Manuscript Page of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with Notes by Ezra Pound
U nastavku sledi odlomak iz intervjua koji je T. S. Eliot dao za magazin The Paris Review iz koga sam izdvojila deo koji se odnosi na Paundovu intervenciju nad pesmom Pusta zemlja.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember the circumstances of your first meeting with Pound?
ELIOT
I think I went to call on him first. I think I made a good impression, in his little triangular sitting room in Kensington. He said, “Send me your poems.” And he wrote back, “This is as good as anything I’ve seen. Come around and have a talk about them.” Then he pushed them on Harriet Monroe, which took a little time.
INTERVIEWER
You have mentioned in print that Pound cut The Waste Land from a much larger poem into its present form. Were you benefited by his criticism of your poems in general? Did he cut other poems?
ELIOT
Yes. At that period, yes. He was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do.
INTERVIEWER
Does the manuscript of the original, uncut Waste Land exist?
ELIOT
Don’t ask me. That’s one of the things I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. I sold it to John Quinn. I also gave him a notebook of unpublished poems, because he had been kind to me in various affairs. That’s the last I heard of them. Then he died and they didn’t turn up at the sale.
INTERVIEWER
What sort of thing did Pound cut from The Waste Land? Did he cut whole sections?
ELIOT
Whole sections, yes. There was a long section about a shipwreck. I don’t know what that had to do with anything else, but it was rather inspired by the Ulysses canto in The Inferno, I think. Then there was another section which was an imitation Rape of the Lock. Pound said, “It’s no use trying to do something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do something different.”
INTERVIEWER
Did the excisions change the intellectual structure of the poem?
ELIOT
No. I think it was just as structureless, only in a more futile way, in the longer version.
Postcard from Eliot to Pound, Dec 8th, 1925.
