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
Index of Names : Occident
/
Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (97)
| # | 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. |
|
| 2 | 1909.2 |
Ezra Pound met Laurence Binyon. He attended his lectures on 'Art and thought in East and West' and frequently visited him at the British Museum with Dorothy Shakespear, who often copied Chinese paintings while Binyon and Pound talked. Pound may have heard about Wang Wei in the Gallery of Prints and Drawings, where are two famous Chinese landscape paintings, one attributed to Wang Wei. In Painting in the Far East, Binyon describes Wang Wei as the 'founder of the southern school, who was even more famous for his poetry than for his painting'. Even if Pound hadn't read the book, he would have gotten the information from Binyon when viewing the paintings. |
|
| 3 | 1911 | Allen Upward was Ezra Pound's mentor on Chinese poetry. When Pound was introduced to Upward in London in 1911, Upward had already made a name for himself as a poet and a writer of original thought. Although Upward's admiration for Confucius may have inspired Pound's lifelong interest in Confucianism, his enduring influence on Pound in the area of Chinese poetry. This influence may be attributed to two important events : The publication of Upward's Scented leaves from a Chinese jar [ID D29136], a sequence of poems based on Chinese works. In these poems, Pound found what had earlier fascinated him in Japanese haiku – sharp, contrasting colors and the evocative juxtaposition of emotions and images. Pound wrote to Dorothy : "The chinese things in Poetry are worth the price of admission". The second event was Upward's initiation of Pound into the study of Herbert Allen Giles A history of Chinese literature. | |
| 4 | 1913 | Dorothy Pound resumed her Chinese lessons using Walter Caine Hillier's The Chinese language and how to learn it. As Dorothy had such a passion for Chinese culture, Ezra Pound shared with her virtually everything remarkable in Giles' History of Chinese literature. |
|
| 5 | 1913-1915 | Ezra Pound, acting as secretary to W.B. Yeats spent the winters at Stone Cottage in Sussex to assimilate the lessons of Chinese poetry and Japanese No drama. Pound began to work on the notebooks by Ernest Fenollosa. | |
| 6 | 1913 |
Pound, Ezra. A few don'ts by an Imagiste. In : Poetry ; vol. 1, no 6 (March 1913). "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of freedom from time limits and space limits ; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest work of art." 1. Direct treatment of the 'thing', whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm : to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. |
|
| 7 | 1913 |
Ezra Pound received Ernest Fenollosa's 21 notebooks from Mary Fenollosa. Contents : 1. No plays. 2. Notes to Chinese lessons. 3. Notes to Chinese lessons. 4. Chinese thoughts. 5. Intermediate Chinese lessons. 6. Chinese and Japanese poetry : abstracts and lectures. 7. Chinese poetry : lectures by Professors Hirai and Shida. 8. Chinese poetry : Qu Yuan. 9-12. Chinese poetry : lectures by Professor Mori. 12. Chinese poetry : notes. 13. Chinese poetry : notes and translations. 14.-21. : Chinese poetry : notes and translation. |
|
| 8 | 1914 |
M.M. [Pound, Ezra]. The words of Ming Mao [ID D29089]. Mr. Loftus Hare's article on Yang-Chu, in the last issue of The Egoist, is most interesting, but let me add here Ming-Mao's reply to Yang Chu, especially to the remarks on Confuciuas, as follows : Yang-Chu says that Kung-fu-tse had never a day's joy in all his life, yet we read that the Master Kung was once rapt into three days' revery, or as the Taoists say, ecstasy by the mere sound of certain beautiful music. To say that a man so capable of aesthetic pleasure has never a day's joy, is manifest folly. As for Yang and his relation to Egoism, it was Kung who gave true instruction, seeing that he taught that a man's joy should rest in the dignity of his own mind and not in the shilly-shally of circumstance. Thus he died serene though it were among fishermen. As for Ch'ieh and Chow, their pleasures depended on their having been born to imperial position, their luxury was bestowed upon them, how shall hereditary emperors who are born with such opportunity for revels be set up as examples for men of common fortune, who, even if they had the capacity for debauch, would, if they desired to exercise it, spend all their lives in a vain desire for trappings and for numerous women in brocade, and for pavilions and caparisoned horses ? The counsels of Yang-Chu are in no sense Egoism, since they teach a man to depend on all things save himself. This dependence on self is the core of Confucian philosophy. |
|
| 9 | 1914 |
Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Song Faxiang. Homer Pound encountered Song Faxiang in Philadelphia and then directed him to Ezra Pound in London. Song was so impressed with the father and son's passion for Chinese culture that he offered to find jobs in China for both of them. Ezra Pound responded : "China is interesting, VERY". Letters from Song Faxiang to Ezra Pound. 8 Febr. 1914 "I have already sent two inquiries for a position for you in China and have seen a few men and see if I can make them give you a good position. They ask me to get your academic records, etc. So if you will be kind enough to send to me, it will be a great advantage. I think I can get a fairly good position for you. We will see what can be done." 1 April 1914 "Now in regard to your coming out to Peking, I have been trying very hard to get a suitable position for you but so far I have not been able. I have found a position about $200.00 = £20 per month as a translator. If you feel like it, please let me know. It might be all right for you for the beginning, but I am rather afraid that you do not like it. I am looking for a good position for you." 3 July 1914 "Accept my congratulations for you happy union and newly married life. I wish you great success. I am sorry that you have changed your plan that you are coming to Peking to join me. I hope sometime in the near future you can come to pay me a visit." Qian Zhaoming : Pound's encounter with Song coincided with his initial attraction to Confucianism. Song as Pound's first Chinese contact turned out to be a caustic critic of Confucius and Mencius. Interacting with him proves to have informed Pound of the anti-Confucian polemics in early Republican China. Song's attack on Confucianism appears in Song's article The causes and remedy of the poverty of China. [Song, Faxiang]. F.T.S. The causes and remedy of the poverty of China [ID D29080]. Note by Ezra Pound. "The following MSS, was left with me by a Chinese official. I might have treated it in various ways. He suggested that I should rewrite it. I might excerpt the passages whereof I disapprove but I prefer to let it alone. At a time when China has replaced Greece in the intellectual life of so many occidentals, it is interesting to see in what the occidental ideas are percolating into the orient. We have here the notes of a practical and technical Chinaman. There are also some corrections, I do not know by whom, but I leave them as they are. " Song turned out to be a caustic critic of Confucius. He compared China negatively with America, admiring American economists' adherence to the principle of production and consumption and denouncing the Confucian admonition against material 'desires' and 'appetites'. The Chinese had been taught to be 'satisfied' in poverty', he contended, 'hence the present poverty'. Pound did not agree with Song. Song's anti-Confucian article led Pound back to a scrutiny of Pauthier's Confucian Four Books. After reading William Loftus Hare's Chinese egoism, he got a chance to respond implicitly to Song. Without any knowledge of the degree to which Confucianism had been corrupted, Pound wondered how China could remedy its problems – What Song described as 'the corruption of the internal administration, the weakness of our army, the deplorable condition of our finance, and the misery of the people' – by abandoning its Confucian tradition. To Pound nothing seemed wrong with Confucian teachings. Song and his fellow Chinese modernists just had to distinguish Confucianism from the political system of old China. When the Chinese modernists were breaking from Confucianism in their search for a modern nation, Pound was moving in a contrary direction, reclaiming the humanist values of the Confucian tradition. He looked to China for an alternative to modernity. Song and his contemporaries in their attempt to replace Confucianism with a Western model. |
|
| 10 | 1914 ca. | Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were attracted to ritual bronzes of the Shang and Zhou societies in London museums. |
|
| 11 | 1915.1 |
Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (1) Rihaku flourished in the eight century of our era. The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer is of about this period. The other poems from the Chinese are earlier. Song of the Bowmen of Shu By Bunno (um 1000 B.C.) Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots And saying : When shall we get back to our country ? Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen, We have no comfort because of these Mongols. We grub the soft fern-shoots, When anyone says "Return", the others are full of sorrow. Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty. Our defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return. We grub the old fern-stalks. We say : Will we be let to go back in October ? There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort. Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country. What flower has come into blossom ? Whose chariot ? The General's. Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong. We have no rest, three battles a month. By heaven, his horses are tired. The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them. The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fish-skin. The enemy is swift, we must be careful. When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring. We come back in the snow, We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty, Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief ? The beautiful Toilet By Mei Sheng, 140 B.C. Blue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth, White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand, And she was a courtesan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who know goes drunkenly out And leaves her to much alone. The River Song By Rihaku, 8th century A.D. [Li Bo] The boat is of shato-wood, and its gunwales are cut magnolia, Musicians with jeweled flutes and with pipes of gold Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine Is rich for a thousand cups. We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water, Yet Sennin needs A yellow stork for a charger, and all our seamen Would follow the white gulls or ride them. Kutsu's prose song Hangs with the sun and moon. King So's terraced palace is now but barren hill, But I draw pen on this barge Causing the five peaks to tremble, And I have joy in these words like the joy of blue islands. (If glory could last for ever Then the waters of Han would flow northward). And I have moped in the Emperor's garden, Awaiting an order-to-write ! I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water Just reflecting the sky's tinge, And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing. The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island grasses at Yei-shu, The purple house and the crimson are full of spring softness. South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer, Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace. Vine-strings a hundred feet long hang down from carved railings, And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other, and listen, Crying - "Kwan, Kuan", for the early wind, and the feel of it. The wind bundles itself into a bluish cloud and wanders off. Over a thousand gates, over a thousand doors are the sounds of spring singing. And the Emperor is at Ko. Five clouds hang aloft, bright on the purple sky, The imperial guards come forth from the golden house with their armour a-gleaming. The Emperor in his jeweled car goes out to inspect his flowers, He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks, He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales, For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales, Their sound is mixed in this flute, Their voice is in the twelve pipes here. The River-Merchant's Wife : a letter By Rihaku [Li Bo] While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan : Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the look out ? At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa. The Jewel Stairs' Grievance By Rihaku [Li Bo] The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn. Note : Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, there-fore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poems is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach. Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin By Rihaku [Li Bo] March has come to the bridge-head, Peach boughs and apricot boughs hang over a thousand gates, At morning there are flowers to cut the heart, And evening drives them on the eastward-flowing waters. Petals are on the gone waters and on the going. And on the back-swirling eddies, But to-day's men are not the men of the old days, Though they hang in the same way over the bridge-rail. The sea's colour moves at the dawn And the princes still stand in rows, about the throne, And the moon falls over the portals of Sei-go-yo, And clings to the walls and the gate-top. With head gear glittering against the cloud and sun, The lords go forth from the court, and into far borders. They ride upon dragon-like horses, Upon horses with head-trappings of yellow metal, And the streets make way for their passage. Haughty their passing, Haughty their steps as they go in to great banquets, To high halls and curious food, To the perfumed air and girls dancing, To clear flutes and clear singing ; To the dance of the seventy couples ; To the mad chase through the gardens. Night and day are given over to pleasure And they think it will last a thousand autumns, Unwearying autumns. For them the yellow dogs howl portents in vain, And what are they compared to the lady Riokushu, That was cause of hate ! Who among them is a man like Han-rei Who departed alone with his mistress, With her hair unbound, and he his own skiffsman ! Lament of the Frontier Guard By Rihaku [Li Bo] By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand, Lonely from the beginning of time until now ! Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn. I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land : Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert. There is no wall left to this village. Bones white with a thousand frosts, High heaps, covered with trees and grass ; Who brought this to pass ? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger ? Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums ? Barbarous kings. A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn, A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom, Three hundred and sixty thousand, And sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning. Desolate, desolate fields, And no children of warfare upon them, No longer the men for offence and defence. Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate, With Rihoku's name forgotten, And we guardsmen fed to the tigers. Exile's letter By Rihaku [Li Bo] To So-Kin of Rakuyo, ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen. Now I remember that you built me a special tavern By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin. With yellow gold and white jewels, we paid for songs and laughter And we were drunk for month on month, forgetting the kings and princes. Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border, And with them, and with you especially, There was nothing at cross purpose, And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing, If only they could be of that fellowship, And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret. And then I was sent off to South Wei, smothered in laurel groves, And you to the north of Raku-hoku, Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common. And then, when separation had come to its worst, We met, and travelled into Sen-jo, Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters, Into a valley of the thousand bright flowers, That was the first valley ; And into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds. And with silver harness and reins of gold, Out came the East of Kan foreman and his company. And there came also the "True man" of Shi-yo to meet me, Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ. In the storied houses of San-ko they gave us more Sennin music, Many instruments, like the sound of young phoenix broods. The foreman of Kan-chu, drunk, danced because his long sleeves wouldn't keep still With that music playing And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap, And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens, And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or rain. I had to be off to So, far away over the waters, You back to your river-bridge. And your father, who was brave as a leopard, Was governor in Hei Shu, and put down the barbarian rabble, And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance. And what with broken wheels and so on, I won't say it wasn't hard going. Over roads twisted like sheep's guts. And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the North, And thinking how little you cared for the cost, and you caring enough to pay it. And what a reception : Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jewelled table, And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning. And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle, To the dynastic temple, with water about it clear as blue jade, With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums, With ripples like dragon-scales, going grass-green on the water, Pleasure lasting, with courtesans, going and coming without hindrance, With the willow flakes falling like snow, And the vermillioned girls getting drunk about sunset, And the water, a hundred feet deep, reflecting green eyebrows Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight, Gracefully painted And the girls singing back at each other, Dancing in transparent brocade, And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it, Tossing it up under the clouds. And all this comes to an end. And is not again to be met with. I went up to the court for examination, Tried Layu's luck, offered the Choyo song, And got no promotion, and went back to the East Mountains White-headed. And once again, later, we met at the South bridge-head. And then the crowd broke up, you went north to San palace, And if you ask how I regret that parting : It is like the flowers falling at Spring's end Confused, whirled in a tangle. What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart. I call in the boy, Have him sit on his knees here To seal this, And send it a thousand miles, thinking. Four poems of Departure By Rihaku [Li Bo] or Omakitsu [Yip Wai-lim : By Wang Wei]. Light rain is on the light dust. The willows of the inn-yard Will be going greener and greener, But you, Sir, had better take wine ere your departure, For you will have no friends about you When you come to the gates of Go. Separation on the River Kiang By Rihaku Ko-jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. His lone sail blots the far sky. And now I see only the river, The long Kiang, reaching heaven. Taking Leave of a Friend By Rihaku [Li Bo] Blue mountains to the north of the walls, White river winding about them Here we must make separation And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass. Mind like a floating wide cloud, Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance. Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing. Leave-Taking Near Shoku By Rihaku [Li Bo] "Sanso, King of Shoku, built roads" They say the roads of Sanso are steep. Sheer as the mountains. The walls rise in a man's face, Clouds grow out of the hill at his horse's bridle. Sweet trees are on the paved way of the Shin, Their trunks burst through the paving, And freshets are bursting their ice In the mids of Shoku, a proud city. Men's fates are already set, There is no need of asking diviners. [Der Staat Shoku = Shu. Die Stadt Shin = Chengdu. Rishogu = Li Guang]. The City of Choan By Rihaku [Li Bo] The phoenix are at play on their terrace. The phoenix are gone, the river flows on alone. Flowers and grass Cover over the dark path where lay the dynastic house of the Go. The bright cloths and bright caps of Shin Are now the base of old hills. The Three Mountains fall through the far heaven, The isle of White Heron splits the two streams apart. Now the high clouds cover the sun And I cannot see Choan afar And I am sad. South-Folk in Cold Country [Yip Wai-lim : By Li Bo] The Dai horse neighs against the bleak wind of Etsu, The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the North, Emotion is born out of habit. Yesterday we went out of the Wild-Goose gate, To-day from the dragon-Pen. (1) Surprised. Desert turmoil. Sea sun. Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven. Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements. Mind and spirit drive on the feathery banners. Hard fight gets no reward. Loyalty is hard to explain. Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift moving, Whose white head is lost for this province ? (1) I.e., we have been warring from one end of the empire to the other, now east, now west, on each border. Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku [Yip Wai-lim : By Guo Pu]. The red and green kingfishers flash between the orchids and clover, One bird casts its gleam on another. Green vines hang through the high forest, They weave a whole roof to the mountain, The lone man sits with shut speech, He purrs and pats the clear strings. He throws his heart up through the sky, He bites through the flower pistil and brings up a fine fountain. The red-pine-tree god looks at him and wonders. He rides through the purple smoke to visit the sennin, He takes "Floaring Hill" (1) by the sleeve, He claps his hand on the back of the great water sennin. But you, you dam'd crowd of gnats, Can you even tell the age of a turtle ? (1) Name of a sennin. Ballad of the Mulberry Road Fenollosa MSS., very early) [Yip Wai-lim : anonymous] The sun rises in south-east corner of things To look on the tall house of the Shin For they have a daughter named Rafu (pretty girl), She made the name for herself : "Gauze Veil", For she feeds mulberries to silkworms, She gets them by the south wall of the town. With green strings she makes the warp of her basket, She makes the shoulder-straps of her basket from the boughs of Katsura, And she piles her hair up on the left side of her head-piece. Her earrings are made of pearl, Her underskirt is of green pattern-silk, Her overskirt is the same silk dyed in purple, And when men going by look on Rafu They set down their burdens, They sand and twirl their moustaches. Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu [Yip Wai-lim : By Lu Zhaolin]. Yip Wai-lim : The original poem is 68 lines. Pound translated only the first sixteen lines. I The narrow streets cut into the wide highway at Choan, Dark oxen, white horses, drag on the seven coaches with outriders The coaches are perfumed wood, The jeweled chair is held up at the crossway, Before the royal lodge : A glitter of golden saddles, awaiting the princess ; They eddy before the gate of the barons. The canopy embroidered with dragons drinks in and casts back the sun. Evening comes. The trappings are bordered with mist. The hundred cords of mist are spread through and double the trees, Night birds, and night women, Spread out their sounds through the gardens. II Birds with flowery wing, hovering butterflies crowd over the thousand gates. Trees that glitter like jade, terraces tinged with silver, The seed of a myriad hues, A network of arbours and passages and covered ways, Double towers, winged roofs, border the network of ways : A place of felicitous meeting. Riu's house stands out on the sky, with glitter of colour As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus to gather his dews, Before it another house which I do not know : How shall we know all the friends whom we meet on strange roadways ? To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud" By Tao Yuan Ming, 365-427 A.D. [Tao Yuanming = Tao Qian] "Wet Springtime", says To-Em-Mei, "Wet Spring in the Garden". I The clouds have gathered, and gathered, and the rain falls and falls, The eight ply of the heavens are all folded into one darkness, And the wide, flat road stretches out. I stop in my room toward the East, quiet, quiet, I pat my new cask of wine. My friends are estranged, or far distant, I bow my head and stand still. II Rain, rain, and the clouds have gathered, The eight ply of the heavens are darkness, The flat land is turned into river. "Wine, wine, here is wine" ! I drink by my eastern window. I think of talking and man, And no boat, no carriage, approaches. III The trees in my east-looking garden are bursting out with new twigs, They try to stir new affection, And men say the sun and moon keep on moving Because they can't find a soft seat. The birds flutter to rest in my tree, and I think I have heard them saying, "It is not that there are no other men But we like this fellow the best, But however we long to speak He cannot know of our sorrow". "I have not come to the end of Ernest Fenollosa's notes by a long way, nor is it entirely perplexity that causes me to cease from translation. True, I can find little to add to one line out of a certain Poem : 'You know ell where it was that I walked When you had left me.' In another I find a perfect speech in a literality which will be to many most unacceptable. The couplet is at follows : 'Drawing sword, cut into water, water again flow : Raise cup, quench sorrow, sorrow again sorrow'. [Final page] There are also other poems, notably the 'Five colour Screen', in which Professor Fenollosa was, as an art critic, especially interested, and Rihaku's sort of Ars Poetica, which might be given with diffidence to an audience of good will. But if I give them, with the necessary breaks for explanation, and a tedium of notes, it is quite certain that the personal hatred in which I am held by many, and the invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists, will be brought to bear first on the flaws of such translation, and will then be merged into depreciation of the whole book of translations. Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems." E.P. |
|
| 12 | 1915 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound from London ; 22 Sept. 1915. "I wonder if there is a decent translation of Confucius. I've Pauthier's French version. NOT the odes, but the 'Four Books'." Allen Upward introduced Pound to Guillaume Pauthier's Les quatre lives de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine. |
|
| 13 | 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. |
|
| 14 | 1915 |
Pound, Ezra. Imagisme and England : a vindication and an anthology. In : T.P.'s weekly ; no 25 (1915). "It is quite true that we have sought the force of Chinese ideographs without knowing it." |
|
| 15 | 1915 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Felix E. Schelling ; June (1915). "As for the Chinese translations, they have been approved by one or two people who know some of the originals. They are, I should say, closer than the 'Rubaiyat', but then the ideographs leave one wholly free as to phrasing. I mean, instead of 'hortus inclusus' you have a little picture of an enclosure with two or three stalks of grass and a flower (very much abbreviated) inside. Or for 'to visit, or ramble' you have a king and a dog sitting on the stern of a boat. (No, I don't make them nicely, I haven't a brush. The two top dabs are ripples or drops for the water.) This charming sign does not occur in Cathay. It is merely an exquisite example of the way the Chinese mind works. Of course, all the ideographs are not as amusing. Fenollosa has left a most enlightening essay on the written character (a whole basis of aesthetic, in reality), but the adamantine stupidity of all magazine editors delays its appearance." |
|
| 16 | 1915 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Milton Bronner ; 21 Sept. 1915 "I should probably have gone to China if I hadn't married." |
|
| 17 | 1915 |
Pound, Ezra. The Renaissance. In : Poetry ; vol. 5, no 5 (1915). "The last century rediscovered the middle ages. It is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China. Undoubtedly, pure color is to be found in Chinese poetry, when we begin to know enough about it ; indeed a shadow of this perfection is already at hand in translations. Liu Ch'e, Chu Yuan, Chia I, and the great vers libre writers before the Petrarchan age of Li Po, are a treasure to which the next century may look for as great a stimulus as the renaissance had from the Greeks." |
|
| 18 | 1915 |
Letter from William Carlos Williams to Harriet Monroe. "… Pound's translation from the Chinese is something of great worth well handled. Auperb ! I suppose you've see his Cathay the Chinese things are perhaps a few of the greatest poems written..." |
|
| 19 | 1916 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Wyndham Lewis ; 24 June (1916). "If you like I will send you a copy of Cathay so that the colonel [Lewis] may be able to understand what is imagisme." |
|
| 20 | 1916-1918 |
Qian Zhaoming : After the publication of Cathay ound continued to explore Chinese poetry through the Fenollosa notebooks and Wang Wei, or Omakitsu, as he is called by Fenollosa. In a letter to Iris Barry, 24 Aug. 1916 he writes : "I have spent the day with Wang Wei, eight century Jules Laforgue Chinois". Pound saw in Wang Wei a modern sensibility and a likeness to the French symbolist Laforgue. In Wang Wei he apparently discovered the possibility of ruther modernizing his style by combining the French and Chinese influences. In a letter to Kate Buss, 4 Jan. 1917 he emphasizes Wang Wei's modernity and his resemblance to the French symbolists : "Omakitsu is the real modern – even Parisian – of VIII cent. China". Nov. 1918 he brought out a short version of Wang Wei's poem Dawn on the mountain in The little review. Pound's failure to reproduce Wang Wei's whole art has been potent, generative, ironically influential. He was exposed to a poetics firmly based on the non-dualistic notions of Taoism / Zen-Buddhism. Thought Pound may not have been able to grasp Wang Wei's philosophy, he was by that point both intuitively and conceptually conditioned to appreciate Wang Wei's Taoist / Zen-Buddhist art. |
|
| 21 | 1916 |
Pound, Ezra. Lustra [ID D29059]. EPITAPHS Fu I Fu I loved the high cloud and the hill, Alas, he died of alcohol. Li Po And Li Po also died drunk. He tried to embrace a moon In the Yellow River. ANCIENT WISDOM, RATHER COSMIC So-shu dreamed, And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly, He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else, Hence his contentment. |
|
