“Chinese dreams : Pound, Brecht, Tel quel” (Publication, 1999)
Year
1999
Text
Hayot, Eric. Chinese dreams : Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 2004). Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1999. (HayE1)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Hayot, Eric
(1972-) : Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University
Mentioned People (2)
Brecht, Bertolt
(Augsburg 1898-1956 Berlin) : Schriftsteller, Dramatiker, Regisseur
Pound, Ezra
(Hailey, Idaho 1885-Venedig 1972) : Dichter, Schriftsteller
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Germany
/
Literature : Occident : United States of America
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (6)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1909.1-1972 |
Ezra Pound and China : general Quellen : Binyon, Laurence. Chou king. Trad. De Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2601]. Li ki ; ou, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les céremonies. Trad. de Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2642]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726]. Goullart, Peter. Forgotten kingdom [ID D3683]. Hare, William Loftus. Chinese egoism. In : The Egoist ; vol. 1, no 23 (1914). The Chinese classics. Transl. by James Legge. [ID D2212]. Pound übernimmt die übersetzerischen Grundlagen. Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. La Charme, Alexandre de. Confucii Chi-king : sive, liber carminum [ID D1988]. Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de. Histoire générale de la Chine [ID D1868]. Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary [ID D8646]. Economic dialogues in ancient China. Ed. by Lewis Maverick [ID D29079]. Mori Kainan / Ariga Nagao. [On Chinese poetry]. Morrison, Robert. Morrison, Robert. A dictionary of the Chinese language [ID D1934]. Pauthier, [Jean-Pierre] Guillaume. Les livres sacrés de l'Orient [ID D2040]. Rock, Joseph : Monographs on the Naxi. [s. Rock]. [Wang, Youpu]. The sacred edict. With a translation of the colloquial rendering, notes and vocabulary by F[rederick] W[illiam] Baller [ID D10024]. Zhang, Tiemin. Chinese-English dictionary. (Shanghai : Commercial Press, 1933). [Correspondence with Chinese friends : About 400 letters, postcards, and telegrams in three Pound archives and three private collection.] Sekundärliteratur 1950 Hugh Gordon Porteus : Throughout the works of Ezra Pound one comes across references to Chinese literature, and to quotations from the Chinese classics – sometimes in English paraphrase, sometimes in Chinese character. Increasingly, since the first world war, Pound has busied himself with things Chinese. Constantly he has advocated the inclusion of Chinese language, poetry and (Confucian) doctrine in the English educational system. Pound's avowed ignorance of Chinese literature in general and of the Chinese language in particular makes only the more spectacular his singular achievements in these two field. What is remarkable about Pound's Chinese translations is that so often they do contrive to capture the spirit of their originals, even when, as quite often happens, they funk or fumble the letters. For Pound, the Chinese character is a mysterious and magical unknown quantity, which sets all his faculties vibrating at the highest pitch of excitement. His pseudo-sinology releases his latent clairvoyance, just as the pseudo-sciences of the ancients sometimes gave them a supernormal insight. A Chinese text serves Pound as a receipt for the elixir served a Chinese alchemist. The result is a phenomenon of psychometry abetted by aesthetics. 1953 Kenner, Hugh : Pound never translates 'into' something already existing in English. He has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original, which permanently extends the bounds of English verse. Translation is for Pound somewhat easier than what is called 'original composition'. Many Poundian principles meet in the translator's act that the best of his translations exist in three ways, as windows into new worlds, as acts of homage, and as personae of Pound's. In the Cathay poems, Pound is at his best both as poet and as translator ; he is amazingly convincing at making the Chinese poet's world his own. 1955 Angela Jung Palandri : The redeeming feature in Pound is that even when his imagination runs wild, which is often does, he does not always go overboard by substituting the generally recognized meanings with the ones he draws out from the indeogramic analysis. Sinologists who dismiss Pound's translations as mere nonsense without a second thought actually betray their own limitations in scholarship and lack of imagination. For although apparently unorthodox and wild, Pound's interpretations are not as groundless as generally assumed. 1960 Winters, Yvor. In defence of reason. (London : Routledge, 1960). … the Chinese poets, like Pound, were primitive in their outlook, and dealt with the more obvious and uncomplicated aspects of experience ; but their outlook, though primitive, like Pound's, differed from Pound's in a richness and security of feeling within its limits – their subjects, though simple, were nevertheless more rich than any with which Pound has thus far dealt, and they lent themselves to the composition of poems longer than most which Pound has thus far attempted, so that he had an opportunity to explore the possibilities of the free verse which he had previously begun to employ whereas the Chinese translations are written in what is really 'a heavily cadenced prose that continually verges on verse without achieving it', the Cantos are written in a slow and heavily accentual verse, which at its best displays and extraordinary suavity and grace of movement. 1960 Rosenthal, M.L. A primer of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1960). The development of Pound's interest in Chinese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general. 1964 Donald Davie : As for his [Pound's] contention that no Chinese can read Chinese characters without being aware of how they are built up out of pictorial metaphors, most authorities now appear to disagree with him. It is in any case something that can be neither proven nor disproven. Just as most speakers of English use the word 'discourse' without being aware of the metaphor of running about concealed in its etymology, so one concedes that a slow-witted Chinese, or a sharp-witted Chinese in a state of fatigue, would not register the pictorial metaphors in the Chinese he was reading. The argument can then be pushed further only by unprofitably speculating on what is the statistically normal degree of slow-wittedness or exhaustion among Chinese. 1970 Akiko Miyake : Confucianism always meant for Pound the idea of order which he found lacking in his understanding of European civilization and which is particularly indispensable for constructing his counterpart of Dante's cosmos for ascending from hell to paradise in his fictitious cosmos and thereby metaphorically liberating the Platonic essence of beauty and knowledge. The most impressive fact about Pound as a poet is the way he sacrificed anything for creating his poetic contemplation and his personal mystery. The vorticist movement, through which Pound succeeded in starting the Cantos, ruined his early reputation. The obscurity of the Cantos very much impeded his career as a poet, and finally his glorification of Mussolini's regime as a part of the manifestation of his ideal provoked his long imprisonment. It is not unlikely that writing the Cantos increased his mental disorder. One cannot determine for certain whether Pound's apotheosis of Confucianism was a cause or a symptom of his mental disorder. It is spectacular to contrast his Cantos, however, which steadily proceeded with their own kind of skill. His mental disorder advanced along with his exaltation of the Confucian order, till his pro-fascist broadcasting during the war invited catastrophe. Pound pointed out the defect of Platonism for an artist and offered a correction in his ideogramic method, which is probably the first correction of Platonism through Chinese influence in history. He presented a possible parallelism between the Sung Confucians' metaphysical interpretation of Confucian classics and Christian contemplation though he worked through the vague suggestions of the former that appeared in Pauthier's text. Particularly, his paralleling of Chinese history and the Eleusinian concept of the recurrence of life is a very interesting attempt to interpret Chinese culture within a basic pattern of anthropology common to any type of culture. 1976 Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound begeistert sich für Konfuzius aus folgenden Gründen : James Legge hält viele Passagen für unverständlich ; Arthur Waley entschuldigt sich im Vorwort seiner Übersetzung des Lun yu für die Trockenheit. Die konfuzianischen Schriften sind für Pound eine Lebensphilosophie, die Summer der Weisheit. Sie sind der Schlüssel zum guten Staat und der Beginn des Denkens. Wie Konfuzius lebte Pound in einer von Kriegen erschütterten Welt, wie Konfuzius war er ein grosser, suggestiver Lehrer. Wie dieser, pflegte Pound aus der Literatur früherer Zeiten zu zitieren. Am Ende des Canto XIII und 116 deutet er an, dass er sich als Nachfolger von Konfuzius betrachtet. Pound sieht in Konfuzius einen Philosophen, der 'ideogrammatisch' denkt, d.h. der die Dinge selbst in ihren Beziehungen zur Umwelt untersucht. In sich aufgenommen hat Pound die für die konfuzianische Philosophie charakteristische Vorstellung eines Kosmos, in dem Natur und menschliche Gemeinschaft in organischer Beziehung stehen. Er macht sie – in verwandelter Form – zu dem zentralen Leitgedanken seiner konfuzianischen Übersetzungen und der Cantos. Pound sieht die Natur, die konfuzianische Ethik und die Mythologie in einem grossen, ständig fortschreitenden Prozess, und diese Gedankenverbindung erwies sich für seine Konfuzius-Übersetzungen und vor allem für seine Cantos als sehr fruchtbar. Er betonte immer wieder, dass der Westen Konfuzius brauche. Er glaubte, durch Konfuzius eine Philosophie gefunden zu haben, die sich in China und in den frühen Jahren in Amerika schon bewährt hatte. Er versucht, die konfuzianischen Ideen dynamisch im Prozess der Anwendung zu zeigen, wobei er die Schriftzeichen als lebendige Szenen darstellt. Es gelingt ihm dadurch, dem Begriff seine ursprüngliche Vitalität zurückzugeben und gleichzeitig den späteren moralischen Sinn des Wortes zu treffen. Pounds Stil ist lebendig und voller Bilder und trifft in seiner Prägnanz und Suggestionskraft oft genau das chinesische Original. Er führt bei der organischen Dekomposition die konfuzianischen Werte auf legendige Bilder und Handlungen zurück, die sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Oft erscheinen diese Werte in einer Reihe von verschiedenen Metamorphosen. Pound macht die konfuzianischen Begriffe dynamischer, präziser und wesentlich komplizierter und mehrdeutiger als im chinesischen Text. Er greift über den Kosmos hinaus, in metaphysische Bereiche und er ruft die Götter an. Er bricht den geschlossenen konfuzianischen Kreis auf und weitet ihn so, dass er sich erst im Unendlichen schliesst. Wie Konfuzius die vergessene Weisheit der Antike für seine Zeit zu neuem Leben erweckte, so vermittelt Pound dem Westen östliche Weisheit. 1980 Wesling, Donald. The chances of rhyme : device and modernity. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1980). [About the importance of Chinese syllabic metre for Ezra Pound] : Apparently Chinese, with its rhythms and excitements different from ours, cannot achieve the special expectation of syntactical delay or the pleasure frustration of the English periodic sentence. With ideograms as equal units, juncture and disjuncture are insistent, but Chinese will not display the specific track of feeling of the Western languages, which do not so strongly employ separation of the parts of the line. There are in English more units (words) in a given line ; therefore more partitions ; and therefore the line is more possessed of continuity… Thus when, as with Pound, a writer wanted the laconism of the clumped phrase, he consciously imitated, in English, the Chinese mode. 1984 Y.T. Walther : There are elements particular to Pound as a poet and to English as a language different from Chinese that have prevented Pound's ideogrammic method from procuring the desired effects. The major instrument of the ideogrammic method is the technique of juxtaposition, which is the omission of grammatical links and interpretive elements in a sentence or sentences. The common belief is that when the links or transitions are taken away, obscurity takes place. This is a misconception. Obscurity occurs only then the expectation of the complete sentence form is frustrated. The first major reason why juxtaposition creates obscurity in Pound's modern English but not in T'ang poetry is the difference in the English and Chinese reading patterns : the former constitutes an expectation of the full sentence while the latter relies much on discontinuity. The first major reason why Pound's ideogrammic method fails to communicate is that 'the traditional ways of coming into relation with each other' in the English language and thinking pattern do not yield to ideogrammic understanding. Pound's incommunicativeness is not so much a result of his using the ideogrammic method as of using it indiscriminatingly and of making it the only norm acceptable in poetry, in other word, monism. The method to Pound, is a tool to purify a poetry of 'emotional slither' that he had inherited from a previous century. 1985 Chang Yao-hsin : Pound took in his Chinese translations sufficient notice of other rhetorical figures such as simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and even allegory embedded in classical Chinese poetry. He also gave due consideration to the symmetrical structure, the refrains, and the pathetic fallacy, so conspicuously noticeable in some of the odes. A general perusal of Pound's Chinese translation of the odes reveals an unmistakable editorial bias. He wants to give an accurate, precise, and definite description. He wants to achieve direct and exact treatment and most basic economy of poetic expression. He wishes to avoid the slightest hint of a moral and artistic defection through unforgivably careless use of an unnecessary word. In fine, he intends to substantiate his imagist aesthetic and prove its efficacy as an antidote to Victorian poetics. The translation of classic Chinese poetry affords him a fine opportunity to do this, and at the suggestion of Fenollosa, he seized it with both hands. Thus the endeavor is a labor of love indeed. On the matter of translation, Pound holds that the translator should not pester the reader with superfluities of any kind which would put him further from the masterwork. Whatever Pound's weakness and however outrageous his editorial licence, he succeeds well where most translators of Chinese literature fail : he seldom puts himself between the reader and the master he undertakes to translate. Pound's work as a translator of Chinese literature made his Confucius unintelligible and ridiculous sometimes, so much so that we can not take his version of the 'Four books' seriously as a work introducing the thought system of Confucius. The moment he starts to apply the method, he ceases to be communicative and draws ridicule upon himself. In his character-analysis which is part of the 'method', he made very few lucky hits, and picked little that is germane. The Cantos, in structure, bears a clear stamp of classic Chinese poetry. We may even suggest that classic Chinese poetry may have served as an aesthetic prototype for the form of Pound's epic. Just as in a Chinese poem the characters stand at one apart and yet correlated as if by an inner cohesive force to form an organic whole, so the hundred-odd cantos juxtapose and relate to one another to add up the weird colossus of the masterwork. The influence of Confucius' philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in Confucian classic which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One of these relates to race and racial discrimination. Obviously chauvinistic, Confucius never spoke of minority nationalties in outlying areas of China except as barbarians. 1988 Chang Yao-hsin : Nostalgia for the ideal past, desire to salvage a world from total decay, and devotion to humanity proved to be the bonds that tied him and Confucius together. Whether for good or for evil, rightly or wrongly, Pound was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help him save the West. The influence of Confucius's philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in the Confucian classics which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One such issue relates to race and racial discrimination. Works of art, once completed, acquire an independent existence and invite interpretations which may not always have much to do with their creators. To say that a person with bad political ideas cannot write good poetry and thus condemn both Pound and his masterwork is perhaps as simplistic as to dismiss Wagner's music as worthless. 