Omar Pound

Omar Shakespear Pound (10 September 1926 – 2 March 2010)^[1] was an Anglo-American writer, teacher, and translator. The son of Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy Shakespear, Pound was the author of Arabic & Persian Poems (1970) and co-author of Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). He also wrote poems of his own and published material about his parents.^[2]

Omar was born in the American Hospital of Paris, the son of poet Ezra Pound and his wife artist Dorothy Shakespear, who were living in Italy at the time. The couple had been in Paris since May for the concert performance of an opera Ezra had written with two musicians, and had stayed on in Paris because Dorothy wanted the baby to be born at the American Hospital. Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Paris and was a friend of the Pounds, drove her there for the birth. Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at the local town hall in Neuilly and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well."^[3] Omar was born 14 months after the daughter of Ezra and his mistress, violinist Olga Rudge.^[4]

Dorothy took Omar to London when he was 18 months old, where she stayed for a year, then left him in the care of his maternal grandmother, Olivia Shakespear.^[5] He was sent to live in the Norland Institute, which trains nannies and used to look after young children for parents who were overseas. Ezra's parents visited Omar there in 1931.^[2] Omar lived there until 1933 before moving to the home of Ruth Ethel Dickie, the former matron of Norland, in Felpham, Sussex.^[6] In 1933 he attended a Montessori School, also in Sussex, then a local prep school. When Olivia Shakespear died in 1938, Omar met his father for the first time; Ezra was in London settling Olivia's affairs.^[2] In 1940 Omar became a boarder at Charterhouse School.^[7] He survived a bombing during World War II and the London Blitz.^[8]

Pound se casó con Elizabeth Stevenson Parkin en 1955, ^{[ 2 ]} y tuvieron dos hijas, Katherine Shakespear Pound y Oriana Davenport Pound. ^{[ 1 ]} En su entrada biográfica en Contemporary Authors , Pound declaró que no tenía ninguna afiliación política ni religiosa. En una entrevista, aclaró que se consideraba "fundamentalmente un místico", y añadió: "Incluso decir que uno no tiene religión es una aceptación de los misterios de la vida, y creo que la aceptación de los misterios da una sensación de asombro". ^{[ 11 ]} Pound murió a los 83 años en Princeton, Nueva Jersey. ^{[ 1 ]}