“Cathay revisited : the Chinese tradition in the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder” (Publication, 1972)
Year
1972
Text
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. (Pou97)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Wang, David Rafael
(China 1931-1977) : Dichter, Übersetzer, Professor
Mentioned People (4)
Moore, Marianne
(Kirkwood, Miss. 1887-1972 New York, N.Y.) : Dichterin, Schriftstellerin
[Permission for quotations by Cynthia Stamy and Qian Zhaoming].
[Permission for quotations by Cynthia Stamy and Qian Zhaoming].
Pound, Ezra
(Hailey, Idaho 1885-Venedig 1972) : Dichter, Schriftsteller
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
Snyder, Gary
(San Francisco, Calif. 1930-) : Schriftsteller, Dichter, Professor of English, University of California Davis
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
[Reproduction of the texts with the permission by Gary Snyder, January 2013].
Stevens, Wallace
(Reading, Penn. 1879-1955 Hartford, Conn.) : Dichter, Schriftsteller, Dramatiker, Anwalt
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America
/
References / Sources
Chronology Entries (19)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1897-1955 |
Wallace Stevens and China : general Quellen : Beal, Samuel. Buddhism in China [ID D8373]. Binyon, Laurence. Painting in the Far East [ID D21512]. Duthuit, Georges. Chinese mysticism and modern painting [ID D30303]. Exhibition of Chinese sculpture, Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) to Sung (A.D. 960-1279) [ID D30325]. Fenollosa, Ernest. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese art [ID D5101]. Hackney, Louise Wallace. Guide-posts to Chinese painting [ID D30326]. Okakura, Kakuzô. The book of tea [ID D30306]. Okakura, Kakuzô. The ideals of the East [ID D30304]. Pope, Arthur. An introduction to the language of drawing and painting [ID D30305]. 1925 Munson, Gorham B. The dandyism of Wallace Stevens. In : Dial ; vol. 79 (Nov. 1925). Because of this tranquility, this well-fed and well-booted dandyism of contentment, Mr. Stevens has been called Chinese. Undeniably, he has been influenced by Chinese verse, as he has been by French verse, but one must not force the comparison. For Chinese poetry as a whole rests upon great humanistic and religious traditions : its quiet strength and peace are often simply by-products of a profound understanding ; its epicureanism is less an end, more a function, than the tranquility – may I say – the decidedly American tranquility of Wallace. 1993 Lloyd Haft : It is difficult to imagine a modern American poet whose work would be more difficult to translate into Chinese than that of Wallace Stevens. His esthetic, in which anything like rational understandability seems almost taboo and which continually prefers 'gaiety' or 'gaudiness' to the flat, spare, quasi-'objective' sound affected by many of his contemporaries, poses nightmares even for the native reader seeking comprehension. From the translator's point of view, another troublesome feature of Stevens' poetic world is that his central subjects, the 'mind' and the 'imagination', are terms more specific to the English language than many readers realize. 2003 Qian Zhaoming : Wallace Stevens's Chan-like notions are directly linked to his lifelong interest in Chan art. In Bevis, William W. Mind of winter : Wallace Stevens, meditation, and literature. (Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), William Bevis states, "A number of Stevens' poems seem not only to use meditative issues and points of view, but also to imitate the structure of meditative experience, an advanced, sensate meditative experience that follows the middle way." For Bevis, Stevens's use of meditation is no proof for direct exchange with Chan. To quote his words, "Stevens seems to have arrived at his knowledge without significant help from Buddhists, scientists, or orientalists." In my view, Stevens's innate meditative detachment not only clarifies his well-known fascination with Chan art, but also multiplies the likelihood of an intimate transaction with its message. Chan art is designed to invite viewers to enter into it and lose themselves to its outlook. Stevens's habit of looking at things with meditative detachment almost ensures his entry into the nothing or the no-mind state of Chan art with the thing itself perceived. Okakura's The ideals of the East offers accounts of the origin of Chan, its emphasis on meditation, its disrespect for rituals, and, above all, what it means by 'suchness' . Binyon's Painting in the Far East similarly elaborates on Chan art. The essay on The noble features of the forest and the stream gives a superb insight into the Chan belief that people can enjoy 'the luxuries of nature' even 'without stepping out of their houses'. It was Chan painting that played a principal role in elevating Stevens' detachment to a higher level of meditative experience. One is offered three ways to grasp Chan : visual, verbal, and actional. Stevens was involved in all three during his formative years. It was his own meditative nature that inspired his to pursue Chan art. From there he moved on to read about Chan Buddhism. 2007 Huang, Xiaoyan. Guo jia she ke ji jin ke ti de jie duan xing cheng guo zhi yi. [ID D30293]. As a modern American poet, Wallace Stevens apparently assimilated the Chinese Cultural heritage in his poetry writing. We can sense the influences of Chinese culture here and there in his poems, essays, letters and journals as well. This paper attempts to explore the relations between Stevens and China, to analyze Chinese Daoism and the spirit of Chinese art absorbed in his poetry creating, and to find a new way to interpret Stevens and his poems. 2009 Devin Zuber : Stevens assembled a private art collection that included Japanese and Chinese prints, paintings, and Buddhist statues, as well as an impressive array of costly exhibition catalogues on Oriental art, in addition to numerous other books related to Buddhism and Eastern religions. Stevens shared with Zen Buddhism a deep skepticism towards language as a system of representation ; one reason Zen painting developed as a kind of didactic tool in the way that it did stemmed from a strong conviction that words were woefully inadequate for the totality of experience. |
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| 2 | 1905-1972 |
Marianne Moore and China : general. Quellen Animals in paintings from Asia. Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1965). Baynes. Vol. 1-2. (New York, N.Y. : Pantheon Books, 1950). (Bollingen series ; 19). Bynner, Witter. Laotzu. The way of life according to Laotzu [ID D30328]. [With notations]. Candolle, Alphonse de. Origin of cultivated plants. (New York, N.Y. : D. Appleton, 1886). Master bronzes : selected from museums and collections in America. February 1937. Confucius. The analects of Confucius. Transl. and ann. by Arthur Waley [ID D8879]. [With notations]. Confucius. Shih-ching : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. [Transl. by] Ezra Pound. [ID D29062]. Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest. Transl. by Ezra Pound. [ID D29063]. [1951, With notations]. Confucius to Cummings : an anthology of poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound [ID D30334]. Costumes from the Forbidden City. Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 1945). Cottrell, Annette B. Dragons. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1962). Davis, Frank. The Chinese dragon. In : Illustrated London news ; Aug. 23 (1930). Davis, Frank. The unnatural history of China : the lions of Buddha. In : Illustrated London news ; vol. 178 (1931). Eaton, Evelyn. Go ask the river [ID D30339]. Encyclopedia Britannica. European and Oriental sculpture. Anderson Galleries (Dec. 1928). Exhibition of early Chinese paintings and sculptures. Bourgeois Gallery, New York (Nov.-Dec. 1922). [With notations]. Fang, Achilles. Rhymeprose on literature. In : Harvard journal of Asiatic studies (1951). Franck, Harry Alverson. Roving through southern China [ID D3164]. Guang, Rusi. Chinese wit, wisdom and written characters [ID D30337]. Hackney, Louise Wallace. Guide-posts to Chinese painting. (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927). Ji, Lu ; Hughes, E[rnest] R[ichard]. The art of letters : Lu Chi's "Wen fu", A.D. 302 [ID D30329]. Lin, Yutang. The Chinese theory of art [ID D30330]. The lost flute, and other Chinese lyrics [ID D30333]. Master bronzes. (Buffalo : Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, 1937). Paine, Robert Treat. Animals in paintings from Asia. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1956). Pallister, Bury. The China collectors : Parker companion. (London : Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1874). Pound, Ezra. Instigations of Ezra Pound ; together with an essay on the Chinese written character [ID D22141]. Reed, Stanley. Oriental rugs and carpets. (New York, N.Y. : Putnam, 1967). The silent zero, in search of sound. Transl. by Erich Sackheim [ID D30336]. Sitwell, Osbert. Escape with me ! : an Oriental sketch book.[ID D3453]. Studies in Chinese literature. Ed. by John L. Bishop. [ID D10623]. Sze, Mai-mai. The tao of painting : a study of the ritual disposition of Chinese painting [ID D30310]. Sze, Mai-mai. The way of Chinese painting [ID D30335]. [Inscribed "For Marianne Moore this pocket version! Affectionately, Mai-mai Sze, November 24, 1959"]. Topsell, Edward. Historie of foure-footed beastes. (London : Printed by William Iaggard, 1607). The treasure of Luhan. In : Metropolitan Museum of art bulletin. (Dec. 1919). Wilhelm, Richard. The I ching : or, Book of changes. Rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Vol. 1-2. (New York, N.Y. : Pantheon Books, 1950). (Bollingen series ; 19). Worcester Art Museum news bulletin and calendar. (1955). [Article on Chinese jades and photos of Zhou dynasty dragon]. Xue, Tao. I am a thought of you [ID D30338]. Sekundärliteratur 1971-1972 David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : Marianne Moore states in the epigraph to her Complete poems : "Omissions are not accidents". We can assume that she is reticent about what she does not know well and that she will only "talk about them when I understand them". She never makes direct references to or gives quotations of classical Chinese poetry in her work. But we find in her poetry some allusions to Chinese objects d'art. She finds 'precision' and 'fastidiousness' in many things Chinese. 1995 Lina Unali : Marianne Moore searched in the Orient and in China in particular, for new sources of artistic inspiration and regeneration. Sometimes this only led to a rephrasing of traditional values in more agreeable terms. 1997 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/orient/mod10.htm. Marianne Moore's interest in China stemmed in part from her friendship with a Presbyterian missionary family and her visits to New York galleries. Always intrigued by the exotic, she regularly sought elements of "the wisdom of the East" to illustrate her moral points. 1999 Cynthia Stamy : As a young adult, Moore was experiencing the East as strange and peculiar. China's unfettered ability to resist American religious assimilation, the Christian framework which was so important for the Moore family, must have made it seem seven more alien, and possibly more exotic. Her affinity for scholarly work on Chinese subjects from poetry to painting, calligraphy, chinoiserie, textile design, and religious history is evident not only in her poetry and appended notes, but also in prose work throughout her writing career. Moore was involved in the imaginative production of the Orient ; she posited China as a repository of wisdom, forbearance, peace, and tranquility. At different times, Moore uses Chinese poetry, art, and philosophy to resist the dictates of contemporary verse forms, the influence of European literature and art, the restrictions of a masculine logic, and the imposition of the demands of contemporary politics and mass culture. Moore's fascination with dragons of the Far East can be seen as symptomatic of her apparent need to invest China and things Chinese with an originary potency, to place moral statements against a ground of the ancient and even prehistoric. Moore practices a kind of poetic primitivism in her poems that include Chinese supernatural creatures which allies her work with that of modernist painters who engaged in a similar practice of juxtaposition. Moore's deployment of things Chinese in her poems is augmented by her respect for Chinese ingenuity and tradition. Her selectivity in choosing China's art, but not her history, China's imperial past, but not her peasantry, is itself a dated orientalist response which reflects an impression of China suited to her own needs. Moore's original use of the Chinese 'fu' style of poetry is one successful instance of her consisten ingenuity in finding and employing 'new' form in her poetry. While Moore was not the first modern poet to prefer a Far Eastern form for expressing feelings and truths found in observations of nature, she used the model of the Chinese 'fu' in distinctive ways. The self-conscious antiquarianism of her repeated borrowing of 'fu' techniques exposes Moore's sens of the problematic nature of modernity, as she employed this ancient formal tributary model to pose questions about the moral and cultural significance of the present. Moore's 'fu'-inspired poems exhibit the kind of authority and didacticism which often characterize an ancient poetry. Like the Imagists and the practioners of the 'fu', Moore in her poetry exhibits a sustained use of a form of free verse within a very exacting structure. Her use of syllabic verse does not create its own rhythm and, therefore, the reader's attention is called to prose rhythms within the poem. The influences Moore seems to have absorbed from the 'fu', both in terms of structure and subject-matter, are distributed widely throughout her work and can be found in poems written both early and late in her career. Her interrelationships between the human and the natural were central to both the Confucian and Taoist traditions philosophies which Moore studied and referred to in her prose and poetry. Moore's syllabic verse also forms link with the Chinese language, in which each character is a single syllable. Moore's familiarity with Chinese scrolls was such that she was capable of making references to a specific type of scroll which depicted characteristic scenes of the larger rivers in China. 2003 Qian Zhaoming : Marianne Moore showed a passion for the artifacts of late imperial China – the Yuan, Ming, and Qing products – throughout her long career. Moore is fond of going to Chinese art exhibitions primarily because they promise to educate her eyes. As her correspondence reveals, she takes delight not only in examining the exhibits but also in recounting her prized items. Moore's interest in Chinese art is primarily an interest in Chinese animal pictures illustrating an approach that might be called 'imaginative objectivism'. By studying Chinese animal pictures, Moore benefits more than just recapturing some images in her own poetry. The true value for Moore of the Chinese tradition of treating animals is that it braces up her objection to the Western bias of the animal genre. She had attended many Chinese art shows where she has the freedom of examining for herself how Chinese painters turn themselves into 'instruments' of actual life. The Tao of painting by Mai-mai Sze awakened Moore to its true meaning and possibilities. It encouraged her to rethink the value of her own ambiguity and reserve in some early experiments. From Sze she has learned to overlook the distinction between Confucianism and Daoism / Buddhism. 2006 Victoria Bazin : Marianne Moore deploys imagery and tropes in circulation in the newspapers and literature she was reading on the subject of China and Chinese art and culture. Moore's respect for Eastern difference might appear to be an enlightened attempt to refuse the Orientalist impulse to accumulate knowledge of the 'other' thereby reinforcing Western hegemonic power, the fact that her poetic observations of 'China' reproduce it as a site of exotic and unfathomable otherness suggests its general complicity with European exoticism. |
