WEBVTT

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Yeah.

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I'd like to read just a
few of the recent ones.

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These I've been working
lately with macaronics.

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Macaronics are
multilingual poems.

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They're not
something, by the way,

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that come from the supermarket.

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It's a tradition that goes back
to the Renaissance in Italy,

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where people started--

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those late Latin scholars
began writing poems line

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by line in Latin and Italian.

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Then later it spread
to England, France,

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and people were writing
poems in English and Latin

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or in English and
French together.

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What interests me
about it, of course,

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is the way that Pound
used this technique,

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though, not so formally.

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In "The Cantos," he's
always mixing languages.

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There are 16 languages
in "The Cantos."

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And he would-- he never put
them together as formally

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as the macaronist did.

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But it interests me very
much to see what effect

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you can achieve if you
juxtapose in discrete languages

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and what they will do-- what the
language will do to each other.

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Let's see if I have one here.

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This one is built up--

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actually, this one is built
up out of the Latin of Perseus

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and out of Pound's own
translations of the lines

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in Perseus, so it--

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what you will hear is
both the Latin, and then

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the quote from the Pound.

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So this is a totally
borrowed piece of verse.

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I have very little
to do with it,

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except the help of a
typewriter in putting these two

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great poets together.

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No, my dear, I'll not wish
you the death you deserve.

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sunt apud infernos
tot milia formosarum

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There are enough women in hell,
quite enough beautiful women.

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But it is not
sufficient, my dear,

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to be as beautiful as you are.

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despicit et magnos
recta puella deos

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And of all those
young women, not

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one has inquired the
cause of the world.

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So go your way, my
dear, and I'll go mine.

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