re Pound and the Talmud:  On 3 March 1926 Pound wrote to his father that
he had recently read some selections from the Talmud.  David Moody
 
Jonathan P. Gill wrote:
>
> Daniel and Everyone:
>
> I haven't replied on this issue because I wanted to give everyone a chance
> to respond.
>
> It is true that Pound usually used the Talmud as a shorthand for Jewish
> textuality in general, but I wouldn't underestimate the power of that
> gesture.
>
> As for Pound's actual contacts with the text, I have no evidence he ever
> read it, and no evidence he ever even read anything reliable about it.
> Nonetheless, it's important to remember that the Talmud was widely
> available around the turn of the century in America for the first time in
> a number of translations and adaptations.  One Philadelphia publishing
> house even brought out Pound's beloved Longfellow and the Talmud in the
> same series.
>
> As for England, the Talmud was widely available in London bookstores, and
> even considered something fashionable in the more general context of
> oriental literature--not to be ignored, given Pound's growing interest in
> the Chinese and Japanese texts that we were collected in volumes with the
> Talmud.
>
> More to the point, one of the first British reviews of Pound's work (in
> The Bookman, I think) is on the same page as a review of an edition of the
> Talmud!
>
> Zukofsky pointed out Rodkinson's edition of the Talmud to Pound in a
> letter from th 1930s (if memory serves), and (again, if memory serves)
> Pound's response indicated that he had not and would not read it.
>
> Incidentally, the Ezra of the Bible was considered an "author" of the
> Talmud--Pound knew this.
>
> So no, no smoking gun.  Still, such an extended engagement, with such
> passion, over so many decades, with a book he never read?  I think that;s
> plenty significant.  It puts me in mind of Pound comment to Hemingway's
> remark about Turgenev that he had "never read the Rooshians."
>
> This is all off the cuff, so necessarily incomplete and lacking in
> detail--but I hope it's helpful.
>
> Jonathan Gill~
> Columbia University
>
> P.S. By the way, I recently came across an article quoting the OED's entry
> on "bullshit."  Guess who is cited as the modern use of "bullshit" as a
> verb!  Hint: check the Pisan Cantos.