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| 3 | 1909.1-1972 |
Ezra Pound and China : general Quellen : Binyon, Laurence. Chou king. Trad. De Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2601]. Li ki ; ou, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les céremonies. Trad. de Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2642]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726]. Goullart, Peter. Forgotten kingdom [ID D3683]. Hare, William Loftus. Chinese egoism. In : The Egoist ; vol. 1, no 23 (1914). The Chinese classics. Transl. by James Legge. [ID D2212]. Pound übernimmt die übersetzerischen Grundlagen. Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. La Charme, Alexandre de. Confucii Chi-king : sive, liber carminum [ID D1988]. Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de. Histoire générale de la Chine [ID D1868]. Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary [ID D8646]. Economic dialogues in ancient China. Ed. by Lewis Maverick [ID D29079]. Mori Kainan / Ariga Nagao. [On Chinese poetry]. Morrison, Robert. Morrison, Robert. A dictionary of the Chinese language [ID D1934]. Pauthier, [Jean-Pierre] Guillaume. Les livres sacrés de l'Orient [ID D2040]. Rock, Joseph : Monographs on the Naxi. [s. Rock]. [Wang, Youpu]. The sacred edict. With a translation of the colloquial rendering, notes and vocabulary by F[rederick] W[illiam] Baller [ID D10024]. Zhang, Tiemin. Chinese-English dictionary. (Shanghai : Commercial Press, 1933). [Correspondence with Chinese friends : About 400 letters, postcards, and telegrams in three Pound archives and three private collection.] Sekundärliteratur 1950 Hugh Gordon Porteus : Throughout the works of Ezra Pound one comes across references to Chinese literature, and to quotations from the Chinese classics – sometimes in English paraphrase, sometimes in Chinese character. Increasingly, since the first world war, Pound has busied himself with things Chinese. Constantly he has advocated the inclusion of Chinese language, poetry and (Confucian) doctrine in the English educational system. Pound's avowed ignorance of Chinese literature in general and of the Chinese language in particular makes only the more spectacular his singular achievements in these two field. What is remarkable about Pound's Chinese translations is that so often they do contrive to capture the spirit of their originals, even when, as quite often happens, they funk or fumble the letters. For Pound, the Chinese character is a mysterious and magical unknown quantity, which sets all his faculties vibrating at the highest pitch of excitement. His pseudo-sinology releases his latent clairvoyance, just as the pseudo-sciences of the ancients sometimes gave them a supernormal insight. A Chinese text serves Pound as a receipt for the elixir served a Chinese alchemist. The result is a phenomenon of psychometry abetted by aesthetics. 1953 Kenner, Hugh : Pound never translates 'into' something already existing in English. He has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original, which permanently extends the bounds of English verse. Translation is for Pound somewhat easier than what is called 'original composition'. Many Poundian principles meet in the translator's act that the best of his translations exist in three ways, as windows into new worlds, as acts of homage, and as personae of Pound's. In the Cathay poems, Pound is at his best both as poet and as translator ; he is amazingly convincing at making the Chinese poet's world his own. 1955 Angela Jung Palandri : The redeeming feature in Pound is that even when his imagination runs wild, which is often does, he does not always go overboard by substituting the generally recognized meanings with the ones he draws out from the indeogramic analysis. Sinologists who dismiss Pound's translations as mere nonsense without a second thought actually betray their own limitations in scholarship and lack of imagination. For although apparently unorthodox and wild, Pound's interpretations are not as groundless as generally assumed. 1960 Winters, Yvor. In defence of reason. (London : Routledge, 1960). … the Chinese poets, like Pound, were primitive in their outlook, and dealt with the more obvious and uncomplicated aspects of experience ; but their outlook, though primitive, like Pound's, differed from Pound's in a richness and security of feeling within its limits – their subjects, though simple, were nevertheless more rich than any with which Pound has thus far dealt, and they lent themselves to the composition of poems longer than most which Pound has thus far attempted, so that he had an opportunity to explore the possibilities of the free verse which he had previously begun to employ whereas the Chinese translations are written in what is really 'a heavily cadenced prose that continually verges on verse without achieving it', the Cantos are written in a slow and heavily accentual verse, which at its best displays and extraordinary suavity and grace of movement. 1960 Rosenthal, M.L. A primer of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1960). The development of Pound's interest in Chinese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general. 1964 Donald Davie : As for his [Pound's] contention that no Chinese can read Chinese characters without being aware of how they are built up out of pictorial metaphors, most authorities now appear to disagree with him. It is in any case something that can be neither proven nor disproven. Just as most speakers of English use the word 'discourse' without being aware of the metaphor of running about concealed in its etymology, so one concedes that a slow-witted Chinese, or a sharp-witted Chinese in a state of fatigue, would not register the pictorial metaphors in the Chinese he was reading. The argument can then be pushed further only by unprofitably speculating on what is the statistically normal degree of slow-wittedness or exhaustion among Chinese. 1970 Akiko Miyake : Confucianism always meant for Pound the idea of order which he found lacking in his understanding of European civilization and which is particularly indispensable for constructing his counterpart of Dante's cosmos for ascending from hell to paradise in his fictitious cosmos and thereby metaphorically liberating the Platonic essence of beauty and knowledge. The most impressive fact about Pound as a poet is the way he sacrificed anything for creating his poetic contemplation and his personal mystery. The vorticist movement, through which Pound succeeded in starting the Cantos, ruined his early reputation. The obscurity of the Cantos very much impeded his career as a poet, and finally his glorification of Mussolini's regime as a part of the manifestation of his ideal provoked his long imprisonment. It is not unlikely that writing the Cantos increased his mental disorder. One cannot determine for certain whether Pound's apotheosis of Confucianism was a cause or a symptom of his mental disorder. It is spectacular to contrast his Cantos, however, which steadily proceeded with their own kind of skill. His mental disorder advanced along with his exaltation of the Confucian order, till his pro-fascist broadcasting during the war invited catastrophe. Pound pointed out the defect of Platonism for an artist and offered a correction in his ideogramic method, which is probably the first correction of Platonism through Chinese influence in history. He presented a possible parallelism between the Sung Confucians' metaphysical interpretation of Confucian classics and Christian contemplation though he worked through the vague suggestions of the former that appeared in Pauthier's text. Particularly, his paralleling of Chinese history and the Eleusinian concept of the recurrence of life is a very interesting attempt to interpret Chinese culture within a basic pattern of anthropology common to any type of culture. 1976 Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound begeistert sich für Konfuzius aus folgenden Gründen : James Legge hält viele Passagen für unverständlich ; Arthur Waley entschuldigt sich im Vorwort seiner Übersetzung des Lun yu für die Trockenheit. Die konfuzianischen Schriften sind für Pound eine Lebensphilosophie, die Summer der Weisheit. Sie sind der Schlüssel zum guten Staat und der Beginn des Denkens. Wie Konfuzius lebte Pound in einer von Kriegen erschütterten Welt, wie Konfuzius war er ein grosser, suggestiver Lehrer. Wie dieser, pflegte Pound aus der Literatur früherer Zeiten zu zitieren. Am Ende des Canto XIII und 116 deutet er an, dass er sich als Nachfolger von Konfuzius betrachtet. Pound sieht in Konfuzius einen Philosophen, der 'ideogrammatisch' denkt, d.h. der die Dinge selbst in ihren Beziehungen zur Umwelt untersucht. In sich aufgenommen hat Pound die für die konfuzianische Philosophie charakteristische Vorstellung eines Kosmos, in dem Natur und menschliche Gemeinschaft in organischer Beziehung stehen. Er macht sie – in verwandelter Form – zu dem zentralen Leitgedanken seiner konfuzianischen Übersetzungen und der Cantos. Pound sieht die Natur, die konfuzianische Ethik und die Mythologie in einem grossen, ständig fortschreitenden Prozess, und diese Gedankenverbindung erwies sich für seine Konfuzius-Übersetzungen und vor allem für seine Cantos als sehr fruchtbar. Er betonte immer wieder, dass der Westen Konfuzius brauche. Er glaubte, durch Konfuzius eine Philosophie gefunden zu haben, die sich in China und in den frühen Jahren in Amerika schon bewährt hatte. Er versucht, die konfuzianischen Ideen dynamisch im Prozess der Anwendung zu zeigen, wobei er die Schriftzeichen als lebendige Szenen darstellt. Es gelingt ihm dadurch, dem Begriff seine ursprüngliche Vitalität zurückzugeben und gleichzeitig den späteren moralischen Sinn des Wortes zu treffen. Pounds Stil ist lebendig und voller Bilder und trifft in seiner Prägnanz und Suggestionskraft oft genau das chinesische Original. Er führt bei der organischen Dekomposition die konfuzianischen Werte auf legendige Bilder und Handlungen zurück, die sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Oft erscheinen diese Werte in einer Reihe von verschiedenen Metamorphosen. Pound macht die konfuzianischen Begriffe dynamischer, präziser und wesentlich komplizierter und mehrdeutiger als im chinesischen Text. Er greift über den Kosmos hinaus, in metaphysische Bereiche und er ruft die Götter an. Er bricht den geschlossenen konfuzianischen Kreis auf und weitet ihn so, dass er sich erst im Unendlichen schliesst. Wie Konfuzius die vergessene Weisheit der Antike für seine Zeit zu neuem Leben erweckte, so vermittelt Pound dem Westen östliche Weisheit. 1980 Wesling, Donald. The chances of rhyme : device and modernity. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1980). [About the importance of Chinese syllabic metre for Ezra Pound] : Apparently Chinese, with its rhythms and excitements different from ours, cannot achieve the special expectation of syntactical delay or the pleasure frustration of the English periodic sentence. With ideograms as equal units, juncture and disjuncture are insistent, but Chinese will not display the specific track of feeling of the Western languages, which do not so strongly employ separation of the parts of the line. There are in English more units (words) in a given line ; therefore more partitions ; and therefore the line is more possessed of continuity… Thus when, as with Pound, a writer wanted the laconism of the clumped phrase, he consciously imitated, in English, the Chinese mode. 1984 Y.T. Walther : There are elements particular to Pound as a poet and to English as a language different from Chinese that have prevented Pound's ideogrammic method from procuring the desired effects. The major instrument of the ideogrammic method is the technique of juxtaposition, which is the omission of grammatical links and interpretive elements in a sentence or sentences. The common belief is that when the links or transitions are taken away, obscurity takes place. This is a misconception. Obscurity occurs only then the expectation of the complete sentence form is frustrated. The first major reason why juxtaposition creates obscurity in Pound's modern English but not in T'ang poetry is the difference in the English and Chinese reading patterns : the former constitutes an expectation of the full sentence while the latter relies much on discontinuity. The first major reason why Pound's ideogrammic method fails to communicate is that 'the traditional ways of coming into relation with each other' in the English language and thinking pattern do not yield to ideogrammic understanding. Pound's incommunicativeness is not so much a result of his using the ideogrammic method as of using it indiscriminatingly and of making it the only norm acceptable in poetry, in other word, monism. The method to Pound, is a tool to purify a poetry of 'emotional slither' that he had inherited from a previous century. 1985 Chang Yao-hsin : Pound took in his Chinese translations sufficient notice of other rhetorical figures such as simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and even allegory embedded in classical Chinese poetry. He also gave due consideration to the symmetrical structure, the refrains, and the pathetic fallacy, so conspicuously noticeable in some of the odes. A general perusal of Pound's Chinese translation of the odes reveals an unmistakable editorial bias. He wants to give an accurate, precise, and definite description. He wants to achieve direct and exact treatment and most basic economy of poetic expression. He wishes to avoid the slightest hint of a moral and artistic defection through unforgivably careless use of an unnecessary word. In fine, he intends to substantiate his imagist aesthetic and prove its efficacy as an antidote to Victorian poetics. The translation of classic Chinese poetry affords him a fine opportunity to do this, and at the suggestion of Fenollosa, he seized it with both hands. Thus the endeavor is a labor of love indeed. On the matter of translation, Pound holds that the translator should not pester the reader with superfluities of any kind which would put him further from the masterwork. Whatever Pound's weakness and however outrageous his editorial licence, he succeeds well where most translators of Chinese literature fail : he seldom puts himself between the reader and the master he undertakes to translate. Pound's work as a translator of Chinese literature made his Confucius unintelligible and ridiculous sometimes, so much so that we can not take his version of the 'Four books' seriously as a work introducing the thought system of Confucius. The moment he starts to apply the method, he ceases to be communicative and draws ridicule upon himself. In his character-analysis which is part of the 'method', he made very few lucky hits, and picked little that is germane. The Cantos, in structure, bears a clear stamp of classic Chinese poetry. We may even suggest that classic Chinese poetry may have served as an aesthetic prototype for the form of Pound's epic. Just as in a Chinese poem the characters stand at one apart and yet correlated as if by an inner cohesive force to form an organic whole, so the hundred-odd cantos juxtapose and relate to one another to add up the weird colossus of the masterwork. The influence of Confucius' philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in Confucian classic which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One of these relates to race and racial discrimination. Obviously chauvinistic, Confucius never spoke of minority nationalties in outlying areas of China except as barbarians. 