1996 Robert Kern : Pound Orientalized modernism, in the sense that his versions of Chinese poems became models for modernist poetry in general, both in his own work and in that of other poets as well. Pound's involvement with Chinese poetry represents a certain, probably unavoidable, neglect of its full reality as an independent and exotic cultural production. Although it provokes and enables Pound's pursuit of modernism, Chinese poetry itself is displaced as a literary tradition in its own right. Thus if Chinese poetry in our time is Pound's invention, and if that invention's most essential concern is, in fact, with 'a new kind of English poem', then what we are dealing with as Chinese poetry is something that has been produced in and by the West. The publication of Cathay ushered in a whole new era of Anglo-American regard for Chinese poetry, along with a new era of translation. To see that Cathay constitutes a watershed in the history of Chinese translation, we may consider the attitude of translators active during the period just prior to its publication, a period extending roughly from the 1880s to 1915. English translators of this era tend variously to appropriate, domesticate, or otherwise impose themselves and their culture upon Chinese texts, and there seem to be few if any explicit rules or conventions to guide the practice of translation. The writers, for the most part, introduce their work by expressing dissatisfaction with existing translations and calling for some new approach, one which will not necessarily constitute a closer approximation of the Chinese, but which will correct what they feel to be the excesses of previous translators, especially James Legge. Frequently they articulate their dissatisfactions in terms of a postromantic distinction between the scholarly and the literary or the poetic, where the former represents an uninviting literalism or a pedantic adherence to the text, thought to impede a freer, more imaginative interpretations of the material. Pound himself, who would later assume his own antischolarly stance and insist on not translating the words, was often the target of criticism directed at what was seen to be his own unseemly or ignorant deviations from the text. But if Pound appears to take the side of the poets against the scholars in this debate, a further distinction must be made between his understanding of poetic translation and that of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. Pound's distaste for literal translation makes him more responsive and responsible to other aspects of the poem, including its sequence of images, its rhythms, and its tone. It is in this sense that Pound satisfies his obligations to the original text and in this sense also that his translations become acts of homage to the poets he translates. After his reading of Fenollosa in 1913, Pound apparently came to feel that imagism is not merely a modernist style but a category or genre of poetry with a lineage as ancient as that of the lyric itself. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader, in part, by defamiliarizing his English – which means not that he translates from Chinese into English, or from a foreign idiom into a familiar one, but that he allows his English to be reordered or even disordered, for expressive purposes, by his sense of the cultural and linguistic otherness of the experience to be conveyed. Pound's interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese after Cathay takes the form as well of an increasingly intense focus on Chinese characters, also understood as universal, natural. They constitute a permanently available system of signs, and not so much a language as an authorizing source of language, more immediate to nature or things themselves than any alphabetical writing could be, and therefore less arbitrary than alphabetical scripts. Pound never abandons his own 'virtu' or creativity as a reader, regardless of whether that which is to be read is a whole text or a single ideogram. His aim is to make it new, and making it new for him means both to preserve and to reconstruct. In presenting Chinese characters, he could hardly go further toward preserving the reality of Chinese in its difference or otherness, at least from the point of view of English or Western readers. In regarding the characters as universal signs, and in tending to read them creatively, to suit his own purposes, Pound can be seen in his own way to the downplaying the difference of Chinese. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : For Pound, translation should not be 'philology', which fails to give to the literary works at hand the vitality or contemporary relevance the original had in its own time and place, but 'interpretation', where the 'translator' is definitely making a new poem. Even if Pound had been interested in philological translations of Confucian texts, he would not have been sufficiently trained in the rules of sinology to produce such a translation, and most critics writing on the subject agree that Pound's translations are wrong in many specifics. At the same time, Pound's Chinese translations have been judged favorably in respect to capturing the 'spirit' of the Chinese works. Pound's Confucian translations are extremely rich in imagery, and this is because, working with an antiquated theory about the composition of Chinese characters, he found more images in individual Chinese words than other twentieth-century sinologists do. What is essential to an understanding of Pound as a translator of Confucian texts, he did not take into account the fact that some of the elements of those words indicate the sound of the word more than, or even rather than, represent the meaning of the word pictographically. 1999 Eric Hayot : Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in an ontology of Chinese writing. Later on, Pound intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his Cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. 'Pound and China' produces various understandings of the West's relationship to China in general, understandings influenced both by literary judgments and by moral ones. 1999 Ming Xie : Both Fenollosa and Pound had consistently ignored or played down the phonetic aspect of Chinese characters in order to accentuate their primitive pictorial element. The Chinese ideogram, according to Fenollosa and Pound, is not the picture of a sound, but 'the picture of a thing'. Pound himself was perhaps both expressing his doubts about and professing his ignorance of the nature of the Chinese character. Fenollosa's ideogrammic principle seems to refer the image to the external object, which, through the mediation of the image, acts upon the human mind. Pound's Cathay versions do not seem to contain any lines or images that are made on the basis of pictorial etymology. Pound seemed always more interested in the process of perception and definition that lies behind the pictorial analogy. For him, the ideogram thus becomes the fundamental principle of poetry, and of a new mental economy in general. Pound's actual encounter with the Fenollosa materials may have been merely accidental, but Pound's own sense of his search for fundamental values in poetry and civilization was not. His Chinese adventures were not just fanciful exoticism, but a search for universal standards of 'perfection'. Pound believed that good translation should not try to replicate exactly the original experience that may be extracted from the poem and that good translation should consist in the expression of the translaros's own interpretation of the original structure of form and feeling in a new idiom. 2003 Ira B. Nadel : [Ezra Pound in Philadelphia 1889-1906].The young Ezra Pound encountered his first Chinese object, a Ming dynasty vase at Fernbrook Avenue in Wyncote, Penn. At Aunt Frank Weston's in New York, he saw a remarkable screen book, a sequence of oriental scenes adorned with poems in Chinese and Japanese ideograms. The oriental collections in the museums of Philadelphia provided additional exposure to Chinese culture, preparing Pound for his later absorption in Orientalism developed through the work of Laurence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, Nô drama, and his own study of Chinese. Family interest in China originated in Homer and Isabel Pound's concern with the work of Christian missionaries in China. Accounts of travel, religious work, and trade formed part of the family's reading. But the oriental objects in the Pound home indicate more than homage to a foreign culture with things Chinese. They represent Philadelphia's continuing attraction to the material culture of China, which had a formative role in Pound's earliest conception of the Orient. Chinese decorative and fine art formed Pound's initial encounter with China and contributed to his likely being the first major American writer to respond more to oriental art than to its literary tradition. Chinese painting and imagery acted as a catalyst for his writing and formation of his work. Pound found in the cultural heritage of Philadelphia's celebration of China the beginnings of a lifelong preoccupation with the country. 2005 Zhu Chungeng : Confucianism, Pound believes, offers a solution to the West that, from its political institutions to its economic system, has fallen into chaos and disorder. Ideology and aesthetics are inextricable. Pound also sees in Confucianism a way of making poetry in articulating his vision of a new earthly paradise. Unlike other failing metaphysical religions, Confucianism, in Pound's view, does not commit 'splitting' – the separation of ideas from the phenomenal or culture from nature. Pound considers Confucianism not just a balanced system ; he finds Confucianism particularly attractive because of Confucius's deep concern with man and culture, his focus on social and ethical issues, his emphasis on individual responsibility, and, above all, his strong commitment to realizing social order and harmony in this world. Pound embraces Confucianism also because he considers it verifiable truth obtainable through empirical experience. He repeatedly expresses his confidence in modern science, which he thinks is not only characteristic of his cosmology but also sets an example for literary study. This empirical approach is evident in his inductive aesthetics, such as his imagism or ideogrammic method, where ideas are to be expressed through the concrete particulars. Confucianism, for Pound, is entirely assimilable to his trusted 'method of modern science' as a comprehensive means of attaining verifiable truth. The objective of this procedure is to establish social order and harmony, from family all the way to the state. The Confucian master man must have self-discipline, great sensibility, and strong sense of responsibility to accomplish this objective. 2007 Sean Macdonald : Pound was merely promoting one aspect of Chinese etymology, 'xiangxing', the pictographic category for Chinese characters, and was not particularly concerned with the many other categories and forms of semantic associations. Pound's understanding of the Chinese language aside, the ideogrammic method is an obvious parallel to montage : "The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register." Pound liked to play with etymology, and he had a tendency to split words up into etymons. His ideogrammic method was, right from the outset, a way to fragment language at the basic level of vocabulary, where individual words are split into fractured juxtaposition. In addition, Pound's fractured syntax, his particular use of citation, extra-literary text, and typography, in his prose and The cantos shows clear links to avant-garde movements. For a modernist like Pound, the view of written Chinese as a script which overcomes the mediation of alphabetical writing systems seemed to justify his own view of the potential immediacy of language. On the one hand, such a view of Chinese can only be maintained at a distance : Chinese is idealized as a form of direct access to the signified, as a sort of signified in the flesh and not seen as an everyday mode of communication. On the other hand, for Pound, his appropriation of Chinese language and culture was the very least a very positive appropriation. "The Chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS", writes Pound. Pound's interests in Chinese culture changed over time, but his Confucianism shows a distinctly political streak, especially in light of his support of Mussolini's government. For Pound, Confucius and Mencius would have been a couple of good fascists. Poundian ideograms tend to work in cumulative and constractive juxtapositional clusters of text and imagery. His ideograms can be placed on a continuum of attitudes toward Chinese culture and language that goes back as far as seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in China. The association of Chinese culture with a particular modern technique cannot be dismissed as solely a modernist or avant-gardist appropriation of Chinese language and culture as primitive, or an historical curiosity. 2008 Qian Zhaoming : In Pauthier's Confucius Pound seems to have found a philosopher, a cultural hero, who shared their modernist values. While affirming social responsibility the Chinese sage also stressed the relevance of individual dignity. To Pound such a philosopher could serve as an antidote against evils in the West. 2009 Williams, R. John : In their attention to Chinese ideography, Pound and Fenollosa entirely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese writing system, fixating somewhat blindly on its more exotic secondary elements. Pound even thought that Chinese ideography was so pictographically transparent that one could decipher the characters without even knowing Chinese. But even if Pound had a few truly ideographic examples to point to, the fact is that even the most generous estimates indicate that only a handful of Chinese characters actually conform to the ideographic principles, causing us to feel naturally suspicious of Pound's propensity to speak of 'the' Chinese character. Pound's translations may have accomplished a degree of 'openness' for his Anglo-American audience in the 1920s, but, in continuing to view Pound's translations as a framework for understanding 'the' Chinese poem today creates a scandal on two fronts : First, such a view closes our eyes to the simple fact that Chinese poetry is much more than the imagistic expressionism that Pound attributed to it ; and second, it glosses over the contemporary realities that Pound ignored by continually turning to the proverbially ancient and the aesthetically ideographic. 2010 Roslyn Joy Ricci : Ezra Pound romanticized Chinese characters as ideograms, signifiers attached to the signified, bypassing language. This misunderstanding of the Chinese character became productive error by stimulating the creation of a new poetic style – ideogrammic method. The visual aesthetics of characters appealed to his creativity. The journey from complege ignorance of the composition if Chinese writer characters to sufficient understanding to appreciate their complex evolution is both challenging and rewarding. Pound saw in Chinese characters the potential to transmit generalities with both detail and succinctness – in an aesthetical appealing form. He believed that each character conveyed a concept with broad associations to the universe as a whole. He translated Chinese characters and used them in his own poetic creations with this belief in mind. What he actually did, by using the characters in isolation without character context, was to inadvertently open the boundaries of signification providing readers with the opportunity to create their own truth constructs from the details of the character. Using this premise to construct an ideogrammic poetic method allowed Pound the licence to corrupt language signification without the shackles of conventional poetic restraints. Pound strived for simplicity in his poetry, including poetry translation, but he also endeavoured to employ the most efficient medium available. He used musical notation, both ancient and modern, and symbols juxtaposed with Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, ancient Greek and Latin. Pound was a lateral thinker, decades ahead of his time. His fascination with Confucian ideology led him to Chinese characters as the storage place of this knowledge. The visual aesthetics of characters captured his imagination – turning his interest towards them. 2010 Xin Ning : Unlike professional sinologists and translators, Pound's interest in Confucianism was the direct result of his discontent with the modern Western world. His self-appointed mission was to 'civilize the Americans' with the Chinese example. He wanted to reform the West under the guidance of the wisdom of the East. His interpretation of Confucianism is a creative 'misreading' rather than a faithful introduction to the original teaching of Confucius. Pound's 'misreading' provides us with a good example of the cross-cultural dialogue between the traditional and the modern age, between China and the West, and between translation and creative writing, which demonstrates not only the individual talent of Pound as an artist and cultural figure, but also the relevance of ancient Chinese thought to the modern world as well as the possibility of this ancient cultural tradition's self-renovation. |
