The Pisan Cantos (1948)
A60
Editions
a. First edition
EZRA POUND | THE PISAN | CANTOS | A NEW DIRECTIONS Book
1 blank leaf, 2 leaves, 118 pp., 2 blank leaves, incl. music. 22.1 x 14.2 cm. Black cloth boards lettered in silver down the spine; end-papers. Grey dust-jacket printed in green.
Published 30 July 1943 at $2.75; 1525 copies printed. On verso of title-leaf: . . . Manufactured in the United States by the Vail-Ballou Press New Directions Books are published by James Laughlin New York Office—500 Fifth Avenue— 18 “These ten [i.e. eleven] Cantos, called ‘The Pisan Cantos’ because they were composed when the poet was incarcerated in a prison camp near Pisa, are the most recent additions to the monumental epic poem on which Pound has been at work for more than twenty [ze. thirty] years.” (Dust-jacket)
Contents: [Cantos] LXXIV-LXXXIV
Notes: Cantos LXXII and LXXIII, omitted from the sequence, were withheld by the author. Of these two Cantos, written in Italian, 26 lines of Canto LXXII were printed as “Presenza di F. T. Marinetti” in Marina Repubblicana, Venice, for 15 January 1945—C1697b, and the complete Canto LXXIII appeared in the same paper for 1 February 1945—C1699a. A copyright edition of both Cantos was printed by the Ezra Pound Estate in June 1973—A94—but they still (1981) have not been released for general circulation. (The 42 lines printed as “Canto Proceeding (72 circa)” in Vice Versa, New York, for January 1942—C1625— were reprinted with some changes in Drafts of Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII ([1969])—A91—as a fragment unassigned.) Canto LXXX consists of seven lines followed by Janequin’s motet “Les Oiseaux,” reproduced (in an arrangement by Gerhart Miinch for violin) in facsimile of the manuscript (in the hand of Olga Rudge). The first page of a corrected typescript (at Yale) of The Pisan Cantos was transcribed, with illustration opposite, on page 170 of volume 2 of P.J. Croft’s Autograph Poetry in the English Language: Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Tventieth Century (2 volumes, London, Cassell, 1973, and New York [ete.], MCGRAW-Hill Book Company [1973]).
b. First English edition ([1949])
EZRA POUND | [rule] | THE | Pisan | CANTOS | FABER AND FABER | LONDON
1 blank leaf, 2 leaves, 7-132 pp. 20.8 x 14.7 cm. Black cloth boards lettered in gold down the spine; end-papers. Buff dust-jacket printed in red and black.
Published 22 July 1949 at 125. 6d; 1976 copies printed. On verso of title-leaf: First published in mcmxlix ... Printed in Great Britain by R. MACLEHOSE and Company Limited The University Press Glasgow... In the first impression, pages 104 and 105 occur in the wrong order, which should be, as numbered: 103, 105, 104, 106. The error was corrected in later impressions, which are identified on the verso of the title-leaf.
Notes: In this English edition a number of omissions and expurgations were introduced in the text. Three words referring to King David (printed as line 17 on page 7 of the American edition) were omitted after the third line up on page 11; two words referring to Winston Churchill (printed in line 3 up on page 18 of the American edition) were omitted in line 16 on page 24; an 8-line passage referring to the Prince of Wales (printed as lines 15-22 on page 22 of the American edition) was omitted after line 9 on page 28; the word “buggering” (printed in line 15 on page 46 of the American edition) was replaced by TB oonaaaae ” in line 3 up on page 53; the name “Maritain” (printed in line 9 up on page so aml in line 12 on page 83 of the American edition) was replaced by “M......2 in line 13 up on page 58 and in line 13 on page 95; and a reference to Léon Blum (printed as line 12 up on page 72 in the American edition) was omitted after line 8 up on page 83. (The omitted words were restored in the edition of The Cantos published in 1976 by Faber and Faber—A61g.) This book was reissued paperbound in 1973 by Faber and Faber in their series of Faber paper covered Editions at 80p.
Content is now editable.