The Congruence of Lope de Vega’s Plays and Noh in The Pisan Cantos

This chapter compares literary strategies Ezra Pound learned early on from classic Spanish drama, especially the works of Lope de Vega, to those he discovered later in Japanese Noh drama. Discussing the relationship between Pound and Noh, Yoshiko Kita points out how, in 1913, when Pound first obtained from Ernest Fenollosa’s widow a draft of a Noh translation, he compared it with Lope’s work. Critics have demonstrated how Noh played a vital role in shaping The Cantos. However, given that Pound composed much of The Pisan Cantos during his imprisonment in Pisa in 1945, critical discussions focus on their elegiac element in relation to Noh, with little mention made of the discrepancy between the elegiac allusion to Hagoromo (in Canto 80) and the comic implications of Pound’s allusion to Irish playwright John Synge (in Canto 77). This kind of gap, for Kita, exemplifies a distinctive quality of Pound’s poetry, namely, his interest in the multiplicity of the individual, rather than in an all-encompassing tragic consummation.