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| 2 | 1915.2 |
Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (2) Sekundärliteratur 1915 Arthur Clutton-Brock : "We do not know from the title of this little book whether Mr Pound has translated these poems direct from the Chinese or has only used other translations. But for those who, like ourselves, know no Chinese, it does not matter much. The result, however produced, is well worth having, and it seems to us very Chinese. There is a strong superstition among us that a translation should always seem quite English. But when it is made from a literature very alien in method and thought, it is not a translation at all if it seems quite English. Besides, a literal translation from something strange and good may surprise our language into new beauties. If we invite a foreigner of genius among us, we don't want to make him behave just like ourselves ; we shall enjoy him best and learn most from him if he remains himself. So we think Mr Pound has chosen the right method in these translations, and we do not mind that they often are 'not English'. The words are English and give us the sense ; and after all it is the business of a writer to mould language to new purposes, not to say something new just as his forefathers said something old. So it is the business of the reader not to be angry or surprised at a strange use of language, if it is a use proper to the sense. Mr. Pound has kept to the reality of the original because he keeps his language simple and sharp and precise. We hope he will give us some more versions of Chinese poetry." 1916 Arthur Clutton-Brock : "… His verse is not ordinary speech, but he aims in it at the illusion of ordinary speech ; and, thought this illusion gives an air of liveliness to the poems, it seems to us to be bought at too high a price. Certainly the original poems as well as the translations show that he has talent – one can read them all with some interest – but why should he use it to express so much indifference and impatience ? Why should he so constantly be ironical about nothing in particular ? He seems to have private jokes of his own which he does not succeed in making public. He seems to be always reacting against something ; and the very form of his verse is a reaction against exhausted forms. But nothing can be made of mere reaction or a habit of irony. The world may not be serious, but the universe is. One suspects a hidden timidity in this air of indifference, as if Mr Pound feared above all things to give himself away. A poet must be ready to give himself away ; he must forget even the ironies of his most intimate friends when he writes, no less than tha possible misunderstandings of fools…" 1918 Arthur Waley read a paper on 'The poet Li Bo, A.D. 701-762, before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London, in which he gives his translation of Pomes no 3, 4, 8, and 14 of Cathay. "But I venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give either the first or second place to Li Bo". 1938 Achilles Fang : Es wimmelt von orthographischen Fehlern, falschen Ämterbezeichnungen, verstellten Zeilen oder fehlenden Strophen. Öfter wird kein Dichter genannt oder ein falscher angegeben, noch dazu stets in japanischer Transkription. 1951 Hugh Kenner : "Cathay is notable, considered as an English product rather than Chinese product." These poems serve "to extend, inform, and articulate the preoccupations of the present by bringing the past abreast of it". 1965 A.C. Graham : "The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pounds Cathay". 1970 Akiko Miyake : The vividness and freshness of Cathay as poetry depends more than anything else on Pound's effort to create his own Imagist poetry out of the unfamiliar materials. Fenollosa was a man with strong opinions on everything, and his individuality is shown in the notebooks. Even with his very limited knowledge of Chinese, he tried to reach the depth of the meaning by learning each word, each allusion. He aimed at more than scholarly accuracy, and Pound responded to such depth. He must have been fascinated by the task of groping for poetry underneath the unfamiliar surface. The greatest reward Pound got through writing Cathay comes probably from the fact that he could invent his own poetry even out of so remote a country as China, and of poetry in so ancient a period, for after writing Cathay, China became one of his indispensable themes. In writing Cathay, Pound by no means exhausted the rich resources of Fenollosa's essay. He did not even try the possibility of intellectual search with images in this little book. 1976 Monika Motsch : Im Gegensatz zu Chinese written character as a medium for poetry von Ernest Fenollosa [ID D22141], wird Cathay nicht angegriffen und abgelehnt, sondern anerkannt ; wenn nicht als wortgetreue Übersetzung, so doch als selbständige Dichtung. Die Anerkennung ist erstaunlich, da Pound in der Zeit, als er Cathay schrieb, kein einziges Wort Chinesisch konnte und auf Fenollosa's Notizen zurückgreifen musste, die fehlerhaft waren oder Lücken aufwiesen. Auch wenn Pounds Übersetzung voller Fehler ist, so hat er doch grundlegende Züge der chinesischen Sprache und Lyrik erfasst und im Englischen wiedergegeben : ihre syntaktische Einfachheit, die kommentarlos aufeinanderfolgenden, dynamischen Bilder, eindringliche Naturbeschreibungen und die emotionelle Verhaltenheit. Fenollosa hat Pounds Gesichtskreis ungeheuer erweitert. Er weckte sein Interesse an der Übersetzung alter Literaturen und regte ihn an zur Beschäftigung mit der chinesischen Lyrik und mit Konfuzius. The River Merchant's Wife : Das Gedicht ist eine ziemlich genaue Übersetzung des chinesischen Originals. Pound hat nur einige Namen ausgelassen, die Europäer nur mit Hilfe eines längeren Kommentars verständlich wären. Der Stil kennt, wie die chinesische Sprache, kaum grammatische Über- oder Unt4erordnung, und logisch ordnende Partikel fehlen fast vollständig. Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin : Das Gedicht setzt ein mit einfachen, klaren Hauptsätzen, die je eine Zeile einnehmen und dem Rhythmus eine getragene Ruhe verleihen. Die Verben sind teilweise weggelassen und der Rhythmus wird zunehmend dynamischer. Leave-Taking Near Shoku : Dass es sich um ein Abschiedsgedicht handelt, geht nur aus dem Titel hervor. Die Trauer bleibt unausgesprochen. In drei kurz skizzierten, gegensätzlichen Naturbildern wird die Unsicherheit der Trennung um so deutlicher. To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud" : Die dritte Strophe ist bei Pound völlig anders als im Original und seine Version ist eher ein selbständiges Gedicht als eine Übersetzung. 1967 Yip Wai-lim : Cathay consists of only nineteen poems. Many people have translated at least five times as many from the Chinese ; but none among these has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry and in the history of modern English poetry. Considered as translation, Cathay ought to be viewed as a kind of re-creation. The poems are bound to differ from the originals in the sense that certain literal details are either eliminated or violated ; local tase is modified or even altered to suit the English audience and certain allusions are suppressed in order to relieve the readers from the burden of footnotes. The criticism of Cathay fall into two obvious patterns : defense and condemnation. Most of Pound's defenders could not discuss the way in which some of the poems are said to be close to the original in the 'sequence of images', 'rhythm', 'effects', and 'tone'. Those who condemn Pound tend to concentrate on the scar and overlook everything els. To understand Pound is to widen the possibility of communication, and a clear measurement of Pound' achievement : 1. To look at the problems of translation from Chinese into English, and in particular, to discuss the difficulty of approximating in English the peculiar mode of representation constituted by Chinese syntax. 2. To look into Pound's mind as a poet, to know the obsessive concepts and techniques he cherished at the time he translated these Chinese poems and to see haw these conditioned his translation. 3. Since Fenollosa annotated these poems under Japanese instructors ('Rihaku', for instance, is the Japanese name for Li Bo), it is necessary for us to examine the triple relation, from the original Chinese to Fenollosa's notes and to the end products, in order to find out how the intermediary has obstructed Pound and how his creative spirit sometimes breaks through the crippled text to resurrect what was in the original. 4. No translator can claim to have actually translated the poetry. This is also true of Pound. How close, then, are the 'equivalents' he gets out of the Fenollosa notes to the original, the 'cuts and turns' of the Chinese poems ? In other words, we need to compare carefully the original and the derivative 'form of consciousness' to see what has actually happened in between. In his dealing with Cathay Pound is able to get into the central consciousness of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance. Pound has indeed made many philological mistakes as a consequence of his ignorance of Chinese. But it is important to remind readers that not all of them are due to ignorance ; many are done deliberately to heighten artistic intensity, and some, for a less defensible reason, are conditioned by his own obsessions as a practicing poet. The first poem Song of the bowmen of Shu is a reworking from Ariga Nagao's English version. It has followed the curves of the original's internal thought-form and the undercurrent of sadness. Pound has to admit that he has changed partially the character of the semi-monologue he has all the way dominated. 1967 D.B. Graham : While some of the Cathay poems have drawn wide praise and much analytical attention, Separation on the river Kiang has been faulted for its errors or else ignored. The criticism of this poem raises certain important questions about the critical perspective of the early Chinese translations. The usual charges against Cathay, and Separation on the river Kiang in particular, have to do with Pound's 'failure' to render literally the Chinese of Li Bo. They are chastising Pound for mistranslating and praising him for not translating. In Cathay Pound was not concerned with the quality of verse that he described as 'melopoeia', the 'musical property' of poetry. The 'melopoeia' Separation is achieved through several techniques. The first is the duplication of the monosyllabic pattern that constitutes the basic rhythmic unit of Chinese poetry. Metrically, the monosyllabic base helps Pound achieve a central aim, the breaking up of the dominant measure of English verse, the iambic. In addition to the 'melopoeia' of the monosyllabic structure of the poem, some 'melopoetic' effects are also accomplished by syntactical reduction. Of the prime characteristics of Chinese verse, none is more apparent or important than conciseness, terseness, economy. The key to Pound's succinctness lies in the syntactical order of subject / verb / complement, a formula that Fenollosa saw as central to Chinese verse. The ideogram attracted Fenollosa and Pound precisely because they viewed it as a direct expression of action. The music of Pound's poem is not confined to imitating the 'melopoetic' qualities of Chinese verse. Pound combines specifically Chinese traditions and English techniques to produce something both ancient and new. Like Fenollosa before him, Pound was attracted to the Chinese ideogram as a natural medium for poetry. Both saw the ideogram as bearing a direct, inherent relationship with the thing it names. Linguistically wrong, Pound and Fenollosa were pragmatically astute, for Chinese verse did depend heavily on concrete images, a reliance that made it a perfect medium of imitation for the imagists. 1971 Hugh Kenner : The 14 poems in the original Cathay were selected from some 150 in the notebooks, were the first 'vers-libre' translations not derived from other translations but from detailed notes on the Chinese texts. the Cathay poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry. Perfectly vital after 50 years, they are among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I. 1978 Antony Tatlow : In making his Cathay translations Pound had employed a method which took as its starting point the Chinese line and phrase. In those poems which stress the context of speech, the Chinese line of often broken up to meet the requirements of his own rhythmus. The form of speech is often stylized but the element of gesture is fundamental and is inseparable from Pound's sense of the present relevance of the poem. 1979 John Kwan-Terry : Pound's contemporaries spoke of the Cathay poems as adding 'a new breath' to the literary atmosphere and as 'like a door in a wall, opening upon a landscape made real by the intensity of human emotions'. I believe that the poems, besides being a stage in the technical development of Pound's poetry, also constitute an important chapter in the development of Pound's poetic sensibility. From the beginning, Pound's poetry sought to relate two seemingly disparate worlds – one, a world of irritating contemporary realities confronted by a vibrant vitality anxious to do battle ; the other, a world of aesthetic and mystic visions that seemed to transcend time and its wars altogether. In the raw material provided by Fenollosa, Pound saw the possibility, or the possibility presented itself for him, to create or recreate a poetry that can integrate the high and the low, the ordinary and the transcendent. Like the early poems, the Cathay poems are infused with a sense of loss, of desolation and loneliness, but on a wider scale. Reading these poems, one has the impression of vast distances and the partings and exiles that distances entail ; an empire so huge that its defenders and functionaries cannot know its purposes, and perhaps these purposes are absurd anyway ; distances also in time and history, so great that human glory cannot hope to outlast them. The social scope covered is equally impressive : war and peace, the high-born and the low-born, the intellectual and the domestic, the soldier and the poet, wife, husband, lover, friend. What sets these poems apart, is an achieved sense of harmony, of unity sought and found – the unity that integrates the contemporary reality with the self, the quotidian with the eternal moment. A quality of Chinese poetry that appeals to Pound strongly is the absence of 'moralizing', 'comment', and 'abstraction'. Cathay poems involve the subjective, but they do not convey the sense of being 'abandoned' which seems to be the prevailing ethos in modern literature and is so strong an element in Pound's poetry. There is less sense of the 'anguish' of being without God. There is resignation, but not despair. The poetry conveys a sense of gratitude, a creative delight in experience, in the small moments of life. One of the greatest values in Cathay is that it can express the human need for relationship, and the ways in which the sense of identity is bound up with love. For Pound, Fenollosa's theory seemed to come as a powerful criticism of the principles of Imagism. The implications in Fenollosa's essay, as Pound saw them, were that Imagism took too static a view of what poetry could perform. It conceived of the world as so many inert 'things', to be brought into juxtaposition, whereas the world is made up of 'energies', and a poems should be a sort of vortex, concentrating these energies. The Cathay poems mark a unique stage in Pound's career, a stage in which Pound's sensibility, interacting with the Chinese tradition, discovered a creative theme, a sense of the integrated man. 1985 Ronald Bush : Pound, maintaining the beautiful indirection of the poem The river-merchant's wife, transformed its subject. The implied emotional drama of the poem is one of love maturing before our eyes. The wife remembers herself as a little girl, recalls a time when she entered into an arranged marriage without much feeling, and then, spurred by the pain her husband's departure has provoked, slowly realizes how much she cares for him. At the end of the poem she dreams of his returning and achieves a poignant reunion by traveling a considerable distance in her imagination to meet him halfway. In Pound's hands, this poem becomes a dark reflection of its Chinese self and a recognizable cousin to the poems of blocked expression in the suite around it. In Pound's poem, to affirm her love for her husband, the wife must overcome not only the miles between them but also her own fugitive feelings of betrayal. Comparing the Exile's letter to the notes on which it is based, Pound exaggerated Li Po's nostalgia for a past when poets were joined in true fellowship. Something extraordinary is created in his poem, not by a single friendship but by a poetic community that disdains gold and has forgotten kings and princes. It is this unique fellowship that allows the poets for once to speak out their 'hearts and minds without regret'. 