In the middle of last month, I mentioned a letter I found in my late father’s belongings from a guy who fought against the Germans in WWII and even described some battles to him. That post even contains links to my scans of those missives.
At midnight I made a different, in a sense opposite, find also in my father’s belongings: a book by Uwe Frisch about the German musician Gerhart Müench (1907-1988) who emigrated to Mexico in 1953. [1]
Müench was my mother’s piano teacher. We can even see him giving her a lesson at the National Conservatory of Music of Mexico City for 25 seconds in this video from 1970.
Müench, born in Dresden, was a real scholar, and not only in music. What impressed me about Frisch’s little book, which doesn’t even have a spine, are its last pages (44-45): it collects a poem by Ezra Pound dedicated to his friend Gerhart.
Given that Frisch wrote the book in Spanish (where among other things he translated from German an essay by Müench) now that I wanted to read the original in English of the poem Pound dedicated to Müench, I came across a surprise. The core part of the poem is missing in the PDFs I saw on the internet!
It is very annoying to retranslate a poet into his original language because one lacks the original text. I don’t know if it was deliberately censored, but the part of Pound’s poem that I didn’t find on the internet today is precisely the part that mentions ‘hellfire’ and ‘the fiery river of Hades’ that became ‘Dresden’ because of the Allied bombing, and Pound mentions Gerhart by name in that city ‘while a fiery sky still pours…’
Pound thus speaks of the Hellstorm Holocaust in Dresden, which may be why he was censored in some editions of his book. But his original English words may have been different from the ones I put in inverted commas, as I now retranslate it from my Spanish booklet into the original language.
If there are Pound fans who have an edition of The Cantos where this poem appears uncensored, it would be nice if he came across this post and quoted in English the lines I highlighted in orange on the second page. Both of my parents used to mention Müench in their conversations. Before I discovered Frisch’s booklet I was unaware that he was born in Dresden.
________
[1] Uwe Frisch: Gerhart Müench o De la Poética y la Metafísica de un Compositor (Morelia: Instituto Michoacano de la Cultura, 1985).