“The Confucian odes of Ezra Pound : a critical appraisal” (Publication, 1963)
Year
1963
Text
Dembo, L.S. The Confucian odes of Ezra Pound : a critical appraisal. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1963). (Perspectives in criticism ; 12). [Shi jing]. (Pou14)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Dembo, L.S.
(1929-2002)
Mentioned People (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
/
Philosophy : China : Confucianism and Neoconfucianism
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1954 |
Confucius. Shih-ching : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. Ezra Pound [Shi jing]. [ID D29062]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices. Sekundärliteratur 1963 L.S. Dembo : The impulse of the Confucian mind to view all art, aesthetic or discursive, as an implement of education is reflected in Pound. A revived 'Shih' [Shi jing] becomes the instrument for revealing the ultimate identity of all true leaders in all epochs. Kung educates Chou [Zhou] China to the reality of Wen Wang ; Pound 'educates' his own age to the 'reality' of Jefferson and Mussolini. Wen becomes the prototype of the latter two, just as Kung becomes the prototype of Pound himself. To Ernest Fenollosa, whose ideas are largely responsible for Pound's 'ideogrammic' translation, the Chinese language, by its very nature, embodied the quintessence of poetry. Or to use Pound's terms, the Chinese character was the perfect literary expression of the idea in action. Pound tried to recreate in English the two poetic qualities that Fenollosa said inhered in Chinese : the concrete image and the sense of dramatic succession. He believed that here lay the essence of the communication of reality – the laconic immediate idiom that was the antithesis of abstract statement – and these qualities are the basis of the ideogrammic method as applied to the translation of the odes. As a Western poet, Pound was inclined in creating not standardized figures who are without identity, but personae who, by revealing individual emotion, themselves become the center of interest. Marital life in the Shih ching finds its expression basically in two kinds of odes : of separation, in which the wife reveals the qualities of ideal womanhood and the desertion, in which, by her lament, she exposes the injustices of a harsh world. Other themes appear, such as the bride's nostalgia for her parents and friends, or the desire for children. The variety of prosodic and rhetorical modes by which Pound renders these themes – a variety that carries with it differences in shades of feeling – makes it hard to realize that the originals are of a uniform metric and a more or less consistent rhetoric. Of the various kinds of emotion expressed by men in the 'Kuo Feng', the two most distinctive are the longing for home of the soldier and the sorrow of the disaffected scholar or official. As Pound was well aware, war was a central Confucian preoccupation, and the lament of the soldier was a product and symptom of serious disorder in the universe. Confucius admitted the possibility of two kinds of war : the just, proceeding from the king, and the unjust, proceeding from the vassals. In rendering the historical odes about the Chou [Zhou] kings, the translator whose interests are literary rather than sociological has the heavy burden of providing variety and interest to, as well as intimating depth of emotion and repetitious poetry. Pound tried to solve this problem by using the same techniques that he used in rendering the folk songs, namely those that would 'lyricize' or 'colloquialize' the material and give the illusion of a person speaking. This solution fails, not because it is in theory unsound, but once again because of Pound's utter lack of talent in handling the colloquial idiom and his indiscriminate fluctuation between genuine and false voices. The sacrificial odes with which the anthology concludes will appear as a more or less uniformly lyrical but highly repetitious and fairly obscure series of poems, a state of affairs differing only in degree from that confronting him in the preceding books. 1974 Eugene Eoyang : The translations by Ezra Pound of the three hundred and five poems from the Shi jing constitute a creative and re-creative enterprise of threefold interest to comparatists : 1) As interpretations of Confucianism, occasioned by the original poems transmuted by two millennia od didactic commentary, Pound's versions represent an essential document in the history of Oriental-Western literary relations ; 2) as modern American poems inspired by ancient Chinese originals, Pound's work is a significant example of literary influence across national boundaries ; and 3) as translations from the Chinese, Pound's renderings are central to any discussion of the theory and practice of translation. What is significant is that Pound's poetic sense leads him to an empathy with the original not untrue to the poem in spirit, even if slightly unfaithful to the letter. His translations are licentious and immodest in a way the Confucian commentators would