1990 Qian Zhaoming : Cathay is a beautiful translation of classical Chinese poetry. It is considered as such because it has translated the charm and simplicity of the classical Chinese poems. To this one may add that it takes a great poet plus a great critic to translate great poetry. Though Pound is handicapped by his own ignorance of the Chinese language and Fenollosa's numerous misrepresentations, with his poetic sensibility and critical experience he is able to penetrate the shell and catch the quintessence. It is true that there are many deviations in his translation. But compared with what he has preserved, the presentation, the mood, and the whole image, his flaws are negligible and his triumph is great. It is through Pound that the English readers first get the original of such great Chinese poets as Li Bo. But Pound himself has also benefited from translating Chinese classical poetry. He is exposed to new sensibilities and new techniques, which in turn exert an important impact on him in his literary career, and through him also exert an important impact on modern English poetry. 1996 Robert Kern : Cathay is very much a production of creative reading, where 'creative' means not only inventive or fictionalizing but insightful and penetrating, both psychologically and philologically. Pound is nonetheless able to recover the movement of consciousness in his texts, even to the point of occasionally capturing elusive realities of voice and tone, an achievement which virtually demands that he go beyond strict dictionary meanings. Therefore, if he is also guilty of errors because of his ignorance of Chinese, or because he is misled by the uncertainties of Fenollosa's notes, sometimes his inaccuracies are conscious and deliberate, committed for the sake of greater artistic intensity and even on behalf of 'his own obsessions as a practicing poet'. The poems in Cathay are not only sometimes acutely 'accurate', despite their deviations from dictionary sense, but are continuous, thematically and in other respects, with the rest of Pound's work. What need to be stressed is the extent to which he as deliberately pursued this continuity, and it is under the category of his 'obsessions as a practicing poet', that Pound's acts of Orientalizing or creative reading should be placed. Cathay appropriates Chinese poetry for purposes other than those of Chinese poetry itself. Pound is using the Chinese texts as a drawing board for the creation of a modernist style or technique, he is also already practicing it, in the sense that modernism in general may be defined as an activity of appropriation, a series of strategies, such as allusion, collage, and what Pound would later call 'the ideogrammic method', for incorporating other texts, other voices, other perspectives within one's own, and for shoring up, the ruins of the modern world, amassing the cultural valuables of the past and increasingly of other, non-Western cultures in order to restore coherence and stability to modern experience, or to create them anew. At the same time, he seems to be moving beyond imagism, and in many of the Cathay poems, which reflect Pound's reading of Fenollosa's essay, we find less of an emphasis on the image as 'itself the speech', less reliance on the technique of superpositioning as a structural resource, and less of an appeal in general to strict imagist orthodoxy as a means of producing the Chinese poem. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader by defamiliarizing his English. This process takes several forms in Cathay, one of the most important of which is both Fenollosan and imagist. Writing for Pound, during this period, is a process of stripping words of their associations in order to arrive at their exact meanings and this process is itself a form of defamiliarization, of discovering and presenting arrangements of language that emphasize their own strangeness with respect to more conventional, or historically and culturally conditioned, modes of expression. 1998 Grace Fang : Pound found Chinese poetry and ideograms to be the perfect means of expression for his creative resources and convictions. His translations provided him with a new opportunity to recreate the source text and to activate dynamic responses in the reader, which reflect a vivid Chinese picture through Western eyes. Not every character is a picture, and even when most Chinese people use a character originally created as an imitation of the shape of a object, they will not be aware of its etymology. Chinese language derives much of its poetic power from its three-thousand-year development of these phonetic and semantic devices. It also functions as a normal communicative language in which the form of the character does not stand for its original visual form but for the meaning it conveys. There is an arbitrary relationship between sign and meaning, and the character represents not the original natural image but the conventional signification. A Chinese character can stand by itself as 'a word' or can be combined with one or two or three other characters to from 'a word', which would lead the character to lose its own original meaning and to gain a new significance in the combination as a compound word. Therefore, the ideogrammic method either risks over-emphasizing the etymological meaning of the separated part of the character or mistaking the individual signified for the significance of a whole compound word. Fenollosa and Pound show great concern for the language they deal with, but to over-emphazise the philological sense at the expense of other considerations, such as the total textual structure, rhyme, and 'original meaning' refined by the original poet, is dangerous, particularly when the translator has not established his expertise in the source language. Misinterpretations and mistakes are bound to happen. Pound's Cathay is a poetic performance across three culture, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, English), to be synchronized in his own poetic voice. Although Pound may sometimes have conveyed certain wrong meanings, most of the time he has conveyed the right feeling. Although he does not understand all the words, he has remained as faithful as possible to the original poet's sequence of tone, voice, rhythms and images. 1999 Eric Hayot : The differences between Arthur Waley and Pound notwithstanding, it is vital to notices how far they both are from Herbert A. Giles' attempts to turn the Chinese poem into an English one. Relative to Giles's, Pound's translations allowed the poems to stay strange, English enough to read but Chinese enough to represent their own difference. He was essentially 'rebuking' Giles for not making his translations Chinese enough, for bringing them too far into English. Waley's rebuke of Pound criticizes Pound for doing exactly what Pound didn't like about Giles, namely for making the poems too English, and for not adequately respecting their originals. Pound's translations impress more than Waley's precisely because they have something poetic about them. Pound was, at times, wrong both about the specifics of his language and the general tone of the poem. Despite the vast differences in their literary reception, it can be helpful to consider differences between Giles, Pound, Waley and Yip matters of degree rather than king. Each translator attempts to bring across more or less of the Chinese difference by putting it in a literary or cultural language more or less comprehensible to English readers, most of whom know little about China. Inevitably, the translation will carry with it aspects of English language and culture not justified by any mood or motive of the original text. 1999 Ming Xie : The connection between Pound's haiku images and his earlier epigrams might be viewed as the logical precedent for what Pound set out to do in Cathay. Pound's apparent ignorance of Chinese and Chinese literary forms has perhaps enabled him to modulate and transpose freely the original Chinese poems in terms adapted to his own generic experiments and expressive consideration. He was perhaps fortunate enough not to be in a position to render literally from the original Chinese ; he evidently derived a stimulus to innovate forms of a more immediate expressiveness from this ostensibly unpromising activity, that of translating from a language not fully understood. The Cathay poems display the importance of a certain kind of provincialism of feeling, feeling deeply rooted in details of the actual circumscribed world of the protagonists. Pound and Thomas Hardy are often concerned with the reality of memory and retrospection, regret and melancholy, time and isolation. The use of natural imagery in the poems is often of primary importance. There is a natural relation of the natural setting to the speaking and observing persona in the Cathay poems, as well as a sense of distance that separates the observer or speaker from the natural world that he or she observes. But the resulting tension is precisely what is most important in any good poems. The individual perspective in Cathay is for the most part retrospective and is almost always tinged with an elegiac coloring. This elegiac coloring is not a general, all-pervasive mood or atmosphere enveloping or devouring the individual speakers in the poems. It also often tends to leave the emotional stance of the translating poet in a kind of sympathetic neutrality, not by any implicit collusion expressing his own personal elegiac feeling. The Cathay poems as a whole do not provide some extraordinary moral perspective in which the reader would be invited to judge morally ; rather, they almost invariably invite the reader to participate and sympathize in an ordinary highly individualized emotional or psychological perspective, except that the exotic and unfamiliar context makes this for the Western reader 'ordinary' only by an act of consciously maintained vicarious projection. The river-merchant's wife : In Pound's version the emotion of the woman speaker is presented within her confined perspective through particular stages of emotional development and psychological retrospection, out of which emerge different shades of meaning and significance. Pound divides the poem into different stanzas or strophes, in order to delineate more sharply and contrastively the successive stages of retrospection and revelation. In the Chinese poem, due to lack of specified relations of tense or number, the narrative sequence is not explicitly established by syntactical markers. Pound has largely ignored Fenollosa's theory of the transitive verb. His Cathay displays a surprisingly wide variety of poetic techniques and rhetorical structures neglected in Fenollosa's treatise, especially in the use of paratactic and anaphoric constructions. These devices do not in fact originate with Cathay ; rather they are a continuation of Pound's earlier practices and experiments. But it is nevertheless evident that Pound's extensive use of these structures is based upon his intuitive sense of their importance and significance in the original Chinese poems, as confirmed in large part by Fenollosa's often detailed notes and literal versions. The language of Cathay was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary ; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian English, as was often Pound's practice. Cathay is an example of a strong tendency in Pound to regard translation as not historical but contemporary or timeless. Pound's versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry, because he has largely stripped away most of the supposed or fictitious qualities that late-Victorian poetic treatment (by James Legge, Herbert Giles) had imposed upon classical Chinese poetry. The success of Cathay is also largely due to Pound's tacit and skillful reliance upon a stylized evocation of China. The use of Chinese landscape seems to provide a powerful confirmation of the kind of 'otherness' which Western readers tacitly identified with an emotional coding linked to understood conventions of feeling in Chinese art and poetry. 2000 Sylvia Ieong Sao Leng : Ezra Pound's Cathay had gone through two rearrangements before it was brought out by Elkin Mathews in April 1915. Originally, the sequence was made up of eleven poems. The Cathay typescript at the Beinecke Library shows that Pound had added four poems to the original eleven when he submitted the sequence to Mathews. In the last minute, pound ‘suppressed the four appended poems and added 'Lament of the frontier guard' and 'South – folk in cold country'. In 1916 when Pound incorporated Cathay into Lustra, he restored the four suppressed poems. 2003 Barry Ahearn : Pound leads his readers to believe that the original Chinese verses are of such high quality that even inexpert translators cannot greatly harm them. In Chinese poetry he cites two poems as examples of how Chinese and Western poetic practices share common ground. In respect of The jewel stairs' grievance he illustrates how the Western reader should approcach the poem : "I have never found any occidental who could 'make much' of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, no merely by 'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poems. You can play Conan Doyle if you like." Pound first shares the burden with Fenollosa, Mori Kainan and Ariga Nagao (though on closer inspection, he calls their abilities into question and transfer credit to the poems themselves. Second, he contends that the poems have qualities (some of which he specifies and some of which he does not) that make them amenable to translation. There is also a third strategy Pound employs to divert the readers' attention from his role as translator. This third strategy is to include images in the poems that will strike the reader as recognizably Chinese because these images already seem Chinese, thanks to existing Western preconceptions about China. He adopted various strategies to suggest the virtual identity of Chinese poetry and Western literary forms. But he also 'foreignized' the translations to remind his readers that there were unavoidable differences. Pound uses complicated means to make his translations seem authentically 'foreign' – complicated because they depend upon delicate adjustments of diction. In his attempt to make the language of Cathay on occasionally bizarre form of English, Pound does not limit himself to nouns and verbs. He well knew that some of the most perplexing problems for a novice translator arise from some of the simplest words. The effect of verbal perplexities is to produce a strange impression, the impression that this translation has been produced not by Ezra Pound, but by a native speaker of Chinese whose command of English is less than fluent. Pound inserts a sufficient number of odd expressions in the poems, with the intention of leaving the reader with the impression that even though these English versions may be imperfect, there must lie behind them a superior Chinese original. Pound's treatment of the poems in the Fenollosa papers adopts a divided stance : the Chinese poems are like Western ones ; the Chinese poems are in many respect alien. 2007 Choi Hongsun : Pound departs from his Anglocentric conversion and takes a centrifugal attitude toward otherness of the other. He attempts to foreground the cultural and linguistic otherness of Chinese poetry and to revive its own poetic qualities in his translated poems. Pound the poet searches for 'dynamic equivalence' in consideration of the receptor language and culture. This target language oriented approach has a centripetal focus on a new poetic English that is filtered through translation. Thus, such otherness is incorporated into the Pound's own creative work. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry maintains the precarious tension between two different translating strategies : formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Cathay demonstrates Pound's attempts to foreground the otherness of the Chinese original to further the potential of English poetry through the appropriation of such otherness. In regards to formal equivalence, Pound the translator pursues a text to be equivalent, rather than equal, to the distinctive aspects of Chinese poetry. He thus foreignizes English in an attempt to reflect the poetic otherness of the original. At the same time, while his translation is oriented toward dynamic equivalence, such otherness is incorporated into his whole poetic arsenal of English, so that Pound the poet invents a new English stranger than the original Chinese. Even concerning dynamic equivalence, his translated language never gets domesticated conventionally, but rather it must be identified as somewhere between the source language and the target language. In this way, Cathay marks an important turning point in the history of Chinese translation as well as in Pound's own literary career. 2012 A. Serdar Öztürk : The image, the ideogram itself, if it is to be effective, depends greatly on the beauty and the force of the image, the ideogrammic component. That Pound was successful in translating the Chinese image is everywhere attested in Cathay. Which ties the poem together is not so much the narrative as the succession of images. The Imagists concern for concentrated expression and Pound's definition of the image as 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' would lead one to believe, that most of the poetry in Cathay would tend toward brevity. Although there are a representative number of short poems, the greater number is rather long. To account for the ability to sustain an image in a poem of more than a few lines, or even a few stanzas, one must turn again to the effectiveness of ideogrammic juxtaposition. |
