Year

1995

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Mentioned People (2)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (10)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1913	Ezra Pound and Mary McNeil Fenollosa. Qian Zhaoming : In 1960 Pound said : "I met her [Mrs. Fenollosa] at Sarojini Naidu's and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn't have time to finish it." Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespear ; 2 October, 1913. "Dined on Monday with Sarojini Niadu [Naidu] and Mrs Fenolosa [Fenollosa], relict of the writer on chinese art, selector of a lot of Freer"s stuff, etc. I seem to be getting orient from all quarters. I'm stocked up with K'ung fu Tsze [Confucius] and Men Tsze [Mengzi] etc. I suppose they'll keep me calm for a week or so." The second meeting between Mrs. Fenollosa and Pound took place in the Café Royal on the evening of 6 October. Amont the party also were Sarojini Naidu and William Heinemann, the publisher who brought out Fenollosa's posthumous Epochs. By then, Pound not only had perused Pauthier's French translation of Confucius and Mencius but had gone through the early chapters of H.A. Giles' History of Chinese literature. Mrs. Fenollosa was impressed and satisfied. A third meeting between the two was scheduled on 29 September, 1913.. Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespeare ; 7 October, 1913. "I find the chinese stuff far more consoling. There is no long poem in chinese. They hold if a man can't say what he wants to in 12 lines, he'd better leave it unsaid. THE period was 4th cent. B.C. – Chu Yüan, Imagiste." Pound recalled forty-five years later : "… and after a couple of weeks I got a note : would I come to that hotel in Trafalgar Square at any rate, it is where my grandfather stayed. There she [Mrs. Fenollosa] was, gone like a priestess at an altar, and she merely said, 'You're the only person who can finish this stuff the way Ernest wanted it done'. Then she sent me his manuscript…" Pound's meeting with Mary Fenollosa opened up a new phase in his career – the phase marked by his Chinese studies. In the Chinese models provided by Giles – notably Qu Yuan and Liu Che – Pound found an art more objective than the Greek, more suggestive than the Provençal, more precise than the modern French, and more brilliant and resourceful than the medieval Japanese. To illustrate his Imagist theories now, he would have to include, amont other things, the Chinese voice.	Document: Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. S. 13. (Mot3, Publication)
2	1913	Dorothy Pound resumed her Chinese lessons using Walter Caine Hillier's The Chinese language and how to learn it. As Dorothy had such a passion for Chinese culture, Ezra Pound shared with her virtually everything remarkable in Giles' History of Chinese literature.	Person: Pound, Ezra
3	1914	Pound, Ezra. Des Imagistes [ID D29162]. [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. After Ch'u Yuan. I will get me to the wood Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria, By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars There come forth many maidens To gather grapes for the leopards, my friend For there are leopards drawing the cars. I will walk in the glade, I will come out of the new thicket And accost the procession of maidens. Pound, Ezra. Liu Ch'e The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoice of the heart is beneath them : A wet leaf that clings to the thereshold. Pound, Ezra. Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord O fan of white silk, Clear as frost on the grass-blade, You are also laid aside. Ban, Jieyu. Song of regret, a rewrite of a Chinese translation of Herbert A. Giles. Commenting on the first Imagist anthology, Charles Norman observes that "Two things strike a reader at once – the many poems, including four of Pound's six, which are adapted from the Chinese or formed on Chinese models, and many, including Pound's other two, which are influenced by Greek art, thought and poetry". The Greek-Chinese combination reflects what Pound was thinking at the moment when he edited Des Imagists. While reading Giles' translation of classical Chinese poetry he was struck by an affinity between the two ancient traditions.	Document: Pound, Ezra. Des Imagistes : an anthology. (London : Poetry Bookshaop, 1914). http://ia600301.us.archive.org/8/items/desimagistesanan00alberich/desimagistesanan00alberich.pdf. (Pou92, Publication) Document: Ezra Pound & China. Ed. by Zhaoming Qian. (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2003). S. 63. (Pou32, Publication)
4	1915	Letter from William Carlos Williams to Harriet Monroe. "… Pound's translation from the Chinese is something of great worth well handled. Auperb ! I suppose you've see his Cathay the Chinese things are perhaps a few of the greatest poems written..."	Person: Pound, Ezra Person: Williams, William Carlos
5	1916	William Carlos Williams reads A history of Chinese literature by Herbert A. Giles.	Person: Williams, William Carlos
