My preface to The Arimaspia was published in Hyperallergic. First, a collection of poems translated mostly from the Greek Anthology.
It's a handsome hand-set limited-edition letterpress book and its lovely formal quality contrasts with the poems' ribald profanity. Following Pound's example and dictum, he makes these great old poets come alive again, makes them new, suffusing them with the very spirit and transience of Now. There, the poems are worked into one of the two main narrative streams, the one dealing with an apprentice Greek philosopher's journey to India. If I'm right that these poem translations came first, then I imagine The Arimaspia arose somehow from them like Across the Universe arose from the songs of the Beatles, a scaffolding for composition, but with a result of far greater complexity.
The Arimaspia is simultaneously a novel and a poem, a mock epic and a cacophony of voices, a send-up of the Victorian novel of adventure and a post-Modern reflection on the futility of narrative. Because this is the literary counterpart to his great work, The Shape of Ancient Thought , it tells of forgotten or effaced encounters between the West and the East, between the Self, in other words, and the Other.
This is a theme found in much of Tom's work, but nowhere is it more brilliantly and comically exemplified. I'd been reading Pound's Cantos for some time before I first happened upon the recordings he made of some of them. It was a revelation. As a student I'd always read him with utter seriousness, and now there he was wisecracking and imitating voices and singing and declaiming and generally hamming his way through what I had thought was supposed to be the most serious poetry of the century.
In some regards The Arimaspia is a Poundian work β a transgressive work containing many voices intruding and impinging and harmonizing while narrative streams carry forward strange tales of fortitude and depravity.
