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2010

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Chronology Entries (3)

#	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.	Document: Porteus, Hugh Gordon. Ezra Pound and his Chinese character : a radical examination. (1950). In : An examination of Ezra Pound : a collection of essays. Ed. by Peter Russell. (Norfolk, Conn. : New directions, 1950). http://www.pdfs.name/gardan. (Pou82, Publication) Document: Pound, Ezra. The translations of Ezra Pound. With an introd. by Hugh Kenner. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1953). (Pou91, Publication) Document: Palandri, Angela C.Y. Ezra Pound and China. (Ann Arbor : University Microfilms, 1955). Diss. Univ. of Washington, 1955. S. 210-211. (Pou26, Publication) Document: Davie, Donald. Ezra Pound : Poet as sculptor. (New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 1964). (Davie1, Publication) Document: Miyake, Akiko. Between Confucius and Eleusis : Ezra Pound's assimilation of Chinese culture in writing the Cantos I-LXXI. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1981). Diss. Duke University, 1970. S. 430-433, 436. (Pou100, Publication) Document: Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael]. Cathay revisited : the Chinese tradition in the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder. (Los Angeles, Calif. : University of Southern California, 1972). Diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1972. s. 13. (Pou97, Publication) Document: Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. S. 56-57, 63-65, 69, 99-101, 119. (Mot3, Publication) Document: Walther, Y.T. Juxtaposition and its limitations : an explanation of obscurity in Ezra Pound's poetry. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 14, no 1-4 (1983-1984). (Pou37, Publication) Document: Chang, Yao-hsin. Chinese influence in Emerson, Thoreau, and Pound. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1984). S. 230, 232, 145-146, 248, 295. (Pou103, Publication) Document: Chang, Yao-hsin. Pound's Cantos and Confucianism. In : Ezra Pound : the legacy of Kulchur. Ed. by Marcel Smith and William A. Ulmer. (Tuscaloosa, Ala. : University of Alabama Press, 1988). S. 107-198, 111. (Pou75, Publication) Document: Kern, Robert. Orientalism, modernism, and the American poem. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996). (Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 97). [Enthält] : Modernizing orientalism / orientalizing modernism : Ezra Pound, Chinese translation, and English-as-Chinese. S. 155-156, 169-172, 184, 186, 203-205. (Pou64, Publication) Document: Cheadle, Mary Paterson. Ezra Pound's Confucian translations. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 1997). S. 29-31, 42. (Pou50, Publication) Document: Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the appropriation of Chinese poetry : Cathay, trnslation, and imagism. (New York, N.Y. : Garland, 1999). (Comparative literature and cultural studies ; vol. 6. Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 2042). S. 20-22, 178, 183, 213-214. (Pou70, Publication) Document: Hayot, Eric. Chinese dreams : Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 2004). Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1999. S. 12, 14. (HayE1, Publication) Document: Ezra Pound & China. Ed. by Zhaoming Qian. (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2003). S. 12-13. (Pou32, Publication) Document: Zhu, Chungeng. Ezra Pound's Confucianism. In : Philosoh and literature ; vol. 29, no 1 (2005). http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophy_and_literature /v029/29.1zhu.pdf. (Pou51, Publication) Document: Qian, Zhaoming. Ezra Pound and his first Chinese contact for and against Confucianism. In : ScholarWork@UNO / University of New Orleans (2006). http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=engl_facpubs. (Pou49, Publication) Document: Macdonald, Sean. Montage as Chinese : modernism, the avant-garde, and the strange appropriation of China. In : Modern Chinese literature and culture ; vol. 19, no 2 (2007). [Enthält : Ezra Pound]. (Pou46, Publication) Document: Williams, R. John. Modernist scandals : Ezra Pound’s translations of 'the' Chinese poem. In : Orient and Orientalisms in US-American poetry and poetics. Sabine Sielke, Christian Kloeckner (eds.). (New York, N.Y. : P. Lang, 2009). (Transcription ; vol. 4). http://english.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Williams%20Pound%20Essay.pdf. S. 150-151, 160. (Pou79, Publication) Document: Ning, Xin. Picking the blossoms of the apricot : Ezra Pound's ideogramic thinking and his vision of Confucius. In : East Asian Confucianisms : interactions and innovations : proceedings of the Conference of May 1-2, 2009. (New Brunswick, N.J. : Confucius Institute at Rutgers University, 2010). (Pou65, Publication) Person: Pound, Ezra
2	1925-1969	Pound, Ezra. The cantos. Sekundärliteratur allgemein 1972 David Happell Hsin-fu Wand : The role of Chinese mythology in Ezra Pound's Cantos : 1) It provides him with some of the major symbols of his Pisan Cantos and subsequent cantos. 2) It provides a further means of his emerging from his Purgatorio into his Paradiso. 3) It lends him a proper guide and a vision of heaven. 4) It makes the Cantos cohere. Furthermore, it makes him forget his prejudice against Taoists and Buddhists, to whom he is indepted for the Chinese myths and symbols in The Cantos. 1976 Monika Motsch : Die organische, kosmische ('ideogrammatische') Denkweise, die Pound im Konfuzianismus bewunderte, wird weiter entwickelt und ist die Philosophie der Cantos. Der konfuzianische Kosmos – so wie ihn Pound auffasste – bildet den weitern Rahmen, in dem sich die Gestalten der Cantos bewegen, Odysseus und Konfuzius, die griechischen Götter und die Kaiser des chinesischen Altertums. Das Gegenthema von Kund und Eleusis ist Usura. Im Laufe der Cantos sammeln sie immer mehr Assoziationen um sich, die aus den verschiedensten Geschichtsepochen und Kulturen stammen : 'Kung' bezieht sich auch auf die Naturlyrik, die Yin- und Yang-Lehre und die frühe amerikanische Geschichte, 'Eleusis' auf die Hadesfahrt des Odysseus und die Götter Aphrodite und Dionysos. In den 'Pisan Cantos' formt sich aus den vieldeutigen gegensätzlichen Komponenten von 'Kung und Eleusis' für Augenblicke das visionäre Bild einer neuen Gesellschaft und Kultur. Die Philosophie der 'Cantos' ist viel stärker an China als am Western orientiert. Die Natur ist das Grundelement. 1988 Chang Yao-hsin : Pound saw no effective cure in Christianity for the disease of his times. He even lost faith in the value of Greek literature and philosophy. When he turned East, he found a messiah in Confucius, who enunciated 'the principle of the good' and the medicine for the disease of the West in his Ta hio. Confucius, Pound believed, could enlighten and civilize the barbarous Occident. The wisdom of the Confucian classic Da xue was, as he saw it, not yet exhausted and indeed inexhaustible. Order and tranquility come from enlightened rule, and two salient features of Confucian enlightened rule are equitable distribution of wealth and light taxation. These ideals constitute the thematic concerns of the Chinese cantos. A major thematic concern in The cantos is the treatment of usury, which takes up an enormous amount of space. