BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
Many people do not know who Ezra Pound was. A major american poet, with poems like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, he was il miglior fabbro, the best blacksmith
that could churn the metal to shape the art and equal universal art at the hand
of this master of literature and translation.
Ezra
Pound, died in Italy in prison accused as traitor for broadcasting fascist and
non-fascist and anti-fascist radio talks through italian radio, during the
Second World War. Why do poets always
have to end this way, I know... but I will not tell you, it is interesting
research in the library and on the internet, noone talks about that subject.
Pound
was a multi-linguist, a scholar and a genius of art and poetry. The mentor of poets like T.S. Eliot, THOMAS
STEARNS ELIOT, author of the The Waste
Land, poems like The Hollow Men,
edited by the prestigious publishing house in London, Faber&Faber.
Eliot
wrote a very know poem entitled: The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (I grow
old/I grow old/I wear the bottom of my trousers rolled), it is a piece of
poetic art in english and american literature, for Eliot lived the rest of his
life in England and everyone fights over him and the extraordinary legacy of
his heritage.
Let us go, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table (begins the character Prufrock)
But who is “us”? Then, “you” and “I”. How many people are to
go, this is the mystery of the poem for some scholars. And, if you translate to
spanish you have to be careful with this twist, a psychological and
sociological turn, that must say:
Vayamos, tú y yo
Cuando el anochecer esta esparcido por el
cielo
Como un paciente en éter sobre el mesón…
It could also mean to use the verb vámos, but it would not imply the
existence of more than two people that are going as Eliot wants to perhaps
imply. There is a “you” and “I”, perhaps
the third entity is the patient etherized upon the table to symbolize the
precarious death of humanity, the end of all numb things, or the start of life,
in its implicit beginning. In the
beginning... the bible says. I would not
dare translate the bible.
