More on Pound's Prison Experience

A SIDE from what Pound tells us in his Pisan Cantos, most of what is known about his life in the prison camp near Pisa (officially called the MTOUSA Disciplinary Training Center) where he was confined in 1945 for allegedly treasonable wartime broadcasts comes from five sources. Two articles by people who were stationed there describe the camp and explain several references in The Cantos, and one of them (Robert L. Allen's) gives us several interesting glimpses of Pound; Pound himself gave an account of the camp to Professor Giovanni Giovannini which was used by Harry M. Meacham in The Caged Panther.' Eva Hesse, in her translation Pisaner Cantos, prints some official documents which show that Pound was taken to the camp on 24 May and that he was transferred from there to Rome and flown to the United States on I7-I8 November.2 Julien Cornell, Pound's lawyer (who made the case that Pound was in no fit mental state in 1945 to stand trial for treason), describes Pound's sufferings in the camp in such terms as to give the impression that Pound had a serious mental breakdown after three weeks in a steel cage and that, even after he was transferred to a tent and given medical treatment, his mind was seriously impaired. Cornell must have got his information from Pound, but of course he had reason to make the most of the

Criminology · Pound (networking) · Prison · Computer Science · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Samuel Beckett and Modernism

• Queering Modernist Translation

  Christian Bancroft•Queering Modernist Translation•2020

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