1988 Chang Yao-hsin : Nostalgia for the ideal past, desire to salvage a world from total decay, and devotion to humanity proved to be the bonds that tied him and Confucius together. Whether for good or for evil, rightly or wrongly, Pound was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help him save the West. The influence of Confucius's philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in the Confucian classics which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One such issue relates to race and racial discrimination. Works of art, once completed, acquire an independent existence and invite interpretations which may not always have much to do with their creators. To say that a person with bad political ideas cannot write good poetry and thus condemn both Pound and his masterwork is perhaps as simplistic as to dismiss Wagner's music as worthless. 1996 Robert Kern : Pound Orientalized modernism, in the sense that his versions of Chinese poems became models for modernist poetry in general, both in his own work and in that of other poets as well. Pound's involvement with Chinese poetry represents a certain, probably unavoidable, neglect of its full reality as an independent and exotic cultural production. Although it provokes and enables Pound's pursuit of modernism, Chinese poetry itself is displaced as a literary tradition in its own right. Thus if Chinese poetry in our time is Pound's invention, and if that invention's most essential concern is, in fact, with 'a new kind of English poem', then what we are dealing with as Chinese poetry is something that has been produced in and by the West. The publication of Cathay ushered in a whole new era of Anglo-American regard for Chinese poetry, along with a new era of translation. To see that Cathay constitutes a watershed in the history of Chinese translation, we may consider the attitude of translators active during the period just prior to its publication, a period extending roughly from the 1880s to 1915. English translators of this era tend variously to appropriate, domesticate, or otherwise impose themselves and their culture upon Chinese texts, and there seem to be few if any explicit rules or conventions to guide the practice of translation. The writers, for the most part, introduce their work by expressing dissatisfaction with existing translations and calling for some new approach, one which will not necessarily constitute a closer approximation of the Chinese, but which will correct what they feel to be the excesses of previous translators, especially James Legge. Frequently they articulate their dissatisfactions in terms of a postromantic distinction between the scholarly and the literary or the poetic, where the former represents an uninviting literalism or a pedantic adherence to the text, thought to impede a freer, more imaginative interpretations of the material. Pound himself, who would later assume his own antischolarly stance and insist on not translating the words, was often the target of criticism directed at what was seen to be his own unseemly or ignorant deviations from the text. But if Pound appears to take the side of the poets against the scholars in this debate, a further distinction must be made between his understanding of poetic translation and that of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. Pound's distaste for literal translation makes him more responsive and responsible to other aspects of the poem, including its sequence of images, its rhythms, and its tone. It is in this sense that Pound satisfies his obligations to the original text and in this sense also that his translations become acts of homage to the poets he translates. After his reading of Fenollosa in 1913, Pound apparently came to feel that imagism is not merely a modernist style but a category or genre of poetry with a lineage as ancient as that of the lyric itself. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader, in part, by defamiliarizing his English – which means not that he translates from Chinese into English, or from a foreign idiom into a familiar one, but that he allows his English to be reordered or even disordered, for expressive purposes, by his sense of the cultural and linguistic otherness of the experience to be conveyed. Pound's interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese after Cathay takes the form as well of an increasingly intense focus on Chinese characters, also understood as universal, natural. They constitute a permanently available system of signs, and not so much a language as an authorizing source of language, more immediate to nature or things themselves than any alphabetical writing could be, and therefore less arbitrary than alphabetical scripts. Pound never abandons his own 'virtu' or creativity as a reader, regardless of whether that which is to be read is a whole text or a single ideogram. His aim is to make it new, and making it new for him means both to preserve and to reconstruct. In presenting Chinese characters, he could hardly go further toward preserving the reality of Chinese in its difference or otherness, at least from the point of view of English or Western readers. In regarding the characters as universal signs, and in tending to read them creatively, to suit his own purposes, Pound can be seen in his own way to the downplaying the difference of Chinese. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : For Pound, translation should not be 'philology', which fails to give to the literary works at hand the vitality or contemporary relevance the original had in its own time and place, but 'interpretation', where the 'translator' is definitely making a new poem. Even if Pound had been interested in philological translations of Confucian texts, he would not have been sufficiently trained in the rules of sinology to produce such a translation, and most critics writing on the subject agree that Pound's translations are wrong in many specifics. At the same time, Pound's Chinese translations have been judged favorably in respect to capturing the 'spirit' of the Chinese works. Pound's Confucian translations are extremely rich in imagery, and this is because, working with an antiquated theory about the composition of Chinese characters, he found more images in individual Chinese words than other twentieth-century sinologists do. What is essential to an understanding of Pound as a translator of Confucian texts, he did not take into account the fact that some of the elements of those words indicate the sound of the word more than, or even rather than, represent the meaning of the word pictographically. 1999 Eric Hayot : Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in an ontology of Chinese writing. Later on, Pound intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his Cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. 'Pound and China' produces various understandings of the West's relationship to China in general, understandings influenced both by literary judgments and by moral ones. 1999 Ming Xie : Both Fenollosa and Pound had consistently ignored or played down the phonetic aspect of Chinese characters in order to accentuate their primitive pictorial element. The Chinese ideogram, according to Fenollosa and Pound, is not the picture of a sound, but 'the picture of a thing'. Pound himself was perhaps both expressing his doubts about and professing his ignorance of the nature of the Chinese character. Fenollosa's ideogrammic principle seems to refer the image to the external object, which, through the mediation of the image, acts upon the human mind. Pound's Cathay versions do not seem to contain any lines or images that are made on the basis of pictorial etymology. Pound seemed always more interested in the process of perception and definition that lies behind the pictorial analogy. For him, the ideogram thus becomes the fundamental principle of poetry, and of a new mental economy in general. Pound's actual encounter with the Fenollosa materials may have been merely accidental, but Pound's own sense of his search for fundamental values in poetry and civilization was not. His Chinese adventures were not just fanciful exoticism, but a search for universal standards of 'perfection'. Pound believed that good translation should not try to replicate exactly the original experience that may be extracted from the poem and that good translation should consist in the expression of the translaros's own interpretation of the original structure of form and feeling in a new idiom. 2003 Ira B. Nadel : [Ezra Pound in Philadelphia 1889-1906].The young Ezra Pound encountered his first Chinese object, a Ming dynasty vase at Fernbrook Avenue in Wyncote, Penn. At Aunt Frank Weston's in New York, he saw a remarkable screen book, a sequence of oriental scenes adorned with poems in Chinese and Japanese ideograms. The oriental collections in the museums of Philadelphia provided additional exposure to Chinese culture, preparing Pound for his later absorption in Orientalism developed through the work of Laurence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, Nô drama, and his own study of Chinese. Family interest in China originated in Homer and Isabel Pound's concern with the work of Christian missionaries in China. Accounts of travel, religious work, and trade formed part of the family's reading. But the oriental objects in the Pound home indicate more than homage to a foreign culture with things Chinese. They represent Philadelphia's continuing attraction to the material culture of China, which had a formative role in Pound's earliest conception of the Orient. Chinese decorative and fine art formed Pound's initial encounter with China and contributed to his likely being the first major American writer to respond more to oriental art than to its literary tradition. Chinese painting and imagery acted as a catalyst for his writing and formation of his work. Pound found in the cultural heritage of Philadelphia's celebration of China the beginnings of a lifelong preoccupation with the country. 2005 Zhu Chungeng : Confucianism, Pound believes, offers a solution to the West that, from its political institutions to its economic system, has fallen into chaos and disorder. Ideology and aesthetics are inextricable. Pound also sees in Confucianism a way of making poetry in articulating his vision of a new earthly paradise. Unlike other failing metaphysical religions, Confucianism, in Pound's view, does not commit 'splitting' – the separation of ideas from the phenomenal or culture from nature. Pound considers Confucianism not just a balanced system ; he finds Confucianism particularly attractive because of Confucius's deep concern with man and culture, his focus on social and ethical issues, his emphasis on individual responsibility, and, above all, his strong commitment to realizing social order and harmony in this world. Pound embraces Confucianism also because he considers it verifiable truth obtainable through empirical experience. He repeatedly expresses his confidence in modern science, which he thinks is not only characteristic of his cosmology but also sets an example for literary study. This empirical approach is evident in his inductive aesthetics, such as his imagism or ideogrammic method, where ideas are to be expressed through the concrete particulars. Confucianism, for Pound, is entirely assimilable to his trusted 'method of modern science' as a comprehensive means of attaining verifiable truth. The objective of this procedure is to establish social order and harmony, from family all the way to the state. The Confucian master man must have self-discipline, great sensibility, and strong sense of responsibility to accomplish this objective. 2007 Sean Macdonald : Pound was merely promoting one aspect of Chinese etymology, 'xiangxing', the pictographic category for Chinese characters, and was not particularly concerned with the many other categories and forms of semantic associations. Pound's understanding of the Chinese language aside, the ideogrammic method is an obvious parallel to montage : "The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register." Pound liked to play with etymology, and he had a tendency to split words up into etymons. His ideogrammic method was, right from the outset, a way to fragment language at the basic level of vocabulary, where individual words are split into fractured juxtaposition. In addition, Pound's fractured syntax, his particular use of citation, extra-literary text, and typography, in his prose and The cantos shows clear links to avant-garde movements. For a modernist like Pound, the view of written Chinese as a script which overcomes the mediation of alphabetical writing systems seemed to justify his own view of the potential immediacy of language. On the one hand, such a view of Chinese can only be maintained at a distance : Chinese is idealized as a form of direct access to the signified, as a sort of signified in the flesh and not seen as an everyday mode of communication. On the other hand, for Pound, his appropriation of Chinese language and culture was the very least a very positive appropriation. "The Chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS", writes Pound. Pound's interests in Chinese culture changed over time, but his Confucianism shows a distinctly political streak, especially in light of his support of Mussolini's government. For Pound, Confucius and Mencius would have been a couple of good fascists. Poundian ideograms tend to work in cumulative and constractive juxtapositional clusters of text and imagery. His ideograms can be placed on a continuum of attitudes toward Chinese culture and language that goes back as far as seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in China. The association of Chinese culture with a particular modern technique cannot be dismissed as solely a modernist or avant-gardist appropriation of Chinese language and culture as primitive, or an historical curiosity. 