| 22 | 1917 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to James Joyce (1917). "I have begun an endless poem, of no known category, Phanapoeia or something or other, all about everything. Poetry may print the first three Cantos this spring. I wonder what you will make of it. Probably too sprawling and unmusical to find favor in your ears". [Betr. Da xue]. |
|
| 23 | 1917 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Kate Buss ; 4 January (1917). "Dear Miss Buss : Thanks for sending me the copy of your review. The only error seems to be in supposing that 'Albâtre' was in any way influenced by Chinese stuff which I did not see until a year of two later. The error is natural as Cathay appeared before Lustra, but the separate poems in Lustra had mostly been written before the Chinese translations were begun and had mostly been printed in periodicals either here or in America… The subject is Chinese, the language of the translations is mine – I think. At least if you compare the 'Song of the Bowemen' with the English version of the same poem in Jennings' 'Shi King' Part II, 1-7 called 'Song of the Troops', or the 'Beautiful Toilet' with the same poem in Giles' Chinese literature, you will be able to gauge the amount of effect the celestial Chinese has on the osseous head of an imbecile or a philologist. Omahitsu is the real modern – even Parisian – of VIII cent. China." |
|
| 24 | 1917 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to John Quinn ; Jan. 10, 1917. "The Dec. number of Seven Arts has just arrived. I don't know whether I owe it to you or to the editor. I have just sealed up Fenollosa's Essay on the Chinese written character, to send to them. It is one of the most important essays of our time. But they will probably reject it on the ground of its being exotic. Fenollosa saw and anticipated a good deal of what has happened in art (painting and poetry) during the last ten years, and his essay is basic for all aesthetics, but I doubt if that will cut much ice… I want the Fenollosa essay published… China is fundamental, Japan is not… I don't mean to say there aren't interesting things in Fenollosa's Japanese stuff (or fine things, like the end of Kagekiyo, which is, I think, 'Homeric'). But China is solid. One can't go back of the Exile's letter, or the Song of the bowmen, or the North Gate." |
|
| 25 | 1917 |
Eliot, T.S. Ezra Pound : his metric and poetry [ID D29165]. After "Ripostes," Mr. Pound's idiom has advanced still farther. Inasmuch as "Cathay," the volume of translations from the Chinese, appeared prior to "Lustra," it is sometimes thought that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left a quantity of manuscripts, including a great number of rough translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain poems subsequently incorporated in "Lustra" had appeared in "Poetry," Mrs. Fenollosa recognized that in Pound the Chinese manuscripts would find the interpreter whom her husband would have wished; she accordingly forwarded the papers for him to do as he liked with. It is thus due to Mrs. Fenollosa's acumen that we have "Cathay"; it is not as a consequence of "Cathay" that we have "Lustra." This fact must be borne in mind… It is easy to say that the language of "Cathay" is due to the Chinese. If one looks carefully at (1) Pound's other verse, (2) other people's translations from the Chinese (e.g., Giles's), it is evident that this is not the case. The language was ready for the Chinese poetry. Compare, for instance, a passage from "Provincia Deserta": I have walked into Périgord I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping, Painting the front of that church,— And, under the dark, whirling laughter, I have looked back over the stream and seen the high building, Seen the long minarets, the white shafts. I have gone in Ribeyrac, and in Sarlat. I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy, Walked over En Bertran's old layout, Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus, Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned. with a passage from "The River Song": He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks, He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales, For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales, Their sound is mixed in this flute, Their voice is in the twelve pipes here. It matters very little how much is due to Rihaku and how much to Pound. Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer has observed: "If these are original verses, then Mr. Pound is the greatest poet of this day." He goes on to say: The poems in "Cathay" are things of a supreme beauty. What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our poetry, that new breath these poems bring…. Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader…. Beauty is a very valuable thing; perhaps it is the most valuable thing in life; but the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly is almost more valuable. Of both these qualities Mr. Pound's book is very full. Therefore, I think we may say that this is much the best work he has done, for, however closely he may have followed his originals—and of that most of us have no means of judging—there is certainly a good deal of Mr. Pound in this little volume. "Cathay" and "Lustra" were followed by the translations of Noh plays. The Noh are not so important as the Chinese poems (certainly not so important for English); the attitude is less unusual to us; the work is not so solid, so firm. "Cathay" will, I believe, rank with the "Sea-Farer" in the future among Mr. Pound's original work; the Noh will rank among his translations. It is rather a dessert after "Cathay." There are, however, passages which, as Pound has handled them, are different both from the Chinese and from anything existent in English. There is, for example, the fine speech of the old Kagekiyo, as he thinks of his youthful valour… |
|
| 26 | 1917 |
Pound, Ezra. Provincialism the enemy. In : New age ; 19 July (1917). "Confucius' constant emphasis is on the value of personality, on the outlines of personality, on the man's right to preserve the outlines of his personality, and of his duty not to interfere with the personalities of others. Confucius' emphasis is on conduct. 'Fraternal deference' is his phrase. If a man have 'fraternal deference' his character and his opinions will not be a nuisance to his friends and a peril to the community. It is a statesman's way of thinking. The thought is for the community, Confucius' constant emphasis is on the value of personality, on the outlines of personality, on the man's right to preserve the outlines of his personality, and of his duty not to interfere with the personalities of others." |
|
| 27 | 1918 |
Pound, Ezra. Chinese poetry [ID D29083]. It is because Chinese poetry has certain qualities of vivid presentation; and because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one labours to make a translation, and that I personally am most thankful to the late Ernest Fenollosa for his work in sorting out and gathering many Chinese poems into a form and bulk wherein I can deal with them. I do not think my views on poetry can be so revolutionary and indecent as some people try to make out, for some months ago I heard Selwyn Image talking of Christmas Carols and praising, in them, the very qualities I and my friends are always insisting on. Selwyn Image belongs to an older and statelier generation and it is not their habit to attack traditional things which they dislike, and for that reason the rather irritating work of revising our poetical canon has been left for my contemporaries, who come in for a fair share of abuse. I shall not, in this article, attempt any invidious comparisons between English and Chinese poetry. China has produced just as many bad poets as England, just as many dull and plodding moralizers, just as many flaccid and over-ornate versifiers. By fairly general consent, their greatest poet is Rihaku or "Li Po", who flourished in the eighth century A.D. He was the head of the court office of poetry, and a great 'compiler'. But this last title must not mislead you. In China a 'compiler' is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising. Thus, a part of Rihaku's work consists of old themes rewritten, of a sort of summary of the poetry which had been before him, and this in itself might explain in part the great variety of his work. Nevertheless, when he comes to treat of things of his own time he is no less various and abundant. I confine myself to his work because I can find in it examples of the three qualities of Chinese poetry which I wish now to illustrate. The first great distinction between Chinese taste and our own is that the Chinese like poetry that they have to think about, and even poetry that they have to puzzle over. This latter taste has occasionally broken out in Europe, notably in twelfth-century Provence and thirteenth-century Tuscany, but it has never held its own for very long. The following four-line poem of Rihaku's has been prized for twelve centuries in China: THE JEWEL-STAIRS GRIEVANCE The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And 1 let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn. 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, not 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 poem. You can play Conan Doyle if you like. First, 'jewel-stairs', therefore the scene is in a palace. Second, 'gauze stockings', therefore a court lady is speaking, not a servant or common person who is in the palace by chance. Third, 'dew soaks', therefore the lady has been waiting, she has not just come. Fourth, 'clear autumn with moon showing', therefore the man who has not come cannot excuse himself on the grounds that the evening was unfit for the rendezvous. Fifth, you ask how do we know she was waiting for a man ? Well, the title calls the poem 'grievance', and for that matter, how do we know what she was waiting for ? This sort of Chinese poem is probably not unfamiliar to the reader. Nearly every one who has written about Chinese has mentioned the existence of these short, obscure poems. In contrast to them, in most rigorous contrast, we find poems of the greatest vigour and clarity. We find a directness and realism such as we find only in early Saxon verse and in the Poema del Cid, and in Homer, or rather in what Homer would be if he wrote without epithet; for instance, the following war poem. The writer expects his hearers to know that Dai and Etsu are in the south, that En is a bleak north country, and that the 'Wild Goose Gate' is in the far northeast, and the 'Dragon Pen' is in the very opposite corner of the great empire, and probably that the Mongols are attacking the borders of China. Given these simple geographical facts the poem is very forthright in its manner. The Dai horse, from the south, neighs against the north wind, The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the north. Emotion is of habit Yesterday we went out of the Wild Goose Gate, To-day from the Dragon Pen. Surprised. Desert Turmoil. Sea sun. Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven. Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements, Our mind and spirit are on getting forward the feather-silk banners. Hard fight gets no reward. Loyalty is difficult to explain. Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift-moving, Whose white head is lost for this province. There you have no mellifluous circumlocution, no sentimentalizing of men who have never seen a battlefield and who wouldn't fight if they had to. You have war, campaigning as it has always been, tragedy, hardship, no illusions. There are two other fine war poems which are too long to quote here, one reputed to be by Bunno: a plodding of feet, soldiers living on fern-shoots, generals with outworn horses ; another by Rihaku, supposedly spoken by a sentinel watching over a long-ruined village. There are no walls, there are decaying bones, enduring desolation. CHINESE POETRY II There are two other qualities in Chinese poetry which are, I think, little suspected. First, Chinese poetry is full of fairies and fairy lore. Their lore is 'quite Celtic'. I found one tale in a Japanese play; two ghosts come to a priest to be married, or rather he makes a pilgrimage to their tomb and they meet him there. The tale was new to me, but I found that Mr. Yeats had come upon a similar story among the people of Aran. The desire to be taken away by the fairies, the idea of souls flying with the sea-birds, and many other things recently made familiar to us by the Celtic school, crop up in one’s Chinese reading and are so familiar and so well known to us that they seem, often, not worth translating. If the reader detests fairies and prefers human poetry, then that also can be found in Chinese. Perhaps the most interesting form of modern poetry is to be found in Browning's 'Men and Women'. This kind of poem, which reaches its climax in his unreadable 'Sordello', and is most popular in such poems as 'Pictor Ignotus', or the 'Epistle of Karshish', or 'Cleon', has had a curious history in the west. You may say it begins in Ovid's 'Heroides', which purport to be letters written between Helen and Paris or by Oenone and other distinguished persons of classical pseudo-history; or you may find an earlier example in Theocritus' Idyl of the woman spinning at her sombre and magic wheel. From Ovid to Browning this sort of poem was very much neglected. It is interesting to find, in eighth-century China, a poem which might have been slipped into Browning's work without causing any surprise save by its simplicity and its naive beauty. THE RIVER-MERCHANTS WIFE (A LETTER) While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo-stilts, playing horse. You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Cho-kan ; Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married you, My Lord, I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, 1 looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with your dust Forever, and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look-out ? At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies. And you were gone for five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet, by the gate, when you were departing. Now the moss is grown there ; the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away. The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August, Over the grass in the west garden. They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang Please let me know beforehand And I will come out to meet you, As far as Cho-fu-sa. I can add nothing, and it would be an impertinence for me to thrust in remarks about the gracious simplicity and completeness of the poem. There is another sort of completeness in Chinese. Especially in their poems of nature and of scenery they seem to excel western writers, both when they speak of their sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things. For instance, when they speak of mountainous crags with the trees clinging head downward, or of a mountain pool where the flying birds are reflected, and Lie as if on a screen, as says Rihaku. The scenes out of the marvellous Chinese painting rise again and again in his poems, but one cannot discuss a whole literature, or even all of one man’s work-in a single essay. |
|
| 28 | 1918 |
Pound, Ezra. Books current : One hundred and seventy Chinese poems by Arthur Waley [ID D8884]. In : Future 2 (1918). [Review]. The book is certainly the fullest illustration of Chinese poetic subject matter available in English. There are passages undeniably beautiful. The one lack is the sense of intensity which should hold the reader's attention. |
|
| 29 | 1918 |
