“Ezra Pound und China” (Publication, 1976)
Year
1976
Text
Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. (Mot3)
Type
Publication
Contributors (2)
Motsch, Monika
(Berlin 1942-) : Sinologin, Professorin für Sinologie Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Pound, Ezra
(Hailey, Idaho 1885-Venedig 1972) : Dichter, Schriftsteller
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
[In der Sekundärliteratur wurden Analysen einzelner Strophen der Gedichte nicht berücksichtigt]
Subjects
Literature : Occident : China as Topic
/
Literature : Occident : United States of America
/
Sinology and Asian Studies : Europe : Germany
Chronology Entries (9)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1909.1-1972 |
Ezra Pound and China : general Quellen : Binyon, Laurence. Chou king. Trad. De Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2601]. Li ki ; ou, Mémoires sur les bienséances et les céremonies. Trad. de Séraphin Couvreur. [ID D2642]. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. Giles, Herbert A. A history of Chinese literature [ID D7726]. Goullart, Peter. Forgotten kingdom [ID D3683]. Hare, William Loftus. Chinese egoism. In : The Egoist ; vol. 1, no 23 (1914). The Chinese classics. Transl. by James Legge. [ID D2212]. Pound übernimmt die übersetzerischen Grundlagen. Karlgren, Bernhard. Glosses on the Book of odes [ID D3516]. La Charme, Alexandre de. Confucii Chi-king : sive, liber carminum [ID D1988]. Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de. Histoire générale de la Chine [ID D1868]. Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary [ID D8646]. Economic dialogues in ancient China. Ed. by Lewis Maverick [ID D29079]. Mori Kainan / Ariga Nagao. [On Chinese poetry]. Morrison, Robert. Morrison, Robert. A dictionary of the Chinese language [ID D1934]. Pauthier, [Jean-Pierre] Guillaume. Les livres sacrés de l'Orient [ID D2040]. Rock, Joseph : Monographs on the Naxi. [s. Rock]. [Wang, Youpu]. The sacred edict. With a translation of the colloquial rendering, notes and vocabulary by F[rederick] W[illiam] Baller [ID D10024]. Zhang, Tiemin. Chinese-English dictionary. (Shanghai : Commercial Press, 1933). [Correspondence with Chinese friends : About 400 letters, postcards, and telegrams in three Pound archives and three private collection.] Sekundärliteratur 1950 Hugh Gordon Porteus : Throughout the works of Ezra Pound one comes across references to Chinese literature, and to quotations from the Chinese classics – sometimes in English paraphrase, sometimes in Chinese character. Increasingly, since the first world war, Pound has busied himself with things Chinese. Constantly he has advocated the inclusion of Chinese language, poetry and (Confucian) doctrine in the English educational system. Pound's avowed ignorance of Chinese literature in general and of the Chinese language in particular makes only the more spectacular his singular achievements in these two field. What is remarkable about Pound's Chinese translations is that so often they do contrive to capture the spirit of their originals, even when, as quite often happens, they funk or fumble the letters. For Pound, the Chinese character is a mysterious and magical unknown quantity, which sets all his faculties vibrating at the highest pitch of excitement. His pseudo-sinology releases his latent clairvoyance, just as the pseudo-sciences of the ancients sometimes gave them a supernormal insight. A Chinese text serves Pound as a receipt for the elixir served a Chinese alchemist. The result is a phenomenon of psychometry abetted by aesthetics. 1953 Kenner, Hugh : Pound never translates 'into' something already existing in English. He has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original, which permanently extends the bounds of English verse. Translation is for Pound somewhat easier than what is called 'original composition'. Many Poundian principles meet in the translator's act that the best of his translations exist in three ways, as windows into new worlds, as acts of homage, and as personae of Pound's. In the Cathay poems, Pound is at his best both as poet and as translator ; he is amazingly convincing at making the Chinese poet's world his own. 1955 Angela Jung Palandri : The redeeming feature in Pound is that even when his imagination runs wild, which is often does, he does not always go overboard by substituting the generally recognized meanings with the ones he draws out from the indeogramic analysis. Sinologists who dismiss Pound's translations as mere nonsense without a second thought actually betray their own limitations in scholarship and lack of imagination. For although apparently unorthodox and wild, Pound's interpretations are not as groundless as generally assumed. 1960 Winters, Yvor. In defence of reason. (London : Routledge, 1960). … the Chinese poets, like Pound, were primitive in their outlook, and dealt with the more obvious and uncomplicated aspects of experience ; but their outlook, though primitive, like Pound's, differed from Pound's in a richness and security of feeling within its limits – their subjects, though simple, were nevertheless more rich than any with which Pound has thus far dealt, and they lent themselves to the composition of poems longer than most which Pound has thus far attempted, so that he had an opportunity to explore the possibilities of the free verse which he had previously begun to employ whereas the Chinese translations are written in what is really 'a heavily cadenced prose that continually verges on verse without achieving it', the Cantos are written in a slow and heavily accentual verse, which at its best displays and extraordinary suavity and grace of movement. 1960 Rosenthal, M.L. A primer of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1960). The development of Pound's interest in Chinese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general. 1964 Donald Davie : As for his [Pound's] contention that no Chinese can read Chinese characters without being aware of how they are built up out of pictorial metaphors, most authorities now appear to disagree with him. It is in any case something that can be neither proven nor disproven. Just as most speakers of English use the word 'discourse' without being aware of the metaphor of running about concealed in its etymology, so one concedes that a slow-witted Chinese, or a sharp-witted Chinese in a state of fatigue, would not register the pictorial metaphors in the Chinese he was reading. The argument can then be pushed further only by unprofitably speculating on what is the statistically normal degree of slow-wittedness or exhaustion among Chinese. 1970 Akiko Miyake : Confucianism always meant for Pound the idea of order which he found lacking in his understanding of European civilization and which is particularly indispensable for constructing his counterpart of Dante's cosmos for ascending from hell to paradise in his fictitious cosmos and thereby metaphorically liberating the Platonic essence of beauty and knowledge. The most impressive fact about Pound as a poet is the way he sacrificed anything for creating his poetic contemplation and his personal mystery. The vorticist movement, through which Pound succeeded in starting the Cantos, ruined his early reputation. The obscurity of the Cantos very much impeded his career as a poet, and finally his glorification of Mussolini's regime as a part of the manifestation of his ideal provoked his long imprisonment. It is not unlikely that writing the Cantos increased his mental disorder. One cannot determine for certain whether Pound's apotheosis of Confucianism was a cause or a symptom of his mental disorder. It is spectacular to contrast his Cantos, however, which steadily proceeded with their own kind of skill. His mental disorder advanced along with his exaltation of the Confucian order, till his pro-fascist broadcasting during the war invited catastrophe. Pound pointed out the defect of Platonism for an artist and offered a correction in his ideogramic method, which is probably the first correction of Platonism through Chinese influence in history. He presented a possible parallelism between the Sung Confucians' metaphysical interpretation of Confucian classics and Christian contemplation though he worked through the vague suggestions of the former that appeared in Pauthier's text. Particularly, his paralleling of Chinese history and the Eleusinian concept of the recurrence of life is a very interesting attempt to interpret Chinese culture within a basic pattern of anthropology common to any type of culture. 1976 Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound begeistert sich für Konfuzius aus folgenden Gründen : James Legge hält viele Passagen für unverständlich ; Arthur Waley entschuldigt sich im Vorwort seiner Übersetzung des Lun yu für die Trockenheit. Die konfuzianischen Schriften sind für Pound eine Lebensphilosophie, die Summer der Weisheit. Sie sind der Schlüssel zum guten Staat und der Beginn des Denkens. Wie Konfuzius lebte Pound in einer von Kriegen erschütterten Welt, wie Konfuzius war er ein grosser, suggestiver Lehrer. Wie dieser, pflegte Pound aus der Literatur früherer Zeiten zu zitieren. Am Ende des Canto XIII und 116 deutet er an, dass er sich als Nachfolger von Konfuzius betrachtet. Pound sieht in Konfuzius einen Philosophen, der 'ideogrammatisch' denkt, d.h. der die Dinge selbst in ihren Beziehungen zur Umwelt untersucht. In sich aufgenommen hat Pound die für die konfuzianische Philosophie charakteristische Vorstellung eines Kosmos, in dem Natur und menschliche Gemeinschaft in organischer Beziehung stehen. Er macht sie – in verwandelter Form – zu dem zentralen Leitgedanken seiner konfuzianischen Übersetzungen und der Cantos. Pound sieht die Natur, die konfuzianische Ethik und die Mythologie in einem grossen, ständig fortschreitenden Prozess, und diese Gedankenverbindung erwies sich für seine Konfuzius-Übersetzungen und vor allem für seine Cantos als sehr fruchtbar. Er betonte immer wieder, dass der Westen Konfuzius brauche. Er glaubte, durch Konfuzius eine Philosophie gefunden zu haben, die sich in China und in den frühen Jahren in Amerika schon bewährt hatte. Er versucht, die konfuzianischen Ideen dynamisch im Prozess der Anwendung zu zeigen, wobei er die Schriftzeichen als lebendige Szenen darstellt. Es gelingt ihm dadurch, dem Begriff seine ursprüngliche Vitalität zurückzugeben und gleichzeitig den späteren moralischen Sinn des Wortes zu treffen. Pounds Stil ist lebendig und voller Bilder und trifft in seiner Prägnanz und Suggestionskraft oft genau das chinesische Original. Er führt bei der organischen Dekomposition die konfuzianischen Werte auf legendige Bilder und Handlungen zurück, die sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Oft erscheinen diese Werte in einer Reihe von verschiedenen Metamorphosen. Pound macht die konfuzianischen Begriffe dynamischer, präziser und wesentlich komplizierter und mehrdeutiger als im chinesischen Text. Er greift über den Kosmos hinaus, in metaphysische Bereiche und er ruft die Götter an. Er bricht den geschlossenen konfuzianischen Kreis auf und weitet ihn so, dass er sich erst im Unendlichen schliesst. Wie Konfuzius die vergessene Weisheit der Antike für seine Zeit zu neuem Leben erweckte, so vermittelt Pound dem Westen östliche Weisheit. 1980 Wesling, Donald. The chances of rhyme : device and modernity. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1980). [About the importance of Chinese syllabic metre for Ezra Pound] : Apparently Chinese, with its rhythms and excitements different from ours, cannot achieve the special expectation of syntactical delay or the pleasure frustration of the English periodic sentence. With ideograms as equal units, juncture and disjuncture are insistent, but Chinese will not display the specific track of feeling of the Western languages, which do not so strongly employ separation of the parts of the line. There are in English more units (words) in a given line ; therefore more partitions ; and therefore the line is more possessed of continuity… Thus when, as with Pound, a writer wanted the laconism of the clumped phrase, he consciously imitated, in English, the Chinese mode. 1984 Y.T. Walther : There are elements particular to Pound as a poet and to English as a language different from Chinese that have prevented Pound's ideogrammic method from procuring the desired effects. The major instrument of the ideogrammic method is the technique of juxtaposition, which is the omission of grammatical links and interpretive elements in a sentence or sentences. The common belief is that when the links or transitions are taken away, obscurity takes place. This is a misconception. Obscurity occurs only then the expectation of the complete sentence form is frustrated. The first major reason why juxtaposition creates obscurity in Pound's modern English but not in T'ang poetry is the difference in the English and Chinese reading patterns : the former constitutes an expectation of the full sentence while the latter relies much on discontinuity. The first major reason why Pound's ideogrammic method fails to communicate is that 'the traditional ways of coming into relation with each other' in the English language and thinking pattern do not yield to ideogrammic understanding. Pound's incommunicativeness is not so much a result of his using the ideogrammic method as of using it indiscriminatingly and of making it the only norm acceptable in poetry, in other word, monism. The method to Pound, is a tool to purify a poetry of 'emotional slither' that he had inherited from a previous century. 1985 Chang Yao-hsin : Pound took in his Chinese translations sufficient notice of other rhetorical figures such as simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and even allegory embedded in classical Chinese poetry. He also gave due consideration to the symmetrical structure, the refrains, and the pathetic fallacy, so conspicuously noticeable in some of the odes. A general perusal of Pound's Chinese translation of the odes reveals an unmistakable editorial bias. He wants to give an accurate, precise, and definite description. He wants to achieve direct and exact treatment and most basic economy of poetic expression. He wishes to avoid the slightest hint of a moral and artistic defection through unforgivably careless use of an unnecessary word. In fine, he intends to substantiate his imagist aesthetic and prove its efficacy as an antidote to Victorian poetics. The translation of classic Chinese poetry affords him a fine opportunity to do this, and at the suggestion of Fenollosa, he seized it with both hands. Thus the endeavor is a labor of love indeed. On the matter of translation, Pound holds that the translator should not pester the reader with superfluities of any kind which would put him further from the masterwork. Whatever Pound's weakness and however outrageous his editorial licence, he succeeds well where most translators of Chinese literature fail : he seldom puts himself between the reader and the master he undertakes to translate. Pound's work as a translator of Chinese literature made his Confucius unintelligible and ridiculous sometimes, so much so that we can not take his version of the 'Four books' seriously as a work introducing the thought system of Confucius. The moment he starts to apply the method, he ceases to be communicative and draws ridicule upon himself. In his character-analysis which is part of the 'method', he made very few lucky hits, and picked little that is germane. The Cantos, in structure, bears a clear stamp of classic Chinese poetry. We may even suggest that classic Chinese poetry may have served as an aesthetic prototype for the form of Pound's epic. Just as in a Chinese poem the characters stand at one apart and yet correlated as if by an inner cohesive force to form an organic whole, so the hundred-odd cantos juxtapose and relate to one another to add up the weird colossus of the masterwork. The influence of Confucius' philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in Confucian classic which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One of these relates to race and racial discrimination. Obviously chauvinistic, Confucius never spoke of minority nationalties in outlying areas of China except as barbarians. 1988 Chang Yao-hsin : Nostalgia for the ideal past, desire to salvage a world from total decay, and devotion to humanity proved to be the bonds that tied him and Confucius together. Whether for good or for evil, rightly or wrongly, Pound was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help him save the West. The influence of Confucius's philosophy on Pound is not always fortunate and wholesome. There are certain unhealthy tendencies in the Confucian classics which may have echoed and strengthened similar propensities in Pound. One such issue relates to race and racial discrimination. Works of art, once completed, acquire an independent existence and invite interpretations which may not always have much to do with their creators. To say that a person with bad political ideas cannot write good poetry and thus condemn both Pound and his masterwork is perhaps as simplistic as to dismiss Wagner's music as worthless. 1996 Robert Kern : Pound Orientalized modernism, in the sense that his versions of Chinese poems became models for modernist poetry in general, both in his own work and in that of other poets as well. Pound's involvement with Chinese poetry represents a certain, probably unavoidable, neglect of its full reality as an independent and exotic cultural production. Although it provokes and enables Pound's pursuit of modernism, Chinese poetry itself is displaced as a literary tradition in its own right. Thus if Chinese poetry in our time is Pound's invention, and if that invention's most essential concern is, in fact, with 'a new kind of English poem', then what we are dealing with as Chinese poetry is something that has been produced in and by the West. The publication of Cathay ushered in a whole new era of Anglo-American regard for Chinese poetry, along with a new era of translation. To see that Cathay constitutes a watershed in the history of Chinese translation, we may consider the attitude of translators active during the period just prior to its publication, a period extending roughly from the 1880s to 1915. English translators of this era tend variously to appropriate, domesticate, or otherwise impose themselves and their culture upon Chinese texts, and there seem to be few if any explicit rules or conventions to guide the practice of translation. The writers, for the most part, introduce their work by expressing dissatisfaction with existing translations and calling for some new approach, one which will not necessarily constitute a closer approximation of the Chinese, but which will correct what they feel to be the excesses of previous translators, especially James Legge. Frequently they articulate their dissatisfactions in terms of a postromantic distinction between the scholarly and the literary or the poetic, where the former represents an uninviting literalism or a pedantic adherence to the text, thought to impede a freer, more imaginative interpretations of the material. Pound himself, who would later assume his own antischolarly stance and insist on not translating the words, was often the target of criticism directed at what was seen to be his own unseemly or ignorant deviations from the text. But if Pound appears to take the side of the poets against the scholars in this debate, a further distinction must be made between his understanding of poetic translation and that of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. Pound's distaste for literal translation makes him more responsive and responsible to other aspects of the poem, including its sequence of images, its rhythms, and its tone. It is in this sense that Pound satisfies his obligations to the original text and in this sense also that his translations become acts of homage to the poets he translates. After his reading of Fenollosa in 1913, Pound apparently came to feel that imagism is not merely a modernist style but a category or genre of poetry with a lineage as ancient as that of the lyric itself. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader, in part, by defamiliarizing his English – which means not that he translates from Chinese into English, or from a foreign idiom into a familiar one, but that he allows his English to be reordered or even disordered, for expressive purposes, by his sense of the cultural and linguistic otherness of the experience to be conveyed. Pound's interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese. His interest in Chinese after Cathay takes the form as well of an increasingly intense focus on Chinese characters, also understood as universal, natural. They constitute a permanently available system of signs, and not so much a language as an authorizing source of language, more immediate to nature or things themselves than any alphabetical writing could be, and therefore less arbitrary than alphabetical scripts. Pound never abandons his own 'virtu' or creativity as a reader, regardless of whether that which is to be read is a whole text or a single ideogram. His aim is to make it new, and making it new for him means both to preserve and to reconstruct. In presenting Chinese characters, he could hardly go further toward preserving the reality of Chinese in its difference or otherness, at least from the point of view of English or Western readers. In regarding the characters as universal signs, and in tending to read them creatively, to suit his own purposes, Pound can be seen in his own way to the downplaying the difference of Chinese. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : For Pound, translation should not be 'philology', which fails to give to the literary works at hand the vitality or contemporary relevance the original had in its own time and place, but 'interpretation', where the 'translator' is definitely making a new poem. Even if Pound had been interested in philological translations of Confucian texts, he would not have been sufficiently trained in the rules of sinology to produce such a translation, and most critics writing on the subject agree that Pound's translations are wrong in many specifics. At the same time, Pound's Chinese translations have been judged favorably in respect to capturing the 'spirit' of the Chinese works. Pound's Confucian translations are extremely rich in imagery, and this is because, working with an antiquated theory about the composition of Chinese characters, he found more images in individual Chinese words than other twentieth-century sinologists do. What is essential to an understanding of Pound as a translator of Confucian texts, he did not take into account the fact that some of the elements of those words indicate the sound of the word more than, or even rather than, represent the meaning of the word pictographically. 1999 Eric Hayot : Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. As a young man, he translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in an ontology of Chinese writing. Later on, Pound intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his Cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. 'Pound and China' produces various understandings of the West's relationship to China in general, understandings influenced both by literary judgments and by moral ones. 1999 Ming Xie : Both Fenollosa and Pound had consistently ignored or played down the phonetic aspect of Chinese characters in order to accentuate their primitive pictorial element. The Chinese ideogram, according to Fenollosa and Pound, is not the picture of a sound, but 'the picture of a thing'. Pound himself was perhaps both expressing his doubts about and professing his ignorance of the nature of the Chinese character. Fenollosa's ideogrammic principle seems to refer the image to the external object, which, through the mediation of the image, acts upon the human mind. Pound's Cathay versions do not seem to contain any lines or images that are made on the basis of pictorial etymology. Pound seemed always more interested in the process of perception and definition that lies behind the pictorial analogy. For him, the ideogram thus becomes the fundamental principle of poetry, and of a new mental economy in general. Pound's actual encounter with the Fenollosa materials may have been merely accidental, but Pound's own sense of his search for fundamental values in poetry and civilization was not. His Chinese adventures were not just fanciful exoticism, but a search for universal standards of 'perfection'. Pound believed that good translation should not try to replicate exactly the original experience that may be extracted from the poem and that good translation should consist in the expression of the translaros's own interpretation of the original structure of form and feeling in a new idiom. 