6	1920	William, William Carlos. Prologue to Kora in hell. Qian Zhaoming : Williams alludes not only to Yang Guifei, but also to Li Bo. He refers to Li Bo as a genius who 'is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor's attendants and with a dancing girl to hold his tablet'. This story is taken from Giles' History. Williams attacks Pound and Eliot for copying the poetry of the past and of Europe.	Person: Williams, William Carlos
7	1920	Williams, William Carlos. To the shade of Po Chü-i. [MS sent to The little review ca. 1920]. The work is heavy. I see bare branches laden with snow. I try to comfort myself with thought of your old age. A girl passes, in a red tam, the coat above her quick ankles snow smeared from running and falling – Of what shall I think now save of death the bright dancer ? Qian Zhaoming : The poem represents not only William's tribute to the Chinese poet but also his effoert to pursue his spirit and art form.	Person: Williams, William Carlos
8	1921	Williams, William Carlos. Portrait of the author. In : Contact ; spring (1921). [betr. Yang Guifei, letzte Strophe ; englische Version von Bo Juyi's Chang hen ge] http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/56467/. The birches are mad with green points the wood's edge is burning with their green, burning, seething--No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips-- Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!--Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken O my brother, you redfaced, living man ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon this same dirt that I touch--and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame! Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil. But that face of yours--! Answer me. I will clutch you. I will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you--! It is the madness of the birch leaves opening cold, one by one. My rooms will receive me. But my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I am shaken, broken against a might that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house and leaves me--with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes--peering out into a cold world. In the spring I would drink! In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei! your hands, your lips to drink! Give me your wrists to drink-- I drag you, I am drowned in you, you overwhelm me! Drink! Save me! The shad bush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror. Drink and lie forgetting the world. And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends. Qian Zhaoming : At the time when Williams wrote Prologue to 'Kora in hell' and Portrait of the author, English version of Bo Juyi : Quelle : Giles, Herbert A. A history Williams owned a copy of Giles' book (14th print.). A note in his hand on the front endpaper shows that he gave the book to his mother in 1916. Williams : "Bob McAlmon, my co-editor on Contact rescued it from the wastebasket. I threw it away because I thought it was sentimental and I was afraid I was imitating Pound. I hated to imitate. But Bob said it was good so I let it survive." Henry W. Wells : Williams casually refers to one of the chief figures in Chinese history : Xuanzong.	Document: Wells, Henry W. William Carlos Williams and traditions in Chinese poetry. In : The literary half-yearly ; vol. 16, no 1 (1975). (WillW6, Publication) Person: Williams, William Carlos
9	1921	Williams, Carlos Williams. Sour grapes : a book of poems. (Boston : Four Seas Co., 1921). Qian Zhaoming : Bo Juyi gave Williams the technique of achieving wholeness by means of uniting opposing elements. The immediate effect of using the strategy is a tangible harmony in Sour grapes poems : the dark is balanced with the light, the cold with the warm, the death with the living, and the sour with the sweet. Bo Juyi not only employs the same metaphor, but employs it to illustrate precisely the same truth about the world. It is certainly possible that Williams took both the image and the idea from the Chinese poet. Williams' effort to see life as whole, as Bo Juyi did. Williams make the following statement in 1956 :"Everyone knows the meaning of sour grapes, but it had a special meaning for me. I've always thought of a poet as not a successful man except in his own mind, which is devoted to something entirely different than what the world whinks of as success. The poet puts his soul in his work and if he writes a good poem he is successful. When I decided on the title I was playing a game, sticking my fingers up to my nose at the world. All the poems are poems of disappointment, sorrow. I felt rejected by the world. But secretly I had my own idea. Sour grapes are just as beautiful as any other grapes. The shape, round, perfect, beautiful. I knew it – my sour grape – to be just as typical of beauty as any grape, sweet or sour. But the world undoubtedly read a sour meaning into my title."	Person: Williams, William Carlos
10	1923	Williams, William Carlos. Spring and all. (Dijon : Contact Publ. Co., 1923). Qian Zhaoming : Technical fusions in Spring and all have origins in the Chinese poetic heritage : the fusion of poetry with prose and the fusion of poetry with painting is a characteristic shared by virtually all Chinese lyrics.	Person: Williams, William Carlos

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB