Ezra Pound in Athens: Words Spoken to Zissimos Lorenzatos in 1965

There is some confusion evident in biographies concerning Ezra Pound’s movements at the time of his eightieth birthday, on 30 October 1965. A little-known source from Greece establishes the dates of the week that Pound and Olga Rudge spent in Athens, and fills in some of the details as to whom he met and which sites he was shown. The recollections of Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915–2004) are themselves not always accurate, nor entirely without their own purposes, especially with regard to the role played by George Seferis. Sorting the chronology, the essay considers what it might have meant for Pound to visit Greece for the first time; Lorenzatos’s memories are used to assess the weight of the words spoken by Pound in Greece, words that resonate in Canto CXVI.