2003 Ira B. Nadel : [Ezra Pound in Philadelphia 1889-1906].The young Ezra Pound encountered his first Chinese object, a Ming dynasty vase at Fernbrook Avenue in Wyncote, Penn. At Aunt Frank Weston's in New York, he saw a remarkable screen book, a sequence of oriental scenes adorned with poems in Chinese and Japanese ideograms. The oriental collections in the museums of Philadelphia provided additional exposure to Chinese culture, preparing Pound for his later absorption in Orientalism developed through the work of Laurence Binyon, Ernest Fenollosa, Nô drama, and his own study of Chinese. Family interest in China originated in Homer and Isabel Pound's concern with the work of Christian missionaries in China. Accounts of travel, religious work, and trade formed part of the family's reading. But the oriental objects in the Pound home indicate more than homage to a foreign culture with things Chinese. They represent Philadelphia's continuing attraction to the material culture of China, which had a formative role in Pound's earliest conception of the Orient. Chinese decorative and fine art formed Pound's initial encounter with China and contributed to his likely being the first major American writer to respond more to oriental art than to its literary tradition. Chinese painting and imagery acted as a catalyst for his writing and formation of his work. Pound found in the cultural heritage of Philadelphia's celebration of China the beginnings of a lifelong preoccupation with the country. 2005 Zhu Chungeng : Confucianism, Pound believes, offers a solution to the West that, from its political institutions to its economic system, has fallen into chaos and disorder. Ideology and aesthetics are inextricable. Pound also sees in Confucianism a way of making poetry in articulating his vision of a new earthly paradise. Unlike other failing metaphysical religions, Confucianism, in Pound's view, does not commit 'splitting' – the separation of ideas from the phenomenal or culture from nature. Pound considers Confucianism not just a balanced system ; he finds Confucianism particularly attractive because of Confucius's deep concern with man and culture, his focus on social and ethical issues, his emphasis on individual responsibility, and, above all, his strong commitment to realizing social order and harmony in this world. Pound embraces Confucianism also because he considers it verifiable truth obtainable through empirical experience. He repeatedly expresses his confidence in modern science, which he thinks is not only characteristic of his cosmology but also sets an example for literary study. This empirical approach is evident in his inductive aesthetics, such as his imagism or ideogrammic method, where ideas are to be expressed through the concrete particulars. Confucianism, for Pound, is entirely assimilable to his trusted 'method of modern science' as a comprehensive means of attaining verifiable truth. The objective of this procedure is to establish social order and harmony, from family all the way to the state. The Confucian master man must have self-discipline, great sensibility, and strong sense of responsibility to accomplish this objective. 2007 Sean Macdonald : Pound was merely promoting one aspect of Chinese etymology, 'xiangxing', the pictographic category for Chinese characters, and was not particularly concerned with the many other categories and forms of semantic associations. Pound's understanding of the Chinese language aside, the ideogrammic method is an obvious parallel to montage : "The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register." Pound liked to play with etymology, and he had a tendency to split words up into etymons. His ideogrammic method was, right from the outset, a way to fragment language at the basic level of vocabulary, where individual words are split into fractured juxtaposition. In addition, Pound's fractured syntax, his particular use of citation, extra-literary text, and typography, in his prose and The cantos shows clear links to avant-garde movements. For a modernist like Pound, the view of written Chinese as a script which overcomes the mediation of alphabetical writing systems seemed to justify his own view of the potential immediacy of language. On the one hand, such a view of Chinese can only be maintained at a distance : Chinese is idealized as a form of direct access to the signified, as a sort of signified in the flesh and not seen as an everyday mode of communication. On the other hand, for Pound, his appropriation of Chinese language and culture was the very least a very positive appropriation. "The Chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS", writes Pound. Pound's interests in Chinese culture changed over time, but his Confucianism shows a distinctly political streak, especially in light of his support of Mussolini's government. For Pound, Confucius and Mencius would have been a couple of good fascists. Poundian ideograms tend to work in cumulative and constractive juxtapositional clusters of text and imagery. His ideograms can be placed on a continuum of attitudes toward Chinese culture and language that goes back as far as seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in China. The association of Chinese culture with a particular modern technique cannot be dismissed as solely a modernist or avant-gardist appropriation of Chinese language and culture as primitive, or an historical curiosity. 2008 Qian Zhaoming : In Pauthier's Confucius Pound seems to have found a philosopher, a cultural hero, who shared their modernist values. While affirming social responsibility the Chinese sage also stressed the relevance of individual dignity. To Pound such a philosopher could serve as an antidote against evils in the West. 2009 Williams, R. John : In their attention to Chinese ideography, Pound and Fenollosa entirely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese writing system, fixating somewhat blindly on its more exotic secondary elements. Pound even thought that Chinese ideography was so pictographically transparent that one could decipher the characters without even knowing Chinese. But even if Pound had a few truly ideographic examples to point to, the fact is that even the most generous estimates indicate that only a handful of Chinese characters actually conform to the ideographic principles, causing us to feel naturally suspicious of Pound's propensity to speak of 'the' Chinese character. Pound's translations may have accomplished a degree of 'openness' for his Anglo-American audience in the 1920s, but, in continuing to view Pound's translations as a framework for understanding 'the' Chinese poem today creates a scandal on two fronts : First, such a view closes our eyes to the simple fact that Chinese poetry is much more than the imagistic expressionism that Pound attributed to it ; and second, it glosses over the contemporary realities that Pound ignored by continually turning to the proverbially ancient and the aesthetically ideographic. 2010 Roslyn Joy Ricci : Ezra Pound romanticized Chinese characters as ideograms, signifiers attached to the signified, bypassing language. This misunderstanding of the Chinese character became productive error by stimulating the creation of a new poetic style – ideogrammic method. The visual aesthetics of characters appealed to his creativity. The journey from complege ignorance of the composition if Chinese writer characters to sufficient understanding to appreciate their complex evolution is both challenging and rewarding. Pound saw in Chinese characters the potential to transmit generalities with both detail and succinctness – in an aesthetical appealing form. He believed that each character conveyed a concept with broad associations to the universe as a whole. He translated Chinese characters and used them in his own poetic creations with this belief in mind. What he actually did, by using the characters in isolation without character context, was to inadvertently open the boundaries of signification providing readers with the opportunity to create their own truth constructs from the details of the character. Using this premise to construct an ideogrammic poetic method allowed Pound the licence to corrupt language signification without the shackles of conventional poetic restraints. Pound strived for simplicity in his poetry, including poetry translation, but he also endeavoured to employ the most efficient medium available. He used musical notation, both ancient and modern, and symbols juxtaposed with Chinese characters, hieroglyphics, ancient Greek and Latin. Pound was a lateral thinker, decades ahead of his time. His fascination with Confucian ideology led him to Chinese characters as the storage place of this knowledge. The visual aesthetics of characters captured his imagination – turning his interest towards them. 2010 Xin Ning : Unlike professional sinologists and translators, Pound's interest in Confucianism was the direct result of his discontent with the modern Western world. His self-appointed mission was to 'civilize the Americans' with the Chinese example. He wanted to reform the West under the guidance of the wisdom of the East. His interpretation of Confucianism is a creative 'misreading' rather than a faithful introduction to the original teaching of Confucius. Pound's 'misreading' provides us with a good example of the cross-cultural dialogue between the traditional and the modern age, between China and the West, and between translation and creative writing, which demonstrates not only the individual talent of Pound as an artist and cultural figure, but also the relevance of ancient Chinese thought to the modern world as well as the possibility of this ancient cultural tradition's self-renovation. |
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| 2 | 1913 |
Ezra Pound and Mary McNeil Fenollosa. Qian Zhaoming : In 1960 Pound said : "I met her [Mrs. Fenollosa] at Sarojini Naidu's and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn't have time to finish it." Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespear ; 2 October, 1913. "Dined on Monday with Sarojini Niadu [Naidu] and Mrs Fenolosa [Fenollosa], relict of the writer on chinese art, selector of a lot of Freer"s stuff, etc. I seem to be getting orient from all quarters. I'm stocked up with K'ung fu Tsze [Confucius] and Men Tsze [Mengzi] etc. I suppose they'll keep me calm for a week or so." The second meeting between Mrs. Fenollosa and Pound took place in the Café Royal on the evening of 6 October. Amont the party also were Sarojini Naidu and William Heinemann, the publisher who brought out Fenollosa's posthumous Epochs. By then, Pound not only had perused Pauthier's French translation of Confucius and Mencius but had gone through the early chapters of H.A. Giles' History of Chinese literature. Mrs. Fenollosa was impressed and satisfied. A third meeting between the two was scheduled on 29 September, 1913.. Letter from Pound to Dorothy Shakespeare ; 7 October, 1913. "I find the chinese stuff far more consoling. There is no long poem in chinese. They hold if a man can't say what he wants to in 12 lines, he'd better leave it unsaid. THE period was 4th cent. B.C. – Chu Yüan, Imagiste." Pound recalled forty-five years later : "… and after a couple of weeks I got a note : would I come to that hotel in Trafalgar Square at any rate, it is where my grandfather stayed. There she [Mrs. Fenollosa] was, gone like a priestess at an altar, and she merely said, 'You're the only person who can finish this stuff the way Ernest wanted it done'. Then she sent me his manuscript…" Pound's meeting with Mary Fenollosa opened up a new phase in his career – the phase marked by his Chinese studies. In the Chinese models provided by Giles – notably Qu Yuan and Liu Che – Pound found an art more objective than the Greek, more suggestive than the Provençal, more precise than the modern French, and more brilliant and resourceful than the medieval Japanese. To illustrate his Imagist theories now, he would have to include, amont other things, the Chinese voice. |
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| 3 | 1915.2 |
Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (2) Sekundärliteratur 1915 Arthur Clutton-Brock : "We do not know from the title of this little book whether Mr Pound has translated these poems direct from the Chinese or has only used other translations. But for those who, like ourselves, know no Chinese, it does not matter much. The result, however produced, is well worth having, and it seems to us very Chinese. There is a strong superstition among us that a translation should always seem quite English. But when it is made from a literature very alien in method and thought, it is not a translation at all if it seems quite English. Besides, a literal translation from something strange and good may surprise our language into new beauties. If we invite a foreigner of genius among us, we don't want to make him behave just like ourselves ; we shall enjoy him best and learn most from him if he remains himself. So we think Mr Pound has chosen the right method in these translations, and we do not mind that they often are 'not English'. The words are English and give us the sense ; and after all it is the business of a writer to mould language to new purposes, not to say something new just as his forefathers said something old. So it is the business of the reader not to be angry or surprised at a strange use of language, if it is a use proper to the sense. Mr. Pound has kept to the reality of the original because he keeps his language simple and sharp and precise. We hope he will give us some more versions of Chinese poetry." 1916 Arthur Clutton-Brock : "… His verse is not ordinary speech, but he aims in it at the illusion of ordinary speech ; and, thought this illusion gives an air of liveliness to the poems, it seems to us to be bought at too high a price. Certainly the original poems as well as the translations show that he has talent – one can read them all with some interest – but why should he use it to express so much indifference and impatience ? Why should he so constantly be ironical about nothing in particular ? He seems to have private jokes of his own which he does not succeed in making public. He seems to be always reacting against something ; and the very form of his verse is a reaction against exhausted forms. But nothing can be made of mere reaction or a habit of irony. The world may not be serious, but the universe is. One suspects a hidden timidity in this air of indifference, as if Mr Pound feared above all things to give himself away. A poet must be ready to give himself away ; he must forget even the ironies of his most intimate friends when he writes, no less than tha possible misunderstandings of fools…" 1918 Arthur Waley read a paper on 'The poet Li Bo, A.D. 701-762, before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London, in which he gives his translation of Pomes no 3, 4, 8, and 14 of Cathay. "But I venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give either the first or second place to Li Bo". 1938 Achilles Fang : Es wimmelt von orthographischen Fehlern, falschen Ämterbezeichnungen, verstellten Zeilen oder fehlenden Strophen. Öfter wird kein Dichter genannt oder ein falscher angegeben, noch dazu stets in japanischer Transkription. 1951 Hugh Kenner : "Cathay is notable, considered as an English product rather than Chinese product." These poems serve "to extend, inform, and articulate the preoccupations of the present by bringing the past abreast of it". 1965 A.C. Graham : "The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pounds Cathay". 1970 Akiko Miyake : The vividness and freshness of Cathay as poetry depends more than anything else on Pound's effort to create his own Imagist poetry out of the unfamiliar materials. Fenollosa was a man with strong opinions on everything, and his individuality is shown in the notebooks. Even with his very limited knowledge of Chinese, he tried to reach the depth of the meaning by learning each word, each allusion. He aimed at more than scholarly accuracy, and Pound responded to such depth. He must have been fascinated by the task of groping for poetry underneath the unfamiliar surface. The greatest reward Pound got through writing Cathay comes probably from the fact that he could invent his own poetry even out of so remote a country as China, and of poetry in so ancient a period, for after writing Cathay, China became one of his indispensable themes. In writing Cathay, Pound by no means exhausted the rich resources of Fenollosa's essay. He did not even try the possibility of intellectual search with images in this little book. 1976 Monika Motsch : Im Gegensatz zu Chinese written character as a medium for poetry von Ernest Fenollosa [ID D22141], wird Cathay nicht angegriffen und abgelehnt, sondern anerkannt ; wenn nicht als wortgetreue Übersetzung, so doch als selbständige Dichtung. Die Anerkennung ist erstaunlich, da Pound in der Zeit, als er Cathay schrieb, kein einziges Wort Chinesisch konnte und auf Fenollosa's Notizen zurückgreifen musste, die fehlerhaft waren oder Lücken aufwiesen. Auch wenn Pounds Übersetzung voller Fehler ist, so hat er doch grundlegende Züge der chinesischen Sprache und Lyrik erfasst und im Englischen wiedergegeben : ihre syntaktische Einfachheit, die kommentarlos aufeinanderfolgenden, dynamischen Bilder, eindringliche Naturbeschreibungen und die emotionelle Verhaltenheit. Fenollosa hat Pounds Gesichtskreis ungeheuer erweitert. Er weckte sein Interesse an der Übersetzung alter Literaturen und regte ihn an zur Beschäftigung mit der chinesischen Lyrik und mit Konfuzius. The River Merchant's Wife : Das Gedicht ist eine ziemlich genaue Übersetzung des chinesischen Originals. Pound hat nur einige Namen ausgelassen, die Europäer nur mit Hilfe eines längeren Kommentars verständlich wären. Der Stil kennt, wie die chinesische Sprache, kaum grammatische Über- oder Unt4erordnung, und logisch ordnende Partikel fehlen fast vollständig. Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin : Das Gedicht setzt ein mit einfachen, klaren Hauptsätzen, die je eine Zeile einnehmen und dem Rhythmus eine getragene Ruhe verleihen. Die Verben sind teilweise weggelassen und der Rhythmus wird zunehmend dynamischer. Leave-Taking Near Shoku : Dass es sich um ein Abschiedsgedicht handelt, geht nur aus dem Titel hervor. Die Trauer bleibt unausgesprochen. In drei kurz skizzierten, gegensätzlichen Naturbildern wird die Unsicherheit der Trennung um so deutlicher. To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud" : Die dritte Strophe ist bei Pound völlig anders als im Original und seine Version ist eher ein selbständiges Gedicht als eine Übersetzung. 1967 Yip Wai-lim : Cathay consists of only nineteen poems. Many people have translated at least five times as many from the Chinese ; but none among these has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry and in the history of modern English poetry. Considered as translation, Cathay ought to be viewed as a kind of re-creation. The poems are bound to differ from the originals in the sense that certain literal details are either eliminated or violated ; local tase is modified or even altered to suit the English audience and certain allusions are suppressed in order to relieve the readers from the burden of footnotes. The criticism of Cathay fall into two obvious patterns : defense and condemnation. Most of Pound's defenders could not discuss the way in which some of the poems are said to be close to the original in the 'sequence of images', 'rhythm', 'effects', and 'tone'. Those who condemn Pound tend to concentrate on the scar and overlook everything els. To understand Pound is to widen the possibility of communication, and a clear measurement of Pound' achievement : 1. To look at the problems of translation from Chinese into English, and in particular, to discuss the difficulty of approximating in English the peculiar mode of representation constituted by Chinese syntax. 2. To look into Pound's mind as a poet, to know the obsessive concepts and techniques he cherished at the time he translated these Chinese poems and to see haw these conditioned his translation. 3. Since Fenollosa annotated these poems under Japanese instructors ('Rihaku', for instance, is the Japanese name for Li Bo), it is necessary for us to examine the triple relation, from the original Chinese to Fenollosa's notes and to the end products, in order to find out how the intermediary has obstructed Pound and how his creative spirit sometimes breaks through the crippled text to resurrect what was in the original. 4. No translator can claim to have actually translated the poetry. This is also true of Pound. How close, then, are the 'equivalents' he gets out of the Fenollosa notes to the original, the 'cuts and turns' of the Chinese poems ? In other words, we need to compare carefully the original and the derivative 'form of consciousness' to see what has actually happened in between. In his dealing with Cathay Pound is able to get into the central consciousness of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance. Pound has indeed made many philological mistakes as a consequence of his ignorance of Chinese. But it is important to remind readers that not all of them are due to ignorance ; many are done deliberately to heighten artistic intensity, and some, for a less defensible reason, are conditioned by his own obsessions as a practicing poet. The first poem Song of the bowmen of Shu is a reworking from Ariga Nagao's English version. It has followed the curves of the original's internal thought-form and the undercurrent of sadness. Pound has to admit that he has changed partially the character of the semi-monologue he has all the way dominated. 1967 D.B. Graham : While some of the Cathay poems have drawn wide praise and much analytical attention, Separation on the river Kiang has been faulted for its errors or else ignored. The criticism of this poem raises certain important questions about the critical perspective of the early Chinese translations. The usual charges against Cathay, and Separation on the river Kiang in particular, have to do with Pound's 'failure' to render literally the Chinese of Li Bo. They are chastising Pound for mistranslating and praising him for not translating. In Cathay Pound was not concerned with the quality of verse that he described as 'melopoeia', the 'musical property' of poetry. The 'melopoeia' Separation is achieved through several techniques. The first is the duplication of the monosyllabic pattern that constitutes the basic rhythmic unit of Chinese poetry. Metrically, the monosyllabic base helps Pound achieve a central aim, the breaking up of the dominant measure of English verse, the iambic. In addition to the 'melopoeia' of the monosyllabic structure of the poem, some 'melopoetic' effects are also accomplished by syntactical reduction. Of the prime characteristics of Chinese verse, none is more apparent or important than conciseness, terseness, economy. The key to Pound's succinctness lies in the syntactical order of subject / verb / complement, a formula that Fenollosa saw as central to Chinese verse. The ideogram attracted Fenollosa and Pound precisely because they viewed it as a direct expression of action. The music of Pound's poem is not confined to imitating the 'melopoetic' qualities of Chinese verse. Pound combines specifically Chinese traditions and English techniques to produce something both ancient and new. Like Fenollosa before him, Pound was attracted to the Chinese ideogram as a natural medium for poetry. Both saw the ideogram as bearing a direct, inherent relationship with the thing it names. Linguistically wrong, Pound and Fenollosa were pragmatically astute, for Chinese verse did depend heavily on concrete images, a reliance that made it a perfect medium of imitation for the imagists. 