2008 Qian Zhaoming : In Pauthier's Confucius Pound seems to have found a philosopher, a cultural hero, who shared their modernist values. While affirming social responsibility the Chinese sage also stressed the relevance of individual dignity. To Pound such a philosopher could serve as an antidote against evils in the West. 2009 Williams, R. John : In their attention to Chinese ideography, Pound and Fenollosa entirely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese writing system, fixating somewhat blindly on its more exotic secondary elements. Pound even thought that Chinese ideography was so pictographically transparent that one could decipher the characters without even knowing Chinese. But even if Pound had a few truly ideographic examples to point to, the fact is that even the most generous estimates indicate that only a handful of Chinese characters actually conform to the ideographic principles, causing us to feel naturally suspicious of Pound's propensity to speak of 'the' Chinese character. Pound's translations may have accomplished a degree of 'openness' for his Anglo-American audience in the 1920s, but, in continuing to view Pound's translations as a framework for understanding 'the' Chinese poem today creates a scandal on two fronts : First, such a view closes our eyes to the simple fact that Chinese poetry is much more than the imagistic expressionism that Pound attributed to it ; and second, it glosses over the contemporary realities that Pound ignored by continually turning to the proverbially ancient and the aesthetically ideographic. 2010 Roslyn Joy Ricci : Ezra Pound romanticized Chinese characters as ideograms, signifiers attached to the signified, bypassing language. This misunderstanding of the Chinese character became productive error by stimulating the creation of a new poetic style – ideogrammic method. The visual aesthetics of characters appealed to his creativity. The journey from complege ignorance of the composition if Chinese writer characters to sufficient understanding to appreciate their complex evolution is both challenging and rewarding. Pound saw in Chinese characters the potential to transmit generalities with both detail and succinctness – in an aesthetical appealing form. He believed that each character conveyed a concept with broad associations to the universe as a whole. He translated Chinese characters and used them in his own poetic creations with this belief in mind. What he actually did, by using the characters in isolation without character context, was to inadvertently open the boundaries of signification providing readers with the opportunity to create their own truth constructs from the details of the character. Using this premise to construct an ideogrammic poetic method allowed Pound the licence to corrupt language signification without the shackles of conventional poetic restraints. Pound strived for simplicity in his poetry, including poetry translation, but he also endeavoured to employ the most efficient medium available. He used musical notation, both ancient and modern, and symbols juxtaposed with Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, ancient Greek and Latin. Pound was a lateral thinker, decades ahead of his time. His fascination with Confucian ideology led him to Chinese characters as the storage place of this knowledge. The visual aesthetics of characters captured his imagination – turning his interest towards them. 2010 Xin Ning : Unlike professional sinologists and translators, Pound's interest in Confucianism was the direct result of his discontent with the modern Western world. His self-appointed mission was to 'civilize the Americans' with the Chinese example. He wanted to reform the West under the guidance of the wisdom of the East. His interpretation of Confucianism is a creative 'misreading' rather than a faithful introduction to the original teaching of Confucius. Pound's 'misreading' provides us with a good example of the cross-cultural dialogue between the traditional and the modern age, between China and the West, and between translation and creative writing, which demonstrates not only the individual talent of Pound as an artist and cultural figure, but also the relevance of ancient Chinese thought to the modern world as well as the possibility of this ancient cultural tradition's self-renovation. |
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| 4 | 1913 |
Pound, Ezra. A few don'ts by an Imagiste. In : Poetry ; vol. 1, no 6 (March 1913). "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of freedom from time limits and space limits ; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest work of art." 1. Direct treatment of the 'thing', whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm : to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. |
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| 5 | 1916 |
Stevens, Wallace. Three travelers watch a sunrise [ID D30295]. The characters are three Chinese, two negroes and a girl. The scene represents a forest of heavy trees on a hilltop in eastern Pennsylvania. To the right is a road, obscured by bushes. It is about four o'clock of a morning in August, at the present time. When the curtain rises, the stage is dark. The limb of a tree creaks. A negro carrying a lantern passes along the road. The sound is repeated. The negro comes through the bushes, raises his lantern and looks through the trees. Discerning a dark object among the branches, he shrinks back, crosses stage, and goes out through the wood to the left. A second negro comes through the bushes to the right. He carries two large baskets, which he places on the ground just inside of the bushes. Enter three Chinese, one of whom carries a lantern. They pause on the road. Second Chinese. All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern. [The Chinese laugh.] Third Chinese. I could find it without, On an August night, If I saw no more Than the dew on the barns. [The Second Negro makes a sound to attract their attention. The three Chinese come through the bushes. The first is short, fat, quizzical, and of middle age. The second is of middle height, thin and turning gray; a man of sense and sympathy. The third is a young man, intent, detached. They wear European clothes.] Second Chinese. [Glancing at the baskets.] Dew is water to see, Not water to drink: We have forgotten water to drink. Yet I am content Just to see sunrise again. I have not seen it Since the day we left Pekin. It filled my doorway, Like whispering women. First Chinese. And I have never seen it. If we have no water, Do find a melon for me In the baskets. [The Second Negro, who has been opening the baskets, hands the First Chinese a melon.] First Chinese. Is there no spring? [The negro takes a water bottle of red porcelain from one of the baskets and places it near the Third Chinese.] Second Chinese. [To Third Chinese.] Your porcelain water bottle. [One of the baskets contains costumes of silk, red, blue and green. During the following speeches, the Chinese put on these costumes, with the assistance of the negro, and seat themselves on the ground.] Third Chinese. This fetches its own water. [Takes the bottle and places it on the ground in the center of the stage.] I drink from it, dry as it is, As you from maxims, [To Second Chinese.] Or you from melons. [To First Chinese.] First Chinese. Not as I, from melons. Be sure of that. Second Chinese. Well, it is true of maxims. [He finds a book in the pocket of his costume, and reads from it.] "The court had known poverty and wretchedness; humanity had invaded its seclusion, with its suffering and its pity." [The limb of the tree creaks.] Yes: it is true of maxims, Just as it is true of poets, Or wise men, or nobles, Or jade. First Chinese. Drink from wise men? From jade? Is there no spring? [Turning to the negro, who has taken a jug from one of the baskets.] Fill it and return. [The negro removes a large candle from one of the baskets and hands it to the First Chinese; then takes the jug and the lantern and enters the trees to the left. The First Chinese lights the candle and places it on the ground near the water bottle.] Third Chinese. There is a seclusion of porcelain That humanity never invades. First Chinese. [With sarcasm.] Porcelain! Third Chinese. It is like the seclusion of sunrise, Before it shines on any house. First Chinese. Pooh! Second Chinese. This candle is the sun; This bottle is earth: It is an illustration Used by generations of hermits. The point of difference from reality Is this: That, in this illustration, The earth remains of one color— It remains red, It remains what it is. But when the sun shines on the earth, In reality It does not shine on a thing that remains What it was yesterday. The sun rises On whatever the earth happens to be. Third Chinese. And there are indeterminate moments Before it rises, Like this, [With a backward gesture.] Before one can tell What the bottle is going to be— Porcelain, Venetian glass, Egyptian … Well, there are moments When the candle, sputtering up, Finds itself in seclusion, [He raises the candle in the air.] And shines, perhaps, for the beauty of shining. That is the seclusion of sunrise Before it shines on any house. [Replacing the candle.] First Chinese. [Wagging his head.] As abstract as porcelain. Second Chinese. Such seclusion knows beauty As the court knew it The court woke In its windless pavilions, And gazed on chosen mornings, As it gazed On chosen porcelain. What the court saw was always of the same color, And well shaped, And seen in a clear light. [He points to the candle.] It never woke to see, And never knew, The flawed jars, The weak colors, The contorted glass. It never knew The poor lights. [He opens his book significantly.] When the court knew beauty only, And in seclusion, It had neither love nor wisdom. These came through poverty And wretchedness, Through suffering and pity. [He pauses.] It is the invasion of humanity That counts. [The limb of the tree creaks. The First Chinese turns, for a moment, in the direction of the sound.] First Chinese. [Thoughtfully.] The light of the most tranquil candle Would shudder on a bloody salver. Second Chinese. [With a gesture of disregard.] It is the invasion That counts. If it be supposed that we are three figures Painted on porcelain As we sit here, That we are painted on this very bottle, The hermit of the place, Holding this candle to us, Would wonder; But if it be supposed That we are painted as warriors, The candle would tremble in his hands; Or if it be supposed, for example, That we are painted as three dead men, He could not see the steadiest light, For sorrow. It would be true If an emperor himself Held the candle. He would forget the porcelain For the figures painted on it. Third Chinese. [Shrugging his shoulders.] Let the candle shine for the beauty of shining. I dislike the invasion And long for the windless pavilions. And yet it may be true That nothing is beautiful Except with reference to ourselves, Nor ugly, Nor high, [Pointing to the sky.] Nor low. [Pointing to the candle.] No: not even sunrise. Can you play of this [Mockingly to First Chinese.] For us? [He stands up.] First Chinese. [Hesitatingly.] I have a song Called Mistress and Maid. It is of no interest to hermits Or emperors, Yet it has a bearing; For if we affect sunrise, We affect all things. Third Chinese. It is a pity it is of women. Sing it. [He takes an instrument from one of the baskets and hands it to the First Chinese, who sings the following song, accompanying himself, somewhat tunelessly, on the instrument. The Third Chinese takes various things out of the basket for tea. He arranges fruit. The First Chinese watches him while he plays. The Second Chinese gazes at the ground. The sky shows the first signs of morning.] First Chinese. The mistress says, in a harsh voice, "He will be thinking in strange countries Of the white stones near my door, And I—I am tired of him." She says sharply, to her maid, "Sing to yourself no more." Then the maid says, to herself, "He will be thinking in strange countries Of the white stones near her door; But it is me he will see At the window, as before. "He will be thinking in strange countries Of the green gown I wore. He was saying good-by to her." The maid drops her eyes and says to her mistress, "I shall sing to myself no more." Third Chinese. That affects the white stones, To be sure. [They laugh.] First Chinese. And it affects the green gown. Second Chinese. Here comes our black man. [The Second Negro returns, somewhat agitated, with water but without his lantern. He hands the jug to the Third Chinese. The First Chinese from time to time strikes the instrument. The Third Chinese, who faces the left, peers in the direction from which the negro has come.] Third Chinese. You have left your lantern behind you. It shines, among the trees, Like evening Venus in a cloud-top. [The Second Negro grins but makes no explanation. He seats himself behind the Chinese to the right.] First Chinese. Or like a ripe strawberry Among its leaves. [They laugh.] I heard tonight That they are searching the hill For an Italian. He disappeared with his neighbor's daughter. Second Chinese. [Confidingly.] I am sure you heard The first eloping footfall, And the drum Of pursuing feet. First Chinese. [Amusedly.] It was not an elopement. The young gentleman was seen To climb the hill, In the manner of a tragedian Who sweats. Such things happen in the evening. He was Un misérable. Second Chinese. Reach the lady quickly. [The First Chinese strikes the instrument twice as a prelude to his narrative.] First Chinese. There are as many points of view From which to regard her As there are sides to a round bottle. [Pointing to the water bottle.] She was represented to me As beautiful. [They laugh. The First Chinese strikes the instrument, and looks at the Third Chinese, who yawns.] First Chinese. [Reciting.] She was as beautiful as a porcelain water bottle. [He strikes the instrument in an insinuating manner.] First Chinese. She was represented to me As young. Therefore my song should go Of the color of blood. [He strikes the instrument. The limb of the tree creaks. The First Chinese notices it and puts his hand on the knee of the Second Chinese, who is seated between him and the Third Chinese, to call attention to the sound. They are all seated so that they do not face the spot from which the sound comes. A dark object, hanging to the limb of the tree, becomes a dim silhouette. The sky grows constantly brighter. No color is to be seen until the end of the play.] Second Chinese. [To First Chinese.] It is only a tree Creaking in the night wind. Third Chinese. [Shrugging his shoulders.] There would be no creaking In the windless pavilions. First Chinese. [Resuming.] So far the lady of the present ballad Would have been studied By the hermit and his candle With much philosophy; And possibly the emperor would have cried, "More light!" But it is a way with ballads That the more pleasing they are The worse end they come to; For here it was also represented That the lady was poor— The hermit's candle would have thrown Alarming shadows, And the emperor would have held The porcelain in one hand … She was represented as clinging To that sweaty tragedian, And weeping up the hill. Second Chinese. [With a grimace.] It does not sound like an elopement. First Chinese. It is a doleful ballad, Fit for keyholes. Third Chinese. Shall we hear more? Second Chinese. Why not? Third Chinese. We came for isolation, To rest in sunrise. Second Chinese. [Raising his book slightly.] But this will be a part of sunrise, And can you tell how it will end?