Eliot, T.S. A note on Ezra Pound. In : To-day ; no 4 (1918). Cathay is an absolutely objective work ; it depends upon nothing but its own value. Here, and in the 'Wayfarer' [sic], Mr. Pound shows a matured genius. He has gained in ability to set down an emotion, using images with greater austerity, only for their contribution to the total effect. Nothing could owe less to exotic charm, indeed, than 'The Bowmen of Shu' or 'The River-Merchant's Wife. |
|
| 30 | 1918 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to Harriet Monroe, 19 June, 1918. "I have made a discovery which I have never before seen mentioned in any Occidental book on Chinese poetry, but which, I think must be well known in Chinese literature ; namely, that the roots of the characters are the things which give the poetry its overtones, taking the place of adjectives and imaginary writing with us. One cannot translate a poem into anything like the proper spirit, taking the character meaning alone. It is necessary in every case to go to the root of a character, and that will give the key to why that particular word is used and not some other which means the same thing when exactly translated. Mrs. Ayscough quite agrees with me in this. This is the key to the situation, and it is the hunting of these roots that she is now doing." Letter from Florence Ayscough to Amy Lowell, 24 July, 1918. "My reason for suggesting that you put in the little hint of our discovery about the roots is simply and solely to knock a hole in Ezra Pound's translations ; he having got his things entirely from Professor Fenelosa [sic], they were not Chinese in the first place, and Heaven knows how many hands they went through between the original Chinese and Professor Fenelosa's [sic] Japanese original. In the second place, Ezra has elaborated on these until, although they are excellent poems, they are not translations of the Chinese poets." |
|
| 31 | 1918 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to Florence Ayscough ; 24 July (1918). My reason for suggesting that you put in the little hint of discovery about the roots is simply and solely to knock a hole in Ezra Pound's translations ; he having got his things entirely from Professor Fenollosa. They were not Chinese in the first place, and Heaven knows how many hands they went through between the original Chinese and Professor Fenollosa's Japanese original. In the second place, Ezra has elaborated on these until, although they are excellent poems, they are not translations of the Chinese poets. |
|
| 32 | 1919.2 |
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. (2) Plates 月耀如晴雪 [yue yao ru qing xue] 梅花似照晃 [mei hua si zhao huang] 可憐金鏡轉 [ke lian jin jing zhuan] 庭上玉芳馨 [ting shang yu fang xin] [Fenollosa left the notes unfinished ; I am proceeding in ignorance and by conjecture. The primitive pictures were 'squared' at a certain time. E.P.] MOON : sun disc with the moon's horns. RAYS : bright + feathers flying. Bright, vide note on p. 42. Upper right, abbreviated picture of wings ; lower, bird = to fly. Both F. and Morrison note that it is short tailed bird. LIKE : woman mouth. PURE : sun + azure sky. Sky possibly containing tent idea. Author has dodged a 'pure' containing sun + broom. SNOW : rain + broom ; cloud roof or cloth over falling drops. Sweeping motion of snow ; broom-like appearance of snow. PLUM : Tree + crooked female breat. FLOWERS : man + spoon under plants abbreviation, probably actual representation of blossoms. Flowers at height of man's head. Two forms of character in F. 's two copies. RESEMBLE : man + try = does what it can toward. BRIGHT : sun +knife mouth fire. STARS : sun bright. Bright here going to origin : fire over moving legs of a man. CAN : mouth hook. I suppose it might even be fish-pole or sheltered corner. ADMIRE : (be in love with fire) ; heart + girl + descending through two. GOLD : Present from resembles king and gem ; but archaic might be balance and melting-pots. DISC : to erect ; gold + sun, legs (running). TURN : carriage + carriage, tenth of cubit (?). Bent knuckle or bent object revolving round pivot. GARDEN : to blend + pace, in midst of court. HIGH ABOVE JEWEL : king and dot. Note : Plain man + dot = dog. WEEDS : plants cover knife. I.E. growing things that must be destroyed. FRAGRANT : Specifically given in Morrison as fragrance from a distance. M. and F. seem to differ as to significance of sun under growing tree (cause of fragrance). NOTE ON PLATE 1 The component 'bright' in the second ideogram is resolvable into fire above a man (walking). The picture is abbreviated to the light and the moving legs. I should say it might have started as the sun god moving below the horizon, at any rate it is the upper part of the fire sign. This also applies in line 2, fifth ideogram, where the legs are clearer. The rain sign (developed in snow sign) might suggest the cloths of heaven, tent roof. The large base of the last composite sign (Fragrant) Morrison considers as merely a buried sun. Starting at top left, we have scholar over something like a corpse (a sign I find only in compounds : (?) a wounded corpse). This pair alone form 'a vulgar form of sign', or an abbreviation of the full sign for 'voice, notes of music, sound, any noise', also abbreviation for noise of a blow; to the right of it 'weapons like spears or flails' ; this compound = enemy; and our total, sun under tree under enemy. PARAPHRASE "The moon's snow falls on the plum tree; Its boughs are full of bright stars. We can admire the bright turning disc; The garden high above there, casts its pearls to our weeds." Loss in interaction being apparent on study of the ideograms, their inter-relation, and the repetition or echo of components, not only those used but those suggested or avoided. A poem of moonlight; the sun element is contained five times: once in three lines, and twice in the second. You have not understood the poem until you have seen the tremendous antithesis from the first line to the last; from the first character, diagonal, to the last tremendous affirmative, sun under tree under enemies. Ideograms Line 1, No. 2; Line 2, No. 2; and Line 4, No. 5 — almost every alternate sign — are such compendiums as should make clear to us the estimate courtiers put upon single characters written by the old Empress Dowager, after the age-old custom. Line 3, No. 2, Fenollosa had translated admire, then changed to love; I have taken back to admire, for the sake of Latin admiror and to absorb some of Morrison's 'implement used to reflect', though I do not imagine this will reach many readers. When you have comprehended the visual significance, you will not have finished. There is still the other dimension. We will remain bestially ignorant of Chinese poetry so long as we insist on reading and speaking their short words instead of taking time to sing them with observance of the sequence of vowels. If Chinese 'tone ' is a forbidden district, an incomprehensible mystery, vowel leadings exist for anyone who can listen. If our universities had been worth half a peck of horse-dung, something would have been done during the last quarter of a century to carry on Fenollosa's work. Millions have been spent in stultifying education. There is no reason, apart from usury and the hatred of letters, for keeping at least a few hundred poems and the Ta Hio out of bilingual edition, such as I am here giving for this quatrain. The infamy of the present monetary system does not stop with the mal¬nutrition of the masses; it extends upward into every cranny of the intellectual life, even where cowards think themselves safest, and though men of low vitality feel sure boredom can never kill. The state of Chinese studies in the Occident is revoltingly squalid, and one has to read Frobenius in his own language? Because English and American professors are moles. Confucius 'statement', 'A man's character is apparent in every brushstroke': the high value set by the Chinese on calligraphy is appreciable when you think that if the writer does not do his ideogram well, the suggestion of the picture does not carry. If he does not know the meaning of the elements, his ignorance leaks through every ink-mark. Plate 2 舟 伙 石 [zhou huo shi] 洀 洄 男 [zhou hui nan] 舳 灰 古 [zhu hui gu] 訰 旦 伏 [zhun dan fu] 峯 担 東 [feng dan dong] NOTE ON PLATE 2 COLUMN 1 1. A boat (? scow), probably people riding in the boat. 2. Water by boat = ripple. 3. Boat+, I should think, actual picture of the rudder. Morrison gives this second element as development of field sign, something just adjacent to, or coming out of, field. (The field supposed to repre¬sent grain in orderly rows.) With primitive sign, the shoot com¬ing from field would contain idea of causation. The element means 'by', 'from' ; the whole sign = rudder. 4. Speech + grass growing with difficulty (i.e. twisted root and obstacle above it) = appearance of speaking in a confused manner. 5. To follow, over branching horns (together meaning to fight like two bulls), above this a mountain = peak of a hill going perpendicular toward heaven and ending in a point. 6. Morrison gives an ideogram with the mountain sign a little lower, and says it is same as the preceding, but possibly misses the point. F. gives this ideogram with the mountain in odd position as = a peak that clashes with heaven. COLUMN 2 1. Man + fire = messmate. 2. Water + revolve within a circle = eddy. 3. Hand + fire = fire that can be taken in the hand = cinder, ashes. 4. Sun above line of horizon = dawn. 5. Earth (sign not very well drawn — left lower stroke should be at bottom) + the foregoing — level plain, wide horizon. 6. One who binds three planes: heaven, earth and man = ruler, to rule. COLUMN 3 1. A lump of matter under a cliff (in primitive sign the lump was further removed) = a detached stone. 2. Rice-field over struggle = MALE. 3. Ten over mouth = old, what has come down through ten genera¬tions, ten mouths of tradition. 4. Man + dog (dot beside man) = dog lying at man's feet or crawling to man's feet; hence, to lie down. 5. Sun rising, showing through tree's branches = the east. 6. Spring season, hilarity, wantonness. Looks like sun under man and tree, but the early forms all show sun under growing branches, profuse branches and grass. 去 [qu] 法 [fa] 信 [xin] 盍 [he] 闔 [he] SECTION 1 SECTION 2 PLATE 3 NOTE ON PLATE 3 SECTION 1 Compare these last inventions to the twenty-two pages double column of Morrison devoted to HORSE. Self-effacement, to put away evil, earth over self (crooked elbow (?)). Water + the foregoing, water level, universal usage, law (Buddhist term). Self-effacement over sacrificial dish = many persons uniting eagerly together = to unite. Idem, whom closed doors includes = family. SECTION 2 Man and word, man standing by his word, man of his word, truth, sincere, unwavering. The word sign is radical supposedly from combination of tongue and above: ? mouth with tongue coming out it. ㄙ 主 凡 言 出 八 支 屯 丨 PLATE 4 NOTE ON PLATE 4 COLUMN 1 Self, crooked. Ancient form is loop-like, but the form now used sug¬gests bent elbow, mighty biceps idea familiar in Armstrong and Strongi'th'arm insignia. The use of this sign for emphasis is certainly not discordant with this suggestion, which can at any rate serve as mnemonic. Mouth with 'two words and flame emerging' (acc. F.) = to speak, words. Branch, radical. COLUMN 2 Flame in midst of lamp, extended to mean lord, master, to govern. (?) Morrison's form slightly different, plant growing but not detached from earth; the radical is now bud. Plant with twisted root=to grow with difficulty; note also obstacle top left. COLUMN 3 Table, bench or stool with dot under it = every, common, vulgar. I suppose 'any old thing', what one throws under table. To be divided. To begin, to appear as one. The significance of these two rudimentary signs as given by F. is extremely important. The student who hurries over the simple radicals or fundamentals will lose a great deal of time; he will also find much greater difficulty in remembering the combinations of such fundamentals which serve as radicals in the dictionary. 德人無累 大鈞播物 PLATE 5 NOTE ON PLATE 5 TOP LINE 1. VIRTUE or virtu, to pace (two men or man in two places; or seen near and at little distance) + heart under sacrificial dish under ten. 2. MAN (radical). 3. NOT POSSESSING. Morrison says: 'Etymology not clear. It is certainly fire under what looks like a fence, but primitive sign does not look like fire but like bird. At wild guess I should say primitive sign looks like 'birdie has flown' (off with the branch). F. gives it as 'lost in a forest'. 4. This sign is clearly a FIELD over SILK THREAD (though I can not find it in Morrison), indicating that the whole source of the man's existence is balanced on next to nothingness. M. gives silk beside field = petty, trifling, attenuated, subtle. SECOND LINE 1. GREAT (man with ample arms). 2. Gold + equally blended. (The gold sign = also metal, thence the metal.) (M. gives Keun, similar but not identical sign, weight of 90 catties. His dots are a little different.) 3. A measure + divide (radical 165, claws) over field. 4. A measure + banner (rally banner). I have not found the last three characters in Morrison, but one can make sense from the radicals contained in them thus: Virtue, man not possessing = a man without virtue; all his basis (his source of being and action) is balanced on a weak silk thread; the entire man has the even blending of metals (at his command) and knoweth measure in dividing and in bringing together. Knows how and when to divide a field with justice, and when (and in what degree) to unite (to rally men, concentrate them for action). |
|
| 33 | 1919.1 |
