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

233 The Last Ten Years
gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the 1965 performance of Le Testament
de Villon and the poetry week preceding it at the Festival of Two
Worlds: ‘‘By genius, I mean ‘an inevitable swiftness and rightness in a
given field, the trouvaille, the direct simplicity in seizing the e√ective
means’ [a quotation borrowed from Guide to Kulchur]. Pound found all
these attributes in Gian Carlo Menotti when they met to discuss . . . Le
Testament de Villon.’’
The production was staged as a ballet choreographed by John Butler,
with Carmen de Lavallade and other dancers, the stage bare but for a
gibbet. The conductor, Herbert Handt, sang a role.
Thomas Schippers conducted a new production of Otello, and to Olga’s
eyes, his wife Nonie Phipps was the undisputed ‘‘queen’’ of the Festival,
sharing a box with their Venice neighbor Wally Toscanini, daughter of the
conductor Arturo. Also on the program were Pierre Louys’s Chansons de
Bilitis, set to the music of Claude Debussy (again, choreographed by
Butler after a concept of Vera Zorina), and Abram and Isaac (from the
Chester Miracle Play), staged by Rhoda Levine with music by Benjamin
Britten.
‘‘First, poets of di√erent nationalities and divergent ideological viewpoints,’’
Olga recalled, ‘‘who . . . read their own works on stage at the Caio
Melisso Theatre’’ (a dramatic setting built for chamber operas on the
medieval cathedral piazza). Desmond O’Grady was master of ceremonies.
Charles Olson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Tate
were there; Pablo Neruda (who ‘‘looked like a prosperous businessman’’),
Stephen Spender (‘‘in a striped sweat shirt’’), and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Ezra, in a light linen suit and canvas shoes, seated in Menotti’s box, read
with the aid of a microphone—not his own poems, but Marianne Moore’s
translations of La Fontaine, Robert Lowell’s ‘‘imitations’’ from Dante, and
his own translations of the Confucian Odes and Montanari’s Saturno.
Pound, then almost eighty, appeared ‘‘thin, slight and weak,’’ his soft
voice cracking as he ‘‘reached up to the hatrack of memory.’’ He received a
standing ovation. ‘‘Everything about Spoleto was fine for Ezra,’’ Olga
noted, ‘‘the air, the people. Life in the Palazzo del Duomo was exceedingly
pleasant. He did not find Menotti’s stairs too steep to climb, and the local
bread was much to his taste. The 12 o’clock concerts in the theater across