— Venetian, Egyptian, Contorted glass … [He turns toward the light in the sky to the right, darkening the candle with his hands.] In the meantime, the candle shines, [Indicating the sunrise.] As you say, [To the Third Chinese.] For the beauty of shining. First Chinese. [Sympathetically.] Oh! it will end badly. The lady’s father Came clapping behind them To the foot of the hill. He came crying, "Anna, Anna, Anna!" [Imitating.] He was alone without her, Just as the young gentleman Was alone without her: Three beggars, you see, Begging for one another. [The First Negro, carrying two lanterns, approaches cautiously through the trees. At the sight of him, the Second Negro, seated near the Chinese, jumps to his feet. The Chinese get up in alarm. The Second Negro goes around the Chinese toward the First Negro. All see the body of a man hanging to the limb of the tree. They gather together, keeping their eyes fixed on it. The First Negro comes out of the trees and places the lanterns on the ground. He looks at the group and then at the body.] First Chinese. [Moved.] The young gentleman of the ballad. Third Chinese. [Slowly, approaching the body.] And the end of the ballad. Take away the bushes. [The negroes commence to pull away the bushes.] Second Chinese. Death, the hermit, Needs no candle In his hermitage. [The Second Chinese snuffs out the candle. The First Chinese puts out the lanterns. As the bushes are pulled away, the figure of a girl, sitting half stupefied under the tree, suddenly becomes apparent to the Second Chinese and then to the Third Chinese. They step back. The negroes move to the left. When the First Chinese sees the girl, the instrument slips from his hands and falls noisily to the ground. The girl stirs.] Second Chinese. [To the girl.] Is that you, Anna? [The girl starts. She raises her head, looks around slowly, leaps to her feet and screams.] Second Chinese. [Gently.] Is that you, Anna? [She turns quickly toward the body, looks at it fixedly and totters up the stage.] Anna. [Bitterly.] Go. Tell my father: He is dead. [The Second and Third Chinese support her. The First Negro whispers to the First Chinese, then takes the lanterns and goes through the opening to the road, where he disappears in the direction of the valley.] First Chinese. [To Second Negro.] Bring us fresh water From the spring. [The Second Negro takes the jug and enters the trees to the left. The girl comes gradually to herself. She looks at the Chinese and at the sky. She turns her back toward the body, shuddering, and does not look at it again.] Anna. It will soon be sunrise. Second Chinese. One candle replaces Another. [The First Chinese walks toward the bushes to the right. He stands by the roadside, as if to attract the attention of anyone passing.] Anna. [Simply.] When he was in his fields, I worked in ours— Wore purple to see; And when I was in his garden I wore gold ear-rings. Last evening I met him on the road. He asked me to walk with him To the top of the hill. I felt the evil, But he wanted nothing. He hanged himself in front of me. [She looks for support. The Second and Third Chinese help her toward the road. At the roadside, the First Chinese takes the place of the Third Chinese. The girl and the two Chinese go through the bushes and disappear down the road. The stage is empty except for the Third Chinese. He walks slowly across the stage, pushing the instrument out of his way with his foot. It reverberates. He looks at the water bottle.] Third Chinese. Of the color of blood … Seclusion of porcelain … Seclusion of sunrise … [He picks up the water bottle.] The candle of the sun Will shine soon On this hermit earth. [Indicating the bottle.] It will shine soon Upon the trees, And find a new thing [Indicating the body.] Painted on this porcelain, [Indicating the trees.] But not on this. [Indicating the bottle.] [He places the bottle on the ground. A narrow cloud over the valley becomes red. He turns toward it, then walks to the right. He finds the book of the Second Chinese lying on the ground, picks it up and turns over the leaves.] Red is not only The color of blood, Or [Indicating the body.] Of a man's eyes, Or [Pointedly.] Of a girl's. And as the red of the sun Is one thing to me And one thing to another, So it is the green of one tree [Indicating.] And the green of another, Which without it would all be black. Sunrise is multiplied, Like the earth on which it shines, By the eyes that open on it, Even dead eyes, As red is multiplied by the leaves of trees. [Toward the end of this speech, the Second Negro comes from the trees to the left, without being seen. The Third Chinese, whose back is turned toward the negro, walks through the bushes to the right and disappears on the road. The negro looks around at the objects on the stage. He sees the instrument, seats himself before it and strikes it several times, listening to the sound. One or two birds twitter. A voice, urging a horse, is heard at a distance. There is the crack of a whip. The negro stands up, walks to the right and remains at the side of the road. The curtain falls slowly.] Sekundärliteratur David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : The play realize that the Second and the Third Chinese are two personae of Stevens himself. At least, they represent two aspects of Stevens' view toward art and life. White the Second Chinese may represent Stevens the pure aesthete, the Third Chinese complements him as Stevens the humanist. |
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| 6 | 1920-1966 |
Moore, Marianne. The complete poems [ID D30312]. 1920 Moore, Marianne. Picking and choosing. In : Dial ; April (1920). … Gordon Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine", with his three wise men, his "sad French greens", and his "Chinese cherry"… 1921 Moore, Marianne. England. In : Moore, Marianne. Poems. (London : The Egoist Press, 1921). “…The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language…” 1921 Marianne Moore. He made this screen. In : Moore, Marianne. Poems. (London : The Egoist Press, 1921). He made this screen not of silver nor of coral, but of weatherbeaten laurel. Here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry; here, a fig-tree; there, a face; there, a dragon circling space -- designating here, a bower; there, a pointed passion-flower. 1922 Moore, Marianne. People's surroundings. In : Dial ; June (1922). …When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use ; the highway hid by fir trees in rhododendron twenty feet deep, the peacocks, hand-forged gates, old Persian velvet, roses outlined in pale black on an ivory ground, the pierced iron shadows of the cedars, Chinese carved glass, old Waterford, lettered ladies ; landscape gardening twisted into permanence… a green piece of tough translucent parchment, where the crimson, the copper, and the Chinese vermilion of the poincianas set fire to the masonry and turquoise blues refute the clock… 1923 Moore, Marianne. Bowls. In : Secession ; no 6 (July 1923). on the green with lignum vitae balls and ivory markers, the pins planted in wild duck formation, and quickly dispersed – by this survival of ancient punctilio in the manner of Chinese carved carving, layer after layer exposed by certainty of touch and unhurried incision… 1923 Moore, Marianne. Novices. In : The chapbook : a monthly miscellany ; no 36 (April 1923). … averse from the antique with "that tinge of sadness about it which a reflective mind always feels, it is so little and so much"… Note : Line 15 : "The Chinese objects of art and porcelain disperses by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson on the 18th had that tinge of sadness which a reflective minde always feels ; it is so little and so much". Arthur Hadyn, Illustrated London News, February 26, 1921. 1924 Moore, Marianne. Sea unicorns and land unicorns. In : Dial ; Nov. (1924). …Thus personalities by nature much opposed, can be combined in such a way that when they do agree, their unanimity is great, "in politics, in trade, law, sport, religion, China-collecting, tennis, and church-going". 1924 Moore, Marianne. Well moused, lion. In : The Dial ; no 76 (Jan. 1924). Review of Stevens, Wallace. Harmonium. (New York, N.Y. : A.A. Knopf, 1923). http://www.jstor.org/stable/441107. … One feels, however, an achieved remoteness as in Tu Muh's [Du Mu] lyric criticism. : "Powerful is the painting… and high is it hung on the spotless wall in the lofty hall of your mansion"… In his positiveness, aplomb, and verbal security, he has the mind and the method of China ; in such controversial effects as : Of what was it I was thinking ? So the meaning escapes… 1932 Moore, Marianne. No swan so fine. In : Poetry ; vol. 41, no 1 (Oct. 1932). "No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." No swan, with swart blind look askance and gondoliering legs, so fine as the chinz china one with fawn¬ brown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. Oswald, Elaine ; Gale, Robert L. On Marianne Moore’s life and career. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/life.htm "No Swan So Fine" suggests that a beautiful china swan, symbol of art, has serenely outlasted Louis XV of France, its cocky whilom owner. 1933 Moore, Marianne. The plumet basilisk. In : Hound & horn ; vol. 7, no 1 (Oct/Dec. 1933). In Costa Rica In blazing driftwood the green keeps showing at the same place ; as, intermittently, the fire opal shows blue and green. In Costa Rica the true Chinese lizard face is found, of the amphibious falling dragon, the living firework… As by a Chinese brush, eight green bands are painted on the tail – as piano keys are barred by five black stripes across the white… Note : Lines 13-15 : Frank Davis, 'The Chinese Dragon', Illustrated London News, August 23, 1930 : "He is the god of Rain, and the Ruler of Rivers, Lakes, and Seas. For six months of the year he hibernates in the depths of the sea, living in beautiful palaces … We learn from a book of the T'ang Dynasty that 'it may cause itself to become visible or invisible at will, and it can become long or short, and coarse or fine, at its good pleasure'." A dragon "is either born a dragon (and true dragons have nine sons) or becomes one by transformation." There is a "legend of the carp that try to climb a certain cataract in the western hills. Those that succeed become dragon." Sekundärliteratur 1999 Cynthia Stami : In an early manuscript version of 'The plumet basiliks' Moore included four additional stanzas. These lines show that Asia, and particularly China, provide a source of that myth and story so critical to establishing this remove : "This is the feather basilisk of travellers' tales, of which a pair stood bodyguard beside Confucius' crib : aquatic thing lizard-fairy detested by such dragonhood as Michael fought." "When two plumet territories touch, the masters of them are dramatic without shedding blood, exerting charm as Chinese dragon – whiskers in a crystal handle charm ; or as thick- flowering orchids gather dragons, in the East, by forming clouds for them." 1934 Moore, Marianne. Nine nectarines. In : Poetry ; vol. 45, no 2 (Nov. 1934). Arranged by two's as peaches are, at the intervals that all may live – eight and a single one, on twigs that grew the year before – they look like a derivative ; although not uncommonly the opposite is seen – nine peaches on a nectarine. Fuzzless through slender crescent leaves Of green or blue or both, in the Chinese style, the four pairs' half-moon leaf-mosaic turns out to the sun the sprinkled blush of puce-American-Beauty pink applied to beeswax gray by the uninquiring brush of mercantile bookbinding. like the peach 'Yu', the red- cheeked peach which cannot aid the dead, but eaten in time prevents death, the Italian peach nut, Persian plum, Ispahan secluded wall-grown nectarine, as wild spontaneous fruit was found in China first. But was it wild ? Prudent de Candolle would not say. One perceives no flaws in this emblematic group of nine, with leaf window unquilted by 'curculio' which someone once depicted on this much-mended plate or in the also accurate unantlered moose or Iceland horse or ass asleep against the old thick, low-leaning nectarine that is the color of the shrub-tree's brownish flower. A Chinese "understands the spirit of the wilderness" and the nectarine-loving kylin of pony appearance – the long- tailed or the tailless small cinnarmon-brown, common camel-haired unicorn with antelope feet and no horn, here enameled on porcelain. It was a Chinese Who imagined this masterpiece. Notes : (1) "The Chinese believe the oval peaches which are very red on one side, to be a symbol of long life… According to the word of Chin-noug-king, the peach 'Yu' prevents death. If it is not eaten in time, it at least preserves the body from decay until the end of the world." Alphonse de Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants (Appleton, 1886 ; Hafner, 1959). (2) New York Sun, July 2, 1932. The World Today, by Edgar Snow, from Soochow, China. "An old gentleman of China, whom I met when I first came to this country, volunteered to name for me what he called the 'six certainties'. He said : 'You may be sure that the clearest jade comes from Yarkand, the prettiest flowers from Szechuen, the most fragile porcelain from Kingtehchen, the finest tea from Fukien, the sheerest silk from Hangchow, and the most beautiful women from Soochow." (3) Line 41 : Kylin (or Chinese unicorn). Frank Davis, Illustrated London News, March 7, 1931. "It has the body of a stag, with a single horn, the tail of a cow, horses's hoofs, a yellow belly, and hair of five colours." Sekundärliteratur 1971-1972 David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : "Nine nectarines" was originally entitled "Nine nectarines and other porcelain". The might have gained her knowledge of the kylin not only through the Illustrated London news but also through her coinnoisseurship of Chinese porcelain. Moore introduces to her American readers a familiar symbol in classical Chinese art, 'the nectuarine-loving kylin, better known to the Chinese as the qilin, the fabulous beast resembles the Chinese dragon in its appearance. That the kylin is gentle evene benevolent is attested by a description in the Shi jing. Because a kylin 'was seen just before the birth of Confucius', it is regarded as a personal emblem of Confucius. 1995 Lina Unali : The poem is an appreciation of Chinese culture, of Chinese porcelain, of the objects painted on it, of their significance. At the root of Moore's inspiration there is always a need to communicate a dynamic discovery of new values objectified in natural elements and in artefacts, the products of artistic of literary creation. Her attitude is fully positive, surprised, enchanted. 1999 Cynthia Stamy : Moore used only a single Chinese word, in 'Nine nectarines' referring to the 'yu' peach to which the Chinese attribute longevity and life-saving qualities. If she did not understand the fundamentals of pronunciation of the Chinese language, then it is likely that this syllable functioned for her as a proper noun or as and adjective. 2003 Qian Zhaoming : In June 1934, when Moore sent her poem Nine nectarines to 'Poetry' to be published together with The Buffalo, she offered the title 'Imperious ox, imperial dish' for both pieces. Evidently she was aware that her objet d'art adorned with a nectarine or peach motif was once a dish reserved in China for imperial use. Her image goes beyond a single picture to include features of several peach motifs on Ming-Qing wares. 