Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

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What Thou Lovest Well Remains
170
1946–1949
‘‘J’aime, donc je suis’’
Like so many others, Olga was putting the pieces of her life back
together after the war. Count Chigi urged her to return to the Accademia.
La Scala in Milan was staging a new production of Vivaldi’s Juditha
Triumphans with conductor Antonio Guarneri (who had sent the academy
five thousand lire for rights, to be added to their scholarship fund). ‘‘We
will take up our work again . . . renewed and revitalized.’’
Mary, who had been in Sant’Ambrogio since Ezra’s capture, returned to
her foster family. She wrote to her father at St. Elizabeth’s: ‘‘I am now
convinced that it is best for me to become a good farmer. That will not
interfere with my literary interest . . . I am not able to make mother
understand this . . . she insists on my getting ‘culture’ before I become a
farmer.’’ On the first page of the journal she left behind, she had inscribed
a quotation from Shylock’s daughter’s lines in The Merchant of Venice:
‘‘Farewell; and if my fortune be not crost / I have a father / you a
daughter, lost.’’ Olga recalled some thirty years later that it was ‘‘the only
thing she left me before returning to Gais . . . if she intended to hurt, she
succeeded.’’
The political situation in the Tyrol was still tense; the Austrian move-