BK. Ezra Pound

129. Rachewiltz, Mary de. Discretions. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Pound’s daughter’s recollections of her youth and her ‘Tattile’ are punctuated by passages from The Cantos, and shed light upon several, including LXXVI (56b). Remembering her mother’s house in Venice in the years before the war, de Rachewiltz recalls the kimono and Japanese shoes, one pair of straw and another of black wood, that decorated Olga Rudge’s room, and seemed to the child ‘objects of great veneration’. She recalls the passage to Pound’s study on the third floor, and provides, along with other details pertinent to LXXVI, the only description available—no photograph exists—of ‘Tami’s dream’, the painting Kume (Ap) gave to Pound, probably in 1922 in Paris, which finds its way into The Cantos:

The wall along the stairs leading to the top room was taken up completely by a gray opaque canvas into which I read nothingness; chaos, the universe or the torso of a giant, crucified. Tami Koume’s Super-artificial-growing-creation, whispering: “We are now standing at the critical moment of humanity. We must be saved by something.” And he was killed in the Tokyo earthquake and his big canvas in Venice torn to pieces during the war. And on the studio bookcase the great Ovid bound in wooden boards and the marble bas-relief of Isotta da Rimini set in the wall by the desk “and the gilded casoni neither then nor up to the present / the hidden nest, Tami’s dream, the great Ovid / bound in thick boards, the bas relief of Ixotta / and the care in contriving” (see 57, p. 482).