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. (1) [This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences]. We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in new Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such. He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between Eastern and Western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 I have not had to change the allusions to Western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. E.P. 1918.] This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races. The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it. It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Oriental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the essential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an opera 'bouffe'. The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own — ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives. We have already seen proof of the vitality and practical value of Oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the Eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner. I feel that I should perhaps apologize [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and therefore transcribe his words. E.P.] for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives. I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of professional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cultivation. Now my own impression has been so radically and diametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer enthusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share with other Occidentals my newly discovered joy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting the poetry of China. I submit my causes of joy. Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese characters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been perforce content with pro¬vincial standards of English rhyming. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions in dictionaries. One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work : it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been somewhat at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life; but her original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japanese today represent a stage of culture roughly corresponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a private pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is probably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial University of Tokio. My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character, it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment. In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semipictorial appeals to the eye. Contrast, for example, Gray's line : The curfew tolls the knell of parting day with the Chinese line : 月耀如晴雪 Moon Rays Like Pure Snow Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common? It is not enough to adduce that each contains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the question is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose ? On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as the phonetic symbols of Gray. All that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other : Moon rays like pure snow. Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our subjective operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object, which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. [Style, what is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E.P.] Suppose that we look out of a window and watch a man. Suddenly he turns his head and actively fixes his attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focused upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say : Man sees horse. It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily denote these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters: 人 見 馬 Man Sees Horse If we all knew what division of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much this same manner. But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign : all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space : a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs. The thought-picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture. The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession. Contrast the Laocoön statue with Browning's lines : "I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he… And into the midnight we galloped abreast." One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate. Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structure of detached Chinese words. The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that therefore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns. But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes. For example, the ideograph meaning 'to speak' is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning 'to grow up with difficulty' is grass with a twisted root (vide Plates 2 and 4). But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, original pictures to compounds. In this process of com¬pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a 'messmate' is a man and a fire (vide Plate 2, col. 2). A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them. [Axe striking something : dog attending man = dogs him. Vide Plate2, col. 3]. The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring. The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east (vide Plate 2). 'Rice-field' plus 'struggle' = male (vide Plate 2, col. 3). 'Boat' plus 'water' = boat-water, a ripple (vide Plate 2, col. 1). Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so universally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it? If it be so universal, it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature. I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types: one, that a sentence expresses a 'complete thought'; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate. The former has the advantage of trying for some natural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought can not be the test of its own completeness. But in nature there is no completeness. On the one hand, practical completeness may be expressed by a mere interjection, as 'Hi! there! ', or 'Scat! ' or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one’s meaning more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence really completes a thought. The man who sees and the horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no complete sen-tence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce. In the second definition of the sentence, as 'uniting a subject and a predicate', the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all; it is a little private juggling between our right and left hands. The subject is that about which I am going to talk; the predicate is that which I am going to say about it. The sentence according to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal. If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction. Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the Middle Ages. According to this logic, thought deals with abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the 'qualities' which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling depended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the 'thing' as a mere 'particular', or pawn. It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope. The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will, have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be repre¬sented as: term transference term from of to which force which If we regard this transference as the conscious or uncon¬scious act of an agent we can translate the diagram into : agent act object In this the act is the very substance of the fact denoted. The agent and the object are only limiting terms. It seems to me that the normal and typical sentence in English as well as in Chinese expresses just this unit of natural process. It consists of three necessary words : the first denoting the agent or subject from which the act starts, the second embodying the very stroke of the act, the third pointing to the object, the receiver of the impact. Thus : Farmer pounds rice The form of the Chinese transitive sentence, and of the English (omitting particles), exactly corresponds to this uni¬versal form of action in nature. This brings language close to things, and in its strong reliance upon verbs it erects all speech into a kind of dramatic poetry. A different sentence order is frequent in inflected languages like Latin, German or Japanese. This is because they are inflected, i.e. they have little tags and word-endings, or labels, to show which is the agent, the object, etc. In uninflected languages, like English and Chinese, there is nothing but the order of the words to distinguish their functions. And this order would be no sufficient indication, were it not the natural order — that is, the order of cause and effect. It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb 'to be', and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logicians these have seemed more primitive than the transitive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration, or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the transformation going on. The intransitive form derives from the transitive by dropping a generalised, customary, reflexive or cognate object: 'He runs (a race) '. 'The sky reddens (itself) '. 'We breathe (air) '. Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word 'state' would hardly be recognised as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say 'The wall shines', we mean that it actively reflects light to our eye ? The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all transitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific law and with ordinary experience. The English passive voice with 'is' seemed at first an obstacle to this hypothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a generalised transitive verb meaning something like 'receive', which had degenerated into an auxiliary. It was a delight to find this the case in Chinese. In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician : all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost; but in Chinese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions passing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning ‘'to be lost in the forest' relates to a state of non-existence. English 'not' = the Sanskrit 'na', which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a specific colored verb the universal copula 'is', followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree 'greens itself', but 'the tree is green'; not that monkeys bring forth live young,’ but that 'the monkey is a mammal'. This is an ultimate weakness of language. It has come from generalising all intransitive words into one. As 'live', 'see', 'walk', 'breathe', are generalised into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs are in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely bare existence. There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no such original conception: our very word exist means 'to stand forth', to show oneself by a definite act. 'Is' comes from the Aryan root 'as', to breathe. 'Be' is from 'bhu', to grow. In Chinese the chief verb for 'is' not only means actively 'to have', but shows by its derivation that it expresses some¬thing even more concrete, namely 'to snatch from the moon with the hand. 有 Here the baldest symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry. I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how poetical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and individual verbs. Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for-word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical English. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant. Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi-vidual written word. How are such words to be classified? Are some of them nouns by nature, some verbs and some adjectives? Are there pronouns and prepositions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages? One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature before they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. [Even Latin, living Latin, had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen English grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatising or categorising passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. E.P.] Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions! A 'part of speech' is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for another. They act for one another because they were originally one and the same. Few of us realise that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation; that they still retain life. It is only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises, or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will. One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, budding forth one from another. Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated. The Chinese language naturally knows no gram¬mar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japan¬ese, have begun to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions. We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness of our own formalisms. This is especially sad in poetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature. Let us go further with our example. In English we call 'to shine' a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions, if we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, 'bright'. If we need a noun we say 'luminosity', which is abstract, being derived from an adjective. To get a tolerably con¬crete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbitrarily cut off from its power of action, say 'the sun' or 'the moon'. Of course there is nothing in nature so cut off, and therefore this nounising is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once the verb 'shine', the adjective 'bright' and the noun 'sun', we should probably call it an 'infinitive of the infinitive'. According to our ideas, it should be something extremely abstract, too intangible for use. [A good writer would use 'shine' (i.e. to shine), 'shining and' the shine 'or' sheen possibly thinking of the German 'schöne' and 'Schönheit'; but this does not invalidate Professor Fenollosa’s contention. E.P.] The Chinese have one word, ming or mei. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally, 'the sun and moon of the cup' for 'the cup's brightness'. Placed as a verb, you write 'the cup sun-and-moons', actually 'cup sun-and-moon', or in a weakened thought, 'is like sun', i.e. shines. 'Sun-and-moon cup' is naturally a bright cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid scholar may spend a week trying to decide what 'part of speech' he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English. The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is not abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but comprehensive; not something which is neither a noun, verb, nor adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times. Usage may incline the full meaning now a little more to one side, now to another, according to the point of view, but through all cases the poet is free to deal with it richly and concretely, as does nature. In the derivation of nouns from verbs, the Chinese language is forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the Sanskrit roots, which seem to underlie European languages, are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions of visible nature. The verb must be the primary fact of nature, since motion and change are all that we can recognise in her. In the primitive transitive sentence, such as 'Farmer pounds rice', the agent and the object are nouns only in so far as they limit a unit of action. 'Farmer' and 'rice' are mere hard terms which define the extremes of the pounding. But in themselves, apart from this sentence- function, they are naturally verbs. The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a plant which grows in a special way. This is indicated in the Chinese characters. And this probably exemplifies the ordinary derivation of nouns from verbs. In all languages, Chinese included, a noun is originally 'that which does something', that which performs the verbal action. Thus the moon comes from the root ma, and means, 'the measurer'. The sun means that which begets. The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly be exemplified. Even with us, today, we can still watch participles passing over into adjectives. In Japanese the adjective is frankly part of the inflection of the verb, a special mood, so that every verb is also an adjective. This brings us close to nature, because everywhere the quality is only a power of action regarded as having an abstract inherence. Green is only a certain rapidity of vibration, hardness a degree of tenseness in cohering. In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of verbal meaning. We should try to render this in translation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival abstraction plus 'is'. Still more interesting are the Chinese 'prepositions' — they are often post-positions. Prepositions are so important, so pivotal in European speech only because we have weakly yielded up the force of our intransitive verbs. We have to add small supernumerary words to bring back the original power. We still say 'I see a horse', but with the weak verb 'look' we have to add the directive particle 'at' before we can restore the natural transitiveness. [This is a bad example: we can say 'I look a fool'. Look transitive, now means resemble. The main contention is, however, correct. We tend to abandon specific words like resemble and substitute, for them, vague verbs with prepositional directors, or riders. E.P.]. Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which in-complete verbs complete themselves. Pointing toward nouns as a limit, they bring force to bear upon them. That is to say, they are naturally verbs, of generalised or condensed use. In Aryan languages it is often difficult to trace the verbal origins of simple prepositions. Only in 'off' do we see a fragment of the thought 'to throw off'. In Chinese the preposition is frankly a verb, specially used in a generalised sense. These verbs are often used in their special verbal sense, and it greatly weakens an English translation if they are systematically rendered by colorless prepositions. Thus in Chinese, by = to cause; to = to fall toward; in = to remain, to dwell; from = to follow; and so on. Conjunctions are similarly derivative; they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions. Thus in Chinese, because = to use; and = to be included under one; another form of 'and' = to be parallel; or = to partake; if = to let one do, to permit. The same is true of a host of other particles, no longer traceable in the Aryan tongues. Pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory, since they have been taken as unanalysable expressions of personality. In Chinese, even they yield up their striking secrets of verbal metaphor. They are a constant source of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for example, the five forms of 'I'. There is the sign of a 'spear in the hand' = a very emphatic I; five and a mouth = a weak and defensive I, holding off a crowd by speaking; to conceal = a selfish and private I; self (the cocoon sign) and a mouth = an ego¬istic I, one who takes pleasure in his own speaking; the self presented is used only when one is speaking to one's self. I trust that this digression concerning parts of speech may have justified itself. It proves, first, the enormous interest of the Chinese language in throwing light upon our forgotten mental processes, and thus furnishes a new chapter in the philosophy of language. Secondly, it is indispensable for understanding the poetical raw material which the Chinese language affords. Poetry differs from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers. It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only grope. [Cf. principle of Primary apparition, 'Spirit of Romance', E.P.] Poetry must render what is said, not what is merely meant. Abstract meaning gives little vividness, and fullness of imagination gives all. Chinese poetry demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical categories, that we follow the original text with a wealth of concrete verbs. But this is only the beginning of the matter. So far we have exhibited the Chinese characters and the Chinese sentence chiefly as vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature. These embody true poetry as far as they go. Such actions are seen, but Chinese would be a poor language, and Chinese poetry but a narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure relations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too large, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The Chinese compass these also, and with great power and beauty. You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a great intellectual fabric from mere picture writing? To the ordinary Western mind, which believes that thought is concerned with logical categories and which rather condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations. [Compare Aristotle's Poetics : 'Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius'. E.P.] The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself. Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate. The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half-curbing the out-pressing vitalities, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not been full of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and language chained to the obvious. There would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen. Not more than a few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we can fairly well identify in primitive Sanskrit. They are, almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the intricate maze of nature's suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor in quasi-geological strata. Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry. The known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth. The beauty and freedom of the observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. The misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate 'particulars', for such rows do not exist. Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words. Metaphor, its chief device, is at once the substance of nature and of language. Poetry only does consciously [Vide also an article on 'Vorticism' in the Fortnightly Review for September 1914. 'The language of exploration' now in my Gaudier-Brzeska'. E.P.] what the primitive races did unconsciously. The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance. [I would submit in all humility that this applies in the rendering of ancient texts. The poet, in dealing with his own time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of true metaphor, that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as diametrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental, metaphor. E.P.] He must do this so that he may keep his words enriched by all their subtle undertones of meaning. The original metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giving color and vitality, forcing them closer to the con¬creteness of natural processes. Shakespeare everywhere teems with examples. For these reasons poetry was the earliest of the world arts; poetry, language and the care of myth grew up together. I have alleged all this because it enables me to show clearly why I believe that the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue. Let us first see how near it is to the heart of nature in its metaphors. We can watch it passing from the seen to the unseen, as we saw it passing from verb to pronoun. It retains the primitive sap, it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have been told that these people are cold, practical, mechanical, literal, and without a trace of imaginative genius. That is nonsense. Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are con¬tent to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and piece together our diction, as best they may, from forgotten fragments. This anaemia of modem speech is only too well encouraged by the feeble cohesive force of our phonetic symbols. There is little or nothing in a phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its growth. It does not bear its metaphor on its face. We forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the soul's mask. This is the sort of thing one can not possibly forget in using the Chinese symbols. In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in poetry, throw about it a nimbus of mean¬ings. These centre about the graphic symbol. The memory can hold them and use them. The very soil of Chinese life seems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold illustrations which crowd its annals of personal experience, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic climax, moral character as the very core of the principle — all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforcing values with accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideographs are like bloodstained battle-flags to an old campaigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on fold of overtones and with natural affinities, but in Chinese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this quality to its intensest power. I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. According to this European logic thought is a kind of brickyard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. This use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and sticking them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula 'is', or of black mortar for the negative copula 'is not'. In this way we produce such admirable propositions as 'A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly'. Let us consider a row of cherry trees. From each of these in turn we proceed to take an 'abstract', as the phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we may express together by the name cherry or cherry-ness. Next we place in a second table several such characteristic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo. From these we abstract some further common quality, dilutation or mediocrity, and label it 'red' or 'redness'. It is evident that this process of abstraction may be carried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We may go on for ever building pyramids of attenuated concept until we reach the apex 'being'. But we have done enough to illustrate the characteristic process. At the base of the pyramid lie things, but stunned, as it were. They can never know themselves for things until they pass up and down among the layers of the pyramids. The way of passing up and down the pyramid may be exemplified as follows : We take a concept of lower attenua¬tion, such as ‘ cherry ’; we see that it is contained under one higher, such as 'redness'. Then we are permitted to say in sentence form, 'Cherryness is contained under redness', or for short, '(The) cherry is red'. If, on the other hand, we do not find our chosen subject under a given predicate we use the black copula and say, for example, ' (The) cherry is not liquid'. From this point we might go on to the theory of the syllogism, but we refrain. It is enough to note that the practised logician finds it convenient to store his mind with long lists of nouns and adjectives, for these are naturally the names of classes. Most text-books on language begin with such lists. The study of verbs is meagre, for in such a system there is only one real working verb, to wit, the quasi-verb 'is'. All other verbs can be transformed into participles and gerunds. For example, 'to run' practically becomes a case of 'running'. Instead of thinking directly, 'The man runs', our logician makes two subjective equations, namely: The individual in question is contained under the class 'man'; and the class 'man' is contained under the class of 'running things'. The sheer loss and weakness of this method are apparent and flagrant. Even in its own sphere it can not think half of what it wants to think. It has no way of bringing together any two concepts which do not happen to stand one under the other and in the same pyramid. It is impossible to represent change in this system or any kind of growth. This is probably why the conception of evolution came so late in Europe. It could not make way until it was prepared to destroy the inveterate logic of classification. Far worse than this, such logic can not deal with any kind of interaction or with any multiplicity of function. According to it, the function of my muscles is as isolated from the function of my nerves, as from an earthquake in the moon. For it the poor neglected things at the bases of the pyramids are only so many particulars or pawns. Science fought till she got at the things. All her work has been done from the base of the pyramids, not from the apex. She has discovered how functions cohere in things. She expresses her results in grouped sentences which embody no nouns or adjectives but verbs of special character. The true formula for thought is: The cherry tree is all that it does. Its correlated verbs compose it. At bottom these verbs are transitive. Such verbs may be almost infinite in number. In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language agreed with science and not with logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy. Poetry agrees with science and not with logic. The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we express the interactions of things the better the poetry. We need in poetry thousands of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the motive and vital forces. We can not exhibit the wealth of nature by mere summation, by the piling of sentences. Poetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within. In Chinese character each word accumulated this sort of energy in itself. Should we pass formally to the study of Chinese poetry, we should warn ourselves against logicianised pitfalls. We should be ware of modern narrow utilitarian meanings ascribed to the words in commercial dictionaries. We should try to preserve the metaphoric overtones. We should be ware of English grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction with nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal undertone of each noun. We should avoid 'is' and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs. Most of the existing translations violate all of these rules. The development of the normal transitive sentence rests upon the fact that one action in nature promotes another; thus the agent and the object are secretly verbs. For example, our sentence, 'Reading promotes writing', would be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such a form is the equivalent of three expanded clauses and can be drawn out into adjectival, participial, infinitive, relative or conditional members. One of many possible examples is, 'If one reads it teaches him how to write'. Another is, 'One who reads becomes one who writes'. But in the first condensed form a Chinese would write, 'Read promote write'. The dominance of the verb and its power to obliterate all other parts of speech give us the model of terse fine style. I have seldom seen our rhetoricians dwell on the fact that the great strength of our language lies in its splendid array of transitive verbs, drawn both from Anglo-Saxon and from Latin sources. These give us the most individual characterisations of force. Their power lies in their recognition of nature as a vast storehouse of forces. We do not say in English that things seem, or appear, or eventuate, or even that they are; but that they do. Will is the foundation of our speech. [Compare Dante's definition of 'rectitudo' as the direction of the will]. We catch the Demi-urge in the act. I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare's English was so im¬measurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find an 'is' in his sentences. 'Is' weakly lends itself to the uses of our rhythm, in the unaccented syllables; yet he sternly discards it. A study of Shakespeare's verbs should underlie all exercises in style. We find in poetical Chinese a wealth of transitive verbs, in some way greater even than in the English of Shakespeare. This springs from their power of combining several pictorial elements in a single character. We have in English no verb for what two things, say the sun and moon, both do together. Prefixes and affixes merely direct and qualify. In Chinese the verb can be more minutely qualified. We find a hundred variants clustering about a single idea. Thus 'to sail a boat for purposes of pleasure' would be an entirely different verb from 'to sail for purposes of commerce'. Dozens of Chinese verbs express various shades of grieving, yet in English translations they are usually reduced to one mediocrity. Many of them can be expressed only by periphrasis, but what right has the translator to neglect the overtones? There are subtle shadings. We should strain our resources in English. It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed alone as abstract sound without the concrete character. It contradicts the law of evolution. Complex ideas arise only gradu¬ally, as the power of holding them together arises. The paucity of Chinese sound could not so hold them. Neither is it conceivable that the whole list was made at once, as commercial codes of cipher are compiled. Foreign words sometimes recalled Chinese ideograms associated with vaguely similar sound? Therefore we must believe that the phonetic theory is in large part unsound? The metaphor once existed in many cases where we can not now trace it. Many of our own etymologies have been lost. It is futile to take the ignorance of the Han dynasty for omniscience. [Professor Fenollosa is borne out by chance evidence. Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was used to consider all life and nature in the terms of planes and of bounding lines. Nevertheless he had spent only a fortnight in the museum studying the Chinese characters. He was amazed at the stupidity of lexicographers who could not, for all their learning discern the pictorial values which were to him perfectly obvious and apparent. A few weeks later Edmond Dulac, who is of a totally different tradi¬tion, sat here, giving an impromptu panegyric on the elements of Chinese art, on the units of composition, drawn from the written characters. He did not use Professor Fenollosa's own words — he said 'bamboo' instead of 'rice'. He said the essence of the bamboo is in a certain way it grows; they have this in their sign for bamboo, all designs of bamboo proceed from it. Then he went on rather to disparage vorticism, on the grounds that it could not hope to do for the Occident, in one lifetime, what had required centuries of development in China. E.P.]. It is not true, as Legge said, that the original picture characters could never have gone far in building up abstract thought. This is a vital mistake. We have seen that our own languages have all sprung from a few hundred vivid phonetic verbs by figurative derivation. A fabric more vast could have been built up in Chinese by metaphorical composition. No attenuated idea exists which it might not have reached more vividly and more permanently than we could have been expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would be the ideal language of the world. Still, is it not enough to show that Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure, its wealth of such figure? If we attempt to follow it in English we must use words highly charged, words whose vital suggestion shall interplay as nature interplays. Sen¬tences must be like the mingling of the fringes of feathered banners, or as the colors of many flowers blended into the single sheen of a meadow. The poet can never see too much or feel too much. His metaphors are only ways of getting rid of the dead white plaster of the copula. He resolves its indifference into a thousand tints of verb. His figures flood things with jets of various light, like the sudden up-blaze of fountains. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature, they sang out her pro¬cesses in their hymns. And this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has condensed into a more tangible substance. Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sen¬tences become clear, continuous light-bands. Now we are in condition to appreciate the full splendor of certain lines of Chinese verse. Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refined harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones. In music the whole possibility and theory of harmony are based on the overtones. In this sense poetry seems a more difficult art. How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighbouring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor. We can find the concord or harmonising at its in tensest, as in Romeo’s speech over the dead Juliet. Here also the Chinese ideography has its advantage, in even a simple line; for example, 'The sun rises in the east'. The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in which a single dominant overtone colors every plane of meaning. That is perhaps the most conspicuous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our line. 日 昇 東 Sun Rises (in the) East The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb 'rise', we have further homology; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading. Terminal Note. E.P., 1935. Whatever a few of us learned from Fenollosa twenty years ago, the whole Occident is still in crass ignorance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority. I now doubt if it was inferior to the Greek. Our poets being slovenly, ignorant of music, and earless, it is useless to blame professors for squalor. |
|
| 34 | 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. |
|
| 35 | 1919 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; Febr. 2, 1919. "Confucianism has, I think, never made martyrs, and has stolen no man's land on the pretence that it was doing her good." |
|
| 36 | 1919 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to John Gould Fletcher ; 16 Aug. (1919). [About her work with Florence Ayscough]. We have found out something which has never yet been taken into consideration by the translators of Chinese poetry, namely, that the nuances, the shadings of expression are found in the roots of the characters. Our method is that she makes a translation direct fom the Chinese, an absolutely literal one, and she not only gives the equivalents of the signs, but all their roots. Then I take it and work out something as nearly like the original as possible. She again compares with the original, and between us we arrive at something she says, from her knowledge of the language, is practically exact. This discovery should knock out Ezra [Pound]'s translations completely, as far as their resemblance to the originals is concerned, for his were made from Fenollosa transcripts of Japanese translations. I do not claim that these translations are any better as poems, nor perhaps as good as Ezra's, but they are much more faithful. |
|
| 37 | 1922 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe (1922). "Say that I consider the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the only safe guides in religion." Akiko Miyake : These two principles were chosen for his religion. Apparently he chose the former for his ethical and the latter for his artistic pinciple, although the Confucian sense of modesty and moderation is entirely antithetical to his temperament. It is best to consider Pound's enthusiasm for Confucius to be the result of his Prometheus-like defiance of Christianity. |
|
| 38 | 1923 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; ca. June 21, 1923. "His [Confucius'] idea of beginning in the middle i.e. on oneself, is excellent. The exact reverse of Chritianchurchism, which teaches : thou shalt attend to thy neighbor's business before thou attendest to shine own." |
|
| 39 | 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. |
|
| 40 | 1927 |
Pound, Ezra. Prolegomena. In : Exile ; no 2 (Autumn 1927). "The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius ; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort." |
|
| 41 | 1927 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Glenn Hughes ; Rapallo, 9 November, 1927. Dear Hughes : On reading over my translation of Ta Hio, it strikes me that the acrid and querulous preface I had sketches is a bloody impertinence and that any attempt to force local application, talk about need of present America, etc., bloody bureaucracy, etc. etc., would be a damned impertinence. I mean tacking my bloomink preface into the work itself. Hope you'll agree. Seems to me it will be introd. enough if you say in the prospectus : In this brochure (or chapbook) Mr. Pound does for the first of the Confucian classics what he did, in Cathay, for Rikahu. Any question of method or interpretation of ideograph can wait for or be referred to Fenollosa's 'Essay on the Chinese Written Character'… Re the preface to Ta Hio : I don't think I ought to use Kung as a shoehorn for a curse on American State Dept. and the Wilson-Hardic Administrations, etc. At least thass the way I feel this A.M. Re printing : I think text of Ta Hio shd. be one size type and commentators' remarks (including my own) another, or possibly better italic. I had thought of having three sizes : 1) Text ; 2) Comment ; and 3) transtr's notes ; but think it would prob. Make ugly page… |
|
| 42 | 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. |
|
| 43 | 1928 |
Pound, Ezra. The literary essays of Ezra Pound [ID D29121]. "I merely insist that without this minimum the critic has almost no chance of sound judgment. Judgment will gain one more chance of soundness if he can be persuaded to consider Fenollosa's essay or some other, and to me unknown but equally effective, elucidation of the Chinese written character. Before I die I hope to see at least a few of the best Chinese works printed bilingually, in the form that Mori and Ariga prepared certain texts for Fenollosa, 'a crib', the picture of each letter accompanied by a full explanation." |
|
| 44 | 1928 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to René Taupin ; May (1928). "Je viens de donner un nouveau version du Ta Hio [Da xue] de Confucius, parce que j'y trouve des formulations d'idées qui me paraissent utile pour civilizer l'Amérique." |
|
| 45 | 1928 |
Pound, Ezra. Selected poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. with an introd. by T.S. Eliot. [ID D29133]. Introduction. "As for Cathay, it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. I suspect that every age has had, and will have, the same illusion concerning translation, an illusion which is not altogether an illusion either. When a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been 'translated' ; we believe that through this translation we really at last get the original… His [Pound's] translations seem to be – and that is the text of excellence – translucencies ; we think we are closer to the Chinese than when we read, for instance. Legge. I doubt this : I predict that in three hundred years Pound's Cathay will be a 'Windsor Translation', as Chapman and North are now 'Tudor translations' : it will be called (and justly) a 'magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry' rather than 'a translation'. Each generation must translate for itself. This is as much to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a Chinese poetry-in-itslef, waiting for some ideal translator who shall be only translator…" |
|
| 46 | 1928 |
Ezra Pound and Zeng Baosan. Ezra Pound received a Chinese book from his parents some time before March 1, 1928. Miss Thseng [Zeng Baosan] visited Pound in Rapallo before May 17 and helped him to 'decipher' the poems. Letter from Ezra Pound to Isabel Weston Pound ; 1st March, 1928. "Dorothy is up a mountain with a returned missionary. Yes, Chinese book arrived, very interestin' [sic], returned missionary promises us a descendant of Confucius in a month or so, who will prob. Be able to decipher it." Letter from Ezra Pound to Glenn Hughes ; May 17, 1928. "Conferred with descendant of Kung and Thseng-Tsu just before leaving Rapallo. " Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; May 30, 1928. "Translation of Chinese poems in picture book is at Rapallo. They are poems on a set of scenes in Miss Thseng's part of the country. Sort of habit to make pictures and poems on that set of scenes." Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; July 22, 1928. "Will try to copy out those Chinese poems for you sometime, when thermometer is lower." Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; 1st August, 1928. "I copied out these Chinese poems two days ago, but don’t know whether I can trust you to return copy, you have horrible habit of taking copies etc. If I fix up a printable version later I DON'T want rough draft left about. " Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; 1st September, 1928. "Given infinite time I MIGHT be able to read a Chinese poems, thass [sic] to say I know how the ideograph works, and can find 'em in the dictionary or vocable. BUT I shd. scarcely attempt it unless there were urgent reason. Also some of the script in that book was fairly fancy… Four you book, Miss Thseng, descendant of Kung read out the stuff to me. Am perfectly able to look up an ideograph and see what shade it can give, etc. BUT it iz a matter of time. Wd. be no point in it. No I am not a Sinologue. Don't spread the idea that I read it az easy as yourapeann langwudg." |
|
| 47 | 1930 | Ezra Pound become more of an 'orientalist' and incorporate in his poetic pursuits research into Chinese characters and history, and, most importantly the development of the 'ideogram method' as the basis for a new kind of poetry. He had already written the haiku In a station of the metro, as well as other lyrics influenced by the Japanese and also based on the Chinese translations of Herbert Giles. |
|
| 48 | 1931 |
Moore, Marianne. The cantos. In : Poetry ; no 39 (Oct. 1931). [Review of A draft of XXX cantos, by Ezra Pound]. These Cantos are the epic of the farings of a literary mind… In Canto III we have an ideograph for the Far East, consisting of two parts : Green veins in the turquoise, Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars… Mr. Pound took two thousand and more pages to say it in prose, and he sings it in a hundred-forty-two. The book is concerned with beauty. You must read it yourself ; it has a power that is mind and is music ; it comes with the impact of centuries and with the impact of yesterday. Amid the swarming madness of excellence, there is the chirping of 'the young phoenix broods', the Chinese music, the slender bird-note that gives one no peace… In Canto XIII, in the symbolic discussion of the art of poetics, what is said is illustrated by the manner of saying : 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 Kung said, "They have all answered correctly, "That is to say, each in his nature"… 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 ;… "Anyone can run to excesses, "It is easy to shoot past the mark, It is hard to stand firm in the middle. |
|
| 49 | 1934 |
Eliot, T.S. "What Does Mr. Pound Believe?". January 28, 1934. Pound : "I believe the Ta Hio" [Da xue]. |
|
| 50 | 1934 |
Pound, Ezra. The literary essays of Ezra Pound [ID D29121]. "Fenollosa's work was given me in manuscript when I was ready for it. It saved me a great deal of time. I saved probably less time to a limited number of writers who noticed it promptly but who didn't live with is as closely as I did. Fenollosa died in 1908. I began an examination of comparative European literature in or about 1901 ; with the definite intention of finding out what had been written, and how. The motives I presumed to differ with the individual writers." |
|
| 51 | 1934 |
