Letter from Brunnenburg

From 8–11 July, the 31st bi-annual Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC) was held at Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian Tyrol, home of the poet’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. Over one hundred scholars and poets, from five continents, many accompanied by family, converged at what proved in many ways to be a conference for the ages, and a nostos of sorts: since it was to Brunnenburg that Pound came to rest, on 12 July 1958, after his arrival back in Italy following his twelve-year internment in Washington DC at Saint Elizabeth’s. This mood was fostered by the conference theme, ‘Light and Memory in Ezra Pound’, and the fact that Mary’s 100th birthday fell on 9 July. Our celebration of her and her exemplary custodianship of one of the most contested literary legacies of the Modernist era was at the heart of the conference. Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s ‘carissima bambina’, early on undertook the translation into Italian of the Cantos, and her father was giving her advice and instructions even from the internment camp in Pisa. But we were also celebrating the recent publication of her own Italian poems, gathered by Massimo Bacigalupo of Rapallo, undisputed capo of Pound studies in Italy. Mary did not herself read, but responded to the readings and remarks of others, by her son Siegfried de Rachewiltz, and the two mainstays of EPIC, Walter Baumann, the doyen of Pound studies, and long-serving secretary John Gery.

Brunnenburg Castle, almost preposterously romantic where it nestles in a dip on a steep hillside, surrounded by the ...