2006 Victoria Bazin : In Nine nectarines the dialectic of the exotic and the everyday is embedded in the Chinese porcelain plate or, more specifically, the image depicted by the Chinese artist on the plate. The poem is a tribute to the art of the Chinese, then in terms of its sources, it becomes possible to trace the exotic back to its everyday origins. The poem reinforces 'china' as a site of exotic difference by repeatedly pointing to its own difficulties in translating this ancient art into its own Western terms. The attempt to translate pictures into words is compared to the attempts of the Western speaker to understand the inscrutable culture of the Orient. Subjects, verbs and conjunctives are excluded from a language intent on reproducing itself as a materially dense and complex moment rather than a sequential narrative. Yet the poem falters frequently in its attempt to imitate its graphic counterpart. In spite of itself, it offers information that refers to narrative sequence and chronology noting that the nectarines grow 'on twigs that grew the year before'. The art of the Chinese becomes not a form of enquiry or 'observation' but a distillation of something ancient, mystical and ultimately untranslatable. The accuracy of the Chinese artist's representational scene is linked rhetorically to the peach, the fruit that, according to Chinese lore, 'cannot aid the dead, but eaten in time prevents death'. Moore's poem is inscribed by the desire, producing an idealized image of Chinese art that is unfathomable and therefore beyond the reach of modernity's rationalizing processes. 'China' represents a Western and distinctly modernist fantasy of ideological immunity, signaling both the desire for and the impossibility of art forms 'untouched' by modernity. The attempt to resist co-opting 'China' to maintain its otherness, its distinctiveness from the Western imagination only serves to reveal the extent to which it is not 'a Chinese who imagined this masterpiece'. 1935 Moore, Marianne. Half deity. In : Direction ; no. 1 (Jan.-March 1935). Defeated but encouraged by each new gust of wind, forced by the summer sun to plant, she stands on rug-soft grass ; though some are not permitted to gaze informally on majesty in such a manner as she is gazing here. Moore, Marianne. Note to Half deity in What are years (1941). The note cites an interview by Edmund Gillian : 'Meeting the Emperor Pu Yi' (New York Sun ; no 1, Dec. 1934) and Pu Yi's remark : 'It is not permitted'. Sekundärliteratur Cynthia Stamy : The half deity is also 'half worm' – a butterfly. The poem takes on a parallel significance, reflecting on the unnatural restrictions which imperial life in China imposed. 1941 Moore, Marianne. He "Digesteth Harde Yron". In : Partisan review ; vol. 8, no 4 (1941). He "Digesteth Harde Yron" …in S¬like foragings as he is preening the down on his leaden-¬skinned back. The egg piously shown as Leda's very own from which Castor and Pollux hatched, was an ostrich¬ egg. And what could have been more fit for the Chinese lawn it grazed on as a gift to an emperor who admired strange birds, than this one who builds his mud-made nest in dust yet will wade in lake or sea till only the head shows. 1941 Moore, Marianne. Smooth gnarled crape myrtle. In : Moore, Marianne. The collected poems. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1941). A brass-green bird with grass- green throat smooth as a nut springs from twig to twig askew, copying the Chinese flower piece – business-like atom in the stiff- leafed tree's blue- pink dregs-of-wine pyramids of mathematic circularity… as in the acrobat Li Siau Than, gibbon-like but limberer, defying gravity, nether side arched up, cup on head not upset – China's very most ingenious man. 1951 Moore, Marianne. Critics and connoisseurs. In : Moore, Marianne. Collected poems. (New York, N.Y. ; Macmillan, 1951). There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. Certain Ming products, imperial floor coverings of coach- wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something that I like better… 1956 Moore, Marianne. Logic and "the magic flute". In : Moore, Marianne. Like a bulwark. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1956). Up winding stair, here, where, in what theater lost ? was I seeing a ghost – a reminder at least of a sunbeam or moonbeam that has not a waist ? by hasty hop or accomplished mishap, the magic flute and harp somehow confused themselves with China's precious wentletrap… 1956 Moore, Marianne. Tom Fool at Jamaica. In : Moore, Marianne. Like a bulwark. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1956). "Chance is a regrettable impurity." Sekundärliteratur David Hsin-Fu Wand : Marianne Moore has the habit of quoting from other writers, including such lines from the Yi jing. 1959 Moore, Marianne. O to be a dragon. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1959). If I, like Solomon, … could have my wish – my wish … O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven – of silkworm size or immense ; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon ! Note : Dragon : see secondary symbols, Volume II of The Tao of Painting, translated and edited by Mai-mai Sze, Bollingen Series 49 (New York : Pantheon, 1956 ; Modern Library edition, p. 57). Sekundärliteratur 1972 David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : Moore was appropriating a symbol commonly found in both classical Chinese art and literature. For the dragon as a symbol in her poetry is not the evil Occidental dragon, it is the benevolent Chinese dragon which befriends the people, and especially the framers, to whom it brings rain and fertile crops. Moore's wish 'to be a dragon' is an invocation to 'the power of heaven' to help her become adaptable or flexible in her own writing. Although she uses the symbol of the Chinese dragon, she does not sound like any classical Chinese poet. This is because the form and rhythm of her poem are idiosyncratically Moore's and do not bear the slightest resemblance to those of any Chinese poem. She utilized the Chinese symbol to serve her own purpose, since she harnesses the Chinese dragon as her muse in her poetic journey. 1995 Lina Unali : Moore describes the mythical animal of the Chinese tradition as a symbol of power and expresses her wish to identify with it. The meaning of the poem is to be found in the relationship between two different artistic and intellectual experiences, both acquired by the poet, that of the Chinese iconographic tradition and of Taoism as expounded by Chinese masters such as Laozi and Zhuangzi. In Moore the dragon became the emblem of a multiplicity of elements that she probably felt Western culture had not been able convincingly to produce though most of her favourite animals shared some of the traits of the Chinese dragon. In her poetic imagination the dragon's power lies in the immense number of its often contrasting all-positive capacities. The dragon is interpreted by Moore as a powerful symbol of all beneficent tendencies, of all vitality, beauty, respect for human life, elevation, power on earth and in the heavens. 1999 Cynthia Stamy : Moore chose from among several species of a dragon the 'long' dragon, a bringer of rain and a whimsical spirit of changeable aspect. 1962 Moore, Marianne. Blue bug. In : The New Yorker ; May 26 (1962). … bug brother to an Arthur Mitchell dragonfly, speeding to left, speeding to right ; reversible, like "turns in an ancient Chinese melody, a thirteen twisted silk-string three-finger solo". There they are, Yellow River-scroll accuracies. 1966 Moore, Marianne. Tell me, tell me. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1966). … It appeared : gem, burnished rarity and peak of delicacy – in contrast with grievance touched off on any ground – the absorbing geometry of a fantasy : a James, Miss Potter, Chinese "passion for the particular", of a Tired man who yet, at dusk, Cut a masterpiece of cerise… |
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| 7 | 1923 |
Stevens, Wallace. Six significant landscapes [ID D30307]. I An old man sits In the shadow of a pine tree In China. He sees larkspur, Blue and white, At the edge of the shadow, Move in the wind. His beard moves in the wind. The pine tree moves in the wind. Thus water flows Over weeds. II The night is of the colour Of a woman's arm: Night, the female, Obscure, Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself. A pool shines, Like a bracelet Shaken in a dance. III I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way ants crawl In and out of my shadow. IV When my dream was near the moon, The white folds of its gown Filled with yellow light. The soles of its feet Grew red. Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations From stars, Not far off. V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves. VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses -- As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -- Rationalists would wear sombreros. Sekundärliteratur : 1972 David Happell Hsin-Fu Wand : Stevens' 'significant landscape' of the old Chinese in the pine shade projects the 'inner scene' of a man who is Taoist in his orientation through a careful selection of such details as the wind, the water, and the flowing beard. In the context of the poem, everything flows naturally – with the larkspur, the beard, and the pine tree moving in the wind and the water over the weeds. Stevens' choice of such traditional Chinese symbols in landscape paintings as the pine and the water is well justified in his poem. For the gnarled pine, a traditional symbol of longevity in Chinese paintings, underscores the 'venerable' age of the old man. The water image augments the theme of the fluidity of all living matter, as typified by the spontaneous movement of the larkspur, the pine, and the old man's beard in the wind. 1997 Qian Zhaoming : In this poem, Chinese landscape painting is represented in several ways by focus on a single point of sight ('An old man' gazing out forever at those gazing at him) ; by choice of subject of all that is most elemental in nature and in Chinese landscape painting ('a pine tree', 'larkspur', 'wind', 'water' and 'weeds', by reliance on a few simple strokes of description and by an almost monochrome tonality of gray and blue and white ('shadow' and 'blue and white') that is known to have dominated Chinese landscape painting in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. The poem, like the Chinese painting represents, portrays a single impression : consciousness of the unity of all created things. The style and sentiment presented a particular school – the Southern Song landscape painting. The work of this school is valued today especially for its power of illustrating obtuse and enigmatic aesthetic beliefs shared by Taoists and Chan Buddhists. One painting that matches Stevens' poem to the smallest detail is the handscroll 'A sage under a pine tree', a thirteenth-century imitation of a masterpiece attributed to Ma Yuan in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2003 Qian Zhaoming : If Chinese landscape painting aiming to communicate the spirit of Chan or the Dao has a traditional scene. First of all, the old man in Stevens's ekphrastic poem, as in the kind of Song landscape painting it endeavors to emulate, appears sitting in meditation, that is, in a state of active tranquility that opens the way to enlightenment. Second, the figure is shown to be perfectly in harmony with nature. Third, the flowing water in the scene is a perfect symbol of the Dao. |
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| 8 | 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. |
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| 9 | 1950- |
Gary Snyder and China : general Quellen [Chinese and Buddhist literature]. Chang, Kwang-chih. The archaeology of ancient China [ID D13609]. Confucius. [Texts]. Elvin, Mark. The pattern of the Chinese past [ID D12822]. Fenollosa, Ernest. Epoch of Chinese and Japanese art [ID D5101]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry [ID D22141]. Frodsham, John D. The murmuring stream [ID D19382]. Gernet, Jacques. Daily life in China on the eve of the Mongol invasion. (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1962). Grousset, René. The empire of the steppes. (New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 1970). Kahn, Paul. The secret history of the Mongols : the origin of Chinghis Khan : an adaptation of the Yuan ch'ao pi shih. (Berkeley, Calif. : North Point Press, 1984). Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. Laozi. Dao de jing. Marco Polo. The travels. (New York, N.Y. : Penguin, 1958). Needham, Joseph. Science and civilisation in China. Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201]. Pound, Ezra. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Fairbank, John K. ; Reischauer, Edwin O. East Asia [ID D8482]. Hawkes, David. Chu ci : the songs of the South [ID D14573]. Sherman, E. Lee ; Wen, Fong. Streams and mountains without end. In : Artibus Asiae (1976). Siréen, Osvald. The Chinese on the art of painting [ID D29304]. Sowerby, Arthur de Carle. Nature in Chinese art. (New York, N.Y. : John Day, 1940). Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Records of the grand historian [ID D10059]. Su, Tung-p'o [Su, Shi]. Su Tung-p'o : selections from a Sung dynasty poet [ID D10954]. Sullivan, Michael. On the origins of landscape representation in Chinese art. In : Archives of the Chinese Art society of America ; vol. 7 (1953). Sze, Mai Mai. The way of Chinese landscape painting. (New York, N.Y. : Vintage, 1959). Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. [Texts]. Tang shi san bai shou du ben. [300 Tang poems]. 唐詩三百首讀本 Tuan, Yi-fu. China. (Chicago, Ill. : Aldine, 1970). Waley, Arthur. [Translations of Chinese poetry]. Watson, Burton. Chinese lyricism [ID D10951]. Yoshikawa, Kôjirô. An introduction to Song poetry [ID D10945]. Zhuangzi. [Works]. Sekundärliteratur 1972 Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael] : Gary Snyder found in classical Chinese poetry in translation a sense of the harmony of man and nature 'better and to me more accurate than anything in English or Western poetry tradition'. Being a mountain-climber, Snyder finds a spiritual affinity with the Chinese landscape poet Xie Lingyun. He also admires Wang Wei and Yuan Zhen. Snyder finds no simple rule or rules for translating Chinese poetry. Being a Buddhist like Wang Wei and Wei Yinwu and being steeped in the tradition of China, whose culture he has studied, he is adequately trained to be their interpreter. Believing fully that 'whatever is or ever was in any other culture can reconstructed from the unconscious through [Zen] meditation. Snyder subscribes to the theory that a poet is a medium through whom other voices or spirits would distill and speak. Being thoroughly immersed in the translation and explication of Chinese poets as Han Shan, Wang Wei and Wei Yingwu, he penetrated into the essence of these classical Chinese poets and emerges as their twentieth-century American medium. Totally identified with them in his Zen outlook and sensibility, he not only lends the Chinese poets his voice but also fuses with them so skillfully as to make us wonder if he were their poetic reincarnation. With his Taoist-Zen orientation, Snyder believes only in the constancy of flux. Just as the Taoists believe that water is the highest good, because it is characterized by eternal fluidity, Snyder subscribes to no fixed principle about prosody, but tacitly agrees that organicity and spontaneity are the bases of satisfactory rhythm in poetry. As the rhythm of the Chinese poems is totally incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the sound pattern and tonal variations of the Chinese language, a knowledge of Chinese prosody might have contributed to Snyder's use of syllabic count and stress patterns in some of his short poems. Snyder has learned a lesson from classical Chinese poets. And this lesson can by summarized as : make the poem as compressed as possible and omit all words that do not absolutely contribute to the image. 