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| 3 | 1960-1974 |
Tel quel : littérature, philosophie, science, politique [ID D24159]. 1971 : "On comprend donc comment, dans ces conditions, la révolution culturelle prolétarienne chinoise, plus grand événement historique de notre époque, dérange le calcul révisionniste et qu'il fera tout pour la falsifier. Eh bien, nous, nous verson tout pour l'éclairer, l'analyser et la soutenir." Lisa Lowe : The editorial committee at the journal Tel quel had become ardent followers of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After 1968 these critics and intellectuals, who judged the promising yet ultimately suppressed May revolts in France a failed revolution, turned to the Cultural Revolution as an alternative example of revolutionary theory and practice. These intellectuals adopted 'Maoism' and defined it as a more radical critique of society, one that took its theoretical inspiration from a source outside western Marxism. In 1971 Tel quel constituted the People's Republic and the Cultural Revolution as absolutely nonoccidental phenomena, which, owing to their very situation outside, western European political experience, represented a model for revolution and ongoing cultural criticism that could not be recontained by western ideological systems. French Maoism at Tel quel subsided by 1975. By 1971 a manifesto indicating the journal's enthusiastic embrace of Maoism had been published ; the political tenets of the Mouvement de juin 71 were consolidated, with the publication of a "Déclaration" and lists of "Positions" appearing in Tel quel ; no 47 (1971). The declaration began with a protest against the censoring of Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi's De la Chine at a commercial display by L'humanité, the Communist press. Tel quel editors argued that the choice to suppress De la Chine indicated a repressive and dogmatic policy, which colluded with and made possible the revisionist 'line'. The declaration of Tel quel's Maoism was specifically a reaction to the PCF's prohibitions ; China was embraced as a privileged topos of revolution precisely because information about China was suppressed by L'humanité and the PCF : "La censure inévitable du révisionnisme sur la Chine est le prix à payer 'par lui' pour que cette hégémonie soit 'totale'..." The lack of knowledge about China also enabled Tel quel's theorists to idealize the Cultural Revolution as the epitome of 'permanent revolution', a revolution which they constituted as having successfully reintegrated into the factories and countrysides the solidifying elite strata of administrators, bureaucrats, and technicians. In addition, Tel quel elaborated on the then popular notion of the Chinese Cultural Revolution also inclueded a vigorous and continual critique of art and literature, resulting in an ever-changing and ultimate avant-garde. It is in this latter sense particularly that Tel quel romanticized China as a utopian aesthetic ; because information about China was prohibited and censored, the theorists at Tel quel were able to situate their abstract notions of textual practice there without risk of contradiction or disillusionment. François Houmant : Philippe Sollers n'ira pas à la fête Fête de L'Humanité. In : Le monde ; 11 septembre 1971. Sous ce titre, le quotidien rend public le désaccord du directeur de Tel quel avec le Parti communiste français. L'objet de cette rupture : l'interdiction du livre de la journaliste italienne Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi - De la Chine – à la fête annuelle du Parti. Prenant la défense de l'auteur, Philippe Sollers ne rompt pas seulement avec le Parti communiste mais rend hautement visible l'admiration qu'il porte à un ouvrage qu'il a contribué à faire publier. Il stigmatise l'interdit, exalte le livre et prophétise son inscription dans la durée : "Aucun intellectuel d'avant-garde, et plus encore aucun marxiste, ne peut, semble-t-il, rester indifférent davant cette mesure. De la Chine représente aujourd’hui un admirable témoignage sur la Chine révolutionnaire mais encore une ressource d'analyser théorique qu'il serait illusoire de croire refouler. De la Chine, c'est la puissance et la vérité du nouveau lui-même. Son absence, sa censure... sont les symptômes d'un aveuglement navrant... Le travail de Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi a devant lui toute l'histoire." L'affaire Macciocchi joue en fait le rôle de catalyseur idéologique. Elle apparaît surtout comme un prétexte rendant possible le divorce de Tel quel avec son allié communiste d'hier et enracine la revue dans le camp des pro-chinois : opération qui permet de cumuler les avantages liés à la prééminence idéologique, Tel quel devenant rapidement le point de passage de toute und fraction de l'intelligentsia maophile sans perdre ce visage de révolutionnaire qui sied aux avant-gardes. Si l'intérêt pour la Chine était quelque peu perceptible avant 1971, il faut donc attendre cette année-là pour qu'éclate la primauté des thèses maoïstes au sein du comité de rédaction. La parabole telquelienne n'aurait sans doute pas été complète sans un voyage en Chine populaire. A leur retour, loin des polémiques suscitées par l'irruption de L'Archipel du Goulag et la parole du 'zek' Soljénitsyne, ils s'empressent de donner réalité littéraire au simulacre de dévoilement qui leur fut proposé. Eric Hayot : Tel quel's reception of the Cultural Revolution was itself conditioned by a numer of contexts, both practical and theoreticall. It was these contexts that set the stage for Tel quel's eventual embrace of Maoism and the 1974 trip to China. After 1966, the distinction between the cultural dream-object 'China' and actual China became less desirable to maintain, since doing so would be to miss out on 'the message' China was putting out for the first time. The sudden breath of revolution now from a place that had previously functioned largely as an exotic utopia in the past pushed Tel quel toward an increasing sense that China was the literal place of world revolution, and toward a greater sense of the material and intellctual value of China. Tel quel turned openly to Maoism in 1971. The move came about partly because of the journal's deteriorating relationship with the French Communist Party. Between 1966 and 1971, as Tel quel began publishing texts on China, the journal and the PCF stood together in the field of French politics, a stance that remained largely true even during the student revolts of 1968. The final break between Tel quel and the PCF in 1971, occurred around the PCF's refusal to sell Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi's book 'De la Chine'. Tel quel's adoption of Maoism was officially announced in its 1971 issue. As a whole, the declaration and positions in this issue concern themselves far more with European politics than Chinese ones. Besides the various positive references to Mao Zedong's thought and the Cultural Revolution, no mention is made of conditions in China. But the ninth in a list of provosals made by the journal's editorial committee encouraged intellectuals both inside and outside Tel quel to 'undertake the serious work of ideological and political reeducation', and suggested that Tel quel would eventually think through the political, economic, national and international implications of its political struggle. The preface of “Chinese thought” says the issue offers its readers the background necessary to understand the global political situation for which China has assumed a growing importance. More specifically, it asks readers to consider 'the particularities of the language, literature, art, and philosophy of China, in order to better follow and understand the political, social, and cultural transformations that China today is producing and manifesting'. The 1972 issue on China reflected the two major lines of Tel quel's inquiry : one more concerned with developing a theory of Maoism (and thus with contemporary China), and the other more interested in the radical possibilities of Chinese language and literature (and classical China). Facts about 'China' as it appeared to Tel quel : 1) Its language uniquely combined signifier and referent ; 2) its poetry articulated the universal and long-repressed (in the West) problem of symbolization ; 3) its Maoism offered the hope of a truly cultural revolution. |
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| 4 | 1970-1971 |
Philippe Sollers 1970-1971. Eric Hayot : The important relation to Chinese writing remained strong throughout Philippe Soller's move toward Maoism at the end of the 1960s. His translation of ten poems by Mao in 1970, for instance, while signaling Tel quel's political interest in China, also adopted a theory of translation. The advent of China's Cultural Revolution played a vital role in the transformation of Soller's Poundian China into Tel quel's vastly more energetic and political version. Sollers in 1968 and 1969 began debates among the Tel quel editorial committee designed to move the journal toward a Maoist politics – politics that would only surface fully in 1971, after the final breat with the French Communist Party. Sollers writes that the Cultural Revolution is 'the battle of a long-repressed thought, of a mass revolutionary practice now consolidated in the light of day'. Soller's presumption that China is ideal material for an ideological avant-garde suggests that whatever his notion of China was, it remained tied up in some sense of the radical possibilities of the East. In fact the demand that China's worth be recognized, though promted in part by China's growing political and economic power, continues to depend on an 'invented' or imaginary China. |
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| 5 | 1974 |
Wahl, François. La Chine sans utopie. In : Le monde ; 15-16, 18-19 juin 1974. Er schreibt : "La critique explicite, nominale, de Lin Piao – à quoi s'associe sans exception la critique de Confucius, - il est impossible de loin, malgré ce qu'on a pu en lire, d'en mesurer l'insistance, l'omniprésence et l'ampleur. Pas de jour, pas d'heure sans son pi Lin pi Kong... En ce qui concerne Confucius, les choses sont très claires : la campagne prend appui non pas banalement sur ce qu'il serait réactionnaire de rester aujourd'hui encore confucéen, mais bien sur ceci, que l'histoire 'classique' (confucéenne) avait foulé et qui semble en effet indiscutable : que Confucius était réactionnaire déjà en son temps... Confucius, donc, dès le début, c'est le retour au passé et l'opposition à la montée d'une classe (féodale) qui était progressiste en son temps. La campagne pi King insiste, en contrepartie, sur l'action de l'école dees légistes, adversaire acharné des Confucéens... et expression de la féodalité montante. La loi substituée à la coutume, la loi écrite, et donc valable pour les 'esclaves' comme pour les maîtres : el était l'enjeu... Pourquoi ce détour par Confucius pour citiquer Lin Piao ? Comment celui qui fut, pendant la révolution culturelle, le plus proche compagnon d'armes de Mao – un combattant dont on a des raisons de soupçonner que, s'il eut des complicités, ce fut bien plutôt du côté de l'ultra-gauche.... Parmi les critiques – cette fois doctrinales – après coup formulées contre Lin Piao, il en est dont l'impact révolutionnaire est indiscutable et qui font faire à la pratique politique chinoise un grand pas en avant..." "[La Chine] se précipite vers une occidentalisation dont le marxisme soviétique aura été l'instrument et continue - malgré tout,- de fixer la structure. Une économie développée sur le modèle international ( même si les étapes sont différentes). Belle lucidité et anticipation, vue de notre tour d'observation de 2008. (pileface)], un système soviétique améliore (plus égalitaire) mais dont on ne peut assurer qu'il soit beaucoup plus démocratique, la révolution portée dans l'idéologie mais une table rase culturelle : les risques sont très lourds... Ce qui serait le pire pour le marxisme, c'est que l'alternative chinoise à l'URSS aboutisse au même type d'échec." François Hourmant : François Wahl laisse entendre une voix radicalement différente que Tel quel, celle de la désillusion. Le riposte de Tel quel intervient presque aussitôt. Cinq pages très denses émanant de la rédaction constituent la réponse critique à ses propos. Marcelin Pleynet évoque cette 'dissidence' : "Ce voyage en Chine a donné lieu à une vague d'interprétations informatives avec lesquelles, tout autant au simple niveau de la véracité de l'information que pour des raisons critiques de fondements conceptuels, d'analyse de position subjective, voire d'analyse de fondement subjectif des positions conceptuelles, je suis en complet désaccord." Eric Hayot : Wahl's sense that the positive difference of China has been subsumed by a Soviet model (of thinking, of living, of Marxism, of culture) appears over and over in 'La Chine sans utopie'. |
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| 6 | 1974 |
