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.
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