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pound's adaptation of the ideogrammic method for poetic use in The cantos stems as much from his attention to the essentialness of verbal motion and the priority of concrete particulars as from his care for the forceful juxtaposition of words and lines. A respect for individuality is what Pound found most essential to Confucianism initially. The cantos are an enormous tapestry, a 'Guernica' of the compendious fields of study that Pound entered, with little apparent trepidation, over the fifty years or more of his career : not only China and Confucianism, but Ovidian and Homeric polytheism ; Renaissance Italy, medieval Provence, and Neoplatonic light philosophy ; nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and modern Europe. The Pisan cantos are the work of a poet who is watching his life pass before his eyes because he sees the life of the vision he hoped for suddenly draining away. After 1945, the West for Pound was barren of paradise or it was content with mockeries and imitations. The cantos are a record of this movement through hell and purgatory, toward and away from paradise. But in respect to Pound's Confucianism they are an incomplete record. The greatest influence of Confucianism in The cantos begins in the Pisan cantos, because they were written at the same time, in fact in the same notebooks, as Pound's translations into English of his original Italian versions of The great diegest and The unwobbling pivot. By the time of Rock-drill and Thrones, Pound had completed The analects and The classic anthology defined by Confucius. There are therefore many more Confucian references in these later cantos than in the earlier cantos. The Confucian elements of the China cantos derive not from the Book of history or any of the other Confucian classics but from De Mailla's Histoire générale de la Chine. Rock-drill cantos are written on the basis of the Shu jing, Thrones are gleaned from an eighteenth-century Confucian document. Mengzi is an important source for cantos LXXVII, LXXXVII, LXXXIII, LXXXVIII and XCIV. Many Confucian concepts are presented in the form of Chinese words or phrases. Especially when they are printed large, these words are visually striking and contribute dramatically to the sculptural effect of Pound's free verse. Too much attention to the visual, often spectacular nature of The cantos' characters can obscure their most important property : the specific, concrete nature of their definitions according to Pound, and the profound relevance, he was convinced, of those significations to the West. What is more important for Pound in the China cantos than the attaching of any generalizable significance to women in Chinese history is the establishing of the centrality of sound economics in the great Confucian periods of Chinese history. Many of the emperors are portrayed as having been great not only because of their sound economic policies but because of the reverence for 'heaven' and the spirits of ancestors that they show through proper observance of ritual. Like the importance of study, the importance of teaching is implied everywhere in The cantos, the central purpose of which is not only to record modern history but even more, to lead the West toward 'a paradiso terrestre'. 2003 Sun Hong : The Cantos is a manifesto in which Pound proclaims Confucianism as a 'medicine' for the ills of Western civilization. What the poet discovers in Confucianism is not merely a few abstruse philosophical formulas. For him truth exists in harmony and order, in the concrete beauty of this world, an elegance revealed by Confucian canons, particularly those in the Confucian classics. In the Cantos Pound endeavors to present his discovery of this cosmos of truth and beauty. By calling the Cantos 'a long poem', Pound made clear that he was not interested in the rules of an epic. He was aware of the lack of epic quality. Critics have called the Cantos a 'colossal failure', a 'gigantic mess', without any 'major form'. For Pound, order is synonymous with beauty. In his effort to forge this beauty out of chaos, he is unlike other poets who go back only to Homer, trying to evolve and order out of this mythological tradition. Pound pushes his frontier far beyond that point, both in time and space. For him, the frontier is on the other hemisphere, in China, whose civilization of greater antiquity. This nation has shown unusual power of survival, absorbing all foreign influences without losing its own identity. In this ancient culture Pound sees Confucianism. Pound aptly uses ancient Chinese mythology and history as illustrations. His adoption of the Confucian standpoint of history also coincides with his turning away from his early idea of the epic as a 'beautiful story' to his later definition of it as 'a poem including history'. This shift reflects his commitment to what he previously referred to as 'the modern world'. The scope of a traditional epic should be altered and extended to suit modernism. Pound's aim is to create a new model for the new world. 2003 Britton Gildersleeve : Scholars have dealt with elements of the mystic within The cantos. Almost all seem to privilege Western mythologies even when treating Eastern materials. This is especially evident in their analyses of Kuanon [Guanyin], who figures in a number of the Cantos. For Pound, Kuanon – in addition to her traditional functions within the Buddhist pantheon – is a female figure who eludes easy delineation, one who draws upon a legacy of androgyny and Orientalist perspectives to become daughter, mother, wife, and lover in a feminine ideogram that ultimately partakes of both Eleusinian and Eastern mysticism. Juxtaposing various elements of the feminine, Kuanon is the enigma at the heart of Pound's flawed journey-quest toward mystic union with the divine. In general Pound is no fan of Buddhism. When he mentions it in the Cantos, it is almost always with negative inflection. It is not the ultimate spiritual objectives of Buddhism that Pound satirizes, it is both the abuses of power to which no systematized religion is immune, and perhaps more critically, Buddhism's goal of nonattachment to everyday affairs. Given Pound's 'constant concern for good government', Buddhism's emphasis on the transience and unimportance of the temporal and worldly – in contrast to Confucianism's focus on the sociopolitical matrix – is, for him, unacceptable. He couples Buddhism with maternity and infantilism, with decadence and corruption, with emasculation in both the literal and figurative senses of the term. This negative feminization of Buddhism differs from his handling of the Buddha himself. The inference is that the Buddha does have the power to awaken, that his name is deserved. Pound sees parallels between Buddhism and Christianity that are incompatible with his own political agenda. Unlike his views of either Buddhism or Christianity, Pound sees Confucianism as predicated on right behavior in social context, in contrast to Buddhism's major element of nonattachment. He view Confucianism as more logical and useful for his own project : to critique the spiritual excesses he sees in Christianity and Christian states. 