renato gerhardt karlsruhe weinbrennerstrasse 81 hochhaus am entenfang

Ausweisend

karlsruhe, 25 august 54

dear master and friend ezra pound,

since long am I trying to write you, but the terrible news refused to
pass pencil or typewriter.

rainer is dead. the deep desperation about frustrating fights for many
a year took him away. he died the 27th of july, lonely, desperate, fin-
ding no way out but this one.

i still cannot believe it, and I feel terribly helpless as far as our
work is concerned, my brain almost stopped working. for the financial
situation is terribly discouraging and m i find myself unable to get
help from anywhere (i work for more than a year now as a teacher at the
Karlsruhe American Elementary School - for the family's living - and
come home, too tired and worn out to start broadcast or other literaric
work to earn some helpful sums for the publishing like rainer did)
i try to get another big German publishing house to take over what we
did and started and to finish it up on rainer's line.

therefore i have to ask you some questions:

would you agree to have me giving all rights you put into rainer's hands
to this german publishing house (including all our *friehim* finished
translations of your work for further publication?)? rainer prepared
the 'market' very carefully, and all the literaric chatterboxes start
blowing into the same horn now, discussing EP's work. he was the one
*hexhix* who had the courage to tell the public, and the snobs as well,
what they didn't like to hear, and he told it so many times that they
forgot they didn't like it at the beginning, and now, since they heard
it so often, they would feel ashamed, not to agree and probably even
start to grasp what he meant. this is one of the reasons why i don't
understand, what happened, he was so close to what he hoped to get done
for you.

but there were still lots of troubles left, and all i can do now is, trying
to get finished what he started and stop then, for i feel very well that
i wouldn't have the elbows to continue alone on what we couldn't get
done together.

i feel terribly immature and wouldn't dare to do things i know i couldn't
do exactly as well or perfect as he did.

i hope you will agree with me better to leave a thing than not to master
it, at least i try my best to get finished in print what is finished as
manuscript.

please, let me know about all your decisions.

i hate to send bad news to a hospital, but this time i can't help to
do so.

rainer's graetest wish was to come over next year and to see you.
please excuse this terrible soapy letter, to hell, it is hard to express
in a foreign language what you think and feel in such a moment.

My best wishes for you, your health

worda lemenk

Renate Gerhardt

renate gerhardt heidelberg landhausstrasse 2a

heidelberg, 10. oktober 1955

as my friend anite, who mailed your author's copies for me,
tells me, have you asked her for my address. since she could not
answer you because your address was forgotten on the envelope,
she told me about your letter and asked me to write you myself.

i hardly can tell how very releasing this news was for me, because
your reply, as nice as it was ment, last winter, was not very
encouraging for me. we, especially rainer, have had a hard time
to prepare an interested public for your work and especially
rainer has been suffering a lot, that many misunderstandings
could turn our relations to be so disagreeable for both of us in
the end.

mais pas trop de bruit pour une omelette, what i want to let you
know is this:

rainer finished 10 of your cantos and i would be glad if you
would let me know if you were interested to see his translations.
i assure you, he was an honest man and has starved many a year
fighting and working for things that were good and right and
that the public refused to accept as such in the beginning. a
real tragedy that he had to die at the moment where his work
started to have remarkable results.

of course, there was a terrible financial mess, when he died
last summer, and fragmente verlag had to be stopped. but by
now i am out of the worst and in these days i start my new publi-
shing house galerie ubu. there are many interesting and im-
portant things still to be presented to the german public, and
that's why i try to go on along the line that we started with
fragmente verlag.

may i ask you now a few questions? i'll try to be not too boring.
there has been a certain volume of evq hesse's translation.
please, don't believe it is jalousy, when i tell you
that almost everybody over here knows, that this edition contains
very heavy mistakes in translation and doesn't meet your .f o r m
at all.

will you let me know, what rights (i mean for which parts of
your work) are still available? i think it would be a shame, if
to you should happen the same that happened to mr. eliot, whose
work was published much too late and not in an adequate translation
so that nobody took too much notice of them!

2,

you probably remember, the first thing of yours, that ever
appeared after this second war in Germany was my translation
of canto 13 in our provisorical editions of .fragmente. in
fall 1949!

I still have my drawers filled with the complete translations
of your essays and many other things, a complete rough trans-
lation of the cantos. included.

please,mmm if you think you would try it with me xgxxix, let
me know. i could, i think, find enough subscriptions from old
fragmente customers to make a complete edition of your work
possible. i could get rainer's broadcasts about you and your
work repeated by different stations, etc.

so: please let me know.

the present situation in Germany asks for nothing but good and
strong writing like yours, to keep the minds awake and away from
complete confusion.

with best wishes for your health and your further work and
very anxiously waiting for your reply,

always sincerely yours,