Kristeva, Julia. Des chinoises [ID D24171]. [Auszüge zur Reise in China 1974]. Quellen : Chen-Andro, Chantal. Les poèmes ci de Li Qing-chao [ID D24176]. Documents of the women's movement of China. (Peking : New China Women's Press, 1950). Family and kinship in Chinese society [ID D10782]. Granet, Marcel. La civilisation chinoise [ID D3234] Granet, Marcel. Les catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne [ID D3434]. Gulik, Robert van. La vie sexuelle dans la Chine ancienne [ID D7790]. Hsu, Francis L.K. Under the ancestors' shadow [ID D24175]. Hu, Chi-hsi. Mao, la révolution et la question sexuelle. In : Revue française de sciences politiques ; févr. (1973). Lang, Olga. Chinese family and society [ID D24174]. Longobardo, Niccolò. Traité sur quelques points de la religion des Chinois [ID D1792]. Mao, Tse-tung. Textes [ID D14925]. Mao Tse-tung unrehearsed : talks and letters, 1956-71 [ID D14928]. Margouliès, G[eorges]. Le Kou-wen chinois [ID D7073]. Maspero, Henri. Le taoïsme et les religions chinoises [ID D3861]. Meijer, M.J. Mariage law and policy in the Chinese People's Republic. (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, 1971). Niida, Nobory. Law of slave and self : research in the history of Chinese law ; vol. 3. (Tokyo 1962). Schram, Stuart R. Documents sur la théorie de la "révolution permanente" en Chine [ID D14929]. Smedley, Agnes. The battle of hymn of China [ID D24204]. Snow, Edgar. Snow, Edgar. Red star over China [ID D8820]. Snow, Helen Foster. Women in modern China [ID D24177]. Tao tö king : le livre de la voie et de la vertu [ID D8008]. Women in China. Ed. by Marilyn B. Young [ID D24178]. Yü, Siao [Yu, Xiao]. Mao Tse-tung and I were beggars. (Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University, 1959). « Ces notes ne sont pas un livre. Tout juste forment-elles un carnet d'informations et d'interrogations suscitées par le voyage que j'ai pu faire en République populaire de Chine en avril-mai 1974. On les lira surtout par rapport au bouleversement qu'impose à notre propre société le surgissement de ce continent noir, dont le désir et le silence assurent la cohésion : les femmes. Face aux Chinoises, c'est à partir de ce bouleversement que les notes ici présentées essaient de s'écrire. C'est pour cela même, qu'à la hâte, elles ont été écrites. » De ce côté-ci 1. Qui parle ? ... A quarante kilomètres de l'ancienne capitale chinoise Xi'an – première capitale de la Chine unifiée par l'empereur Qin Shi Huangdi au IIe siècle avant notre ère, grande capitale des Tang (618-906) – se trouve le village Huxian, chef-lieu d'une région agricole. Nous y arrivons en voiture par une route chaude, ensoleillée, parcourue de paysans à gros chapeaux en bambou, d'enfants autonomes volant dans des jeux silencieux, d'un corbillard tiré par des hommes tandis que d'autres, en deux rangées sur les côtés, le cernent de perches parallèles portées sur leurs épaules. Tout le village est sur la place où nous devons visiter, dans un des bâtiments en bordure, l'exposition des peintres paysans... Je pense qu'une des fonctions, sinon la fonction la plus importante, de la Révolution chinoise aujourd'hui est de faire passer cette brèche dans nos coneptions universalistes de l'Homme ou de l'Histoire. Ce n'est pas la peine d'aller en Chine pour fermer les yeux devant cette brèche... Ecrire 'pour' ou 'contre' : vieux jeu du militant engagé en situation... Je vais relever ici un seul aspect de ce qui creuse l'abîme entre nous et les regards de Huxian : les femmes chinoises, la famille chinoise, leur tradition et leur révolution actuelle. Ce choix, pour deux raisons. D'abord, parce que les recherches des spécialistes, mes impressions du voyage et les développements les plus récents de la Révolution culturelle prouvent que, dans l'histoire ancienne mais aussi tout au long du socialisme chinois et jusqu'à nos jours, le rôle des femmes et par conséquent la fonction de la famille ont, en Chine, und spécificité que le monothéisme occidental ne connaît pas... 2. La guerre des sexes. 3. Vierge du verbe. 4. Sans temps. 5. Moi qui veux ne pas être. Femmes de Chine 1. La mère au centre. Une filiation utérine, matrilinéaire, et matrilocale ? La génitalité – principe organisateur de l'univers archaïque. Traces dans les coutumes paysannes : Marcel Granet. Les couples royaus. Leibniz sur le Dieu des Chinois. L'écriture idéogrammatique : marque d'un despote ou d'une mère archaïque ? La combinatoire dramatique contre le principe de la raison sussifante. Une commune primitive d'il y a six mille ans, visitée à Panpo. Les femmes, l'érotisme et les vieux traités sexuels. J'ai visité, près de Xi'an, le musée pré-historique de Panpo. Les fouilles, commencées en 1953, ont découvert un village que les archéologues chinois modernes considèrent comme ayant eu l'organisation sociale de la commune primitive et du matriarcat, avant l'apparition du patriarcat, de la propriété privée et des classes... Sur un territoire de cinquante mille mètres carrés dont seulement un cinquième est exploré et présenté dans le musée s'étalent les ruines d'un village de six mille ans avant notr ère. Trois parties apparaissent sur ce sol blanchi par le calcaire et le temps qui livre devant mes yeux une vie lointaine, celle même que Mme Chang Shufang essaie d'expliquer à l'aide d'Engels... « Ce sont les femmes qui ramassaient les plantes sauvages ; en les cultivant autour des maisons, elles ont inventé l'agriculture, ce qi leur a permis de jouer un rôle social de premier plan, y compris en politique. Les hommes se consacraient à la chasse et à la pêche, et ensuite à l'élevage. »... Est-ce un écho de ce rôle central de la mère génitrice dans la famille archaïque, qu'on entend jusque dans les traités secuels et les rites érotiques de la Chine féodale ? Ce qui est sûr, c'est que les les 'manuels' sur 'l'Art de la chambre à coucher' qui remontent au début de notre ère, instituent la femme non seulement comme initiatrice principale aux arts érotiques puisqu'elle en sait la technique de même que le sens secret (alchimique) et les bienfaits pour le corps (la longévité), mais aussi comme celle qui a le droit incontestable à la jouissance... On a souvent insisté sur l'influence de la vie et de la théorie sexuelles chinoises sur la constitution de la mystique sexuelle bouddhiste et tantriste. Il reste, pourtant, une différence essentielle entre l'univers chinois et l'univers bouddhiste sur ce plan : les deux (sexes) s'harmonisent mais généralement ne fusionnent pas en Chine, la dyade alchimiste-érotique du taoïsme n'est pas un androgyne, jamais l'un n'absorbe l'autre au point d'en rendre superflue l'existence comme le dit le tantra « Qu'ai-je besoin d'une autre femme ? J’ai en moi-même une Femme Intérieurs ». Le taoïsme nourrit cette conception de la vie secuelle qui sous-tend la société chinoise et reste, permanente, dans l'ombre des foyers, y compris lorsque le confucianisme règne en maître absolu sur la scène politique depuis les Song au moins (XIe siècle)... 2. Confucius – un « mangeur de femmes ». Filiation bilatérale, échange généralisé simple (mariage avec la fille de l'oncle maternel), famille patrilinéaire féodale. La 'jia' chinoise ; une unité économique. L'autorité du père mort : la hiérarchie des ancêtres aux fils. Les femmes : nomadisme, oppression et intrigues. Le 'pouvoir féminin' : sur les morts. La puissance des aïeules. Les pieds bandés – la souffrance constitue l'objet d'amour. Quelques prototypes classiques : une 'antiféministe', Pan Zhao ; les concubines ; une impératirce : Wu Zetian ; les courtisanes ; les lettrées ; Li Qingzhao ; la suicidaire ; la soldate travestie. Le sort de la morale confucéenne dans la révolution socialiste : une enquête au Taiwan. Je les vois encore, à Pékin ou en province, ces vieilles dames toutes habillées en noir, aux petits pieds de bébé, que je n'osait pas regarder et encore moins photographier. On a beau savoir qu'il existe, ce petit pied, et qu'il est très petit : c'est imaginable. Pris dans une minuscule chaussure en velours noir, le devant pointu, sa semelle en caron, dirait-on, et ce n'est pas invraisemblable, car elles ne doivent pas marcher beaucoup... Les yeux seuls, mouillés, un peu tristes, faits pour regarder au-dedans plutôt qu'en face, et d'une ironie très douce et très voilée, sont les témoins, à déchiffrer, de cette mutilation. Le soir, les fils et les petits-fils les promènent, assises en amazones blessées à l'arrière les lampions s'allument et que tout le monde afflue dans l'ancienne. Cité interdite, la place Tiananmen est pleine de gardes rouges qui promènent leurs grand-mères, aux pieds mutliés, à bicyclette... 3. Socialisme et féminisme. Une révolution bourgeoise, nationaliste, socialiste et féministe à la fois. Les suffragettes chinoises envahissent le Parlement en 1912. Le Mouvement pour les droits des femmes inspire les idées du Mouvement du 4 mai. Un supporter de la cause féminine : Mao Zedong. Les articles de Mao sur le sucide des femmes. Le programme d'études en France comprend les futures militantes féministes et communistes. Xiang Jingyu, Cai Chang Deng Deng Yingchao. 4. Le parti et les femmes. Droits des femmes ou luttes de classes. Mao invente les paysans comme force principale de la Révolution, mais reste prudent sur les femmes. Les paysannes et les étudiantes – sensible aux luttes féminines ; les ouvrières – plus directement marxistes. Xiang Jingyu subordonne les problèmes de la famille et des femmes à la lutte du prolétariat. Un 'pouvoir des femmes' est une contradiction logique et une impasse socio-politique. Les féministes du Guomindang. Le Soviet de Jiangxi de 1930. La Loi sur le mariage, signée Mao, lasse supposer la disparition de la famille et la libération sexuelle comme forces motrices de la Révolution. Stoïcisme et liberté au cours de la Longue Marche. Ajuster la propagande à la psychologie des femmes pour vaincre le Japon. 1949 : Premier Congrès des Femmes chinoises. 5. La loi du mariage (1950). La démographie et l'amour. Les femmes au poste de commandement. Abolir l'ancienne famille confucéenne : mesure économique et idéologique à la fois. La 'Réforme agraire' et la 'Loi du mariage'. Privilèges aux femmes : pas de 'chef de famille' ; la mère garde son nom et peut le léguer aux enfants ; avantages accordés à la femme en cas de divorce ; le travail de la ménagère lui donne droit à la propriété. La famille – institution transitoire ; facilité du divorce. Les fonctions principales de la famille : biologique et éducatrice. Une éthique familiale. Un certain esprit de famille par rapport à Jiangxi. La famille disparaîtra-t-elle sans crise à l'occidentale ? Campagnes contre la morale bourgeoise : 1953, 1956-1957. Démographie : la contraception et l'amour (en famille et pour la Patrie) doivent maintenir l'accroissement de la population. Le Bond en avant : libérer la force de travail des femmes sans faire disparaïtre la famille sous la commune. Mao contre Dulles sur la famille 'démocratique et unie'. 1962 : Mouvement pour l'éducation socialiste – pour la famille, contre le familialisme. Une enquête sur les relations familiales racontées par la littérature moderne : le retour du 'père confucéen'. L'explosion de la famille pendant la Révolution culturelle. L'idéal du moi pour la Chinoise : l'Homme de fer. Les Jeunes Filles de fer de Dazahi. Cinq spectacles sans héros mais avec des héroïnes révoltées contre leur père : elles dramatisent mais ne réussissent jamais toutes seules. Brecht ou ce qui manque. 6. Entrevues. Les mères – Une artiste – Les intellectuelles – Les jeunes, les vieilles, l'amour – Ménagères et ouvrières – Les directrices. ... Il aurait donc fallu pourvoir écrire ces visages de Chinoises : lisses, placides, fermés sans hostilité, qui signifiaient nous ignorer, dans la pénombre de cette première nuit à Pékin, au-dessus de leurs bicyclettes, ou dominant les joues sérieuses de leurs enfants. Froideur souple et friable, distance sans pont, ponctuée par ces habits gris-bleus qui masquent les corps comme des bâches sur des foyers craignant les bombardements ennemis. Etrangère à jamais, glacée dans mon désir refusé d'être reconnue une des leurs, heureuse quand elles se perdaient dans les traits de mon visage et que seuls les larges pans de mon pantalon faisaient crier les vieilles paysannes, rassurées, sur la Grand Muraille : 'waiguo ren' (étrangère). Mal à l'aise dans un groupe d'hommes. Ni asiatique ni européenne, méconnue par elles et détachée d'eux - c'est de cette position inconfortable qu'il me fallait saisir quelques petites vérités sur leur destin à elles, en ce moment. Position peut-être inconfortable mais la seule possible. Car après tout ce que vous savez déjà de la société chinoise, vous aurez compris que ce n'est pas la peine d'aller en Chine si vous ne vous intéressez pas aux femmes, si vous ne les aimez pas. Vous risquez de tomber malade d'incompréhension ou de sortir ragaillardi d'avoir tout compris, mais sans avoir jamais franchi la grande muraille ; précieusement empêtré dans votre propre univers, sans accès – fût-il incertain et difficile à débrouiller – à ce qui coule derrière les façades des affiches et des stéréotypes. Il aurait fallu pouvoir écrire ces corps de Chinoises : remplis, plus ou moins opulents selon l'âge et les maternités vécues, mais toujours aux contours ovales, touchant à peine le sol, et, sans danser, flottant sobres dans l'air du petit matin, dès le lendemain de notre arrivée, sur la place Tiananmen, et sur toutes les routes du pays, avec les flocons en mousse de saules qui inondent le ciel au printemps. Les vestes sans taille et les pantalons aux fonds larges, qui serrent les cous et les poignets, ne suggèrent pas les lignes des corps : je devine à peine des épaules fragiles et étroites, des poitrines discrètes, des ventres et des hanches robustes qui, avec les courtes cuisses fortes fermement soudées au tronc, sont le puissant centre de gravité de ces ensembles qui cheminent sans peser. Ces bras onduleux aux poignets agiles qui manient à merveille les baguettes et les pinceaux et n'effleurent que distraitement les corps des enfants. Ces mollets forts de garçons qu'un pantalon relevé au hasard laisse voir. Le corps bouge aux genoux, au cou, et par les ondulations des bras ; ventre et cuisses scellés droits — sans pliures mais sans raideurs non plus, solides et détendus, relâchés même, irrigués d'un plaisir sans étalage qui a quelque chose de confiant et d'assuré comme l'est le repos après une dépense passionnée. Il aurait fallu pouvoir écrire ces voix de Chinoises : basses jusqu'à l'inaudible dans la conversation, vibrant veloutées dans la poitrine et le ventre, mais qui peuvent, brusquement, se hisser à la gorge et monter aiguës à la tête, tendues entre l'enthousiasme et 1'agressivité, exaltées ou menaçantes, lorsque l'enjeu idéologique se précise dans le discours, ou lorsque le corps est en représentation sur une scène ou devant un micro comme l'exige le code scemque traditionnel. Ecrire ces regards qui peuvent glisser sans voir : aveuglés par une préoccupation ou un plaisir opaques, sans noms, mais aussi éblouis par une idée qui les absorbe, les écarte de l'en-face, et les lance vers un infini où vous n'avez aucune chance d'être. Il faudrait pouvoir écrire ces rires de Chinoises : joyeusement éclatant dans les yeux et les lèvres et, sans que la voix y participe, chassant en un éclair la pudeur permanente pour la remplacer tout de suite par des flambées continues d'ironie et d'humour où se mêlent l'appel à une complicité erotique et le savoir serein qu'elle est impossible : jamais amer, jamais déçu. Il faudrait pouvoir écrire ces familles ou groupes sur les places, dans les parcs, les champs et les usines, où les hommes discrets, d'une modestie qui peut paraître effacée et monotone, s'affairent autour de femmes aussi discrètes mais beaucoup plus à l'aise qu'eux, légèrement dominantes, et dont les gestes harmonieux laissent échapper un érotisme auquel personne ne semble faire attention, mais qui instaure, à travers l'autorité politique et idéologique du jour, une autre — plus souterraine, mais plus immuable peut-être et apparemment plus prenante parce que réglant un espace antérieur à la politique, fait de désirs archaïques dont personne ne parle mais qui s'écrivent avec les gestes, avec les pinceaux. Une femme dans un groupe, c'est le centre vide et paisible duquel émanent et vers lequel convergent tous les actes des hommes destinés au travail, absorbés dans leurs occupations. De là ces regards angoissés de Méditerranéennes nostalgiques que je n'ai jamais rencontrés dans les yeux des Chinoises mais seulement des Chinois ?... Les mères Dans la vaste usine de tracteurs "L'Orient est rouge" à Xi'an où travaillent 6 700 ouvrières, il y a vingt salles spécialement aménagées pour l'allaitement. Deux fois par jour, les mères arrêtent leur travail pour une demi-heure et viennent nourrir leurs bébés amenés des crèches de l'usine ou par les grands-parents qui les gardent aux foyers. A l'écart du bruit, propres et sobres, des dizaines de mères gardent un contact permanent avec leurs enfants sans se détacher réellement de la production. Ces salles existent dans toutes les usines que nous avons visitées, et il semble que l'objectif est d'en faire dans tous les lieux de travail. Un bruit infernal nous accueille dans l'Usine textile n° 4 du Nord-Ouest de la Chine, à Xi'an. De la poussière de coton flotte dans l'air et nous étouffe. Le nez et les oreilles bouchées, on ne desserre pas les lèvres. Construite entre 1954 et 1956, cette usine de 6 380 ouvriers comporte une majorité de femmes (58 %) qui travaillent, avec des variantes d'un atelier à l'autre, dans des conditions plus que difficiles. Le vice-président du Comité révolutionnaire, Wang Jinchun nous dit que ce n'est pas grave, "les gens sont habitués" (!), mais qu'il y a "des examens médicaux réguliers " et qu'en plus "on fait des recherches pour améliorer les conditions d'aération et diminuer le bruit, avant d'être en mesure d'acheter des machines plus perfectionnées." La majorité des ouvrières sont jeunes, encadrées de contremaîtres d'âge moyen ou assez âgés. Des gestes calmes, imperturbables dans le brouillard de coton et de fracas. Quelques yeux dépassent des métiers — curieux, distants. Je remarque des ventres arrondis : les femmes enceintes sont assises sur des chaises roulantes qui les déplacent le long des fileuses — ne pas rester debout, ne pas se fatiguer. Une femme enceinte travaille dans l'atelier de filage jusqu'au sixième mois de la grossesse ; après, on lui donne un travail plus léger : contrôle de la qualité des tissus, comptage, vérification des emballages, etc. Autour de l'accouchement, une femme a droit à cinquante-six jours de congé payé ; en cas de complications (jumeaux, césarienne, etc.), le congé peut se prolonger de soixante-dix à quatre-vingts jours, et s'accompagne d'une allocation de frais supplémentaires. Une ouvrière de deuxième catégorie, c'est-à-dire au plus bas de l'échelle après la stagiaire, touche 38 yuans par mois. On peut arriver, après des années de travail et une bonne qualification, à la huitième catégorie avec 102 yuans par mois. Dans cette échelle, la plupart se maintiennent vers la limite inférieure : 50-56 yuans. Les soins pour un enfant ne coûtent que huit yuans par mois, si l'on confie l'enfant au jardin