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

284 Olga Triumphant
merit in the field of music. In the presentation speech, Nino Guillotti
praised Olga’s research and organization of the works of Vivaldi into a
thematic catalogue, her thirty-two years as executive secretary of the
Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, and declared Olga Rudge ‘‘a national
monument.’’
In June, Professor Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine invited
her to attend the Ezra Pound Centennial Conference. David Moody of the
University of York accompanied her to Orono: ‘‘She traveled on her own
from Venice [to London]. I was asked to ‘look after her’ on the nine-hour
journey from Heathrow to Bangor, Maine, but she needed no looking
after. She was the coolest and most independent of travelers. . . . For the
duration of the journey, she entertained and instructed me with her conversation
. . . civilized talk, not chat, mostly about Pound. . . . [Olga
Rudge] was an extraordinary woman in her own right.’’
In Maine, she was the honored guest of the community of Pound
scholars and disciples—poets Patrick Kavanagh and Allen Ginsberg,
James Laughlin of New Directions—and for the first time she saw Pound’s
translation of The Women of Trachis, performed by the Maine Masque
theatrical group.
In Venice, Jane Rylands was drafting a proposal to establish an Ezra
Pound Memorial Trust to preserve 252, calle Querini as a memorial to
Pound, with Vittorio Branca of the Cini Foundation, Valerie Eliot, Gian
Carlo Menotti, and Isamu Noguchi among the trustees, and an advisory
board of family members. The preliminary draft dated September 1985
made clear that Olga, as the founder, intended for the foundation to
benefit Ezra’s and her descendants, ‘‘by putting the major assets . . . into
the care of a charitable foundation . . . to relieve her heirs of the burdens of
taxation and maintenance.’’ The house would be a research institution six
months of the year, and from November through March, available as a
residence for the family.
Venice gossips viewed the trust as an attempt by the Rylandses to
control Olga for their own personal gain. Joan Fitzgerald claimed to have
seen a document in Olga’s own handwriting stating that it was never her
intention to transfer the house to a foundation for literary scholarship. Bill
McNaughton, who visited Olga during this era, saw the tangle with the