1971 Hugh Kenner : The 14 poems in the original Cathay were selected from some 150 in the notebooks, were the first 'vers-libre' translations not derived from other translations but from detailed notes on the Chinese texts. the Cathay poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry. Perfectly vital after 50 years, they are among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I. 1978 Antony Tatlow : In making his Cathay translations Pound had employed a method which took as its starting point the Chinese line and phrase. In those poems which stress the context of speech, the Chinese line of often broken up to meet the requirements of his own rhythmus. The form of speech is often stylized but the element of gesture is fundamental and is inseparable from Pound's sense of the present relevance of the poem. 1979 John Kwan-Terry : Pound's contemporaries spoke of the Cathay poems as adding 'a new breath' to the literary atmosphere and as 'like a door in a wall, opening upon a landscape made real by the intensity of human emotions'. I believe that the poems, besides being a stage in the technical development of Pound's poetry, also constitute an important chapter in the development of Pound's poetic sensibility. From the beginning, Pound's poetry sought to relate two seemingly disparate worlds – one, a world of irritating contemporary realities confronted by a vibrant vitality anxious to do battle ; the other, a world of aesthetic and mystic visions that seemed to transcend time and its wars altogether. In the raw material provided by Fenollosa, Pound saw the possibility, or the possibility presented itself for him, to create or recreate a poetry that can integrate the high and the low, the ordinary and the transcendent. Like the early poems, the Cathay poems are infused with a sense of loss, of desolation and loneliness, but on a wider scale. Reading these poems, one has the impression of vast distances and the partings and exiles that distances entail ; an empire so huge that its defenders and functionaries cannot know its purposes, and perhaps these purposes are absurd anyway ; distances also in time and history, so great that human glory cannot hope to outlast them. The social scope covered is equally impressive : war and peace, the high-born and the low-born, the intellectual and the domestic, the soldier and the poet, wife, husband, lover, friend. What sets these poems apart, is an achieved sense of harmony, of unity sought and found – the unity that integrates the contemporary reality with the self, the quotidian with the eternal moment. A quality of Chinese poetry that appeals to Pound strongly is the absence of 'moralizing', 'comment', and 'abstraction'. Cathay poems involve the subjective, but they do not convey the sense of being 'abandoned' which seems to be the prevailing ethos in modern literature and is so strong an element in Pound's poetry. There is less sense of the 'anguish' of being without God. There is resignation, but not despair. The poetry conveys a sense of gratitude, a creative delight in experience, in the small moments of life. One of the greatest values in Cathay is that it can express the human need for relationship, and the ways in which the sense of identity is bound up with love. For Pound, Fenollosa's theory seemed to come as a powerful criticism of the principles of Imagism. The implications in Fenollosa's essay, as Pound saw them, were that Imagism took too static a view of what poetry could perform. It conceived of the world as so many inert 'things', to be brought into juxtaposition, whereas the world is made up of 'energies', and a poems should be a sort of vortex, concentrating these energies. The Cathay poems mark a unique stage in Pound's career, a stage in which Pound's sensibility, interacting with the Chinese tradition, discovered a creative theme, a sense of the integrated man. 1985 Ronald Bush : Pound, maintaining the beautiful indirection of the poem The river-merchant's wife, transformed its subject. The implied emotional drama of the poem is one of love maturing before our eyes. The wife remembers herself as a little girl, recalls a time when she entered into an arranged marriage without much feeling, and then, spurred by the pain her husband's departure has provoked, slowly realizes how much she cares for him. At the end of the poem she dreams of his returning and achieves a poignant reunion by traveling a considerable distance in her imagination to meet him halfway. In Pound's hands, this poem becomes a dark reflection of its Chinese self and a recognizable cousin to the poems of blocked expression in the suite around it. In Pound's poem, to affirm her love for her husband, the wife must overcome not only the miles between them but also her own fugitive feelings of betrayal. Comparing the Exile's letter to the notes on which it is based, Pound exaggerated Li Po's nostalgia for a past when poets were joined in true fellowship. Something extraordinary is created in his poem, not by a single friendship but by a poetic community that disdains gold and has forgotten kings and princes. It is this unique fellowship that allows the poets for once to speak out their 'hearts and minds without regret'. 1990 Qian Zhaoming : Cathay is a beautiful translation of classical Chinese poetry. It is considered as such because it has translated the charm and simplicity of the classical Chinese poems. To this one may add that it takes a great poet plus a great critic to translate great poetry. Though Pound is handicapped by his own ignorance of the Chinese language and Fenollosa's numerous misrepresentations, with his poetic sensibility and critical experience he is able to penetrate the shell and catch the quintessence. It is true that there are many deviations in his translation. But compared with what he has preserved, the presentation, the mood, and the whole image, his flaws are negligible and his triumph is great. It is through Pound that the English readers first get the original of such great Chinese poets as Li Bo. But Pound himself has also benefited from translating Chinese classical poetry. He is exposed to new sensibilities and new techniques, which in turn exert an important impact on him in his literary career, and through him also exert an important impact on modern English poetry. 1996 Robert Kern : Cathay is very much a production of creative reading, where 'creative' means not only inventive or fictionalizing but insightful and penetrating, both psychologically and philologically. Pound is nonetheless able to recover the movement of consciousness in his texts, even to the point of occasionally capturing elusive realities of voice and tone, an achievement which virtually demands that he go beyond strict dictionary meanings. Therefore, if he is also guilty of errors because of his ignorance of Chinese, or because he is misled by the uncertainties of Fenollosa's notes, sometimes his inaccuracies are conscious and deliberate, committed for the sake of greater artistic intensity and even on behalf of 'his own obsessions as a practicing poet'. The poems in Cathay are not only sometimes acutely 'accurate', despite their deviations from dictionary sense, but are continuous, thematically and in other respects, with the rest of Pound's work. What need to be stressed is the extent to which he as deliberately pursued this continuity, and it is under the category of his 'obsessions as a practicing poet', that Pound's acts of Orientalizing or creative reading should be placed. Cathay appropriates Chinese poetry for purposes other than those of Chinese poetry itself. Pound is using the Chinese texts as a drawing board for the creation of a modernist style or technique, he is also already practicing it, in the sense that modernism in general may be defined as an activity of appropriation, a series of strategies, such as allusion, collage, and what Pound would later call 'the ideogrammic method', for incorporating other texts, other voices, other perspectives within one's own, and for shoring up, the ruins of the modern world, amassing the cultural valuables of the past and increasingly of other, non-Western cultures in order to restore coherence and stability to modern experience, or to create them anew. At the same time, he seems to be moving beyond imagism, and in many of the Cathay poems, which reflect Pound's reading of Fenollosa's essay, we find less of an emphasis on the image as 'itself the speech', less reliance on the technique of superpositioning as a structural resource, and less of an appeal in general to strict imagist orthodoxy as a means of producing the Chinese poem. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader by defamiliarizing his English. This process takes several forms in Cathay, one of the most important of which is both Fenollosan and imagist. Writing for Pound, during this period, is a process of stripping words of their associations in order to arrive at their exact meanings and this process is itself a form of defamiliarization, of discovering and presenting arrangements of language that emphasize their own strangeness with respect to more conventional, or historically and culturally conditioned, modes of expression. 1998 Grace Fang : Pound found Chinese poetry and ideograms to be the perfect means of expression for his creative resources and convictions. His translations provided him with a new opportunity to recreate the source text and to activate dynamic responses in the reader, which reflect a vivid Chinese picture through Western eyes. Not every character is a picture, and even when most Chinese people use a character originally created as an imitation of the shape of a object, they will not be aware of its etymology. Chinese language derives much of its poetic power from its three-thousand-year development of these phonetic and semantic devices. It also functions as a normal communicative language in which the form of the character does not stand for its original visual form but for the meaning it conveys. There is an arbitrary relationship between sign and meaning, and the character represents not the original natural image but the conventional signification. A Chinese character can stand by itself as 'a word' or can be combined with one or two or three other characters to from 'a word', which would lead the character to lose its own original meaning and to gain a new significance in the combination as a compound word. Therefore, the ideogrammic method either risks over-emphasizing the etymological meaning of the separated part of the character or mistaking the individual signified for the significance of a whole compound word. Fenollosa and Pound show great concern for the language they deal with, but to over-emphazise the philological sense at the expense of other considerations, such as the total textual structure, rhyme, and 'original meaning' refined by the original poet, is dangerous, particularly when the translator has not established his expertise in the source language. Misinterpretations and mistakes are bound to happen. Pound's Cathay is a poetic performance across three culture, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, English), to be synchronized in his own poetic voice. Although Pound may sometimes have conveyed certain wrong meanings, most of the time he has conveyed the right feeling. Although he does not understand all the words, he has remained as faithful as possible to the original poet's sequence of tone, voice, rhythms and images. 