d'enfants de l'usine à la semaine, et six yuans par mois si on les reprend le soir chez soi. Le jardin d'enfants de l'Usine textile n° 4 du Nord-Ouest accueille huit cents enfants de 3 à 6 ans et demi dont s'occupent dix professeurs et quelques nourrices, et, au dire de la directrice, il peut en accueillir davantage si les parents le demandent. Les autres enfants sont à la charge des grands-parents qui habitent avec les couples. Quand les grands-parents sont disponibles, la préférence va à eux plutôt qu'au jardin. Les bébés au-dessous de 3 ans sont dans la crèche à l'usine même : les mères peuvent les visiter et les nourrir deux fois par jour, comme partout ailleurs. Les enfants entourent leur mère ou leur monitrice avec le sérieux et la distance d'adultes. Les joues remplies, les regards graves, toujours pris à quelque jeu où ils s'amusent sans débordement, les petites filles battant immanquablement les petits garçons, ils peuvent être souriants, discrets ou ambitieux, mais je ne les ai jamais vus pleurer, séduire ou s'imposer. Petits corps déjà autonomes qui ne donnent pas l'impression, comme les nôtres, d'être nés trop tôt et de ne pouvoir pas se passer de nous. Micro-société indépendante, ils nous montrent leurs jeux, sautent à nos cous, aux cris joyeux qu'on leur a appris pour la circonstance, saluent de loin nos voitures (on ne peut être qu'étranger si on est en bagnole), mais aussi se promènent enlacés ou la main dans la main, tout seuls, sans adultes, le long des routes, à la campagne ou dans les rues de grandes villes tard après la tombée de la nuit. Tôt éduqués, socialisés précoces, ils témoignent par leur dignité de petits sages, à côté des parents qui, à l'envers, ont l'air enfants, de l'amour solide mais sans effusion et en quelque sorte anonyme, impersonnel, de la mère chinoise. On n'embrasse pas, on ne caresse pas, on ne serre pas un enfant — en tout cas pas trop, et surtout pas en public. S'il vous est cher, il ne vous est pas tout. Qu'il soit votre désir, c'est incontestable, et il en est averti, si l'on en juge par son assurance digne : plus muette et parfois même écrasée chez le garçon (trop aimés ?), plus autonome et parfois même triomphale chez la fille (ayant pu se réfugier auprès d'un père solide, aimant, mais compensé par une mère maîtresse ?). Mais il semble que très tôt ce désir personnel d'enfant a été marqué -— je dirais volontiers : civilisé — par une nécessité sociale qui le tient subordonné, jamais absolu : personne ne se prend pour le petit Jésus. A l'hôpital de Shanghaï, annexe de l'Institut médical n° 2 où nous avons pu voir des opérations par anesthésie sous acupuncture et une très fine opération de la cataracte avec les moyens conjoints de l'acupuncture et de la médecine occidentale, il y a un secteur de gynécologie et de maternité avec quatre-vingts lits. Les maladies gynécologiques et surtout celles dues à des troubles endocriniens, sont soignées souvent par les moyens, considérés plus efficaces, de la médecine chinoise : homéopathie chinoise et acupuncture. Dans une salle à trois lits — trois accouchées : une vendeuse, une ouvrière d'usine de radios et une comptable. Pour l'ouvrière, c'est le deuxième enfant : "Ce sera, dit-elle, le dernier, pour pouvoir me consacrer au travail et pour mieux m'occuper d'elles. Deux filles, et les grands-parents voudront sans doute un garçon, mais on ne les écoutera plus ; à l'usine on distribue des stérilets, gratuits comme l'est l'accouchement." Zhu Chuanfeng s'en est déjà servie et pourra en reprendre l'usage. Encore fatiguée, mais la plus radieuse des trois, est la disgracieuse Chan Beiyin : la comptable du Nord qui est rentrée avec son mari à Shanghaï pour accoucher auprès de ses parents, comme le font beaucoup de femmes traversant pour cela toute la Chine parfois, les maris recevant aussi des congés pour la circonstance. Cela fait huit jours qu'elle a accouché par césarienne, sous anesthésie par acupuncture : "Aucune douleur, rit-elle, dans deux jours je vais marcher." Le bébé, un garçon, est visiblement le héros de cet exploit. Mais elle met une étrange négligence lorsqu'elle en parle, pudeur ou rituel ?, et préfère s'entretenir de ses activités de comptable, de son apprentissage de la Critique du programme de Gotha, et de la campagne contre Lin et Kong qui était "un mangeur de femmes ". Il est vrai que je suis étrangère, qu'il n'y a aucune raison de m'introduire dans les joies intimes de la famille même si elles existent, et que la responsable de la clinique m'accompagne. Toujours est-il que le bébé n'a pas encore de nom, et que le "baptême" est loin d'être une préoccupation pour sa jeune mère. Elle a quand même une idée : Xiao Di, "petite flèche ", et pas n'importe laquelle puisqu'elle vient tout droit d'un poème de Mao, "Fei ming di"... Une artiste ...Je ne m'étonne presque pas quand on me dit que la camarade Li Fenglan est peintre, et qu'on me montre, dans l'exposition des peintres-paysans de la Commune populaire, ses tableaux : "Une brigade travaille le coton", "Moisson". Les thèmes sont immanquablement des thèmes de travail, et les personnages, quand on peut les distinguer dans ce style où l'anthropos se perd au profit du grain de maïs, sont des femmes. Li Fenglan dit qu'elle ne peut pas peindre autre chose que ce qu'elle a vécu : "Je ne dessine pas d'objets auxquels je n'ai pas été mêlée par mon travail." Et continue, harcelée par mes questions qui visiblement lui paraissent bizarres puisque j'essaie de la pousser à des aveux sur les mobiles de son penchant esthétique : En fait, je ne peins pas les objets que je vois, mais je les peins d'après mes rêves, après en avoir rêvé, au retour des champs, un peu fatiguée, et en couleur, la plupart". Li Fenglan, paysanne pauvre, a appris à lire et à écrire assez tard, et n'a jamais suivi de cours de peinture, encore moins d'histoire de l'art. Depuis quelques années, la commune a organisé un stage de peinture où les talents locaux peuvent apprendre, par des spécialistes venus de la ville, à manier les couleurs, les pinceaux, à dessiner un visage, un corps, un champ. Beaucoup de paysans y participent, cela donne lieu à des expositions locales qu'on envoie après à d'autres communes qui, en retour, envoient les leurs — un art impermanent circule ainsi dans tout le pays. Mais Li Fenglan n'a pas participé à ces cours, et tout ce qu'elle dit savoir sur "Fart" est le discours de Mao sur la littérature et l'art à Yanan. Ce manque d'éducation picturale qui, actuellement, est du type réaliste-socialiste, explique peut-être, en partie, la fraîche naïveté de ses tableaux, faits, dirait-on, par un vieux peintre taoïste qui a rêvé d'être Van Gogh avant de se réveiller dans une commune populaire... "Il faut s'élever au-dessus de ce qu'on voit. D'ailleurs, la peinture sert à une femme à s'élever. Dans l'ancien temps, les femmes étaient méprisées, une paysanne-peintre, c'était ridicule. Maintenant, nous sommes heureux, mais je suis la plus heureuse quand je prends le pinceau pour peindre. Je me sens excitée d'enthousiasme. Quand je lis les œuvres du président Mao, aussi, mais autrement." Discours naïfs, discours appris ? Nous avons l'air ridicule de demander à Li et à ses camarades peintres, les motivations subjectives de leur art : ils nous renvoient sans cesse au passé, au bonheur du présent et au fait que la peinture est un moyen de propagande plus direct que la littérature pour toucher les masses. Li est d'ailleurs la seule à parler de rêves, de plaisir à mélanger les couleurs, à varier les jaunes par exemple, et, en ce moment, à nuancer les différents blancs car le tableau qu'elle peint actuellement représente la cueillette du coton : "On n'y voit, dit-elle, que quelques points noirs (les gens) et de grands espaces de blancs à perte de vue qu'il s'agit de sculpter."... Le réalisme intervient, mais pas comme dans les tableaux des vrais maîtres réalistes de leur Commune populaire qui sont, évidemment, des hommes et qui peignent les portraits du secrétaire du Parti communiste : le réalisme intervient, dans du secrétaire du Parti communiste : le réalisme intervient, dans la peinture des femmes, pour appuyer, plus vrai que nature, un animal, un oiseau ou une plante qui ont, du coup, l'air de caricatures. Par ailleurs, la tristesse, les conflits, tout ce qui peut être sujet à mécontentement, est aussi destiné à la caricature. Le tableau, sur papier chinois, à l'encre de Chine colorée, au crayon ou à l'aquarelle, est destiné à l'impression sereine, à la vision calme d'une nature apprivoisée, où l'homme dans son travail se perd, extatique, à peine discernable. Est-ce un hasard si les femmes sont les plus à l'aise dans cette reprise de la tradition picturale chinoise pour la moderniser, en contournant le réalisme brutal qui, d'ailleurs, ne continue pas moins de nous assaillir, par les affiches, comme un mauvais rêve soviétique d'après-guerre ? Les intellectuelles La tendance actuelle étant à une refonte du travail manuel et du travail intellectuel, par laquelle la couche des intellectuels serait vouée à la disparition, les seules personnes exclusivement consacrées au travail intellectuel que nous avons pu rencontrer en Chine sont les professeurs. D'ailleurs, la campagne des "écoles à portes ouvertes" implique qu'ils consacrent deux journées de travail aux usines ou aux champs, de sorte que leur vocation "exclusivement intellectuelle" est toute relative. Il faut souligner tout de suite que cela ne signifie pas du tout la suppression de cette pratique intellectuelle qui, dans la division du travail des sociétés de classes, a donné lieu à la caste des intellectuels. Si en Chine d'aujourd'hui on ne veut pas d' "élite", on veut quand même une "élite rouge" : terme qui signifie d'une part que les spécialistes seront activement politisés et participeront organiquement aux tâches urgentes de la construction socialiste, et d'autre part et en même temps, que leur spécialisation (au moins pour l'énorme majorité, de laquelle il faut exclure le petit détachement de "chercheurs de pointe" dont on n'a pas négligé la formation même pendant les années les plus rouges de la Révolution culturelle, que ce soit en biologie ou en linguistique chomskyenne) ne dépassera pas trop les compétences techniques et scientifiques exigibles des larges masses pour l'accomplissement des travaux en cours. Spécialistes donc, mais pas trop, et en tout cas des spécialistes qui mettent les valeurs politiques au-dessus des valeurs scientifiques, une couche intermédiaire entre la société à division rigide du travail et une autre où cette division ne sera pas génératrice d'inégalité économique, idéologique et politique -— voilà ce qui semble être demandé aux "intellectuels", le but politique pour l'instant étant d'éliminer avant tout une source de nouveaux bureaucrates et de nouvelle bourgeoisie qu'alimenteraient aussi bien la tradition du lettré confucéen que l'exemple encore très présent de l'intellectuel-bour-geois-bureaucrate soviétique. Résultat trop évident de cette politique : baisse du niveau intellectuel, restriction des matières et des domaines enseignés, inemploi objectif d'une partie considérable du savoir des spécialistes formés à l'école confucéenne mais aussi à la soviétique. Autre résultat aussi trop évident : entrée dans la culture de masses illettrées — huit cent millions qui ignorent sans doute les subtilités de la culture classique mais qui discutent le Manifeste communiste, ont le minimum de connaissances techniques et d'hygiène nécessaire à l'étape actuelle du socialisme chinois, et font de la poésie et de la peinture comme nous écrivons des lettres... En Chine, on ne nous a jamais parlé de 'couples' : moins parce que le problème est surmonté par la conception de la refonte de la famille dans la commune... Les Chinois, 'structuralistesV avant la lettre, considéreraient-ils que le 'yin' est toujours nécessaire dans une alliance de deux, et que par conséquent la modernisation ne consisterait que dans la possibilité, pour une femme, d'être structuralement 'yin', s'ils ne peuvent pas être les deux à la fois, ce qui serait le mieux ?... Feng Zhongyun, 53 ans, femme professeur de poésie classique à l'Università de Pékin, a terminé ses études en 1941 ; puis elle est entrée comme enseignante à l'Université Qinghua ; puis, en 1952, à l'Université de Pékin. Intellectuelle éduquée selon ce qu'on appelle ici l'ancien système, elle est sans doute, au moins autant que tout structuraliste occidental, au fait des raffinements prosodiques des genres poétiques chinois, et parle avec le plaisir du connaisseur, des parallélismes, des rythmes, du support graphique imagé et de la mélodie inséparable des vers anciens. Pourtant, ce n'est pas là-dessus qu'on lui demande maintenant de mettre l'accent de son enseignements. Comme tous les enseignants, Feng Zhongyun s'est mise à l'école du marxisme-léninisme qui, dans son domaine à elle, l'incite à chercher 'l'attitude de classes' dans les textes littéraires... [Le] passage par la campagne est, pour Mme Feng, une bonne chose : « Les enfants mûrissent, apprennent les véritables problèmes du pays, ce qui les préserve des tentations de devenir une élite confucéenne, sans pour autant les handicaper sensiblement dans l'apprentissage d'une spécialité digne d'une élite rouge. »... Quelques tendances se dégagent : liquider l'esprit de l'Ecole confucéenne ; étudier l'Ecole des Légistes ; critiquer la tradition qui a florifié Confucius et dénigré les Légistes. Cette orientation anticonfucéenne est actuellement prépondérante, même si Feng reconnaît qu'il y en a d'autres : « L'Université de Pékin était dirigée par des révisionnistes, tout est à revoir ». Notre discussion avec les enseignants de l'Université de Pékin a duré de 9 heures à 17 heures, avec un déjeuner commun. Feng Zhongyun était la seule femme parmi nos hôtes. De tous les discours, préparés d'avance, où chacun exposait les problèmes idéologiques et méthodologiques de sa discipline, le sien était le plus bref, le plus précis et le plus prudent. Elle avait probablement la même conviction politique ferme que ses collègues... A 35 ans, Wu Xiufen est, par contre, entièrement formée par le socialisme. Après quatre ans d'études de physique à l'Université, elle est actuellement professeur de Physique à l'Ecole Normale supérieure de Nankin — beau "campus" de l'ancien Collège américain, dans un vaste parc vert, peuplé de pavillons style Ming qui donnent l'impression d'une cité impériale plutôt que d'un lieu universitaire. Spécialisée en électro-dynamique, elle est une des premières à avoir adopté le principe de F "école à portes ouvertes". Dans l'enseignement de la physique, ceci veut dire que parallèlement à l'apprentissage des théories, les élèves appliquent immédiatement leurs connaissances dans la production d'objets pour l'industrie du pays. Ainsi, les élèves de l'Ecole Normale de Nankin non seulement savent, comme tout "normalien" dans le monde, les principes de fonctionnement d'un générateur, mais fabriquent des moteurs électriques légers dans les quelques ateliers de physique de l'école. Ces moteurs sont vendus à l'Etat, selon le plan de celui-ci. Les "revenus" sont, bien sûr, modestes, car la production n'est pas intensive, mais elle est permanente et sa fonction éducative prime la visée économiste. En plus, un mois par semestre, les élèves de Wu Xiufen travaillent dans les usines, avec les ouvriers de la ville. L'"enseignement à portes ouvertes" veut dire enfin que deux demi-journées par semaine sont consacrées à l'étude politique (les articles du Quotidien du Peuple, les textes de Mao et des classiques du marxisme), actuellement essentiellement orientée dans le sens de la campagne Pi Lin Pi Kong... Sur trois professeurs à l'Ecole, il y a une femme, et 40 % des élèves sont des jeunes filles — proportion satisfaisante, selon Wu, dans l'état actuel des choses, et en tout cas ne posant aucun problème de "droits féminins" particulier, selon elle. Encore plus sûres d'elles-mêmes, les femmes ont en main l'enseignement obligatoire, primaire et secondaire, des établissements que nous avons visités : les cinq écoles secondaires et les dix-neuf écoles primaires de la commune Marco Polo près de Pékin qui donnent, chaque année, vingt candidats à l'Université ; l'Ecole primaire de Changjianlu à Nankin où la directrice Huang Guanglun nous dit que l'enseignement a deux buts : l'un idéologique dominé par l'esprit d'internationalisme et d'amour pour la patrie, et l'autre méthodologique d'ouverture aux connaissances pratiques et au renforcement du corps, selon les indications de Mao. Dans la toute jeune génération d'enseignants, une promotion accélérée s'accompagne, semble-t-il, d'un avantage donné aux jeunes filles. Ainsi, à l'Université de Shanghai, Ji Ruman, 23 ans, est assistante de philosophie après deux ans et huit mois d'études supérieures de philo, au lieu des cinq ans exigibles avant la Révolution culturelle... Lu Qiulan est présentatrice du Musée historique de Xi'an, un des plus riches en Chine, contenant entre autres d'immenses salles de stèles funéraires de toutes les époques dont les treize livres classiques du confucianisme gravés dans la pierre... Lu Qiulan insiste sur le sens des textes confucéens, le milieu social qui les a produits, les révoltes populaires contre, mais aussi sur les différents styles calligraphiques du passé dont Mao s'est inspiré. Son travail d'historienne consiste aussi à approfondir la recherche... Les jeunes, les vieilles, l'amour Mlle Zhan Guofei, 20 ans, est vice-présidente du Syndicat aux Chantiers navals de Shanghaï, immense entreprise pour la construction et la réparation de navires de fort tonnage, qui emploie 7000 ouvriers dont 1400 femmes et occupe 460000 mètres carrés répartis en dis ateliers. Sans être un organisme à importance capitale, surtout après le Révolution culturelle où les fonctions politiques et même de direction de la production sont principalement assumées par le Comité révolutionnaire, le Syndicat joue un rôle essentiel dans l'organisation de la vie quotidienne – famille, mariage, naissance, crèches, jardins d'enfants, réfectoires, mort, divorce, contraception, donc tout ce qui concerne les femmes, est de son ressort, comme de celui du Comité administratif. Mais le Syndicat est chargé aussi de l'éducation idéologique : il organise l'étude de la pensée de Marx, Engels, Lénine (Staline figure dans la série, mais on n'étudie pas sa pensée) et de Mao, la critique de Lin et Kong, la compétition dans la production ; forme de nouveau cadres administratifs ; organise les écoles du soir et les loisirs : sports, cinéma, théâtre « et surtout », die Zhan Guofei, « reçoit les opinions des masses pour critiquer la direction »... Ménagères et ouvrières En Chine, comme ailleurs, les ménagères restent les femmes les plus défavorisées : je ne veux pas dire les plus dénigrées, mais partageant le plus d'archaïsmes. Ce n'est pas que la 'Loi du mariage' ne leur accorde pas des droits : tout au contraire, elles en sont avantagées. Ce n'est pas qu'elles ne bénéficient pas d'inscruction politique : dans le quartier populaire de la rue du Melon à Shanghai, on les réunit une heure tous les mercredis et tous les dimanches pour discuter l'actualité politique, mais aussi des problèmes de santé, d'hygiène, d'éducation des enfants.... Parmi les ouvrières, l'âge semble jouer un rôle décisif pour la détermination de la combativité économique, politique et idéologique. Les jeunes filles et les ouvrières plus âgées me sont apparues comme les éléments les plus actifs : aussi bien pour gérer que pour critiquer... En ce qui concerne les paysannes, des efforts immenses sont déployés pour les extraire des traditions et des superstitions familiales : la 'Loi du mariage' a résolu les problèmes légaux et a détruit les clans qui se vendaient les filles ; l'envoi des jeunes à la campagne à partir de la Révolution culturelle, et le brassage de culture que cela suppose, permet visiblement non seulement de lier les jeunes citadins au peuple, mais aussi de moderniser les villages. Dans la commune populaire Marco Polo, près de Pékin, j'ai rencontré de jeunes paysannes qui font partie d'une troupe de propagande artistique, lisent Mao et quelques romans dont elles ne se rappellent pas les titres, et font des poèmes sur les thèmes politiques du jour. Les mères de famille aussi participent à cette existence collective politisée, active : trois cinémas dans la commune, cours d'alphabétisation et d'instruction politique le soir. Mme Xu Jin, qui se lève tous les jours à 5 h 30 et travaille de 6 heures jusqu'à 19 heures, avec quatre pauses (petit déjeuner ; 10 heures ; déjeuner ; 4 heures) est contente de sa vie : la maison a l'eau courante et l'électricité, le mari travaille à la fabrique de briques, les filles étudient pour devenir des secrétaires, on n'a pas de dimanches mais les femmes ne travaillent que vingt-six jours par mois et les hommes vingt-huit, tout cela rapportant 2500 yuans par an pour les cinq travailleurs de la famille, dont on peut épargner 700... Les directrices Directrices d'école (bien sûr), de cités ouvrières (évidemment), d'usines (moins évident) : elles prennent le commandement avec assurance et calme... Cao Fengchu, 40 ans, mère de trois enfants qui travaillent, après le secondaire, dans les usines et à la campagne... « La vie est stable ». Mme Cao a dit le mot que laissent entendre, sans forcément le formuler, toutes les femmes d'une quarantaine d'années, cadres ou responsables, et qui tranche avec l'image reçue d'une Chine déséquilibrée par la Révolution culturelle, exaltée, romantique, lancée à l'aventure... « Ce n'est pas parce qu'on est pauvre qu'on doit éternellement vivre mal, c'est une question de pouvroi »... Les enfants, dans les rues, la connaissent, s'écartent à son passage ou sautent dans ses bras : c'est la tante Cao, une sorte de mère collective, à laquelle on s'adresse pour tout ce qui concerne l'habitat, les loisirs, l'éducation des enfants, les retraités, les activités culturelles et politiques sur place, la contraception... A l'Ecole primaire de Changjianlu, à Nankin l'équipe dirigeante est entièrement féminine... La réforme de l'enseignement prévoit, à côté de cette liaison avec la pratique, des soins de santé plus sérieux qu'auparavant : examens réguiliers, beaucoup de sport et de jeux... Il semble que les activité nationales, centralisées, concernant les femmes, sont suspendues en ce moment : la revie « Femmes de Chine », ont on a vu des numéros calligraphiés par Mao pendant la Révolution culturelle ne paraît plus. Même si la 'Fédération des Femmes chinoises' existe à l'échelle nationale, avec des 'Associations de Femmes' pour les provinces et auprès des municipalités des villes, il apparaît, dans le récit de Wu Beijin, que toute l'activité dirigée par le Parti auprès des femmes s'effectue sur place, dans l'usine en l'occurrence, par une section spéciale du syndicat. Des cours sont organisés pour les femmes oû elles apprennent des fondements de la théorie politique ou suivent un enseignement technique nécessaire à leur qualification : ces cours ont tendance à être généralement mixtes. Aux femmes seules sont destinés des cours d'hygiène ou de contraception. Mais aussi des réunions politiques où on essaie de tirer les conséquences sur la vie concrète d'une femme des textes politiques ou philosophiques discutés en ce moment dans le pays : « Cela permet aux femmes de changer leur physionomie. Maintenant que les femmes sortent des foyers et qu'à l'usine elles ont un salaire égal avec les hommes, l'important est qu'elles prennent les pinceaux et qu'elles aillent au premier front. » Prendre les pinceaux veut dir, pour Wu Beijin, devenir cadre ou activiste... Sekundärliteratur Lisa Lowe : Kristeva represents China as a culture descending from a pre-oedipal matriarchal heritage ; her figuration of Chinese otherness is part of a strategy to subvert western ideology by positing a feminine, maternal realm outside its patriarchal system. Kriesteva's China expresses a confluence of the discourse of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, as well as orientalism. Kristeva's “Des chinoises” invokes the matriarch of pre-Confucian China as a means of naming and projecting a figure that occupies a space beyond the structured and determined sexuality of western Europe. She associates the period of matriarchy and matrilineality in China with the 'phase pré-oedipienn', a reconstituted period in which the child is intensely allied with the mother before its entry into the Symbolic order of socialization and language. In this sense, “Des chinoises” is a text that embodies several desires : a theoretical desire to locate a position outside French structuralism and psychoanalysis from which these paradigms may be criticized ; a feminist desire to discover and praise a figure of absolute feminine power and to locate a matriarchal society in which this power is effected ; and finally a desire, inherited from the discourse of orientalism, to find in the history of the Orient the opposite of the Occident, to find there all that is absent from and beyond the West. “Des chinoises” was written in the context of both the western Continental feminist debates of the early 1970s and the structuralist and psychoanalytic theoretical debates of the same period ; in this sense writing about 'la chinoise' was an occasion for Kristeva to critique the lack of psychoanalytic sophistication in the French and North American women's movements, as well as a means of providing a feminist critique of the Freudian and Lacanian pardigms of sexual difference. “Des chinoises” invokes the powerful figure of an ancient Chinese matriarch as the disrupting exception to western patriarchy and psychoanalysis, and the People's Republic of China is praised as a political antithesis to contemporary France. In both senses the examples of China and Chinese women are cited only in terms of estern debates, are invented as solutions to western political and theoretical problems. In the book's second section, “Femmes de Chine”, Kristeva constitutes and ancient matrilinear-matrilocal society as the historical analogue to the female-dominated pre-oedipal topos, conflating the matriarch of pre-Confucian China with the modher in pre-oedipal discourse. Both projects place the Mother at the center of their respective paradigms ; as the primary figure in child development and gender acquisition, and as the origin of social and economic organzization. Both efforts depend on the retrospective invention of a prehistorical movement, an idealized state outside society and history, created from a point located within social arrangements. Throughout “Des chinoises” a historical extravagance, which so easily establishes a correspondence between an ancient modality and a contemporary one, lack an adequately complex appreciation of the heterogeneous and contradictory forces of history ; despite an ostensible allegiance to Marxism, Kristeva finds no apparent difficulties in generalizing Chinese history in so undialctical a fashion. Kristeva justifies the mother-centered theories of the pre-oedipal phase and the pre-Confucian matriarchy in an 'analysis' of Chinese language. She argues that the independence of two linguistic systems – of tonal speech and of written ideogrammatic symbols – is particular to the Chinese language, and that the independent system of tonal speech is a preserved remnant of the matrilinear-matrilocal society, in which the mother and her bodily preverbal tones and rhythms were dominant. Chapter 2, Confucius, discusses the Confucian era, generalized and homogenized into a priod ranging from 1000 B.C. to the twentieth century. In Confucian society, the text argues, an oppressive backlash extensively excluded women by law and social hierarchy. Because Chinese women have a point of origin in which they were powerful and dominant, the repressed woman is described as both subject to authoritarian structures of obedience and simultaneously undetermined and outside those structures. Chapters 3-6 discuss the conditions of women in the People’s Republic of China. Kristeva concludes that contemporary women in China have liberated themselves and reemerged as fully autonomous political subjects in a restoration of the coequal status and power they had possessed in the original matrilinear and matrilocal society. Because of its matriarchal roots, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the text asserts, was an antipatriarchal revolution ; the socialist revolution in China, Kristeva argues, brought a fundamental revolution in the patriarchal family and in the roles of women. “Des chinoises” erases the situations of women in contemporary China, the complex interrelation of certain qualified freedoms with remnants of centuries of sexual discrimination and oppression in family, professional, and political life. The Chinese woman is fetishized and constructed as the Other of western psychoanalytic faminism, a transcendental exception to the overstructures bind of women in western Europe. “Des chinoises” curiously reproduces the postures of desire of two narratives it stensibly seeks to subvert : the narratives of orientalism and romantic courtship, whose objects are the 'oriental' and the 'woman' Eric Hayot : It is not just what Kristeva describes about China, but how she describes it, and what she learns from it, that make “Des chinoises” a rich, troubled text. Chinese strangeness does not, for Kristeva, arise from some ancient culture, but rather comes out of a modern society that steps into the same ontological and political space as Europe and the West. Kristeva has for a long time been interested in a notion of strangeness that might bring about liberating change. Considered fully, “Des chinoises” attempts through an analysis of the conditions of Chinese women to discover and describe an economy of gender and power wholly other to the Western psyche, one in which an original matriarchy and a feminine Taoism continue to produce people who cannot fit into the Western category of 'women' or 'man'. What she proposes is not so much learning a lesson from a different culture as a different method of reading from within the West. For, what is claimed to be 'unique' to China is simply understood as the 'negative' or 'repressed' side of Western discourse. In other words, Kristeva's understanding of China simply presents it as the mirror image of the West, so that where the West has gender, China does not. Even though Kristeva argues that in China women do not have gender, China as a general concept nonetheless occupies the space of 'woman' in a larger world picture. Kristeva's claim that Chinese people have no gender in the Western sense 'feminizes' China itself as the West's negative other. Kristeva's interest in classical China and its history grounds and authorizes her general thesis about Chinese women. In general, in “Des chinoises” the deep roots of China's ungendered system are revealed to be engendered by classical texts or ancient archaeological sites, which receive the most superficial of readings. Chung, Hilary. Kristevan (mis)understandings : writing in the feminine. In : Reading East Asian writing : the limits of literary theory. Ed. by Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits. (London : RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Contrary to its reputation, when tanken as a whole, Des chinoises gives the overriding impression not of communion with but rather distance from the women of China. Apart from a section in “Chinese women” containing an account of a series of interviews with Chinese women, inevitably staged, officially sanctioned and mediated by interpretation, the entire encounter with Chinese women is via secondary sources, unquestioningly interpreted. The most disturbing aspect of the work is its optimism. The second case of Kristevan misunderstanding relates to a later period of Kristeva's oeuvre, namely her psychoanalytic explorations of depression and melancholia ; not only does she exclude China as a true site of melancholia (Chinese people don't suffer from true depression) but she also describes Chinese civilization as one in which the semiot response to melancholy is not available to suffers (Chinese people cannot mediate their suffering). Kristeva appears to base far-reaching assuptions about the essential otherness of Chinese experience upon evidence with is unsufficiently researched. As Kristeva later recalled, her 'Chinese experience' coincided with both her encounter with feminism and the start of her training as a psychoanalyst. The impact of this experience and her constructions of China, particularly on her formulations relating to gender and feminism, were profound. Kristeva rationalizes the Chinese chastity code into a manifestation of an alternative symbolic order in which women are invested beyond an identification with the phallus. Far from offering an alternative which resists these mechanisms of exlusion, the Chinese code can readily be argued to impose very similar mechnaisms of disempowerment and exclusion. The optimism of “Des chinoises” resides in the aspiration that an embryonic form of such an alternative economy of the sexes might be emerging in China. This is precisely why Kristeva seeks out an alternative matrilinear legacy in Chinese tradition, and focuses so squarely on the Chinese marriage law whose provisions in the abstract were more beneficent than actual social practice. Kristeva's analysis of the avant-garde was founded on texts produced by male subjects. When questioned about the specificity of women's writing, she rejected the notion of assigning a specific identity to the speaking subject. The attraction of Kristevan analysis is its uncompromising anti-essentialism. Rather, in terms of literary praxis, feminity is construed as a dissident mode of discours associated with rupture and negativity. |
Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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