“A Dream Spain”

This introduction offers an overview of Ezra Pound’s complex relationship to Spanish letters. Following details of Pound’s time in Spain, Viorica Patea examines his relationships with various characters who appear in The Cantos, as well as uncovers traces of Spain in The Spirit of Romance, Pound’s letters, and The Cantos. She recounts Pound’s interest in Lope de Vega’s theatre and El cantar de Mio Cid, and she analyzes Pound’s thinking on the interactions among the Spanish, Provençal, and Italian in pre-Renaissance Romance and Latin literatures, especially the neglected heritage of the troubadours. The Spirit of Romance (1910), she notes, became a substitute for the doctoral dissertation Pound never completed. Then in his Imagistic phase, his interest in Lope’s baroque theatre is seen as a misplaced philological quest. Patea goes on to argue that Pound’s rejection of Spanish literature through his middle years is more a Mauberleyan rejection of his own youthful interest in the baroque, a resistance he comes to reconcile in the 1950s when collaborating with José Vázquez Amaral on a full translation of The Cantos into Spanish.