1999 Eric Hayot : The differences between Arthur Waley and Pound notwithstanding, it is vital to notices how far they both are from Herbert A. Giles' attempts to turn the Chinese poem into an English one. Relative to Giles's, Pound's translations allowed the poems to stay strange, English enough to read but Chinese enough to represent their own difference. He was essentially 'rebuking' Giles for not making his translations Chinese enough, for bringing them too far into English. Waley's rebuke of Pound criticizes Pound for doing exactly what Pound didn't like about Giles, namely for making the poems too English, and for not adequately respecting their originals. Pound's translations impress more than Waley's precisely because they have something poetic about them. Pound was, at times, wrong both about the specifics of his language and the general tone of the poem. Despite the vast differences in their literary reception, it can be helpful to consider differences between Giles, Pound, Waley and Yip matters of degree rather than king. Each translator attempts to bring across more or less of the Chinese difference by putting it in a literary or cultural language more or less comprehensible to English readers, most of whom know little about China. Inevitably, the translation will carry with it aspects of English language and culture not justified by any mood or motive of the original text. 1999 Ming Xie : The connection between Pound's haiku images and his earlier epigrams might be viewed as the logical precedent for what Pound set out to do in Cathay. Pound's apparent ignorance of Chinese and Chinese literary forms has perhaps enabled him to modulate and transpose freely the original Chinese poems in terms adapted to his own generic experiments and expressive consideration. He was perhaps fortunate enough not to be in a position to render literally from the original Chinese ; he evidently derived a stimulus to innovate forms of a more immediate expressiveness from this ostensibly unpromising activity, that of translating from a language not fully understood. The Cathay poems display the importance of a certain kind of provincialism of feeling, feeling deeply rooted in details of the actual circumscribed world of the protagonists. Pound and Thomas Hardy are often concerned with the reality of memory and retrospection, regret and melancholy, time and isolation. The use of natural imagery in the poems is often of primary importance. There is a natural relation of the natural setting to the speaking and observing persona in the Cathay poems, as well as a sense of distance that separates the observer or speaker from the natural world that he or she observes. But the resulting tension is precisely what is most important in any good poems. The individual perspective in Cathay is for the most part retrospective and is almost always tinged with an elegiac coloring. This elegiac coloring is not a general, all-pervasive mood or atmosphere enveloping or devouring the individual speakers in the poems. It also often tends to leave the emotional stance of the translating poet in a kind of sympathetic neutrality, not by any implicit collusion expressing his own personal elegiac feeling. The Cathay poems as a whole do not provide some extraordinary moral perspective in which the reader would be invited to judge morally ; rather, they almost invariably invite the reader to participate and sympathize in an ordinary highly individualized emotional or psychological perspective, except that the exotic and unfamiliar context makes this for the Western reader 'ordinary' only by an act of consciously maintained vicarious projection. The river-merchant's wife : In Pound's version the emotion of the woman speaker is presented within her confined perspective through particular stages of emotional development and psychological retrospection, out of which emerge different shades of meaning and significance. Pound divides the poem into different stanzas or strophes, in order to delineate more sharply and contrastively the successive stages of retrospection and revelation. In the Chinese poem, due to lack of specified relations of tense or number, the narrative sequence is not explicitly established by syntactical markers. Pound has largely ignored Fenollosa's theory of the transitive verb. His Cathay displays a surprisingly wide variety of poetic techniques and rhetorical structures neglected in Fenollosa's treatise, especially in the use of paratactic and anaphoric constructions. These devices do not in fact originate with Cathay ; rather they are a continuation of Pound's earlier practices and experiments. But it is nevertheless evident that Pound's extensive use of these structures is based upon his intuitive sense of their importance and significance in the original Chinese poems, as confirmed in large part by Fenollosa's often detailed notes and literal versions. The language of Cathay was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary ; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian English, as was often Pound's practice. Cathay is an example of a strong tendency in Pound to regard translation as not historical but contemporary or timeless. Pound's versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry, because he has largely stripped away most of the supposed or fictitious qualities that late-Victorian poetic treatment (by James Legge, Herbert Giles) had imposed upon classical Chinese poetry. The success of Cathay is also largely due to Pound's tacit and skillful reliance upon a stylized evocation of China. The use of Chinese landscape seems to provide a powerful confirmation of the kind of 'otherness' which Western readers tacitly identified with an emotional coding linked to understood conventions of feeling in Chinese art and poetry. 2000 Sylvia Ieong Sao Leng : Ezra Pound's Cathay had gone through two rearrangements before it was brought out by Elkin Mathews in April 1915. Originally, the sequence was made up of eleven poems. The Cathay typescript at the Beinecke Library shows that Pound had added four poems to the original eleven when he submitted the sequence to Mathews. In the last minute, pound ‘suppressed the four appended poems and added 'Lament of the frontier guard' and 'South – folk in cold country'. In 1916 when Pound incorporated Cathay into Lustra, he restored the four suppressed poems. 2003 Barry Ahearn : Pound leads his readers to believe that the original Chinese verses are of such high quality that even inexpert translators cannot greatly harm them. In Chinese poetry he cites two poems as examples of how Chinese and Western poetic practices share common ground. In respect of The jewel stairs' grievance he illustrates how the Western reader should approcach the poem : "I have never found any occidental who could 'make much' of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, no merely by 'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poems. You can play Conan Doyle if you like." Pound first shares the burden with Fenollosa, Mori Kainan and Ariga Nagao (though on closer inspection, he calls their abilities into question and transfer credit to the poems themselves. Second, he contends that the poems have qualities (some of which he specifies and some of which he does not) that make them amenable to translation. There is also a third strategy Pound employs to divert the readers' attention from his role as translator. This third strategy is to include images in the poems that will strike the reader as recognizably Chinese because these images already seem Chinese, thanks to existing Western preconceptions about China. He adopted various strategies to suggest the virtual identity of Chinese poetry and Western literary forms. But he also 'foreignized' the translations to remind his readers that there were unavoidable differences. Pound uses complicated means to make his translations seem authentically 'foreign' – complicated because they depend upon delicate adjustments of diction. In his attempt to make the language of Cathay on occasionally bizarre form of English, Pound does not limit himself to nouns and verbs. He well knew that some of the most perplexing problems for a novice translator arise from some of the simplest words. The effect of verbal perplexities is to produce a strange impression, the impression that this translation has been produced not by Ezra Pound, but by a native speaker of Chinese whose command of English is less than fluent. Pound inserts a sufficient number of odd expressions in the poems, with the intention of leaving the reader with the impression that even though these English versions may be imperfect, there must lie behind them a superior Chinese original. Pound's treatment of the poems in the Fenollosa papers adopts a divided stance : the Chinese poems are like Western ones ; the Chinese poems are in many respect alien. 2007 Choi Hongsun : Pound departs from his Anglocentric conversion and takes a centrifugal attitude toward otherness of the other. He attempts to foreground the cultural and linguistic otherness of Chinese poetry and to revive its own poetic qualities in his translated poems. Pound the poet searches for 'dynamic equivalence' in consideration of the receptor language and culture. This target language oriented approach has a centripetal focus on a new poetic English that is filtered through translation. Thus, such otherness is incorporated into the Pound's own creative work. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry maintains the precarious tension between two different translating strategies : formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Cathay demonstrates Pound's attempts to foreground the otherness of the Chinese original to further the potential of English poetry through the appropriation of such otherness. In regards to formal equivalence, Pound the translator pursues a text to be equivalent, rather than equal, to the distinctive aspects of Chinese poetry. He thus foreignizes English in an attempt to reflect the poetic otherness of the original. At the same time, while his translation is oriented toward dynamic equivalence, such otherness is incorporated into his whole poetic arsenal of English, so that Pound the poet invents a new English stranger than the original Chinese. Even concerning dynamic equivalence, his translated language never gets domesticated conventionally, but rather it must be identified as somewhere between the source language and the target language. In this way, Cathay marks an important turning point in the history of Chinese translation as well as in Pound's own literary career. 2012 A. Serdar Öztürk : The image, the ideogram itself, if it is to be effective, depends greatly on the beauty and the force of the image, the ideogrammic component. That Pound was successful in translating the Chinese image is everywhere attested in Cathay. Which ties the poem together is not so much the narrative as the succession of images. The Imagists concern for concentrated expression and Pound's definition of the image as 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' would lead one to believe, that most of the poetry in Cathay would tend toward brevity. Although there are a representative number of short poems, the greater number is rather long. To account for the ability to sustain an image in a poem of more than a few lines, or even a few stanzas, one must turn again to the effectiveness of ideogrammic juxtaposition. |
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| 4 | 1919.3 |
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound [ID D22141]. (3) Sekundärliteratur 1958 George A. Kennedy : Fenollosa's essay is a small mass of confusion. Within the limits of forty-four pages he gallops determinedly in various directions, tilting at the unoffending windmills. Fenollosa was not clear whether the grammarian was one who describe how a language operated or one who prescribed how it should operate. He was fighting to protect poetry from what he viewed as the stifling palm of a grammarian's commandment, one may sympathize full-heartedly with him. No linguist or grammarian elects himself a dictator, nor is he antagonistic to poets. Fenollosa claims the sentence form to be 'forced upon primitive men by nature itself'. This form 'consists of three necessary words', the agent, the act, and the receiver. Since nature is not static, but in constant flux, its movement is an unending transfer of power from one point to another. After settling the natural form of the sentence, Fenollosa discusses parts of speech, and introduces the topic with two brilliant sentences that place him still in this particular regard ahead of our time. His statement is : 'Every written Chinese word is properly and underlying word…' 1970 Akiko Miyake : Pound found in Fenollosa's essay three factors that would reinforce his own theory and justify his practice most assertively. First, Fenollosa justified his belief that the unreality of the ideal, the sole theme in his early poetry, can be presented with solid, definite images. Struggling with hard technical problems of poetry, Pound probably appreciated even the riddle-like assertion of Fenollosa, "The cherry tree is all that it doesAkiko Miyake. Second, Fenollosa justified Pound's partial disagreement with Plato. Supported by Fenollosa, Pound eventually could go beyond his own Occidental tradition. Third, Fenollosa's theory on ideograms suggests the possibility of presenting some definite conception through juxtaposing images. Pound's Imagist works are usually short, one-image poems, because in Pound's definition of the image, the poet reaches the radiating center in his vision only for a breif moment by attaining a sudden release of time-limits and space-limits. If Fenollosa's theory on ideograms that enabled Pound to combine these one-image poems into his magnum opus by giving to these juxtapositions of images conceptual meanings. 