʼ, Nobelprize.org, web, accessed 6 Jan, 2018. Regarding Iwasaki, 良三 is not ʻRyozoʼ as practically everyone in English, including Kodama, has it. �is sort of thing can make a di�erence unless assuming no one whose primary language is not Japanese could possibly care or be able to �nd anything in Japanese anyway. Printers do macrons now, and some dislike trying to reverse engineer sloppy Romanizations. Iwasaki is famous enough and the name common enough that it is not a problem in this case, other than that ʻRyozoʼ is neither correct nor �ndable in Japanese, but it well can be a problem, and Iʼll have sunk with that ship if as is likely another century passes as it continues to take on polluted water. �is is part of the reason no one in Anglophone Pound scholarship knew who Kōri was or in some cases whether he was one person or two until 2012, with his ��een wrong names.

43.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 79, 79n13.44.　Ibid. 85, 90, 91, 93.45.　Ibid. 93.46.　�e twelve articles Pound contributed to the Japan Times in these years, including

ʻStudy of Noh Continues in the Westʼ, are collected in EP&J 150–91.47.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 94, and see 75–77 for Bushʼs overview of Fenollosaʼs under-

standing; Fenollosaʼs 1898 ʻ�e Coming Fusion of East and Westʼ is readily available in �e Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Editionʼ, eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 153–65.

48.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 94, and 94–104; Pound, to Kitasono, 15 Nov. 1940, EP&J 102.49.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 104–05.50.　Sung (成恵卿, Romanized in some sources derived from katakana as Son Hegyon),

Seiyō no mugen nō: Ieitsu to Paundo / 『西洋の夢幻能―イェイツとパウンド』(Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1999); Niikura (新倉俊一), Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo / 『詩人たちの世紀―西脇順三郎とエズラ・パウンド』(Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2003).

51.　Nagahata, ʻPoundʼs Reception of Noh Reconsidered: �e Image and the Voiceʼ, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008): 113–25; Takahashi [高橋美帆], ʻKasōdaijō no Herakure-su: Ezura Paundo han “Torakisu no Onnatachi” wo meguru ichikōsatsuʼ /「火葬台上のヘラクレス―エズラ・パウンド版『トラキスの女たち』をめぐる一考察」, Ezra Pound Review 10 (2008): 1–18; Pound, Women of Trachis [1954] (New York: New Directions, 1957), 3; Arrowsmith, 103–163; Imamura, ʻHemingway, Pound, and the Japanese Artist Tamijūrō Kumeʼ and Kleitz, ʻMichio Itō and the Modernist Vortexʼ, �e Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (2012), 37–47, 48–60, translated along with Ewick, ʻNotes Toward a Cultural Historyʼ in Tōkyō joshidaigaku hikaku bunka kenkūjo kiyō / 『東京女子大学比較文化研究所紀要』77 (2016): 1–49; Mihálka, ʻEzra Poundʼs Translation and Adaption of the Japanese Nōʼ, Journal of American Studies of Turkey 32 (2012): 33–46; Rosenow, ʻ“High Civilization”ʼ, Papers on Language and Literature 48.3 (2012): 227–44; Takahashi, ʻHerakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading of �e Women of Trachisʼ, ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love, eds. William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi (Brooklyn: AMS, 2013), 215–28; Pellecchia, ʻEzra Pound and the Politics of Noh Filmʼ, Philological Quarterly 92.4 (2013 [i.e., 2014]): 499–516; Watson, ʻInside and Outside the Grand Lineage: A Study of Early Translations of Japanese Nō Playsʼ, Asia Paci�c Translation and Intercultural Studies 1 (2014): 28–42; Takeki Ōwada (大和田建樹, an alternative and more natural-seeming reading of ʻTatekiʼ rather than the ʻTakekiʼ Ōwada him-self used also is common), Yōkyoku tsūkai / 『謡曲通解』rev. ed., 8 vols. (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1896); Klankert, ʻStrange Relations: Cultural Translation of Noh �eatre in Ezra Poundʼs

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Dance Poems and W. B. Yeatsʼs At the Hawkʼs Well, Word and Text 4.2 (2014), 98–111; Pound, ʻSword-Dance and Spear-Dance: Texts of the Poems Used with Michio Itowʼs Dancesʼ, Future 1.2 (Dec. 1916), 54–55; Preston, ʻEzra Pound as Noh Studentʼ, Learning to Kneel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 23–61.