'The ethic of Confucius and Mencius', Pound notes, may be used 'to better advantage' with 'Occidentals than may Buddhism', while Confucianism better 'serves as a road map through the forests of Christian theology'. Canto XIII (1930) Kung walked by the dynastic temple and into the cedar grove, and then out by the lower river. And with him Khieu, Tchi and Tian the low speaking And "we are unknown", said Kung, "You will take up charioteering ? Then you will become known, "Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery ? "Or the practice of public speaking ?" And Tseu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order", And Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province I would put it in better order than this is". And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple, "With order in the observances, with a suitable performance of the ritual", And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute The low sounds continuing after his hand left the strings, And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves, And he looked after the sound : "The old swimming hole, "And the boys flopping off the planks, "Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins". And Kung smiled upon all of them equally. And Thseng-sie desired to know : "Which had answered correctly? " And Kung said, "They have all answered correctly, "That is to say, each in his nature". And Kung raised his cane against Yuan Jang, Yuan Jang being his elder, For Yuan Jang sat by the roadside pretending to be receiving wisdom. And Kung said ` "You old fool, come out of it, Get up and do something useful.'' And Kung said "Respect a child's faculties "From the moment it inhales the clear air, "But a man of fifty who knows nothing Is worthy of no respect.'' And "When the prince has gathered about him "All the savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed.'' And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves: If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions. And Kung gave the words "order'' and "brotherly deference'' And said nothing of the "life after death.'' And he said "Anyone can run to excesses, "It is easy to shoot past the mark, "It is hard to stand firm in the middle.'' And they said : If a man commit murder Should his father protect him, and hide him? And Kung said : He should hide him. And Kung gave his daughter to Kong-Tchang Although Kong-Tchang was in prison. And he gave his niece to Nan-Young although Nan-Young was out of office. And Kung said "Wan ruled with moderation, "In his day the State was well kept, And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean, for things they didn't know, But that time seems to be passing." A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, But that time seems to be passing.'' And Kung said, "Without character you will be unable to play on that instrument Or to execute the music fit for the Odes. The blossoms of the apricot blow from the east to the west, And I have tried to keep them from falling." Sekundärliteratur zu Canto XIII 1976 Monika Motsch : Canto XIII richtet zum ersten Mal den Blick voll auf Konfuzius. Dieser Canto besteht fast vollständig aus Zitaten des Lun yu, Zhong yong, Da xue und Mengzi. Der Satzbau ist klar und einfach und besteht meist aus aneinandergereihten, häufig parallelen Hauptsätzen. Niemals werden die Sätze elliptisch verkürzt und die Verben weggelassen, wie dies in den ersten Cantos häufig geschah. Die vielen Wiederholungen schaffen eine Analogie zu der im Grunde einfachen und unkomplizierten Lehre des Konfuzius. Der häufigste Zeilenbeginn ist die reihende Partikel 'and'. Sie verbindet die isoliert dastehenden Aphorismen und schafft zwischen ihnen sozusagen 'gleichzeitige' Zusammenhänge. Das Bild, das Pound von der konfuzianischen Lehre entwirft, ist stellenweise zu sehr von der Aufklärung beeinflusst. Vor allem aber wird das Prinzip 'Ordnung' überbetont, ein Begriff, der bei Konfuzius niemals vorkommt, währen in Wirklichkeit 'Humanität' die Leitidee von Konfuzius ist. 1988 Chang Yao-hsin : Canto 13 shines with the light of Confucius. Confucianism undergoes a rigorous process of 'telegraphic abbreviation', so much so that, to those who know little about and share none of his faith in Confucianism, Pound is indeed offering platitudes for profound verities. But he manages to keep the quintessence of Confucianism intact. The canto begins with a lyric representation of Confucius, chatting at leisure with his disciples, which is a way of presenting Confucius's ideal of harmony. Pound also touched in this canto upon Confucius's doctrine of the mean and upon his call for moderation, radical and extreme to a fault. Pound felt that humanity deserves better than it gets, and it deserves the best. He saw a chaotic world that needed setting to rights and a humanity, suffering from spiritual dearth and cosmic injustice, who needed to be saved. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pound's translation of Canto XIII based on Pauthier's La grand etude, L’invariabilité dans le milieu et Les entretiens philosophiques. A distrust of elders and rulers and a respect for individuality is not all Canto XIII offers in its presentation of Confucianism, what became increasingly important to Pound was Confucianism's social and political orientation and its concern for 'order'. 2003 Qian Zhaoming : Pound's infatuation with China is infatuation with both Chinese art and Chinese poetry. In inventing his Confucius in Canto 13, he cannot but open and close in a fashion that recalls at one Chinese painting and Cathay. Confucian maxims in translation tend to be disturbingly elusive. Working his way through Pauthier's Confucius, Pound is bound to represent only what he can appreciate. There are a number of factors contributing to his selection decisions. Of these, the Chinese pictures stand out in his memory. It is inappropriate to overemphasize their impact, and it is also inappropriate to underestimate it. Just as Chinese poets and artists can alternate between Confucianism and Daoism, so Pound, influenced by them, can take advantage of both philosophies. In The cantos, Pound does return again and again to a Confucian theme. Nonetheless, the aesthetic sensibility that threads through the poem is in accord with Daoist ideals. Canto XLV (1937) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241052. Sekundärliteratur 1976 Monika Motsch : Die drei Leitmotive Kung, Eleusis und Usura treten in den Vordergrund. Jedoch haben sie sich verwandelt und weiterentwickelt. Usura vernichtet nicht nur alle konfuzianischen Werte, sondern auch die Kraft von Eleusis. Canto XLIX (1937) For the seven lakes. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7168. Sekundärliteratur 1928 Qian Zhaoming : Pound got a fourteen-fold screen book with Chinese and Japanese ideograms from his aunt. It consists of eight ink paintings, eight poems in Chinese and eight poems in Japanese, mutually representing eight classic scenes about the shores of the Xiao and Xiang rivers in Hunan. Pound was not able to decipher the eight Chinese poems drawn in three calligraphic styles. Zeng Baosun offered Pound a translation of eight Chinese poems that contributed to Canto XLIX. A transcript of Zeng's oral translation has been found in an unmailed letter Pound worte to his father. From Zeng, Pound have learned everything about China's tradition of 'making pictures and poems on that set of scenes'. Pound's sourcebook represents a Far Eastern tradition of making pictures and poems side by side on a theme of great masters. Pound inserts a version of the eight views in the middle of his modernist epic. The subject is a monument of Chinese culture, and example of how poets and artists in China have continuously made an old theme new. All remarkable copies of the views have been accepted as such because of their originality. For Pound modernism also demands originality, originality allowing him to interweave texts and make statements about history and politics. 1976 Monika Motsch : Es entsteht das Bild einer harmonisch geordneten Gesellschaft und die konfzianische Lehre wird Teil einer grossen Kosmologie. Der Canto beginnt mit fragmentarischen, chinesischen Gedichten, die von Daniel D. Pearlman in The barb of time identifiziert wurden. Nicht der Mensch und seine Gefühle stehen im Vordergrund, sondern der Kreislauf der Natur, Himmel, Wolken, Bäume und Wasser. Die Naturbilder sind einfach und genau und deuten einen Abschied an, bei dem individuelle Gefühle völlig unausgesprochen bleiben. The Chinese history cantos LII-LXI (1940) Notebooks of Ezra Pound 32 LIII-LIV, 282, 31 Earliest times to the Chin dynasty, 399 AD 33 LIV, 282, 32-LVI, 306, 18 Early fifth century AD to mid-Mongol era, 1347 AD 34 LVI, 306, 19-LX, 331, 22 Mid-Mongol era to mid-Ch'ing dynasty, 1717 AD 35 LX, 331, 23-LXI to end Mid-Ch'ing, 1717, to mid-reign of Ch'ien-lung, 1780 AD Sekundärliteratur 1970 Akiko Miyake : The whole of Cantos LII-LXXI can be interpreted either as actual Chinese history and the life and works of John Adams or as some intricate patterns formed by Chinese and Greek-American paideuma, or as some lovely images which the interactions of the divine light and accidental shadows produce. The Chinese people attempt to return to the golden age of the legendary emperors, Yao and Shun, by destroying the corrupt ruler and thus resurrecting the national paideuma, so that one can call this war paidumatically a revival of national life. One of Pound's aims was to liberate the Platonic essence of beauty and knowledge from the poet's own psyche, from its time-bound situation in the poet's historical memory, in order to realize man's eternal state of mind, a paradise. He associated social order in the Chinese state with the divine order which Erigena's heavenly light formed in its own self-division. Canto LII describes the official calendar of the Chinese empire, established in the reign of Yao (B.C. 2356) or Shun (B.C. 2255). Canto LIII : on my interpret the canto as Pound's description the division of the heavenly light, passing from the age of rituals to the age of ideals. The rest of the Chinese history cantos can be interpreted as the cyclic repetitions of the renewal of the established culture at more or less regular intervals. Pound's study of Mencius probably helped him much to understand how the Chinese people attributed such renewal of the national life to good rulers' observance of Confucian philosophy. In Canto LIV one finds the cycling and reappearing of the heaven-begotten light, the Canto can be regarded as the description of the light returning to its origin and bringing the people to a more original form of Metamorphosis. Destructive and constructive elements form intricate patterns of history through minor dynasties, between the fall of Tang the and rise of Song. Canto LVI makes a recapitulation of the cycling patterns of history. In Canto LVII Pound suggests that Ming turned out to be a very dubious phoenix in Chinese history. In Canto LIX Pound shows how the Manchurian emperors were serious in their following of the Confucian paideuma of China, so that their force marched on 'spreading light on proceeding'. Canto LX celebrates the golden age Kang Hi brought back to China. The frontier land in the West was pacified by the expedition of the emperor, who observed the sun as Yao did. Canto LXI can be read as showing the final return of the light to its original forms 1976 Monika Motsch : Die Verbindung von 'Kung und Eleusis' taucht nicht nur in den konfuzianischen Übersetzungen häufig auf, sondern bestimmt auch die Struktur der Cantos. Zwischen dem Mythos von Eleusis und der altchinesischen Idealfigur des Königs Wen entdeckt Pound gemeinsame Berührungspunkte. Im Gegensatz zu James Legge erweitert Pound den Text und stellt die Humanität des Königs durch einzelne Handlungen und präzise Umschreibungen lebendig dar. Pound versucht die konfuzianische Lehre an geschichtlichen Beispielen darzustellen. Dies gelingt ihm jedoch nur sehr unvollkommen ; die gleichen Ideen werden in ständiger Wiederholung vorgetragen, vor allem die Abneigung der konfuzianischen Herrscher, die sich auf Kosten des Volkes bereichern. Alle Nichtkonfuzianer, schlechte Kaiser, Taoisten und Buddhisten werden attackiert. Die Konfuzianer dagegen werden gepriesen und über ihre Fehler, Pedanterie, starres Festhalten an Traditionen, wird geschweigt. Man bekommt den Eindruck, dass die Konfuzianer in China eine glückliche Harmonie des ganzen Volkes bewirken, und es nur den üblen Machenschaften der Taoisten und Buddhisten zu verdanken war, dass dieses Paradies immer wieder zerstört wurde. Pound hat das Vorurteil von Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de. Histoire générale de la Chine ziemlich kritiklos übernommen. Die chinesischen Cantos setzen ein mit Zitaten aus dem 4. Kapitel des Li ji. Noch stärker als die Szenen haben die im Text verstreuten chinesischen Schriftzeichen eine übergreifende Funktion. Sie beginnen mit dem Zeichen 'Licht, Glanz'. Das Zeichen 'Ruhe' gibt ein Gefühl der Harmonie. Die folgenden Ideogramme machen vor allem die Kraft der konfuzianischen Tradition deutlich, indem sie die Kaiser Yao, Shun und Yu, die Xia und die Zhou-Dynastie und Konfuzius selbst mehrfach hervorheben. 1983 John Driscoll : There are many occasions in the China cantos where Pound used his sources extensively, but expressed them in ways which better fitted his aims than could be achieved by using gallicisms. Canto LII is unique in the China cantos in as much as it contains no material taken from Mailla's Histoire générale de la Chine, and in the case of the first page and a half, is not composed from any particular source. As such, the canto merits an individual chapter since its material is quite unlike that of the other cantos in the sequence and functions as a preface to the chronological history of China that follows in Cantos 53 to 61. The narrative techniques that Pound employs in Canto 52 are ones that he also employs when presenting the history sequence in subsequent cantos. There is more on usury, this time linked to Catholicism. This predominating ideology, a European equivalent to Confucianism, is a suitable contrast to the Chinese success story that is to follow in Cantos 53-61. The symbols of our prevailing ideology from medieval Europe are empty. The contrast between Canto 52 and 53 to 61 shows evidence of Pound exploiting contemporary ideas on the