1976 Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound übernimmt die Grundidee Fenollosas, dass Sprache, sei es naturwissenschaftlich beschreibende, philosophische oder poetische Sprache, niemals den organischen Zusammenhang mit den natürlichen Prozessen verlieren dürfe, weil sie sonst unwahr und subjektiv wird. Fenollosa bestärkt Pound in seiner Abneigung gegen sterile Abstraktionen und Rhetorik und in seiner Vorliebe für das dynamische Bild. Dies entsprach den Grundsätzen des imagistischen Kreises. Nachdem sich Pound von den Imagisten getrennt hat, entwickelte er seine 'ideogrammatische Methode'. Sie wird häufig mit der Zerlegung der chinesischen Diagramme in ihre Bildkomponenten gleichgesetzt, jedoch ist das nur ein unwichtiger Teilaspekt einer langen, sprunghaften und weitreichenden Entwicklung. 1980 William Tay : The Fenollosa essay had played a very significant role in the formation of Pound's poetics and practice. One of Fenollosa's arguments is that the Chinese language is the closest to nature since its construction is based on pictorial representation. Anyone with some knowledge of the Chinese language knows that this is a most misleading half-truth. To the advocate of a new poetry promoting concreteness in language, this discovery is happily adopted. The Fenollosa essay, with its investigation of an entirely foreign language and culture, evidently affords a resounding, shocking effect which Pound could not possibly get from Dante, the Greek epigram or the Anglo-Saxon poem. I am not trying to discredit some of Fenollosa's insights and contribution, but to draw the attention to Pound's urgent need to instigate and stimulate. Another assertion by Fenollosa is that the radicals of many Chinese words are 'short-hand pictures' of action or process of actions. By combining several pictorial elements to intimate an idea, the ideogram as Fenollosa sees it demands a conscious involvement in the reconstruction of the whole process. If the method is compared with rhetorical techniques, it can be described as, in Fenollosa's words 'a more compressed or elliptical expression of metaphorical perception'. In an ideogram, one certainly does not find any linguistic connectives ; but in poetry, the compression and ellipsis will result in Pound's juxtaposition experiments or the so-called 'unique mode of presentation' of some Chinese poems. The ideogrammic method or the metonymic mode is not limited to Pound's poetry ; it is also employed in some of his prose discourse. Besides the ideogrammic method, Pound has also resorted to other less sophisticated means to arouse his reader's attention. There are even more eye-catching elements for the reader : the parading of Greek tags, the astonishing appearance of a musical score, the striking spatial arrangement of syntax, and the occasional punctuation of the Chinese pictograms. 1993 Cai Zong-qi : The bulk of the Fenollosa-Pound essay is devoted to an analysis of how the Chinese character evokes the dynamic force of nature as a result of its ideogrammic, morphological, and syntactical organization. When they examine 'primitive Chinese characters' (simple pictograms or ideograms), they seek to represent them as 'shorthand pictures of actions and processes'. When they discuss complex Chinese characters (composite ideograms), they argue that two or more ideograms 'added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. According to them, Chinese nouns are superior to their counterparts in Western languages because their ideogrammic forms are virtually 'meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots'. They regard Chinese verbs as an ideal embodiment of natural force because they contain no passive voice or copula which might diminish the directness and intensity of natural force. Chinese adjectives are lauded because they are derived from and, in many cases, are interchangeable with verbs. Chinese prepositions and conjunctions are worthy of praise because 'they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions'. In focusing their attention on dynamic force, Fenollosa and Pound capture the quintessential quality of the Chinese character in terms of both its etymological evolution and its attendant calligraphic styles. The ability of Chinese characters to preserve and augment the dynamic force latent in its etymological root. This argument has the unintended effect of illuminating how an aesthetic system evolved out of the dynamic force embodied in the Chinese character. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and justify his theories of the poetic image'. Before his discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference of the dynamic force they saw in the Chinese character and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry. When they observe Chinese characters, they stress that the force is natural rather than subjective. If from the Chinese side one looks for a correct presentation of the Chinese language, one may deplore Pound's 'metaphorization' as a misconception that seems to undo his otherwise insightful understanding of the dynamic beautc of the Chinese character in its formation and calligraphy. If one looks at the same problem from the Western side, one may hail it as a fortunate misconception. Through such a misconception, Pound does not merely render the dynamic beauty of the Chinese character intelligible and relevant to Western poetics but actually makes it a source of inspiration for a wide range of attempts at reinventing modern poetry, extending from his own ideogrammic methods to typographical experiments and to the more radical deconstruction of individual words by concrete poets. 2002 Cai Zong-qi : To correct Fenollosa and Pound's overstatements about the pictorial quality of the Chinese language is a justifiable and necessary task in the teaching of Chinese. It would be a deplorable mistake to dismiss Fenollosa's essay merely because it perpetuates the pictorial myth about Chinese characters. To grasp the literary values of this essay, we must dismiss the overly harsh charge against Fenollosa for his perpetuation of the pictorial myth. Fenollosa cites Chinese characters and comments on 'their semi-pictorial effects' only a few times. Even when doing so, he stresses that Chinese characters are 'based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature ' and that 'their ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. The greatest importance of Fenollosa's essay lies in the role it has played in the reinvention of modern Western poetry, a role achieved through the editing and publication by Ezra Pound. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and to justify his theories of the poetic Image'. Prior to this discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry. To Pound, the essay most eloquently articulated the revolutionary principles of modernist poetry he himself wished to establish. Although he had already formed his Imagist-Vorticist ideals before he read Fenollosa's essay, he sincerely and enthusiastically praised the essay as 'a study of the fundaments of all aesthetics' and credited Fenollosa with ushering in 'many modes of thought since fruitful in new Western painting and poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference between the dynamic force they see in Chinese characters and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry. In the eyes of Jacques Derrida, Fenollosa and Pound's poetics of dynamic force represents the first major challenge to the entrenched tradition of Western poetics. "[Pound's] irreducibly graphic poetics", writes Derrida, "was with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance". In foregrounding Pound's fascination with the Chinese written character, Derrida intends not merely to show the gensis of Pound's modernist poetics. He also attempts to reappropriate the Chinese written character as the other, against which he can pit Western phonocentrism and logocentrism. While Pound identifies the Chinese written character as an ancient antecedent of his imagist-Vorticist poetics, Derrida sees it as convincing proof of the invalidity of all phonocentric claims upon which Western ontotheologies rest. In comparing the Chinese written character to algebra, Derrida reveals a profound ignorance of it. Fanciful though it is, his reapropriation of the Chinese written character reflects a broad trajectory from modernist to postmodernist challenges to the Western literary, intellectual, and cultural traditions. Derrida's view of the Chinese written character, like Fenollosa and Pound's, has been the subject of intense debates. Some critics focus on criticizing Derrida's misconceptions of the Chinese language, especially his problematic assuption of its nonphonetic nature. 2008 James Liu : It is responsible for the fallacy 'common among Western readers outside sinological circles, namely, that all Chinese characters are pictograms or ideograms'. 2010 Xin Ning : By metaphor Fenollosa does not mean merely the figure of speech, which is only another arbitrary subjective process. His concept of metaphor is connected with his theory of the origin of language. The primitive language is the metaphor of nature, which means not only the accumulation of separate, visible objects, but also the unseen truth behind and within all these objects. The pictorial Chinese language transmits the unseen truth to the audience. What needs to be pointed out about this unseen truth is that it is not something intangible at the end of the chain of the abstraction, detached from the world of visible things. Fenollosa openly condemns this kind of pursuit of truth as 'mediaeval logic' which can never be stopped until it reaches the apex 'being'. This truth is deeply rooted in things themselves, and the primitive language, as well as science, makes us reach the thing-as-itself and the unseen truth simultaneously. Modern linguists are entitled to make a strong and well-founded accusation against Fenollosa's emphasis on the pictorial nature of Chinese written characters. Fenollosa actually was fully aware of the fact that 'the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs cannot now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value'. Fenollosa seems unable to accept the fact that picto-phonetic characters play such an important role in Chinese and insisted on the primacy of pictorial elements. Fenollosa's theory on Chinese written characters not only provided inspirations to Pound's poetic writing and translation, but also to his political philosophy and overall vision of ancient China. Pound developed from Fenollosa's linguistic theory a general approach known to him as 'ideogramic thinking' and introduced it both to his poetic writing and to his English renditions of Chinese texts. This method taught him to rely on concrete and vivid images as well as their free associations in his compositions of poems, and it enabled him to break both the restraints of the formal requirement of conventional poetry and the literal affinity to the original text in the practice of translation to achieve an ideal combination of authenticity and creativity at a higher level. |
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| 5 | 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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| 6 | 1928 |
