“Pound’s silence” A. Elkann – Book presentation

Pound’s silence

Alain Elkann

Book presentation with the Author

Alain Elkann is an Italian journalist and writer. He collaborates with “La Stampa”, “A”, “Nuovi Argomenti”, “Shalom”, “Panta”.

As Mirella Serri stated in tuttolibri, la Stampa, “The story ends with a clever surprise by the would-be biographer. Rightly, we are used to separating political orientation and artistic production. This applies, however, to literary criticism. Nonetheless, in the creative space of a novel Elkann allows himself the freedom that those who work with the imagination can afford. And so, he inflicts on Pound an exemplary punishment for his anti-Semitism, for his compromise with Nazism and fascism. A punishment that we certainly do not reveal what it is.”

Morli is a writer prisoner of an obsession: understanding what genius consists of. The question challenges him, pushes him to delve deeper into the lives and works of great artists. Finally, this obsession seems to focus on a single name: Ezra Pound, a man who still represents an enigma: one of the most visionary and original American poets of the twentieth century, avant-garde with a solid classical education, economist, translator of Confucius, friend, editor and advisor to Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway. But also, a fascist, anti-Semite, political agitator imprisoned from 1945 to 1958 in the criminal section of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington on charges of treason. Is it possible to understand and reconcile these contradictory souls? Allowing himself to be guided by the Cantos and other works by Pound, Morli tries to piece together the mosaic of a prismatic personality that does not allow itself to be circumscribed by the categories we usually resort to and sets off in search of those who knew him or even just met him. Thus, he begins to weave an imaginary dialogue with the poet where the places and women he loved especially in the last part of his life find their place, when he closes himself in silence and walks the streets of Venice becoming an unfathomable icon. But the more Morli tries to get closer to Pound’s mystery, the more he escapes the question: can the artist be condemned and his art absolved?

Alastair McEwen (translator)
Bordighera Press