China and the West

Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140](4)
Sekundärliteratur
Janet Roberts : Fragrance in flowers such as orchids, the plumb blossom, the peach, and the peony play a dramatic role in Chinese literature. It is not only the 'flower' itself, as a natural item, in its botanical specificity ; the poet is concerned with the act of the memory evoked in an image of petals falling, associated with a woman, and the scent which lingers, in her passage. Like fragrance in Chinese verse, many Chinese poets write the words 'to a tune', or mention a musical instrument. Amy Lowell was serious about music, about music transmitted and transformed into poetry, and certainly she was concerned, in Fir Flower Tablets, about rhythms. Given Amy Lowell's love of music, her effort to translate music into her poems, in her words, "reproduce the effect of the music in another medium. I wanted to try something more, something less obvious than mere rhythm, and closer to the essence of musical speech".
When the composer and violinist Charles Loeffler invited Lowell to his home in Medford, his playing of the d"Indy violin sonata in his music room inspired Lowell to conflate Chinese imagery and musical notations.
Refashioning the poems in English, first required knowledge of the laws of Chinese versification, but then Amy Lowell says she had to respect the technical limits but found it impossible to follow either the rhythms or rhyme schemes of the originals as she had no experience of the spoken language. Since she did not hear the idiom of Chinese speakers, and did not step foot on Chinese soil, it is no wonder, that given she worked with the English transliterations, she could hardly exactly replicate the original rhythms.
Lowell, intrigued by the Chinese classical poems, was inspired by what she saw that Pound was able to achieve, without knowing Chinese language.
Lowell acknowledges that the study of Chinese, as well as the study of poetry, require lifelong learning, and clafifies that she has not taken up the Chinese language or the field of sinology, as had Florence Ayscough.