China and the West

Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest. Transl. by Ezra Pound. [Zhong yong, Da xue]. [ID D29063].
http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices.
1997
Mary Paterson Cheadle : Da xue :The Da xue is composed of seven paragraphs of text, which Pound refers to as 'verses' or the 'canon', followed by a much longer section of commentary. Interpreting Chinese words pictographically after Morrison's example. Pound's translation are more than simple restatements of Pauthier's and Legge's versions. Though he relied on Legge especially for the general sense of any given passage, he diverged from his cribs on numerous crucial points. Where Pound diverges from Pauthier and Legge is with his definition of what constitutes self-discipline, or the rectification of the heart, and this is one of his most significant unorthodoxies. Pound's Confucianism is based in an idealized history beginning with the legendary emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu. And whereas the subject of 'nature' is the relationship of the individual to a whole objectivized world and ultimately to the Christian God, for which that objective world is the metaphor, the Confucian is concerned more specifically with the relationship between individuals in the family or state and the relationship between words and deeps. If the Confucian begins with the ethical and social basis of the doctrine of the rectification of names and extends it to logic, Pound began with a logical or at least aesthetic prescription and, under the influence of Confucianism, extended it to the ethical or social order.
The importance of economics in the Confucian system, as Pound interpreted it, was the crucial part it had in the creation of a humane social order. And it was this concern for social order that made Confucianism superior the Christian tradition and, as represented by Homer und Aristotle, superior to the classical tradition.
Zhong yong : Zong yong is organized into three parts - metaphysics, politics, and ethics – bit this partitioning is useful in an only limited way. As expected of a tract one of whose ideals is wholeness or thematic integration, there is considerable overlap of subject matter among the three parts. The first and third sections especially are conceptual rather than substantial, and most of the discussion in this chapter will be devoted to central concepts and their place in Pound's Confucian vision in the period centered on 1945. In each of the nine rules listed in the Unwobbling piot and elaborated in subsequent paragraphs, it is clear that Confucian government is concerned above all with the ruler's relations : relations with his family, ministers, and subjects. Good government is based not on laws or institutions, but on good men. Pound's English translation is one of his responses to his personal and historical trauma, just as the Italian version was a response to the greatly weakened hold Fascism had in Italy.
The Unwobbling piot occupies the moment at which Pound began disentangling his Confucianism from Fascism, realizing as he did that the survival of his Confucianism depended on such a separation : Pound told to a reporter : "Hitler and Mussolini succeeded insofar as they followed Confucius, they failed because they did not follow him more closely".
The Neoplatonic emphasis that Pound gives to his translation is underscored by the fact that he ends his translation seven chapters before the end of the Chinese text, in this way omitting the discussions of the sincere man as sage and ruler that occur in them.