1986 Yip Wai-lim : It is no accident that Snyders early Amerindian studies, his love for Taoism and Chinese landscape poetry and his Ch'an Buddhist training all converge into one center of awareness where man becomes truly 'moral' by trusting his natural being and by 'following the grain'. The primitive mode of perception of nature was concrete, viewing things as holistically self-complete ; it was a state of total harmony between man and nature before polarization. The Taoist philosophy and esthetic at work in Chinese landscape poetry seeks the restoration of the original mode of perception, giving back to things their own status and their natural endowment and function, allowing them to emerge from their silent world as self-generating, self-conditioning, self-complete beings. In Snyder's paraphrase, this is 'the non-human, non-verbal world, which is the world of nature as nature is itself, before language, before custom, before culture. Ch'an Buddhism, which also give primacy to this world, attempts to teach man, through intuition and poetic flashes in the form of 'kung-an (koan), to live and function within nature's way ; to do this by a process of dispossessing the partial and reduced forms that intellectualization has imposed upon him and which has thus distorted his original commerce with nature's potentials. For Snyder, the underlying principle is the complete awareness of all the beings in Nature as 'self-so-complete' or 'tzu-jan' as the Taoists and the Chan Buddhists would say. It is upon this ground that a new humanism is to be built or rebuilt. 2007 Robin Chen-hsing Tsai : Snyder claims that Christianity desacralizes nature. His knowledge of nature, along with his life experience and proclivity toward direct action, leads to his dual vision of verse-making : 'A poet faces two directions : one is to the world of people and language and man and society, and the other is to the nonhuman, nonverbal world, which is nature as nature is itself, and the world of human nature – the inner world – as it is itself, before language, before custom, before culture'. From a Zen-Buddhist perspective, the poet is strongly convinced that 'the notion of emptiness engenders compassion. Snyder's idealization of the other stems from his deep involvement with the cultural other in/of Eastern thinking, including (Tibetan) Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism (in China and Japan). He writes poetry so as to arouse our 'ecological consciousness' in response to the call of the other. Generall speaking, Snyder's notions of the other are threefold : 1) the human other ; 2) the nonhuman other ; 3) the 'other in the self' or ecological unconscious, 'the wild'. Snyder is both romantic and anti-romantic in his attitude toward 'freedom' in nature, in part because the art of the wild, being 'abyssal', 'disorderly', and 'chaotic'. He looks to the East for religious and cultural inspiration, hoping that the Zen Buddhist's conception of compassion will help achieve and East-West fusion. 2009 Robin Cheng-hsing Tsai : Gary Snyder was much influenced by the Beat generation and countercultural movement of the fifties and sixties, which closely linked anti-establisment politics with non-Western (especially Asian) religions and modes of thought. He attempts to sensitize us to the constant disruptions of our environment by rationalized, capitalist and essentially Western technology. Poet and translator as well as radical ecologist, anarchist-pacifist and Native American mythographer, Snyder was also a disciple of Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism. These cross-fertilizing influences form the basis of his eco-poetics. Snyder's translation of Chinese literature, in particular poetry and Buddhist scriptures, has been instrumental in (re)shaping his imagination of the local and the global. His interest in Asian texts and philosophies has been a crucial element in his expression of a transcultural, post-civilizational, post-human 'culture of wildness'. In Snyder's view, Western discourse of the human and social sciences has been uncritical of the centrality it has historically accorded to culture, civilization and man. A very important 'Other-culture' for Snyder is ancient China. In addition to its Daoist-Buddhist spiritual values, which recognize the vital importance and centrality of the earth in a way that the Western or Middle Eastern monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) do not. Chinese civilization has a very old writing system that includes historical, religious-philosophical and literary texts. This means that the rich ancient culture of China is readily 'translatable'. Snyder's literary and cultural translation of traditional Chinese literature, mostly classical poetry and Zen-Buddhist texts, helps Western readers to see that their horizon of expectations is too narrow and that they need a much wider and more encompassing cultural-environmental imagination. Snyder readily admits the enduring creative influence of Chinese landscape paintings on his imagination that began with the visit to the Seattle Art Museum. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : Snyder developed his ecopoetic way by absorbing a variety of influences from global subcultures : American Indian culture, Hinduism, Japanese haiku, Japanese Nô plays, Chinese classical poetry, Chinese landscape painting, and different branches of Buddhism. His works cover Indian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Huayan Buddhism, Chan Buddhism and Rinzai Zen, whereas his daily practice is 'zazen' ('sitting in meditation') as a Zen practitioner. What he adopted in his poetry is consistent with his belief that 'poetry also exists as part of a tradition'. In his eyes, 'the collective unconscious' and 'cultural history' are embedded in 'the language' of a tradition. Snyder's 'cultural unconscious' refers to the active interaction in translation he created between his mountain experiences on the coast of western America and Han Shan's seclusion in the costal mountain ranges of eastern China. Chinese landscape paintings, Ezra Pound's ideogrammic method and Zen practice gave Snyder an impetus to study Chinese culture and Buddhism. As a teenager Snyder was greatly influence by his first viewing of Chinese landscape paintings at the Seattle Art Museum. He was surprised to find en echo in his soul when confronted by the Chinese depiction of the world in the painting. The same empathy for nature in his own aesthetic sensibilities prefigures his later choice of the Chinese tradition in his poetry. Snyder's interest in Chinese poetry is inseparable from his belief in Mahayana Buddhism. His enthusiasm for Mahayana Buddhism reflects his respect for primitivism and priorities he expressed in his poetry. He found that Chan and Chan poetry suited him because they express the ineffable 'dao in 'koans' and transparent images. Snyder articulates his own unique manifesto of ecopoetry in the hope of legitimating right understanding, right speech and right action. The idea is publicly expressed from the angle of Buddhist environmentalism with an imperative voice through the poem. As a poet in contemporary times, Snyder believes that one should have a right understanding of the relationship between man and nature. In this place, plants, animals, land and planets are in a harmonious and ecological balance. |
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| 10 | 1953 | Gary Snyder studied Oriental culture and languages (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French) at the University of California, Berkeley under Peter A. Boodberg and Chen Shixiang. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Chen Shixiang. |
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| 11 | 1954-1955 |
Wang, Wei. At deer hedge. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Phi Theta annual ; vol. 5 (1954-1955). Empty, the mountain – Not a man, Yet sounds, echoes, as of men talking. Shadows swing into the forest. Swift light Flashes On dark moss, above. |
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| 12 | 1954-1955 |
Wei, Yingwu. To a friend on autumn night. Transl. by Gary Snyder. In : Phi Theta annual ; vol. 5 (1954-1955). Good friend, The autumn night is yours, and I I walk singing under a cold sky. On empty peaks the pine trees shed And you, old man, not yet in bed. |
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| 13 | 1959-1960 |
Snyder, Gary. The back country. In : Galley sail review ; vol. 2, no 1 (Winter 1959-60). [Li Po issue]. Kyoto footnote She said she lived in Shanghai as a child And moved to Kobe, then Kyoto, in the war ; While putting on her one thin white brassiere, She walked me to the stair and all the girls Gravely and politely said take care, out of the whorehouse into cool night air. (BC 81) |
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| 14 | 1960 |
Snyder, Gary. Statement of poetics. In : Allen, Donald. The new American poetry, 1945-1960 [ID D29319]. "Walking, climbing, placing with the hands, I tried writing poems of tough, simple, short words, with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. In part the line was influenced by the five- and seven-character line Chinese poems I'd been reading, which work like sharp blows on the mind." "I've just recently come to realize that the rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the physical work I'm going and life I'm leading at any given time – which makes the music in my head which creates the line." |
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| 15 | 1960 |
Snyder, Gary. Myths & texts [ID D29322]. [Auszüge und Sekundärliteratur]. 1972 David Rafael Wang : Myths and texts is a long poem in three sections – a poem which has no precedent or equivalent in classical Chinese poetry. The first section entitled 'Logging' consists of fifteen individual poems ; the second section 'Hunting' of sixteen poems ; and the third section 'Burning' of seventeen poems. 2009 Joan Qionglin Tan : From a Chan point of view, the three fragments 'Logging', 'Hunting' and 'Burning' complete a spiritual quest for enlightenment on a mythopoetic level uniting Chan and ecology. Logging Tan : The fragment 'Logging' contemplates destruction. In basic Chan teachings greed, anger and ignorance are the three poisons, the origin of suffering. These can be turned into 'sila' (morality), 'samadhi' (meditation) and 'prajna (wisdom). 1 "The morning star is not a star Two seedling fir, one died Io, Io." Tan : Begins with the statement 'The morning star is not a star'. There is a subtle relationship between two parallel traditions. Venus is a planet, one of the brightest celestial objects in the sky. It is not a star, but is called the morning star and the evening star as well, because it is nearer the sun than the earth. Wang : It is the Taoist 'self-transformation'. 2 "The ancient forests of China logged and the hills slipped into the Yellow Sea. Squared beams, log dogs, on a tamped-earth sill. San Francisco 2x4's were the woods around Seattle." Wang : The forests of China merge with 'the wood around Seattle. Tan : Logging 2 uses the image of Chinese landscape as a comparison. In ancient China, the large scale of logging resulted in the vanishing of the forests and the erosion of the landscape. This historical disaster plays an apocalyptic role, for Snyder always tries to 'hold both history and wilderness in mind'. When juxtaposed with the present logging site in Seattle, the astonishing similarity between ancient china and present day Seattle deforestation is designed to move the reader to greater awareness. To address the destruction of American forests, the poet refers to the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism and the natural process of rebirth in physical world and hopes that these may give some consolation. 3 Tan : In Logging 3, the nature-Chan image of 'lodgepole pine' is used to exemplify the regenerative power of nature, for lodgepole seed can withstand fire. The possibility of renewal expresses the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism. In Snyder's mind, spiritual fire in Buddhism, as one of the mythical forms of healing, helps to eradicate the three poisons (greed, anger and ignorance) in humans. Hsü Fang's simple life is deftly compared to life in modern American society. Hsü Fang was a mythic figure in ancient China, who, like Han Shan, lived on mountain plants and vegetables. This image is juxtaposed with the apparently unrelated image of the American grown-up kids, which virtually shows some automatic connections. If the kids are well-educated, they will realize the importance of environmental protection. 10 "Man is the heart of the universe The upshot of the five elements, Born to enjoy food and color and noise. Get off my back Confucius There's enough noise now." Shu Yunzong : In this passage Snyder first turns Confucius into an epicurean who advocates that men should enjoy themselves at the expense of the rest of the world. Then Snyder pits himself against Confucius from an exological perspective rather than from the one held by Chuang Tzu. 12 " At the high and lonely center of the earth: Where Crazy Horse Went to watch the Morning Star, & the four-legged people, the creeping people. The standing people and the flying people Know how to talk… In a long south flight, the land of Sea and fir tree with the pine-dry Sage-flat country to the east. Han Shan could have lived here, & no scissorbill stooge of the Emperor would have come trying to steal his last poor shred of sense. On the wooded coast, eating oysters Looking off toward China and Japan…" Tan : Han Shan is treated as a mythical Chan Buddhist sage. The 'scissorbill stooge' was an allusion to Lü Qiuyin, an official of Taizhou appointed by the Emperor in the Tang dynasty. 