IL MIGLIOR FABBRO, THE BEST BLACKSMITH

BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER

IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

            Many people do not know who Ezra Pound was.  A major american poet, with poems like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, he was il miglior fabbro, the best blacksmith that could churn the metal to shape the art and equal universal art at the hand of this master of literature and translation.

            Ezra Pound, died in Italy in prison accused as traitor for broadcasting fascist and non-fascist and anti-fascist radio talks through italian radio, during the Second World War.  Why do poets always have to end this way, I know... but I will not tell you, it is interesting research in the library and on the internet, noone talks about that subject.

            Pound was a multi-linguist, a scholar and a genius of art and poetry.  The mentor of poets like T.S. Eliot, THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, author of the The Waste Land, poems like The Hollow Men, edited by the prestigious publishing house in London, Faber&Faber.

            Eliot wrote a very know poem entitled: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (I grow old/I grow old/I wear the bottom of my trousers rolled), it is a piece of poetic art in english and american literature, for Eliot lived the rest of his life in England and everyone fights over him and the extraordinary legacy of his heritage.

Let us go, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table (begins the character Prufrock)

But who is “us”?  Then, “you” and “I”. How many people are to go, this is the mystery of the poem for some scholars. And, if you translate to spanish you have to be careful with this twist, a psychological and sociological turn, that must say:

Vayamos, tú y yo

Cuando el anochecer esta esparcido por el cielo

Como un paciente en éter sobre el mesón…

It could also mean to use the verb vámos, but it would not imply the existence of more than two people that are going as Eliot wants to perhaps imply.  There is a “you” and “I”, perhaps the third entity is the patient etherized upon the table to symbolize the precarious death of humanity, the end of all numb things, or the start of life, in its implicit beginning.  In the beginning... the bible says.  I would not dare translate the bible.