sounds of grillo have different connotations. The use of the foreign tag is, as
usual in Pound, both an authenticating and a distancing device. Grillo: the
Italian sets the Pisan stage even as it undercuts the mimesis of the address to
the cricket, reminding us that what we have before us is not the real thing
but, after all, a form of writing. The next line, “Guard’s cap quattrocento”
works the same way. Pound could have written “Guard’s cap was a plain
round one, the kind that Italians have been wearing for centuries, as you can
see in their early Renaissance painting.” The Italian tag quattrocento is not
only a form of shorthand, making the point in highly condensed form; it
functions here as a kind of cheering-up device. How bad, after all, can prison
be if its guards look so quattrocento?
The words “Guard’s cap quattrocento” are now punctuated by a little
stanza, rendered in a simulation of colloquial French (“o-hon dit que’ke fois
au vi’age,” which means “On dit quelquefois au village”), about the useless-
ness of helmets, designed, as they evidently were, less for actual than for psy-
chological protection.^25 Again, the quotation is a way of undermining lyric
norms whereby at this juncture in the poem the poet might express his fears
for the future, his need for courage to bear his situation. As it stands, we can-
not be certain whether the little adage refers to the poet himself or, on the
contrary, is designed as an ironic contrast to his own will to go on, given that
he has no helmet, not even a “casque de crystal rose,” as in Stuart Merrill’s
poem (cited in line 16), to protect him.
Found text in a foreign language thus plays the same role as the proper
names that follow: its hyperspeci¤city leaves its meaning open. In the pas-
sage that follows, every proper name seems to be autobiographical, and yet
there are curious conundrums. Why, for example, “So Salzburg reopens / Qui
suona Wolfgang grillo / Po viola da gamba” (line 9)? Salzburg is hardly one
of Pound’s sacred places—it is not even in his beloved Tyrol—and yet he re-
marks on the reopening after the war of the Salzburg Festival, perhaps be-
cause Mozart’s chamber music and the “viola da gamba” played “piano”
(softly) allow him to invoke the presence of Olga Rudge without so much
as mentioning her name. To be aware of the reopening of the Salzburg Fes-
tival, moreover, may well give the poet the sense of being up on things,
part of the world, as does his conversational remark that “one might do
worse than open a pub on Lake Garda,” as if anyone in his immediate circle
were contemplating such a thing. As for the French Symboliste poets whose
names follow—“[Laurent] Tailhade,” “[Henri] Gauthier-Villars,” the Bel-
gian “[Albert Henri] Mockel,” and the French American Stuart Merrill,
whose line “en casque de crystal rose les baladines” is quoted twice in the
passage—these poets, like Salzburg, are hardly in Pound’s poetic pantheon,
52 Chapter 3