have disapproved of, and yet they accurately reflect an amorality in the original poem. Of all translators, Pound was most sensitive to the distortions that occur even when all constituent elements are accurately preserved. Given the difficulties and constraints, it is not surprising that he did not often succeed. Yet, Pound's strategy for submerging the real refrain in literate variants, and for shaping variant lines into a recurrent motif, becomes clear. Perhaps the most controversial of Pound's versions of the Shi jing are those in which he invents a slang equivalent for the ancient original. Some of the more unfortunate examples have been criticized, either because they patently bear no relation to the Chinese, or because they use a diction that is already dated. Pound's translations are precisely this invaluable (and admitted) record of failures and successes. Conditioned as we are to the failures of translation, it is easy to forget the essentials of poetry that cannot be destroyed by translation. That Pound succeeded in many poems may be verified by a re-reading of Cathay, which remains, even after half a century, fresh and authentic, even if their literal fidelity to the originals has often been impugned. That his translations often miscarried does not vitiate his sincere concern for accuracy. What Pound tells us in his experiments is that these songs were 'colloquial' before they were 'classic'. If he sometimes missed what was untranslatable, he rarely missed what was translatable. His imagination was most challenged by the shape of a poem dimly perceived in the adamantine of a foreign, sometimes ancient language. Pound's renderings are at one attempts at achieved poems that require no recourse to an original, and experiments at transposing originals which makes blatantly clear what has been lost. A good translation, like a good poem, is both inspiration and craft. In this respect, for Pound as for many of his successors, translation becomes the modern muse, the source and inspiration for poetry. 1980 Massimo Bacigalupo : Having perceived the folk nature of the Odes Pound went on to translate them in clearly stressed metres, reminiscent of the ballad and other popular form, often rhymed and leisurely in tone. It would be difficult to find a wholly regular poem among the three hundred – Pound being concerned rather with the feel of tradition than with its precise mechanism. Pound's 'originals' are little more than cues – nor are his responses in any way predictable or of the same quality. He gives us sketches on given themes, impressions that throw light upon the original without being in any way equivalents or substitutes, quotations rather than translations. 1994 Eugene Chen Eoyang : An answer to the question 'Who is the better translator, Arthur Waley or Ezra pound' we can attempt by rephrasing it into another question : 'For whom is Pound or Walyey the better translator ? '. The student of Chinese will find Waley generally the more reliable ; the student of poetry will often find Pound the more interesting. Waley may be limp and laborious, but he never falls into the meretricious or the bombastic. Pound, on the other hand, may be uneven, but some of his versions achieve poetry in a way that Waley's never do. Where Waley is safe, Pound is inspired. Waley produces 'contingent' translations of unerring if often bland good taste. Pound produces 'surrogate' translations of variable quality, ranging from misjudged exercises in failed rhetoric to superlative re-creations with a life of their own. Pound invariably attempted 'surrogate' translations, versions that addressed an audience that would be content with his view of the original. Waley's posture was somewhat ambivalent ; he often spared the reader the scholarly apparatus that he was familiar with, yet he was modest about the literary characters of his translations. Pound attempted a 'surrogate' translation but did not succeed ; Waley provided a 'contingent' translation, which succeeded within its generic limitations. Pound's translations fails because it is an inept piece of poetic writing, not because it is inaccurate. Waley's succeeds despite its slack verbosity because it effectively evokes the original. But the two are being judged on different criteria, because they proceed from entirely different premises. Both versions are equally unsatisfactory in one respect : neither captures the vocative immediacy of the original expression which even two millennia of scholary exegesis in Chinese have not quite managed to erase. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pound is concerned with the live man singing, with the rhythm and melody of the poems. Concerned as he was with recreating a sense of the music of the Shi jing, part of Pound's responsibility as translator was to convey the variety of poetic 'music' or literary traditions that the Shi jing represents. The anthology is a collection of poems spanning the seventh to the eleventh centuries B.C., arranged chronologically backwards in four parts. Equally broad is the subject matter of the poems, which draws on the common lives of men and women, soldiers and merchants, government officials and wives, and on the sacred rituals of the court. In order to recreate a sense of this breath for a twentieth-century Western audience, Pound borrowed from Western literature the myriad rhythms, modes, and voices that he, perhaps more than any other modern poet, had already assimilated in The cantos. The first and longest section 'Folk songs' is a collection of vitally dramatic poems, ones that express Confucian themes ironically as well as seriously, and emotionally or personally rather than in the terms of philosophical discourse. The anthology contributed to Pound's return in the years after 1945 to some of the themes and stances of his early career : the ironic treatment of war and marriages gone awry, the poignant treatment of love and friendship across distances, and the serious treatment of problems of relationship, not only that of men and spirits as in his early poetry, but also now that of individuals and government. The 'experience of life' through which pound takes the poems of the Shi jing is in other respects quite different from the experience of life through which he took his translations in the 1910s. One difference is that the individual is set in a social and political context more than in the early poetry, and the particular problem of an individual's relationship to the government is treated as it had never been earlier. An overarching difference is that the problems of war and love, marriage and isolation are clarified and explicated when regarded through a Confucian perspective, rarely explicit but insinuated in the book as a whole. At St Elizabeths, Pound closely read and studied Glosses on the Book of odes by Bernard Karlgren. He also acquired Legge's bilingual edition of the Shi jing as guides for his own. One way that Pound's translation diverges from Legge's and Karlgren's is in respect to prosody. Sometimes casting the odes in iambic pentameter, heroic couplets, or tetrameter quatrains, he also composed stanza forms that approach free verse, and lines of irregular length that include internal rhyme as well as end rhyme. In using these techniques, Pound is reflecting the variety of the Chinese originals. Many poems in the first 'Kuo Feng' section deal with sexual relations, and these poems are traditionally interpreted as depictions of immoral or amoral sexuality – that is, men and women interacting in disregard of the customary separation of the sexes. Where Pound adopts the satirical voice it is to proffer political criticism, and because the colloquialisms Pound adopts as part of that satirical voice are distinctly American, his criticism is directed at American government especially. In the anthology, individual, familial, and political order are presented as being of equal importance. Some of the rituals are familial or social rituals or customs. 1999 Ming Xie : Pound's great originality in the Classic anthology was the use of a full range of Western forms and genres to suggest parallel or equivalent poetic structures of feeling and response : there are a whole variety of Western modes and forms and other numerous allusive echoes and familiar cadences from Western poetry, mainly English poetry of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The convincing independence and internal coherence of Pound's versions represent not so much a faithful translation of individual Shi jing poems as an anthology in English that can stand side by side with the original Chinese collection. The fact that it is a complete translation of an anthology, reputed to be compiled by Confucius himself, is thus in itself highly significant, for what is translated is for Pound a fully integrated and coherent paradigm of an entire culture. 2010 Roslyn Joy Ricci : Pound's creative interpretation of the Shi jing is greater than his translation expertise but his rendering of the poems do support the notion that he attempts to transmit original authorial intention. Establishing the Shi jing as a repository of ancient Chinese history and as a model for Confucian moral values and oratory prowess affirms the importance of translation in integrity. Pound's translation when compared with those of respected academics reflects exceptional skill. When he interprets Chinese odes he reads characters as an art form. Pound searches for the concrete in the aesthetic. He looks for 'visual sensitivity' and 'primitive energy' in the character. He conjures the invisible from the visible. Pound uses the instincts of a poet, relying on his eyes to find the visual images and interpret them 'fused with emotion'. Pound's translation – or rather interpretation – of the ancient Chinese classic provided insight into his ideogrammic method. Placing the Shi jing in historical perspective demonstrated its diverse use, possible authorial and editorial intentions, and the astounding longevity of its influence. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zentralbibliothek Zürich | Organisation / ZB |
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