“Chinese poetry” (Publication, 1918)
Year
1918
Text
Pound, Ezra. Chinese poetry. In : To-day ; vol. 3 (April 1918). (Pou28)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
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 : United States of America
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1918 |
Pound, Ezra. Chinese poetry [ID D29083]. It is because Chinese poetry has certain qualities of vivid presentation; and because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one labours to make a translation, and that I personally am most thankful to the late Ernest Fenollosa for his work in sorting out and gathering many Chinese poems into a form and bulk wherein I can deal with them. I do not think my views on poetry can be so revolutionary and indecent as some people try to make out, for some months ago I heard Selwyn Image talking of Christmas Carols and praising, in them, the very qualities I and my friends are always insisting on. Selwyn Image belongs to an older and statelier generation and it is not their habit to attack traditional things which they dislike, and for that reason the rather irritating work of revising our poetical canon has been left for my contemporaries, who come in for a fair share of abuse. I shall not, in this article, attempt any invidious comparisons between English and Chinese poetry. China has produced just as many bad poets as England, just as many dull and plodding moralizers, just as many flaccid and over-ornate versifiers. By fairly general consent, their greatest poet is Rihaku or "Li Po", who flourished in the eighth century A.D. He was the head of the court office of poetry, and a great 'compiler'. But this last title must not mislead you. In China a 'compiler' is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising. Thus, a part of Rihaku's work consists of old themes rewritten, of a sort of summary of the poetry which had been before him, and this in itself might explain in part the great variety of his work. Nevertheless, when he comes to treat of things of his own time he is no less various and abundant. I confine myself to his work because I can find in it examples of the three qualities of Chinese poetry which I wish now to illustrate. The first great distinction between Chinese taste and our own is that the Chinese like poetry that they have to think about, and even poetry that they have to puzzle over. This latter taste has occasionally broken out in Europe, notably in twelfth-century Provence and thirteenth-century Tuscany, but it has never held its own for very long. The following four-line poem of Rihaku's has been prized for twelve centuries in China: THE JEWEL-STAIRS GRIEVANCE The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And 1 let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn. 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, not 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 poem. You can play Conan Doyle if you like. First, 'jewel-stairs', therefore the scene is in a palace. Second, 'gauze stockings', therefore a court lady is speaking, not a servant or common person who is in the palace by chance. Third, 'dew soaks', therefore the lady has been waiting, she has not just come. Fourth, 'clear autumn with moon showing', therefore the man who has not come cannot excuse himself on the grounds that the evening was unfit for the rendezvous. Fifth, you ask how do we know she was waiting for a man ? Well, the title calls the poem 'grievance', and for that matter, how do we know what she was waiting for ? This sort of Chinese poem is probably not unfamiliar to the reader. Nearly every one who has written about Chinese has mentioned the existence of these short, obscure poems. In contrast to them, in most rigorous contrast, we find poems of the greatest vigour and clarity. We find a directness and realism such as we find only in early Saxon verse and in the Poema del Cid, and in Homer, or rather in what Homer would be if he wrote without epithet; for instance, the following war poem. The writer expects his hearers to know that Dai and Etsu are in the south, that En is a bleak north country, and that the 'Wild Goose Gate' is in the far northeast, and the 'Dragon Pen' is in the very opposite corner of the great empire, and probably that the Mongols are attacking the borders of China. Given these simple geographical facts the poem is very forthright in its manner. The Dai horse, from the south, neighs against the north wind, The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the north. Emotion is of habit Yesterday we went out of the Wild Goose Gate, To-day from the Dragon Pen. Surprised. Desert Turmoil. Sea sun. Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven. Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements, Our mind and spirit are on getting forward the feather-silk banners. Hard fight gets no reward. Loyalty is difficult to explain. Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift-moving, Whose white head is lost for this province. There you have no mellifluous circumlocution, no sentimentalizing of men who have never seen a battlefield and who wouldn't fight if they had to. You have war, campaigning as it has always been, tragedy, hardship, no illusions. There are two other fine war poems which are too long to quote here, one reputed to be by Bunno: a plodding of feet, soldiers living on fern-shoots, generals with outworn horses ; another by Rihaku, supposedly spoken by a sentinel watching over a long-ruined village. There are no walls, there are decaying bones, enduring desolation. CHINESE POETRY II There are two other qualities in Chinese poetry which are, I think, little suspected. First, Chinese poetry is full of fairies and fairy lore. Their lore is 'quite Celtic'. I found one tale in a Japanese play; two ghosts come to a priest to be married, or rather he makes a pilgrimage to their tomb and they meet him there. The tale was new to me, but I found that Mr. Yeats had come upon a similar story among the people of Aran. The desire to be taken away by the fairies, the idea of souls flying with the sea-birds, and many other things recently made familiar to us by the Celtic school, crop up in one’s Chinese reading and are so familiar and so well known to us that they seem, often, not worth translating. If the reader detests fairies and prefers human poetry, then that also can be found in Chinese. Perhaps the most interesting form of modern poetry is to be found in Browning's 'Men and Women'. This kind of poem, which reaches its climax in his unreadable 'Sordello', and is most popular in such poems as 'Pictor Ignotus', or the 'Epistle of Karshish', or 'Cleon', has had a curious history in the west. You may say it begins in Ovid's 'Heroides', which purport to be letters written between Helen and Paris or by Oenone and other distinguished persons of classical pseudo-history; or you may find an earlier example in Theocritus' Idyl of the woman spinning at her sombre and magic wheel. From Ovid to Browning this sort of poem was very much neglected. It is interesting to find, in eighth-century China, a poem which might have been slipped into Browning's work without causing any surprise save by its simplicity and its naive beauty. THE RIVER-MERCHANTS WIFE (A LETTER) While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo-stilts, playing horse. You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Cho-kan ; Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married you, My Lord, I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, 1 looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with your dust Forever, and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look-out ? At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies. And you were gone for five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet, by the gate, when you were departing. Now the moss is grown there ; the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away. The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August, Over the grass in the west garden. They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang Please let me know beforehand And I will come out to meet you, As far as Cho-fu-sa. I can add nothing, and it would be an impertinence for me to thrust in remarks about the gracious simplicity and completeness of the poem. There is another sort of completeness in Chinese. Especially in their poems of nature and of scenery they seem to excel western writers, both when they speak of their sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things. For instance, when they speak of mountainous crags with the trees clinging head downward, or of a mountain pool where the flying birds are reflected, and Lie as if on a screen, as says Rihaku. The scenes out of the marvellous Chinese painting rise again and again in his poems, but one cannot discuss a whole literature, or even all of one man’s work-in a single essay. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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