Mary de Rachewiltz, poet and secret daughter of Ezra Pound, celebrates her 100th birthday at her castle.

BarcelonaThe poet and translator Mary de Rachewiltz celebrated her centenary this week at Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian Tyrol, where she has lived for decades. Author of poetry collections such as Whose world? (1998) and childhood memories Discretions (1971), Mary de Rachewiltz has also stood out for having translated into Italian the work of her father, Ezra Pound, collected in The Cantos (1985) and Venetian songs (2001).

Born on July 9, 1925 in Brixen as Maria Rudge, Mary was the daughter of Ezra Pound (Hailey, 1885 – Venice, 1972) and the violinist Olga Rudge. As Pound was married to the actress Dorothy Shakespear and could not care for the child, her mother left the child with a Tyrolean farming couple. It was there that the girl grew up, although she occasionally met up with her mother and Ezra Pound at Olga's apartment in Venice. It was during these visits that the girl was drawn to the cultural and literary world, and this love continued to grow during her adolescence, when her father decided to take charge of the girl's education personally. During World War II, when Pound was reading fascist manifestos on Italian radio, he taught his daughter literature at home: "It's the only useful thing I can do," he told her, as De Rachewiltz explains in his memoirs.

From prison to a 13th-century castle

It wasn't until almost the end of World War II that Pound told his daughter he was married to another woman and that they had another son, Omar. Shortly after, Pound was arrested by American authorities for supporting Mussolini, and after a period of imprisonment in Pisa, he returned to the United States, where he could not be tried due to his mental problems and ended up spending twelve years in St. Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital in Washington. Pound returned to Italy in the late 1950s, a cursed classic veteran. He lived almost to the end of his life in the castle that his daughter and her husband, the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz (1926–1997), had bought shortly after their marriage in 1946.

Built in the 13th century, Brunnenburg Castle was a castle that was still in use for decades. She still lives there and celebrated her centenary this week, after a long life dedicated to literature. In addition to writing his poems and working on Pound's Italian translations, he has archived and maintained the Ezra Pound archive, given lectures in the United States, Canada, and Europe on his father's work and modernist poetry, and organized literary recitals and conferences in Brunnenburg.

A few months ago, Edicions de 1984 published the first comprehensive Catalan edition ofThe Songs by Pound, a book that the American poet was writing and rewriting throughout practically his entire career, for almost five decades. medium. "There are two mottos of the author that mark his work. The first is make it new, which refers to how although the themes are always the same, there are always new ways of approaching them: Pound revolutionized form and technique - he continued -. The other is that, in the dilemma of writing more or better, he opted for writing better," he explained. Pound marveled at poets such as Marianne Moore, TS Eliot, Allen Ginsberg and EE Cummings, but also such unique narrators as James Joyce.