246
PARTISAN REVIEW
thirty, a time at which you've decided what you really want to do.
Everybody was at that age at which you've committed yourself. It was
a time when young men would not be accepted in
The Hudson
Review.
Men of my age had only each other and we started our own
magazines out of desperation. There was no place to publish so you
published yourself.
It
was as simple as that. Kindred spirits met by
accident and published together by design.
Barone:
The work of these writers included some fine translations,
didn't it? I think particularly of Paul Blackburn's Provenc;:al poems.
Sorrentino:
Yes, magnificent. The University of
Califo~nia
recently
brought out his anthology of troubador poems.
It
grieves me that
Paul is not here
to
see the book finally come out, twenty years or
more of labor, and remarkable translations. Paul once told me that
the reason he started all this was because Pound told him he should
start it, do it all.
Barone:
Pound seems
to
have started everything.
Sorrentino:
Pound. There is no way to gauge his importance. He is by
far the most important literary figure of the twentieth century. His
energy, his dedication, his brilliance, his critical faculties, his ability
to find things out, to locate things, to attack what was rotten and
to
plug what was good. His casual remarks in letters and his short
essays are, by themselves, enough to make most critics seem fatuous .
Edmund Wilson is a kind of Tom Swift of letters compared to
Pound. Just his services on behalf of Joyce are enough to make him
great, and there's his own work. I don 't think it's a mistake that
Hugh Kenner called his book
The Pound Era,
which shocked a lot of
people. They thought he should have called it
The Joyce Era
or
The
Eliot Era,
but it's not. He's right, it's Pound.
We regret the death of
LARRY NEAL
1937-1981