difference between 'primitive' and 'historical' consciousness. Thus the Li Ki of Canto 52, stripped of some of its distracting imperial or hierarchical ritual, becomes more accessible to us and allows us to establish a synchronic base in Chinese culture for ourselves, before proceeding to the more diachronic material of 53-61. The narrative eases us into a relationship with the text so that when the fuller picture emerges of how unified ideas and actions were in Confucian China, we are brought up short by our awareness that this is lacking in our own culture. Another mediation of Couvreur's Li Ki is the change from a descriptive to a more prescriptive style. The first few pages of Canto 53, on the early emperors, show the development of a 'textbook' style narrative. The archetypal or mythological aspects to the material in this narrative are foreign to Western readers, but this unexpected context helps us to reach the Chinese cultural unity that is represented in the pre-dynastic stage of Confucian historiography through the use of tonal irony. This draws readers into a Chinese modality for history writing where the past is always an object of meditation, followed by imitation or rejection. In this way, the narrative in Canto 53 has a basically 'Chinese' function for readers, despite its occasional Western frame of reference. One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from the study of Canto 53 is the acknowledgement of how flexible Pound's narrative techniques are, and how much this contributes to the success of the poem. There are clearly times when the narrative is on 'our' side looking at China, and other times when it faces the other way. We are led to accept a Chinese frame of reference including lyricism, unity, clarity of purpose, continuity and solidity – especially in cultural forms. A more objective narrative weaves in and out of Chinese symbolic patterns, never fully explaining them nor expressing them as it might if it were totally Chinese. Like other types of material presented in the poem, the selection of ritual has an accumulative effect. We 'pass through' the rituals as we read the poem, and they help us to frame later actions in a Confucian perspective. In Canto 55 Pound devotes the most space to developing it in relation to the wider themes of Confucian order, harmony with nature and justice, continually recurring over the enormous time-span of Chinese dynastic history. Nearly all of the detail used to cover the period of this canto (805-1231 A.D.), is as usual taken from Histoire. That Pound chose to emphasize economic over moral or cultural aspects shows a sensitivity to the particular conflicts and interests of this period. The most important passage in the canto deals with the attempts by Ouang-ngan-ché to reform land ownership and taxation systems in the empire, which were the most significant events of this period outside the rise and fall of dynasties. Pound's presentation of the reforms is significantly different from Histoire's. The fragmentary application of Confucian practicality over Taoist or Buddhist decadence represented at court by the eunuchs, is typical of this period as depicted in Histoire. An important part of Pound's technique for using material from Histoire was the selection of detail, often of relatively minor importance in the context of the chronicle as a whole. The selected details were to function in the poem in a variety of ways, by no means always paralleling a similar function in Histoire. An important principle of selection was whether particular events or characters in history were interesting in the sensational or sentimental way of popular newspaper items, the so-called 'human interest' principle. That this should be felt in Pound's poetry from 1938-40 is hardly surprising, since for many years he had engaged in a cultural, political and economic journalism to crusade for the truth as he saw it. The cyclical Confucianism which runs through the whole sequence might satisfy those readers who look for ideological elements in historical poetry. Others might approach the same conclusions through a more popularistic or journalistic mode, responding to the vernacular 'gut' reactions of the poem's narrative or historical figures. Both Histoire and Pound could occasionally use human interest stories to develop more political themes. The way Pound selected and presented detail for the decline of the Ming is a significant achievement in the China cantos. It is typical of the best descriptive passages in the whole sequence : selected vivid images shorn of their discursive context allowing wider movements in the poetry to be felt by the reader. The human interest principle, even when it exploits sentimentalism, is important in this context. Pound actively enlivened his source Histoire by omitting irrelevant and largely repetitive and boring details of warfare and diplomacy. Within the limited space available, Pound took the right decision in exaggerating the Confucian qualities of his model emperors since the hierarchy he found of emperors who were perfect down to those who were worthless. The issue of whether Pond should or should not have included more material on non-Confucian forces in China such as popular revolts is not so much a question of his omitting material from Histoire. It is his projection of what he considered the Confucian approach to history onto the poem, which in turn reflects Histoire's general perspective. He clearly wanted to present Confucianism to the modern world stripped of some of its more unacceptable elements, such as the sacrificial or religious, yet with its base in Chinese mythology preserved. 'Western decay' as myth is challenged by the China cantos through Pound's attempt at raising our level of consciousness about world history and thus break out of the restrictions that living in the history of Western society has left with us. 1983 John J. Nolde : The basic themes appear over and over in Pound's lines : the ancient legends of the invention of agriculture and of writing ; the channeling of the floods ; the defense of the frontier ; the evils of pernicious doctrines, especially Buddhism and Taoism ; earthquakes, eclipses, comets and the appearance of fabulous animals ; the beat-like, repetitive recounting of the rise and fall of dynasties. Above all there was the constant concern for good government. For millennia the Confucian view held that unless a ruler and his officials were concerned with virtuous rule and the welfare of their people, they and their dynasty were doomed, the 'Mandate of Heaven' would be withdrawn, and the mantle of leadership passed to more vigorous, and virtuous, leaders. The nexus of the problem was usually economic, and the neo-Confucianists made much of the need for equitable taxes, effective public works, and high agricultural productivity. 