My post is on the far side of these admirable line from Canto 20:

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 09:52  PM, Carrol Cox wrote:

> And Rennert had said: Nobody, no, nobody
> Knows anything about Provencal, or if there is anybody,
> It's old Levy."
> And so I went up to Freiburg,
> And the vacation was just beginning,
> The students getting off for the summer,
> Freiburg im Breisgau,
> And everything clean, seeming clean, after Italy.
>
> And I went to old Levy, and it was by then 6:30
> in the evening , and he trailed half way  across Freiburg
> before dinner, to see the two strips of copy,
> Arnaut's, settan'uno R. superiore (Ambrosiana)
> Not that I could sing him the music.
> And he said: Now is there anything I can tell you?"
> And I said: I dunno, sir, or
> "Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by _noigandres_?"
> And he said: Noigandres! NOIgandres!
> "You know for seex mon's of my life
> "Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself:
> "Noigandress, eh, _noi_gandres,
> "Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!"

>  Now I
> don't know who Levy was/is, nor do I know whether some further lines
> (not quoted here) in this Canto represent a "solution" to the problem
> of
> "Noigandres" or not. (More on that in a moment.)

The content of this entire post is shamelessly lifted from Kenner's
_Pound Era_, pp. 114-116.

First of all,  Emil Levy was a Provencal philologist who "had inherited
Diez and Raynouard's responsibilities; his eight-volume supplement to
Raynouard's _Lexique_ had been appearing since 1892."

"...what the devil noigandres may mean is a characteristic scholar's
perplexity.  Pound encountered the word in Canello's edition of Arnaut
(1883), the 13th canzon, the final line of the first stanza. . ."

Arnaut's stanza's first lines are a staccato list of colors and
geographical features, and go on to describe bird-song.  The terms of
the poem are all "staples of Provencal song but here seen afresh though
for the thousandth time".  The final couplet of this stanza reads "D'
un' aital flor don lo fruitz sia amors / E jois lo grans, a l'olors de
noigandres".  It means (roughly) something about a "flower of which the
fruit is love / and joy its seed, and the perfume ... noigandres".
It's easy to see why the gloss of this last line would intrigue Pound
and vex Levy.

Kenner continues: "A vexing anticlimax: one wants to follow the fine
orchestration of sight and thought and sound to its close, and is made
to taste seminar perplexities.  Such a word is the lexicographer's
despair.  If it exists at all it exists here only, as for Greek
lexicographers do many of the words in Sappho. . . And it may not exist
at all; the manuscripts chatter a dissident babel: nuo gaindres, nul
grandes, notz grandres . . . leaning on Raynouard's _Lexique_, [Signor
Canello] fancied some kind of nut, nutmeg, or walnut, and conjured up
cognate forms of which a French correspondent in turn doubted the
existence.  And Levy's job was emending and extending Raynouard.  One
sympathizes with his bedtime ritual.

"And some years before the young American's visit Levy had solved the
problem, divining (after six months, the Canto bids us realize) that
the second part of noigandres must be a from of gandir (protect, ward
off); than enoi is cognate with modern French ennui; and the word comes
apart neatly into d'enoi gandres, wards off ennui. . ."

The lines in the 20th Canto that Carroll brought to our attention pick
up (or as Kenner puts it, "reconstellate") some elements of Arnaut's
poem.  See them again:

        Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata.
        You would be happy for the smell of that place
        And never tired of being there, either alone
        Or accompanied.

"Never tired of being there" because the place "d'enoi gandres", wards
off boredom.
----------

Golly, that was fun.  Sorry I had nothing quote original unquote to
send in your directions.  Once I started reading Kenner I didn't want
to stop, but I kept myself from continuing the rhythm of his masterful
gloss past the "noigandres" issue.  I remembered the word and Kenner's
discussion because of Carroll's post, and couldn't rest until the itch
had been scratched.  Imagine how Levy felt during those seex months.

Happy New Year, all -
Jon