[dri_ft]

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

[082349872349872]

Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?)

My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older?

TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once it had been transmuted into the familiar and he could work it on his own terms. (thus restoring my working hypothesis)

Does that make more sense?

Thanks for your answer!

As to his potential conclusion that fascism ("tomorrow belongs to me") was the answer to "western decline", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696859

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybY0QeZdro

[soundnote]

I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so.

The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic.

(Not to say there aren't oikophilic/xenophobic people, but I feel like that's more often an unthinking stance)