52.　I borrow this line from Yasunari Takahashi in ʻ�e Ghost Trio: Beckett, Yeats, and Nohʼ, Cambridge Review 107 (1986): 173; Takahashi was writing of Yeats but Iʼve always ad-mired the line, and it applies equally or arguably better here: Yeats had been all in with the ghosts for years.

53.　Pound, ʻClassical Stageʼ 211 / CNTJ 12. I am indebted to Mihálka both for her sen-sitivity to ghosts and for bringing this quote Iʼd read a dozen times before fully into my read-ing of Poundʼs encounter with nō.

54.　ʻ�ree Cantos Iʼ 114 / PC 4; Longenbach 222–50.55.　ʻ�ree Cantos IIIʼ 248 / PC 16; ʻ�ree Cantos IIʼ 181 / PC 11; Nicholls 13.56.　ʻ�ree Cantos Iʼ 117 / PC 5; ʻ�ree Cantos IIʼ 185 / PC 13.57.　ʻEzra Pound and the Invention of Japan, I, 19–20; Pound, Rev. of Certain Noble

Plays and ʻNohʼ, Little Review 4.4 (Aug. 1917): 8–9; Pound to John Quinn, 10 Jan. 1917, LEP 102 and �e Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915–1924. ed. Timothy Materer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 94 (herea�er cited as EP/JQ); Pound to Quinn, 4 June 1918, LEP 137, although strangely the same letter, represented to be complete, appears in EP/JQ 151–53 and does not include the comment on nō; Pound to Iris Barry, [1917], qtd. in John Tytell, Ezra Pound: �e Solitary Volcano (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 136. Oddly enough many years later, when Barry was the curator of the Film Library at the New York Museum of Modern Art, it was she to whom Pound �rst turned in soliciting help in his ʻrumpus to get ALL the NOH �lmedʼ, urging Barry to ʻ[put] in an orderʼ with Shio Sakanishi at the Library of Congress or to write directly to the Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, forerunner to �e Japan Foundation, the address of which in Tokyo Pound provided (EP&J 225).

58.　ʻGeopolitical Aestheticʼ 77; Poundʼs Jan. 1917 letter to Quinn, LEP 102, EP/JQ 94.59.　For notes about the period reviews of nō see the �rst part of this essay, ʻEP and the

Invention of Japan, Iʼ, 19–24, and for the CWC vexation my ʻInstigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa I: �e Chinese Written Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the Machinations of a Divinely Inspired Char Womanʼ, Essays and Studies 66.1 (Tokyo Womanʼs Christian University) (2015): 53–72

60.　Houwen 337; Fischer, Ezra Poundʼs Radio Operas: �e BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 37.

61.　See Stoiche� 96.62.　LEP 214. �e ʻsonvbitch who knows a little Nipponeseʼ Pound had in mind was his

former friend and helper on his earlier work in both Chinese and Japanese from Fenollosaʼs manuscripts, Arthur Waley, but that is another essay.

63.　Pound, Rev. of CNP and ʻNohʼ 9.64.　ʻClassical Stageʼ 223 / CNTJ 26–27. Further analysis of the relation of �e Pisan

Cantos and nō may be found in Niikura, ʻ�e Pisan Cantos and Noh Dramaʼ, American Litera-ture in the 1940s 1 (1976): 132–40; Miyake, ʻEP and Nohʼ; and Nobuko Tsukui, Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1983). Ursula Shiojiʼs Ezra Poundʼs Pisan Cantos and the Noh (Frankfurt: Lang, 1998) gets bogged down in Claes Schaarʼs theories said to be about intertextuality, ʻLocation of Surface Contexts and Infra-con-

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texts and their Analysis on the Vertical and Horizontal Axes of the Poemʼ, for example, but is valuable nonetheless for its painstaking tracking of Poundʼs memories of nō, no text at hand, at Pisa.

65.　Amongst the goddesses invoked who ʻmʼelevasti,ʼ li�ed Pound / Odysseus ʻout of Erebusʼ is the compound ʻIsis Kuanonʼ (90/626), and ʻAt Miwo the moonʼs axe is renewedʼ (106/775), allusion to the beginning of the tenninʼs climactic dance at ʻMiwoʼ, or rather Miho no Matsubara, 三保の松原, the Miho Pine Gove, which endures, a World Heritage Site, on the Miho Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture. ʻ�e jewelled axe takes up the eternal renewing, the palace of the moon-god is being renewed with the jewelled axe, and this is always recur-ringʼ (ʻClassical Dramaʼ 461 / CNTJ 102). In a note Pound equates the image with Danteʼs ʻQuale nei plenilumii sereni / Trivia ride tra le ninfe eterneʼ (As in the clear skies at the full moon / Trivia [the goddess of the ʻthree waysʼ, smiles among the eternal nymphsʼ), i.e., the moon goddess, Trivia, better known in English as Diana, shining amongst stars with which Pound was familiar, visible enough with her eternal nymphs one night at Pisa, even in the light of a full moon, to be recorded.

66.　Flory 193–96.67.　Awoi no Uye 9–12, emended in CNTJ 113–15. In 1916 Pound acknowledged in the

opening paragraph of the �rst publication of Awoi that the Hirata-Fenollosa dra� from which he was working ʻpresents di�cultiesʼ, and that ʻin certain placesʼ it was ʻnecessary . . . to choose one meaning over anotherʼ. ʻI wish to say quite simply that if I go wrong I shall be very grate-ful for correction from any scholar capable of providing itʼ, he wrote (9). �is opening note is not reproduced in CNTJ or other reprints.

68.　Yamaguchi (山口静一), Fenorosa : Nihon bunka no senyō ni sasageta isshō / 『フェノロサ : 日本文化の宣揚に捧げた一生』[Fenollosa: A life devoted to the advocacy of Japanese culture], vol. 2 (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1982), 190–93.

69.　Waley, �e Nō Plays of Japan (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), 180; Miner, �e Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 137; Tsukui 167.

70.　Flory 196–98; Stoiche� 96–99; Miyake, ʻEzra Poundʼs Love Mysteries and the Two Noh Plays: “Kayoi Komachi” and “Awoi no Uye”ʼ, Kōbe joshigakuin daigaku ronshū 35.3 (1989): 53, 58–61.

71.　Yeats, ʻSwedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Placesʼ [1914], Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, vol. 2, ed. Lady Gregory (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1970), 316; Earl Miner, ʻNōʼ, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger and Frank J. Warnke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 571; Richard Taylor, �e Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese Noh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 135.

72.　Taylor 140–45; Miyake, ʻEzra Pound and Nohʼ xlvi; Masaru Sekine, Christopher Murray, and Augustine Martin, Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study) Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1990), 37–40.

73.　Pound, Kakitsuhata 435.74.　Ibid. 431, 434–35 / CNTJ 125, 128, 130.75.　Kenner, ʻA Note on CXʼ, Paideuma 8.1 (1979): 51–52.76.　Flory 195.77.　Pound, Kakitsuhata 434 / CNTJ 128–29.78.　Rock, ʻ�e Romance of 2KʼA-2 MA-1 GYU-3 MI-3 GKYIʼ, Bulletin de lʼEcole

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Française dʼetrême-orient 39 (1939): 5.79.　Pound, Kakitsuhata 435, emended in CNTJ 130.80.　Ibid. 433 / CNTJ 128.81.　Ibid. 433–34 / CNTJ 128.82.　Ibid 434 / CNTJ 129.83.　I am grateful to Stéphan Barbery for generous permission to reproduce this image.

More of Barberyʼs striking photographs from the same set are available at https//www. �icker.com/photos/barbery/albums/72157645461966981, web, accessed 17 Jan. 2018.

84.　Stoiche� 99.85.　EP&J xi.86.　Konishi (小西甚一), Nihon bungeishi, vol. 3) / 『日本文藝史 3』(Tokyo: Kodansha,

1984), 524.87.　Hisao Kanaseki, ʻHaiku and Modern American Poetryʼ, East-West Review 3 (1967–

68): 230.88.　Porter, trans., A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), 28.89.　Carter, trans., Traditional Japanese Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1991), 214.90.　Houwen 326.