2008 Li Qingjun : Cantos LII-LXI emphasize that Chinese history, because it was firmly rooted in Confucian morality yet in spite of periodic set-backs, always kept alive a tradition of what it meant to have responsible government and healthy human relationships. For Pound, these ordering norms were to be found in Confucianism, as expressed in the Da yue and the Lun yu. Pound's Cantos is a morality tale. In canto after canto, Pound holds up the mirror in which Western readers can see both the frailty and potential of their civilization. In the 'China cantos', Pound shows how China's past proves the adage that history is ideas put into action. It is the nobility of Confucian ideals that Pound admires and recommends. From Pound's point of view, politicians and statesmen had not made a difference in the stability of Western culture through reason and government machinations. Pound thought that perhaps a poet could hold up a mirror that would reveal the answers that lay in Confucianism and reflect to the readers of his era the moral truths he found in Chinese history. For Pound, China, by means of its Confucian-based ideology, should shed light and enlightenment on the rest of the world. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry not only influenced Pound to his ideogrammic method but also led him to the firm conviction that the West could not ignore Chinese history and culture because there was much to learn from it. In Canto XIII Pound embedded Confucius' action in Asian culture ; in the numerous temples that have edified people's minds, generation after generation ; in the forest that connects people to nature, and in the river that washes away the dirt from people's minds and then nurtures and nourishes the healthy growth of the good seed in their hearts. In contrast to his expression of the disorder and twisted desires that have led to war in the West and caused its disillusionment and deterioration, Pound's view of Confucius was filled with compliments and admiration. From the Analects Pound used the episode of Confucius asking his disciples what they will do, since no officials seemed to be asking them for advice. He rewrote the passage to have Confucius encourage each of his disciples to follow his own nature. He offered Confucius's reminder that only the ruler who knows how to control himself and practice internal stillness of desires can bring order to his country. Pound's use of Chinese characters in The cantos is an illustration of his skill as an imagist who used visual poetry to mirror history. The characters are not merely the replication of Chinese characters ; instead, they are pictures shown in the poetic mirror, layering the meanings in the linguistic text itself, and becoming a part of the poems' references and allusions. Pound turned Chinese characters into pictures and used them to represent concrete ideas. Most characters he chose are not pictograms – they do not actually portray concrete objects, but they are ideograms communicating more than a word, often an entire sentiment or philosophical truth. He used a visual image as his imprimatur of Confucian authenticity to indicate what constitutes good leadership and a society in which individuals could flourish. He noticed as well that leaders in Chinese history who did not find ways to make Confucius's teachings new invariably implemented changes that brought destruction. Pound held up a mirror to China's long history to show how Confucian values, when appropriated for each new age, may stabilize the political system and allow the individual to flourish. He never tried to write a strictly objective history of China. Instead, he offered Confucian values as a model for society and human relationships. 2010 Roslyn Joy Ricci : In Cantos LII-LXI Pound uses forty-eight Chinese characters to further promote his ideogrammic method. These sections demonstrate Pound's first serious use of Chinese characters as signifiers ; provide examples of his ideogrammic method in alphabet poetry ; and offer a unique opportunity to observe his approach to recording Chinese myths, legends, and history. The cantos are a synopsis of Chinese history from 2837 BCE to 1735 CE. They illustrate how he uses characters to sculpt, balance, and situate meaning in time and space. Acting as visual aesthetics they 'break down syntax and interrupt the linearity of traditional reading. Analysis reveals Pound's ability to juxtapose elements of different languages as 'collage-text', utilizing their unique properties so that each contributes to a poetic communication of maximum efficiency, creating a new poetic method within Western literary discourse. Pound does not use Chinese characters as mere enhancers. He carefully chooses where and how his poetry can deliver compounding images for readers of European languages along with Chinese characters for the same purpose. Pound's search for poetic expression – inspired by the idea of ideogrammic communication but constrained by phonocentric language – results in an idiosyncratic synthesis of Chinese poetic style with twentieth century Imagist poetry. Adams cantos LXII-LXXI (1940) Sekundärliteratur 1967 Noel Stock : The Chinese history demonstrate how things run smoothly when rulers and people obey the Confucian 'law', and fall apart when they neglect it. John Adams depict a wise, Confucian-type ruler in action in the American colonies and early United States. An assertion or denial of the connexion between China Adams can hardly be proved, in any strict sense ; unless we go into the matter much more fully than Pound as. Even if it could be proved historically or philosophically, which Pound does not begin to do, either in the Cantos or elsewhere in his writings, there is still the question of poetry : is the connexion conveyed poetically ? Here we are force to say definitely not. These cantos contain references to some of Pound's main economic ideas and continue to develop earlier themes. If we take Pound seriously, it may be argued, we must take seriously his history, even if only to whose sometimes how bad it is. But this presupposes a set of condition which does not exist. To take Pound seriously as an historian, to look up his sources, discuss them, is tantamount to giving nineteenth-century answers to a nineteenth-century question. This is justified when it is a case of exploring his own meaning, but we mut not confuse it with history. It would be different if Pound had shown himself a scholar. The China cantos are not very useful as history, except if we want to get an idea of the sequence of dynasties. Pound's source de Mailla's Histoire générale, is a great work which holds an important place in the annals of western awareness of China. But, through de Mailla's fault, or his own, Pound's cantos do not even begein to register the feel of Chinese history – the rise and fall, the depths, the long periods of chaos, or the extent of monetary depreciation and counterfeiting. For the fact that in giving what he imagined to be an account of events and motives he was driven to formulate the monetary perceptions examined earlier. The Adams section is a 'portrait' of John Adams in action in the flux of events. There is never any doubt where we are, or what we are doing, even when we may be ignorant of what Adams is talking about or the situation in which he is involved. The main fault of the section is that it is much too long. Another is that Pound mixes two methods, which is always dangerous. One moment he uses straight reporting, the next a system of artificial chops and changes. Sometimes in his zeal for monetary reform Pound may be inclined to misread Adam's mood or tone. Not that Adams's