Surprise Notes & Queries on Pound and the 442nd

from Tim Yu

1 hr · 

Facebook scholarship at its finest: A couple years back, I posted a question about the "Japanese sentry" who appears in Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos, saying "Paaak yu djeep over there." With the help of Don Share and Susan M. Schultz, I was able to figure out that this must have been a Japanese American soldier from Hawaii! And our conjecture has now been published in the most recent issue of Notes and Queries.

"We hypothesize that the ‘Japanese sentry’ was in fact a Japanese American soldier serving with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made up of Japanese Americans from Hawaii and from the internment camps to which Japanese Americans on the West Coast had been forcibly relocated in 1942...Pound’s ‘Paaak yu djeep over there’ is a rendering of the sentry’s Hawaiian pidgin."

Japanese American Voice in Pound’s Pisan Cantos | Notes and Queries | Oxford Academic

© The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comEZRA Pound’s Canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos, includes a reference to a ‘Japanese sentry’ whom Pound quotes as saying: ‘Paaak yu djeep over ther...

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