15 "Pine sleeps, cedar splits straight Flowers crack the pavement. Pa-ta Shan-jen (A painter who watched Ming fall) Lived in a tree : 'The brush May paint the mountains and streams Though the territory is lost." Wang : The 'Ming' referred to the Ming Dynasty whose downfall was brought about the invasion of the Manchus. Pa-ta Shan-jen lived on to paint the mountains and streams of his homeland, even when his homeland was lost. Tan : The last poem is a summation of the first fragment 'Logging'. Unlike Logging 1, this poem manifests two traditions and two worlds, including the Oriental and the Occidental, the Buddhist and the Romantic, the physical and the spiritual, and the human and the non-human. Through juxtaposing different images, Snyder attempts to create a harmonious scene within the poem. In the opening stanza, the void where a lodgepole cone is waiting for fire is the right place where enlightenment will be attained through transcendence and reincarnation in the Chan tradition. The poet invokes the Chinese tradition in the form of the painter Pa-ta Shan-jen's (Bada Shanren) powerful brush, which the artist used both literally and metaphorically to keep the landscape intact. Hunting Tan : The subtitle 'Hunting' hints in a primeval forest, where animals and plants will be seen to possess a supernatural power in shaman songs. This fragment is mainly concerned with native American lore, which dedicates some poems to the animals, birds, bears, and deer. Throughout 'Hunting' humanity's life will be intimately tied to the life cycles of animals and the myths surrounding them. Three main aspects are involved in the process of hunting. First, there must be pure divination before hunting, for hunting in the proper time and place is seen as a spiritual encounter, in which the hunted will sacrifice themselves to the hunter. Second, mindfulness is needs for such a spiritual encounter. 2 "Atok: creeping Maupok: waiting to hunt seals. The sea hunter watching the whirling seabirds on the rocks The mountain hunter horn-tipped shaft on a snowslope edging across cliffs for a short at goat 'Upon the lower slopes of the mountain, on the cover, we find the sculptured forms of animals apparently lying dead in the wilderness' thus Fenollosa On the pottery of Shang It's a shem I didn't kill you, Yang Keui Fei, Cut down in the old apartment Left to bleed between the bookcase and the wall, I'd hunt you still, trail you from town to town. But you change shape, death's a new shape, Maybe flayed you'd be true But it would't be through. 'You who live with your grandmother I'll trail you with dogs And crush you in my mouth. ' - Not that we're cruel – But a man's got to eat." Wang : Legend of Yang Guifei, the favorite concubine of Ming Huang of the Tang Dynasty, who was forced to hang herself from a beam when the Tang soldiers revolted in protest against her nepotism and the usurpation of power by her relatives. What starts out to be Eskimos hunting becomes Fenollosa's commentary on the art of the Shang Dynasty, then becomes Yang Guifei of Tang China bleeding to death in an apartment and finally becomes contemporary America. Going through the three stanzas of the poem, we find that the first one deals with hunting for food (Eskimo hunters), the second one with hunting for revenge (Wang Guifei), and the third one with a rationalization for hunting. Whereas the Eskimos may have a legitimate reason for hunting since they need food for survival, whereas the Tang soldiers may have an adequate excuse for demanding the death of Yang Guifei (who was indirectly responsible for the An Lu-shan rebellion in 755), there is neither a legitimate reason or an adequate excuse for trailing someone who lived with his grandmother with a pack of dogs in order to crush him 'in my mouth'. Reading Snyder's poem in the light of the different justifications for hunting, we find that the Eskimos can be exonerate of their guilt because they need food, that the Tang soldiers can be pardoned because they demanded the restoration of order in the empire, but that the thrill-hunters are accountable for their guilt. The poem seems to suggest a progressive degeneration of values, with 'primitive' Eskimos hunting for food, 'sophisticated' Chinese hunting for revenge, and the 'civilized' modern hunting for thrills. By a cyclical reference to man's eating habit, we mean that the poem starts with showing us the activity of hunting to acquire food and ends with giving us the reason for hunting. In each case, 'eating' is man's justification for his acts of violence. In this light, Snyders's poem can be interpreted as a Buddhist's plea for mercy, or universal compassion, for according to the Buddha, man perpetuates his sin in the killing of any sentient being, human or animal. Snyder's Myths and texts can be viewed as a demonstration of the Buddhist belief that all appearance is illusory or deceptive, because the poem in the beginning, turns out to be carfully designed in the end. The unity of the poem lies in Snyder's use of metamorphosis as the leitmotiv. This metamorphosis illustrates the Buddhist principle that nothing is permanent or real in this world as well as the Taoist principle that the only permanence is change. Snyder's selection of primordial images from the myths of diverse cultures serves to demonstrate that, despite the barriers of languages and cultures, all mankind shares a collective unconscious. The poem illustrates the Taoist concept of endless self-transformation. And, as the Taoist transformation is cyclical, we feel the inevitability of the end when 'The morning star is not a star' is transformed into 'The sun is but a morning star'. Tan : Snyder borrowed tow Inuit verbs, 'atok' and 'maupok', literally 'creeping' and 'waiting', to describe the Inuit's hunting habit with a harpoon, which 'was central to all sea mammal hunting'. For the Inuit, this harpoon hunting is called 'maupok', because it depends upon timing, patience and co-ordination as well as hunters' extensive knowledge of the habits of sea mammals. 5 Tan : Hunting 5 is a good example of embodying the third aspect of hunting. Snyder depicts how Native American people used 'the head of the mountain-goat' for 'the making of the horn spoon'. The sacredness is manifested in the last line. 10 "Flung from demonic wombs Off the some new birth A million shapes – just look in any biology book. Wang : Snyder is referring to the popular Buddhist belief that on can cat reborn in different shapes. 14 "Buddha fed himself to tigers & donated mountains of eyes (through the years) To the blind." Wang : Buddha must be reborn in order to feed himself to tigers and he must have 'mountains of eyes' to donate them continually to the blind. 16 "Meanging: compassion. Agents: man and beast, beasts Got the Buddha-nature." All but Coyote. Tan : 'Hunting' comes to its end with an image from the Chinese tradition. The Chan master Zhao Zhou tried to instruct the novice that all sentient beings possess the Buddha nature. Hunting 16 is about Zhao Zhou's famous 'koan' concerning the Chan concept of 'wu/no'. The last lines not only reveal the theme of the second fragment 'Hunt8ing', but also suggest that the spiritual quest should go ahead. Burning Tan : The whole fragment 'Burning' concentrates on nonduality, emptiness and sudden 'satori' using some nature-Chan images. 2 One glance, miles below Bones & flesh knit in the rock 'have no regret – Chip chip (sparrows) & not a word about the void To which one hand diddling Cling. Tan : At the end of Burning 2, Snyder chooses the bird to depict the moment before enlightenment. 3 Tan : The fragment is about enlightenment. To keep Chan in the foreground, Snyder changed the direction of his exploration into the Oriental tradition. He left his 'western American wilderness' as a logger and a hunter in the tradition of American Indian lore. 6 Tan : Snyder himself wears the mask of Han Shan on Cold Mountain. This is the early image of Han Shan's self-portrait, who was ready to cut down delusion with the sword of wisdom. 7 "Face in the crook of her neck felt throb of vein Smooth skin, her cool breasts All naked in the dawn 'byrdes sing forth from every bough' where are they now And dreamt I saw the Duke of Chou." Wang : Snyder is reminiscing about a former girlfriend who appears as prominently in a dream to him as the Duke of Chou supposedly appeared in a dream of Confucius. 9 "Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed Lenin in a sealed train shrough Germany Hsüan Tseng, crossing the Pamirs Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free starving high-country winter of their tribes." Wang : Transition from China, where the Yangzi river flows, to Germany where the Soviet leader rode 'in a sealed train', to the border of China, India, and Afghanistan, and finally to the North American continent, the tribal home of Crazy Horse. 11 Snyder, with the mask of Han Shan, became 'a pure but' waiting for sudden enlightenment. 17 "The storms of the Milky Way Buddha incense in an empty world Black pit cold and light-year Flame tongue of the dragon Licks the sun The sun is but a morning star." Wang : The transformation of the morning star which is 'not a star' into the sun is brought about by the dragon's tongue. The dragon is 'the symbol of the infinite in Chinese art and literature. |
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| 16 | 1965 |
Snyder, Gary. To the Chinese comrades [ID D29209]. The armies of China and Russia Stand facing across a wide plain. Krushchev on one side and Mao on the other, Krushchev calls out "Pay me the money you owe me!" Mao laughs and laughs, long hair flops. His face round and smooth. The armies start marching—they meet— Without clashing, they march through, each other, Lines between lines. All the time Mao Tse-tung laughing. He takes heaps of money. He laughs and he gives it to Krushchev. Chairman Mao's belongings on the March: "Two cotton and wool mixture blankets, A sheet, two pants and jackets, A sweater A patched umbrella, An enamel mug for a rice bowl A gray brief-case with nine pockets.” Like Han-shan standing there —a rubbing off some cliff Hair sticking out smiling maybe rolling a homegrown Yenen cigarette Took a crack at politics. The world is all one. Crawling out that hillside cave dirt house (whatever happened to Wong— quit Chinese school, slugged his dad left the laundry, went to sea— out of the golden gate—did he make A.B. ?—) black eggshell-thin pots of Lung-shan maybe three thousand years B C You have killed. I saw the Tibetans just down from the passes Limping in high felt boots Sweating in furs Flatland heat, and from Almora gazing at Trisul the new maps from Peking call it all China clear down to here, & the Gangetic plain— From Hongkong N. T, on a pine rise See the other side: stub fields. Geese, ducks, and children far off cries. Down the river, tiny men Walk a plank—maybe loading little river boat. Is that China Flat, brown, and wide? The ancestors what did they leave us. Confucius, a few old buildings remain. —tons of soil gone. Mountains turn desert. Stone croppd flood, strippd hills, The useless wandering river mouths, Salt swamps Silt on the floor of the sea. Wind borne glacial flour Ice age of Europe Dust storms from Ordos to Finland The loess of Yenen. glaciers "shrink and vanish like summer clouds..." CROSS THE SNOWY MOUNTAIN! WE SHALL SEE CHAIRMAN MAO! The year the long march started I was four. How long has this gone on. Rivers to wade, mountains to cross— Chas. Leong showed me how to hold my chopsticks like the brush— Upstairs a vhinese restaurant catty-corner from the police Portland, oregon, nineteen fifty-one, Yakima Indian horseman, hair black as crows, shovel shaped incisors, epicanthic fold. Misty cliffs and peaks of the Columbia: Old loggers vanish in the rocks. They wouldn't tote me rice and soy-sauce cross the dam "Snyder you gettin just like A damned Chinaman." Gambling with the Wasco and the Wishram By the river under Hee Hee Butte & bought a hard round loaf of weird bread From a bakery in a tent In a camp of Tibetans At Bodh-Gaya Where Gautama used to stay. On hearing Joan Baez singing "East Virginia" THOSE were the days, we strolled under blossoming cherries ten acres of orchard holding hands, kissing, in the evening talked Lenin, and Marx. YOU had just started out for Peking. I slipped my hand under her blouse and undid her brassiere. I passed my hand over her breasts her sweet breath, it was too warm for May. I thought how the whole world my love, could love like this; blossoms, the books, revolution more trees, sweet girls, clear springs. You took Peking. Chairman Mao, you should quit smoking, dont bother those philosophers Build dams, plant trees, dont kill flys by hand. Marx was another westerner, it's all in the head. You dont need the Bomb, stick to farming. Write some poems. Swim the river, those blue overalls are great. Dont shoot me, let's go drinking, Just Wait. Sekundärliteratur David Rafael Wang : This poem has no Chinese precedent, it achieves a distinct Zen humor. Snyder chides Mao for trying too hard to emulate Marx and all the Westerners. He suggests that progress is only an illusion and that Mao should be content with writing his poems and swimming in the Yangzi river, two activities for which Mao is renowened in China. Snyder further suggests that Mao should 'go drinking' with Snyder himself and not shoot him, since drinking was an activity which united all the leading Tang poets and shooting was an invention of the West. The poem not only warns Mao against progress, but also suggests simple living as an alternative. Joan Qinglin Tan : In the poem we can certainly take Snyder's view of Mao as heavily romanticized but it would seem to be a mistake to read this poem as naïve. Snyder appears to be quite consciously generating a mythical Mao, a Mao who can stand for the aspects of both ancient and modern Chinese culture that he admires, yet a Mao and a new China that he also has an ambivalent attitude towards. It is the mythical Mao who reveals the continued Han Shanian theme in Snyder's poetry. In the first three stanzas we can see Mao wearing the face and attitudes of the countercultural Chan master. In the final stanza, after a heavily nostalgic passage, Snyder gives direct advice to both the real Mao and the new China pleading with them to return to the simplicity of his Han Shanian, Chan Buddhist and ecological agenda. The criticism and disappointment with the political realities of the Chinese régime in the 1960s is sharply contrasted with a romanticism for the revolutionary Mao that finds its roots in the Beat attitudes of the 1950s. |
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| 17 | 1966-1968 |
Snyder, Gary. August on Sourdough : a visit from Dick Brewer. In : Holiday ; vol. 40, no 2 (1966). Snyder, Gary. Four poems for Robin. In : Snyder, Gary. Poems of our moment. (New York, N.Y. : Pegasus, 1968). David Rafael Wang : The two poems are strikingly Chinese in feeling and sensibility. |
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| 18 | 1967 |
Snyder, Gary. Regarding wave. (San Francisco : Printed for Don Allen by Grabhorn-Hoyem, 1967). David Rafael Wang : Snyder uses many titles in Regarding wave, that remind us of the 'yin' symbol. Some of these titles include : Sand, Running water music, Beating wings, All the spirit power went to their dancing place, Long hair, Pleasure boats, Willow, and The good earth. In all these titles we find the common denominator of fluidity, for sand, music, outspread wings, dancing, long hair, boats undulating, swaying willow trees, and the soil of the earth all share a natural rhythm and flow. And this rhythm and flow in nature, according to Snyder, is precisely the rhythm and flow of poetry as well. |
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| 19 | 1969 |
Gary Snyder. 'Ecological calendar'. Snyder has read all the poets in the anthology Tang shi san bei shou du ben and he stated that his favorite Tang poets are Du Fu, Yuan Zhen and Wang Wei. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
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