ideas on money are likely to meet with approval exactly from a present-day banker, or be welcomed altogether by Americans of conservative tehdency for whom he is one of their greatest thinkers. Pound is conscious of Adams's refusal to get het up unnecessarily about things he was powerless to alter, and this knowledge is embodied in his handling of the other's writings. There are many Chinese signs and repetitions, but they are not of any real importance. Pound tries in the Adam cantos to establish John Adams as a guardian of culture and fertility in America as Confucius was in China. He seems to argue that the only difference between Confucius and Adams is that the former, blessed with a more unified paideuma, transmitted the heavenly ray from the tradition, whereas the latter had to find the inherent virtù within his own mind. Pound's paralleling of Confucius and Adams is based on the poet's reading of Da xue that one can find the heavenly light when one looks straight into one's heart, so that Adams could inherit the light and certain Confucian concepts such as the importance of standing in the middle without ever reading Confucian classics. 1970 Akiko Miyake : In Canto LXIII Pound traced the early training of John Adams, seeking to understand how he grasped the 'luminous principle of reason' so firmly as to appeal to the unwritten power. As an apprentice lawyer, he started using correct terms for his law study, just as Confucius advised in the Analects. 1976 Monika Motsch : In den Adams cantos sind ebenfalls chinesische Schriftzeichen eingestreut. Adams kommt auf seiner Suche nach einer guten Gesellschaftsordnung zu ganz ähnlichen Ergebnissen wie Konfuzius. Auch bei Adams soll die Regierung den Bedürfnissen des Volkes Rechnung tragen, dem Wunsch nach Frieden, nach ausgeglichenen sozialen Verhältnissen und freier Ausübung der Künste. The Pisan cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV (1948) Sekundärliteratur 1976 Monika Motsch : Das Schlüsselwort der Pisan cantos ist 'Tao', das Pound wie in seinen konfuzianischen Übersetzungen durch 'Process' wiedergibt und mit seiner Lichtmetaphorik verbindet. Dieser 'Prozess' ist der Rhythmus der Erde, des Himmels und auch der wahre Weg der Menschen. 2003 Ronald Bush : Almost all of the Pisan cantos' fifty-odd sets of missing or garbled characters are excerpts that Pound copied out from The four books he had been allowed to carry to Pisa. After Pound finished his typescript, the characters were orphaned not once but several times. In the course of his composition he sent four separate fragments of his typescript to Dorothy Shakespear Pound. Dorothy then was to draw the Chinese characters. She was forced to locate the ideograms in Morrison's schematic chart of radicals. She wrote : "I have enjoyed working on the Ch[inese] so much ! I have found all of them : thank goodness you marked the dictionary !" Dorothy's typescripts and carbons, sent to James Laughlin and T.S. Eliot in the expectation that they would be used in the New Directions and Faber and Faber editions, were abandoned and now rest in the Beinecke and other libraries. Though Pound was working without his original typescript. In many cases Pound's first typescript and its carbons differ slightly from the published English text. The Chinese characters that were omitted or altered are reproduced from the Confucian text by Legge. Canto LXXVII Contains quotations from Da xue, Zhong yong and Lun yu from Legge's Four books. Rock-drill de los cantares cantos LXXXV-XCV (1955). Sekundärliteratur 1970 Akiko Miyake : The themes in Canto XXXVII : The war of the people against the agents of the bankers, the urgent need to disclose the devastation power of usury, is exalted to its cosmic dimension and dramatically taken into the first theme, the active influence of American founders. 1979 William Tay : "An epic is a poem containing history". Obviously the definition was intended by Pound to encompass The cantos. Having repudiated in both theory and practice the traditional structural models of the long poem, Pound substituted the ideogrammic method as the central organizing principle. Due to its non-linearity and concrete juxtaposition, this method turns out to be complementary in form to Pound's view of 'historical contemporaneity'. The Poundian sources for the Chinese history that goes into The cantos can all be classified as remembered history. None of these sources - the Confucian classics, a Chinese chronicle in Manchurian and rendered into French, a compilation of vulgarized Confucian tenets circulated as the Sacred edict – can truly lay claims to objectivity and accuracy. In re-transmitting these materials, Pound never seems to be bothered by the authenticity, objectivity, and correctness of his sources. He is neither critical nor investigative about his materials. He simply accepts the validity of the printed words without questioning and further research. This unscrupulous use of remembered history is complemented by Pound's ideogrammic method. The method eschews linear development and simply juxtaposes concrete data without explanation. Shu jing is quite extensively used. While Shu jing is purported to contain more than seventeen centures of China's early documents, there are many gaps in the coverage and each of the five parts has to be read differently. Pound however, is capable of communicating historical 'knowledge'. Throughout The cantos, Taoists and Buddhists are often mentioned and described in a derogatory manner, as in the Chinese history cantos. Fortunately the invention of history appears to be rare in The cantos. Analogies to historical characters and past events, are very pervasive. The ideogrammic juxtaposition is based upon Pound's concept of historical contemporaneity. Pound's 'historical contemporaneity' does not make a distinction, and there is not attempt to construct even a self-contained system. Disregarding the difference in social and cultural background, he would isolate an endeared trait or idea, and with that juxtapose any number of historical characters supposed to share it. For Pound the origin, context, and motivation of a certain statement or incident are not important. He does not treat a historical statement as a living thought, but as a dead one, a finished product, cut loose from its roots. Pound's focus is continuously on the emperors and occasionally, the famous prime ministers. Canto XCVIII Sekundärliteratur 2005 Liu Haoming : The canto based on the vernacular Chinese text written in 1726, titled Sheng yu guang xun zhi jie by Wang Youpu, a writing in literary Chinese by emperor Yongzheng. Pound relied on a bilingual edition prepared by W.F. Baller. The first third of the canto interweaves ancient Egyptian myths with Greek allusions to and quotations from the Odyssey. Near the of that part, Wang Youpu is mentioned by name for the first time. From that point onward, the canto becomes a summary of Wang's text with occasional references to Dante and other old or modern Western events and texts. Pound pands his life-long contemplation on the nature of Chinese writing and its poetic implications by taking into consideration, for the first time in his writing career, the oral aspect of the Chinese language. Speech has hardly been