perience of visuality, but also in its preoccupation with the invisible” (21); as such,
the Image is part of a larger “submerged economy of loss and mourning” (27).
- Pound’s dates are 1885–1973; Duchamp’s are 1887–1968.
- Marcel Duchamp, A L’In¤nitif, in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp:
Salt Seller = Marchand du Sel, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1975), 74. See “The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp,”
Perloff, Twenty-¤rst-Century Modernism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), 77–120. - See Marcel Duchamp, Notes, presentation and translation by Paul Matisse
(Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980; rpt. Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1983), #185. Figure 3 reproduces the orthography of the actual note as it
appears in French. The numbered notes are reproduced as facsimile scraps, with the
French and English print versions at the bottom of the page. Slash marks indicate
the end of the line in the handwritten version. The book is unpaginated. - Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism on Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from
Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 126–27. - See Andrew Clear¤eld, “Pound, Paris, and Dada,” Paideuma 7, no. 1 & 2
(spring and fall 1978): 113–40. - Richard Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” South Atlantic Quarterly 83, no. 1 (winter
1984): 44–68; see 60. - See my “Dada without Duchamp; Duchamp without Dada: Avant-Garde
Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Stanford Humanities Review 7, no. 1 (1999):
48–78. - Canto 78/500–501, lines 62–88. For convenience, I have numbered the lines
here starting with 1. - “It is sometimes said in the village / that a helmet has no use / none at all / It
is only good to give courage / to those who don’t have any at all.” See Carroll F. Terrell,
ed., A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1980–1984), 2: 418. The Companion does not tell us whether this stanza
is meant to be spoken or sung. - The line “E fa di clarità l’aer tremare” has its particular resonances for Pound.
In his 1910 introduction to his early Cavalcanti translations, Pound takes on the poet’s
early editors, complaining that they transcribed Cavalcanti’s manuscript incorrectly:
e fa di clarità tremar l’are, perhaps this version is more “musical.” But in Sonneto
VII—as Pound prints it, the line Sonneto 7 itself—the line in question is “Che fa di
clarità l’aer tremare,” which Pound, ignoring the relative pronoun, translates in his
best “archaic” style as “And making the air to tremble with a bright cleareness” (see
Pound, Translations I [New York: New Directions, 1967], 24, 38–39). As Wallace Mar-
tin has pointed out to me (e-mail, 25 March 2002), “Pound’s fanaticism about the
shades of difference between manuscripts and between reciting and singing a poem”
aligns his nominalism with Duchamp’s infrathin. - See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber, 1988), 30.
276 Notes to Pages 44–55