Confucius. Ta Hio : the great learning. Newly rendered into the American language by Ezra Pound. [Da xue]. [ID D29064]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices]. Pound, Ezra. Typescript (1928) : "If Pauthier invented the sane and beautiful things in his translation, then Pauthier was a very great man, and we shd. perhaps reverence Pauthier in place of Confucius. But as Pauther [sic] has presented this matter as a translation of Kung, we may at least suppose that his ideas arose from the contemplation of the original, and are on that count not utterly alien to it." Pound, Ezra. Kung [MS of Ta hio] : "The idea that anyone gains anything by turning the pp. of a dictionary, especilayy [sic] a Chinese dictionary is imbecile. The prejudice against interlinear and page to page translation bas been consitucted [sic] by ignorant teachers who were afraid their students wd. learn too fast for the teacher's convenience. What one wants is to understand the text." Sekundärliteratur 1970 Akiko Miyake : Pound, the Confucian humanist tried to civilize America through translating Da xue and through writing cantos on American history. One can read Pound's translation as if it were a kind of Medieval contemplation whose aim is not to reach a vision of God but to reach knowledge of secular truth. For his translation, Pound depended entirely on Pauthier's French version and not on Legge or the original Chinese text. He tells in the opening passage that the aim of this Confucian classic is to renew mankind through manifestation of "the luminous principle of reason". That 'luminous reason' is somehow like the ultimate cause of all beings and actions which scholastic philosophers identified with the Christian God, because one can manifest it through 'a profound examination of actions and their motivations'. Pound must have believed to be the greatest difference between Christian philosophy and Confucianism was that Confucians never recommended asceticism. He finds with Ta Hio an ideal version of a poet's secular contemplation : the humanistic 'luminous principle of reason' as its destination to replace the Jewish God ; secular researches on human society and history as its means to replace the study of the absurd Bible ; the glorification of human senses as its special agent for discovering the sources of light instead of the denial of sensuous pleasure in asceticism. For Pound Ta Hio was a book of secular contemplation, in which one pursues the metaphysical knowledge of transcendental reason and thereby aims at the renovation of mankind through this metaphysical pursuit. He approached the Song School's metaphysical interpretation of Confucianism first through Fenollosa and then through Pauthier without ever knowing the fact. Pound takes the 5th chapter to be Confucius' assertion that man is capable of knowing the ultimate cause of human actions and knowing it through objects of senses. Pound discovered in Pauthier many factors that he had already pursued through his poetry. First, he found therein man's fundamental aspiration to see the source of all being, which aspiration is symbolized in the Cantos in the Odyssean voyage homeward. Second, he believed that Ta Hio teaches the way to such a source of all being or 'the luminous principle of reason' through secular knowledge of the world ; and third, he thought that Ta Hio affirms the adequacy of human natural inclinations for leading man to an ultimate source of all being. Fourth, he even read in Ta Hio a confirmation of his ideogramic method. Fifth, Ta Hio includes some advice to princes and rulers on finance. 1976 Monika Motsch : Der 'Text von Konfuzius' zu Beginn des Da xue war die Passage in den konfuzianischen Schriften, die Pound am meisten bewunderte, liebt und über die er am längsten meditierte. Wie die Ordnung in der Familie zur Ordnung im Staat führt, zeigt das IX. Kapitel : The K'ang Proclamation says : "As if taking care of an infant". If the heart sincerely wants to, although one may not hit the mark precisely in the center, one won't go far wrong. No girl ever yet studied suckling a baby in order to get married. Pounds Version schliesst den Gedanken völlig aus, den Frieden in der Familie und in der Menschheit als eine mechanische Folge von Ursache und Wirkung zu verstehen, wie dies im chinesischen Text geschieht. Statt dessen zeit er die Möglichkeit auf, dass sich aus natürlichen, arterhaltenden Instinkten, wie z.B. der Liebe zwischen Mutter und Kind oder Mann und Frau, durch Metamorphose neue Verhaltensweisen entwickeln können, die eines Tages zum Frieden unter den Völkern führen würden. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Ta hio is not based on the Chinese text, it is a direct retranslation of the French translation by Guillaume Pauthier. 2003 Sun Hong : Pound regards Da xue as something to believe in, for it tells us of our duty of 'developing and restoring to its primitive clarity our reason. Like Confucius, Pound would trace from branches to roots to grasp the essence of matters. The root of social order, as Da xue indicates, lies in men themselves. In Da xue, he finds a system of perfection. He believes that peace and harmony can be maintained in the world so long as we adhere to the order provided by this text. Da xue's gradations is the harmony and smoothness in its proceeding, a quality in agreement with the orderly system that Pound believes in. Pound looks upon this gradations of order not as rigid dogmas but as profound philosophical principles. Pound's adoption of both, Da xue's gradations of order and the Confucian outlook of history doesn't designate him as merely a transmitter, however. He is an inventor in poetry. His use of ideograms as an exemplar is perhaps the most significant invention he brought into poetry in English. What Pound sees in the natural Chinese signs is the realization of an old Western dream of a universal language. If he said that he believed in Da xue, he also believed in the ideograms, which composed the book, and shared the Confucian concern and affection for the visible things in nature. He sees in Da xue's system an unceasing spiral of movement upward toward a celestial perfection, starting from the basic order at the personal level. He sees in the succession of dynasties a cycle and bad rulers. And he sees in the ideograms bustling nature in motion. |
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| 7 | 1935 |
Pound, Ezra. Social credit : an impact. (London : Stanley Nott, 1935). Fenollosa accented the western need of ideogramic thinking. Get your 'red' down to rose, rust, cherry, if you want to know what you are talking about. We have too much of this talks about infinities. There is a common element with the Confucian method of getting into one's own 'intentions. |
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| 8 | 1945 |
Ezra Pound 1945. 1976 Monika Motsch : Nach dem Einmarsch der amerikanischen Truppen wird Ezra Pound festgenommen und im Straflager von Pisa als Landesverräter mit Androhung der Todesstrafe, interniert. Er schreibt in dieser Zeit seine Pisan Cantos, The great digest und The unwobbling pivot. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pounds was arrested in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason against the United States, imprisoned for six months in the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, transported to the District of Columbia, where he was judged mentally unfit to stand trial, and incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill. He began to show signs of an imminent nervous breakdown. His profound hopes for a Confucian reformation of Western government and culture has dissolved as a result of the events of the previous two years : the fall of Mussolini from power in July 1943, the gradual crumbling of Fascist government in Italy and the comprehensive victory of the Allies in Europe. 2003 Wendy Stallard Flory : By 1945, Pound's reliance on the writings of Confucius had become indispensable to him. In the months before his arrest and during his time in the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa, Confucius became the key reference point for Pound's conception of himself as public activist and private individual, not only intellectually, but, in an even more influential way, psychologically. Pound's Confucius has taken on a strong and intimate symbolic significance as an intrinsic dimension of his own psychological self-conceptualizing. To understand the workings of Pound's mind during his time at Pisa it is essential to have the clearest possible sense of the nature of his Confucianism – and vice versa. Pound has so thoroughly internalized his own 'idea' of Confucius that he thought of himself in terms of Confucius and Confucius in terms of himself. By the time htat he was imprisoned, his intense focus upon and commitment to the value of Confucius's writings had become the indispensable stabilizing influence that enabled him to keep some measure of control over the angry and manic moods that had become increasingly unmanageable as Mussolini dragged Italy ever more deeply into war. Under the extreme stresses of his imprisonment and in the absence of any other help, Pound's faith in the reliability of Confucius's reiterations of the possibilities of mental equilibrium under adversity was his one 'stay against confusion', a defense against even more serious mental disorder. Father Aloysius H. Vath (1909-1992, Chaplain in the US Army, R.C. chaplain in the Pisan cantos) gave Pound the Catholic prayer book for army and navy, ed. by John J. Burke, New York : Paulist Press, 1917. Vath said : "Pound seemed to be very Confucius-minded. He was very interested in Confession, in the Catholic act of contrition, act of sorrow, that was in his [field prayer book]." Pound is developing his larger point, about the compatibility of Confucianism and Catholicism, by noting the importance of the discipline of self-examination in both. By referring to the 'spirits of the parents as intercessors', Pound seems to be trying to anticipate the inevitable objection that the Chinese tradition of ancestor-worship is unreconcilable with Catholic belief and practice. Pound's next emphasis is Catholic missionary activity in China, and he suggests the strategy of incorporating in a Chinese version of the Catholic prayer book Chinese characters that have particular Confucian significance. He suggests that, by teaching the Confucian classics with their focus on 'equity', Catholic priests would be able to attract Protestants to convert to Catholicism. He quotes Mengzi to support the idea that there is nothing to prevent a pope from being an ideal world-ruler in the mold of the ancient Chinese emperors of legendary virtue. Pound has included 'ideograms of Confucian school' in his prayer book. These marginal ideograms are very revealing of Pound's thinking at this time, especially when they are seen in conjunction with the Confucian passages in the Pisan cantos, with Pound's own translations of the Confucian classics. On a photograph in the Counter Intelligence Corps Headquarters in Genoa he is shown working from the James Legge edition of the Confucian classics, that he had brought with him from Rapallo. The Chinese characters that Pound has written in the margins of his Catholic prayer book provide traces of an immersion in the Chinese of the Confucian texts that, given Pound's precarious mental state at that time, would have been, psychologically, 'lifesaving'. Mathew's Chinese-English dictionary in the revised edition that Pound owned when he was in St Elizabeths. Where Legge organizes his glossary according to the radicals of the characters, Mathews organizes his characters according to their sound and their tones, which are indicated by superscript numbers. He finds in his prayer book what he most needs at this time of psychological confusion and fear for his life, reassurance of some enduring principle of order that he can continue to believe in. In the DTC, Pound's most pressing concern is not the reform of governments, but self-governance. When, by means of his marginal characters, he pairs Confucian and Catholic commentaries on self-examination and self-knowledge, he does so not because he considers himself proficient in these exercises, but because he is aware of how great his need for them is. Some of Pound's marginal notations are of single characters, and, of these, some are readily recognizable to readers of Pound's poetry as the pivotal ones that appear in the Cantos and that he includes in the 'Terminology' section at the beginning of his Confucius. Pound's contact with the priest, his study of the Catholic prayer book, and his reflections upon the ethical and spiritual dimension of the Confucian writings seen comparatively, as counterparts to the ethics and spirituality encoded in the Catholic liturgy. |
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| 9 | 1946-1958 | Ezra Pound wird 1946 wegen Landesverrats in Amerika angeklagt. Einer Verurteilung und möglichen Todesstrafe entging er, weil er von einem Gutachter für geisteskrank erklärt wurde. Die nächsten zwölf Jahre verbrachte er im St Elizabeths Hospital, einer staatlichen Heilanstalt in Washington D.C. |
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