considered in the study of Pound's view of the Chinese language. With the inclusion of Wang's vernacular text, the canto supplies this hitherto missing piece in Pound's theory of the Chinese language. An examination of Pound's view of the vernacular side reveals that he conceives the Chinese writing in a literary, philosophical and theological framework grander and more exquisite than most people had realized. The inclusion of speech in his theory of the Chinese writing testifies to the ultimate validity of this theory. By unfolding the dialectics of writing and speech in Pound's conception contained in this important late canto. In Wang's enterprise of rendering the Sacred edict in baihua, Pound recognizes a similarity between the linguistic, literary, and historical situations of late-medieval Italy and late-imperial China, because both Italy and China had long been dominated by a once illustrious but now dead 'locutio secondaria', namely, Latin in Italy and 'wenli' in China, and both Dante and Wang aimed at renovations by renewing a dynamic relationship to the origin. The canto ends with an indirect quotation from Shu jing. Canto CLXVII The Ode is retranslated from 'Song of the Bowmen' the first poem in Cathay.	Document: Stock, Noel. Reading the Cantos : a study of meaning in Ezra Pound. (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). S. 61, 64, 66-70. (Pou68, Publication) Document: Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University, 1967). Diss. Princeton Univ., 1967. = (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1969). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. S. 103. (Yip20, Publication) Document: Miyake, Akiko. Between Confucius and Eleusis : Ezra Pound's assimilation of Chinese culture in writing the Cantos I-LXXI. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1981). Diss. Duke University, 1970. S. 279, 348, 363, 366, 372, 375-376, 378, 381, 383-385, 394, 405, 418-419, 428, 430. (Pou100, Publication) Document: Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael]. Cathay revisited : the Chinese tradition in the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder. (Los Angeles, Calif. : University of Southern California, 1972). Diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1972. S. 108. (Pou97, Publication) Document: Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. S. 80-81, 105-106, 113-114, 119-123, 127-130, 132-133, 140. (Mot3, Publication) Document: Tay, William. History as poetry : the Chinese past in Ezra Pound's 'Rock-drill cantos'. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 10, no 1 (1979). (Pou36, Publication) Document: Nolde, John J. Blossoms from the East : the China cantos of Ezra Pound. (Orono, Maine : The National Poetry Foundation, The University of Maine, 1983). (Ezra Pound scholarship series). S. 28, 430. (Pou77, Publication) Document: Driscoll, John. The China cantos of Ezra Pound. (Stockholm : Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983). (Acta universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia anglistica Upsaliensia ; 46). Diss. Uppsala University, 1983. S. 45, 57, 59, 62-63, 92-94, 97, 106-108, 112, 124, 145. (Pou59, Publication) Document: Chang, Yao-hsin. Pound's Cantos and Confucianism. In : Ezra Pound : the legacy of Kulchur. Ed. by Marcel Smith and William A. Ulmer. (Tuscaloosa, Ala. : University of Alabama Press, 1988). S. 87-88, 90-92. (Pou75, Publication) Document: Cheadle, Mary Paterson. Ezra Pound's Confucian translations. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 1997). S. 16-17, 19, 21, 219-223, 239, 241, 263. (Pou50, Publication) Document: Ezra Pound & China. Ed. by Zhaoming Qian. (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2003). S. 76, 96-97, 103, 193, 195, 197-198, 163-164, 166, 169. (Pou32, Publication) Document: Qian, Zhaoming. The modernist response to Chinese art : Pound, Moore, Stevens. (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2003). http://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Modernist_Response_to_Chinese_ Art.html?id=S0AHhe2a0NoC&redir_esc=y. S. 59, 61, 79. (SteW10, Publication) Document: Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound's Chinese friends : stories in letters. Ed. and ann. by Zhaoming Qian. (Oxford : University Press, 2008). [Enthält] : Briefwechsel mit Song Faxiang (1914), Zeng Baosan, Yang Fengqi (1939-1942), Veronica Hulan Sun, Fang Achilles (1950-1958), Angela Jung Palandri (1952), Zhang Junmai (1953-1957), Zhao Ziqiang (1954-1958), Wang Shenfu (1955-1958), Fang Baoxian (1957-1959). Appendix : Ezra Pound's typescript for "Preliminary survey" (1951). http://cs5937.userapi.com/u11728334/docs/901475cb4b3c/Zhaoming_Qian_Ezra_Pounds_Chinese_Friends _Sto.pdf. S. XXIII, 9, 19. (Pou16, Publication) Document: Li, Qingjun. Ezra Pound's poetic mirror and the 'China cantos' : the healing of the West. In : Southeast review of Asian studies ; vol. 30 (2008). (Pou83, Publication) Document: Liu, Haoming. 'Pharmaka' and 'volgar' eloquio' : speech and ideogrammic writing in Ezra Pound's Canto XCVIII. In : Asia major; 3rd ser. ; vol. 22, pt. 2 (2009). (Pou39, Publication) Document: Pound, Ezra. New selected poems and translations. Ed. and ann. With an afterword by Richard Sieburth ; with essays by T.S. Eliot and John Berryman. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions Publ. Corp., 2010). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay. London : E. Mathews, 1915. (Pou17, Publication) Person: Pound, Ezra
3	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.	Document: 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]. S. 20, 22-23, 25, 36-37, 52, 63, 82, 98. (Pou14, Publication) Document: Eoyang, Eugene. The Confucian odes : Ezra Pound's translations of the 'Shih ching'. In : Paideuma ; vol. 3, no 1-3 (1974). [Shi jing]. (Pou31, Publication) Document: Bacigalupo, Massimo. The forméd trace : the later poetry of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Columbia University Press, 1980). S. 195, 199. (Pou73, Publication) Document: Eoyang, Eugene Chen. The many 'worlds' in world literature : Pound and Waley as translators of Chinese. In : Reading world literature : theory, history, practice. Ed. and with an introd. by Sarah Lawall. (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1994). S. 249, 256-257. (Pou74, Publication) Document: Cheadle, Mary Paterson. Ezra Pound's Confucian translations. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 1997). S. 154-157, 159, 183-185. (Pou50, Publication) Document: Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the appropriation of Chinese poetry : Cathay, trnslation, and imagism. (New York, N.Y. : Garland, 1999). (Comparative literature and cultural studies ; vol. 6. Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 2042). S. 238-239. (Pou70, Publication)

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2000-	Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich	Organisation / AOI	Cited by: Huppertz, Josefine ; Köster, Hermann. Kleine China-Beiträge. (St. Augustin : Selbstverlag, 1979). [Hermann Köster zum 75. Geburtstag]. [Enthält : Ostasieneise von Wilhelm Schmidt 1935 von Josefine Huppertz ; Konfuzianismus von Xunzi von Hermann Köster]. (Huppe1, Published)