TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

that have not traditionally been connected with the Malatesta Cantos. By offering new
details about how Pound actually transacted the business of sorting out which archives to
visit we learn more about how he made his decisions as to which materials to include in
the Cantos. This helps us to a more complete understanding of his engagement with the
Malatesta family. It is more complicated than encoded testimony to his burgeoning faith
in the dictates of strong cultural leaders like Benito Mussolini. Pound can be seen making
an ongoing commitment to the social world of the texts he was encountering and to the
agents that gave him access to them – the poet/ printer Nancy Cunard in particular.
Cunard was an English writer, publisher, activist, and anarchist poet. She rejected her
family‘s upper class values and devoted much of her life fighting racism and fascism,
evidenced by her work as the editor of Negro: An Anthology (1934). Negro collected the
writing of African American writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in
protest of an unfair trial being waged against those wrongfully accused of rape, the so-
called ―Scottsboro Boys.‖
―Canto XXX‖ translates a letter sent by the Jewish printer Hieronymous
Soncinus in 1503 that describes the print-world of Venice. Pound‘s privileging of this
letter at the conclusion of his Cantos dealing with the Italian Renaissance takes on a host
of ironic references once we understand the significance of that year to the Malatesta-
family. The letter seemingly pays tribute to the printers and die-cutters instrumental to the
dissemination of humanist learning in the Renaissance but it also deflates the centrality of
patronage to their production:
Whence have we carved it in metal
Here working in Caesar‘s fane:
To the Prince Caesare Borgia
Duke of Valent and Aemelia
132