Pound, Ezra. ABC of reading [ID D29058]. The First definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa's Essay on the Chinese written character. The complete despicability of official philosophic thought, and, if the reader will really think carefully of what I am trying to tell him, the most stringing insult and at the same time convincing proof of the general nullity and incompetence of organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general, and their learned publications at large, could be indicated by a narrative of the difficulties I encountered in getting Fenollosa's essay printed at all… Fenollosa's essay was perhapts too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language. The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows : In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and prog4essively remoter abstraction. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour'. If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or division of the sprectrum. And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth… By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is the method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussion', and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing… The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese Ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing ; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures. Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, 'Of course, you can see it's a horse' (or a wing or whatever). In tables showing primitive chinese characters in one column and the present 'conventionalized' signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or 'was simplified from', or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise. Thus : 人 man / 木tree / 日 sun / 東sun tangled in the tree's branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East. But when the chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it ? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint ? He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE, CHERRY, IRON RUST, FLAMINGO. That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases. The chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo). Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC ; simply couldn't help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of english type might very well not stay poetic. He died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a 'method'… I once got a man to start translating the Seafarer into Chinese. It came out almost directly into Chinese verse, with two solid ideograms in each half-line. Apart from the Seafarer I know no other european poems of the period that you can hang up with the 'Exile’s letter' of Li Po, displaying the West on a par with the Orient… For those who read only English, I have done what I can. I have translated the TA HIO so that they can learn where to start THINKING. |
|
| 52 | 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. |
|
| 53 | 1936 |
Pound, Ezra. Jefferson and / or Mussolini : l'ideal state : fascism, as I have seen it [ID D29186]. "As to the mysterious of genius, I am reproached for citing Confucius, through the Ta Hio is only thirty-two pages long. The doctrine of Confuius is : 1. That you bring order into your surroundings by bringing it first into yourself ; by knowing the motives of your acts. 2. That you can bring about better world government by amerlioration of the internal government of your nation. 3. That private gain is not prosperity, but that the treasure of a nation is its equity. 4. That hoarding is not prosperity and that people should employ their resources. 5. One should respect intelligence, 'the luminous principle of reason', the faculties of others, one should look to a constant renovation. 6. 'Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoots'." Akiko Miyake : Pound suggested the importance of the 'directio voluntatis' for understanding both, Dante and Confucius. He condensed what he considered 'the doctrine of Confucius', in order to support his fantastic paralleling of the three geniuses, Thomas Jefferson, Benito Mussolini and Confucius. Jefferson and/or Mussolini is an aspect of the credo in Pound's new religion, in which authority comes, that is, from the active cosmic intelligence that gives the poet assurance. |
|
| 54 | 1937 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Katue Kitasono ; March 11 (1937). "When I did Cathay, I had no inkling of the technique of sound which I am now convinced MUST exist or have existed in Chinese poetry." |
|
| 55 | 1937 |
Ezra Pound was taking a six-week vacation in the summer 1937. He had with him only James Legge's bilingual edition of the Four Confucian books. "During August and the first half of September 1937, I isolated myself with the Chinese text of the three books of Confucius, Ta Hio, Analects, and the Unwobbling Middle and that of Mencius, together with an enormously learned crib but no dictionary. You can't pack Morrison or Giles in a suitcase. " "When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from". He went over the text three times, and rose from it with a "better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine". “There are categories of the ideograms not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided really by the feel of their form, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant. The mountain itself has a 'nature' and that nature is to come forth in trees, though men cut and sheep nibble." |
|
| 56 | 1937 |
Pound, Ezra. Immediate need of Confucius [ID D29172]. [Ta Hio = Da xue]. In considering a value already age-old, and never to end while men are, I prefer not to write 'to the modern world'. The Ta Hio stands, and the commentator were better advised to sweep a few leaves from the temple steps. This is no shrine for the hurried tourist or for the conductor with: 'One moment, and now for the alligator tanks so that we can catch the Bombay Express at 8.47'. Dante for a reason wrote De Vulgari Eloquio—On the Common Tongue—and in each age there is need to write De Vulgari Eloquio, that is, to insist on seeing the words daily in use and to know the why of their usage. No man has ever known enough about words. The greatest teachers have been content to use a few of them justly. If my version of the Ta Hio is the most valuable work I have done in three decades I can only wait for the reader to see it. And for each to discover its 'value' to the 'modem world' for himself. Mr. S.V.V. ([The Aryan Path, December 1936) has indicated the parallels in Indian teaching, but the Western reader will first see the antithesis to the general impression of Indian thought now clouding Occidental attention. This cloud exists, and until some light or lightning disrupts it, many of the better minds in the West will be suspicious of all Eastern teaching. It is 'our' impression that an Indian begins all talk with an allusion to the Infinite and that the Ultimate Unity appears four times on every Indian page. I am not saying what ought to be. I am not expounding Indian thought, but indicating a misapprehension. It is in the opinion of the hard-headed, as distinct from the bone-headed, West that Westerners who are drawn to Indian thought are Westerners in search of an escape mechanism, Westerners who dare face neither the rigours of mediaeval dialectic nor the concrete and often exhausting detail of the twentieth-century material sciences. Writing, which is communications service, should be held distinct from the production of merchandise for the book trade. And the measure of communication was defined by Leo Frobenius when he said: 'It is not what a man says but the part of it which his auditor considers important that determines the amount of the communication'. In considering the Occident the Oriental should allow for a fact that I have not yet seen printed. Western contact with the Far East was made in an era of Western degradation. American contact with Japan was forced in the very middle of 'the century of usury'. Western ethics were a consummate filth in the middle of the last century. You can probably date any Western work of art by reference to the ethical estimate of usury prevalent at the time of that work’s composi¬tion; the greater the component of tolerance for usury the more blobby and messy the work of art. The kind of thought which distin-guishes good from evil, down into the details of commerce, rises into the quality of line in paintings and into the clear definition of the word written. If the editors complain that I am not confining my essay to Confucius, I reply that I am writing on the 'need for Confucius'. I am trying to diagnose Western disease. Western disease has raged for over two centuries. Western disease shows in sixty per cent racket on ink money. That is a symptom of moral obtuseness. The Oriental looking at the West should try more often to look at the total West over a longer period than is usually drawn to his attention. For over a thousand years the acute intellectual labour of Europe was done inside the Catholic Church. The readers of The Aryan Path (December 1936) were reminded a few months ago that Scotus Erigena was a layman. A 'movement' or an institution lives while it searches for truth. It dies with its own curiosity. Vide the death of Moslem civilisation. Vide the very rapid withering of Marxist determinism. Yeats burbles when he talks of 'withering into the truth'. You wither into non-curiosity. Catholicism led Europe as long as Erigena, Grosseteste and their fellows struggled for definitions of words. Today the whole Occident is bathed daily in mental sewage, that is, the 'morning paper' in ten millions of copies rouses the Western brain daily. Bunkus is called a philosopher, Puley an economist, and a hundred lesser vermin swarm daily over acres of print. Ex diffinientium cognitione diffiniti resultat cognito - 'KnowIedge of a definite thing comes from a knowledge of things defined', wrote Dante, rubbing it in. You can't know a canzone, which is a structure of strophes, until you know strophes. 'Man triplex, seeks the useful, this in common with vegetables; the delectable, in common with animals; the hmestum; and here he is alone; vel angelicae naturae sociatur'. This kind of dissociation and tidiness is 'mediaeval'. When the experimental method came into material science giving a defined knowledge in realms whereto verbal distinctions had not then penetrated, and where they probably never will penetrate, the Occident lost the habit of verbal definition. The Church had lost its faith anyhow, and mess, unholy and slithering mess, supervened. Curiosity deserted almost all realms save those of physiology, chemistry and kindred material sciences. A tolerance of the most ungodly indistinctness supervened. The life of Occidental mind fell apart into progressively stupider and still more stupid segregations. The Church of England for example remained a bulwark of usury and/or a concatenation of sinecures, for the holding whereof neither courage, character nor intelligence was required or even wanted. Hence (leaping over a certain amount of barbed wire, and intermediary gradations), hence the Western need of Confucius, and specifically of the Ta Hio, and more specifically of the first chapter of the Ta Hio; which you may treat as a mantram, or as a mantram reinforced, a mantram elaborated so that the meditation may gradually be con-centrated into contemplation. (Keeping those two grades of life separate as they are defined in the Benjamin Minor of R. St. Victor.) There is respectable Western thought. There is Western thought that conforms to Confucius just as S.V.V. in December reminded you that there is in Indian Scripture a stress on Confucian 'self-examination etc., with emphasis on action'. Yet I fail to understand S.V.V. when he adds 'without concern for its fruits'. This phrase of his seems to me capable of grave misinterpretation. Does he mean 'profits'? Does he mean 'material profits'? In any case the need is a matter of emphasis. We in the West need to begin with the first chapter of the Ta Hio, not merely to grant a casual admission of it in some out-house of our ethics or of our speculations. There is nothing in this chapter that destroys the best that has been thought in the Occident. The Occident has already done its apparent utmost to destroy the best Western perceptions. Official Christianity is a sink. Catholicism reached nadir, let us say, with Antonelli in the eighteen hundred and fifties. It has started a new ascension with the encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadrigesimo Anno. But the whole of Western idealism is a jungle. Christian theology is a jungle. To think through it, to reduce it to some semblance of order, there is no better axe than the Ta Hio. I, personally, want a revision of the trial of Scotus Erigena. If 'authority comes from right reason' the shindy between Leibniz and Bossuet was unnecessary. Ernest Fenollosa emphasised a difference between the approach of logic and that of science. Confucius left his record in ideogram. I do not wish to confuse the ideogramic method with the specific and basic teaching of the Ta Hio, first chapter. There are here two related matters. The good scholastic (mediaeval) or good canonist recognised the limits of knowledge transmissible by verbal definitions: Scientes quia rationale animal homo est, et quia sensibilis anima et corpus est animal, et igiwrantes de hac anima quid ea sit, vel de ipso corpore, perfectam hominis cognitionem habere non possumus; quia cognitionis perfectio uniuscuiusque terminatur ad ultima elementa. [Knowing because man is a rational animal, and because a sensible soul and body is animal, and ignorant what this soul is, or what this body is, we cannot have complete (perfect) cognition of man, because the completeness of cognition of anything in particular ends with the ultimate element.] 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 talk about vibrations and infinites. There is here a common element with the Confucian method of getting in to one's own 'intentions'. Naturally there is nothing in this which is hostile to Dante's concept of the 'directio voluntatis'. There exists passage after passage in our serious mediaeval thinkers which contains the terms 'virtu', virtus, with vivid and dynamic meaning. But it is precisely the land of thought that is now atrophied in the Occident. This is precisely how we do nut now think. It is for these values that we have need of Ta Hio, and as S.V.V., approaching the work from so different a background, agrees, 'here is a very treasury of wisdom'. S.V.V. did not, I take it, awaken to consciousness in McKinley's America, his early boyhood was not adorned with the bustuous noises of Kipling and the first Mr. Roosevelt. Apparently the Ta Hio offers us a meeting-place, a field of agreement. In so far as ‘at the centre of every movement for order or recon¬struction in China you will find a Confucian’ (this referring to the procession of centuries) in so far as my own knowledge of Kung has come via Tokio, there appears to be here a common field not only for men of Bombay and London, but for pilgrims from an even wider circumference. To my mind there is need, very great need of such common locus of mutual comprehension. The late A.R. Orage claimed to have read the Mahabharata. Very few Occidentals can read it. It is manifestly not the possible meeting ground for Eastern and Western man in our era. Suma Gengi has just been televisioned from London. The news reaches me between one page and another of this essay. There are common denominators. There are points and lines wherein the East can make contact with us Occidentals. But the 'need of Confucius'. Let me try to get this as clear as possible. A 'need' implies a lack, a sick man has 'need'. Something he has not. Kung as medicine? In every cranny of the West there is mildew of books that start from nowhere. There is a marasmus of books that start 'treating of this, that and the other' without defining their terminology, let alone their terms, or circle, of reference. A thousand infernal self-styled economists start off without even defining 'money' (which is a measured claim, transferable from any one to any one else, and which does not bear interest as does a bond or a share-certificate). I take that as example. These filthy writers then go on to muddle their readers with discussion of 'systems' of inflation, of cancellation, of credit problems. And naturally their work is useless and merely spreads ignorance. Think, gentle reader, if the greasy fog in so concrete a science as economics is thus dense, what density is it likely to attain in metaphysics. Where is ethical discrimination to end or begin among us? If only for the sake of understanding and valuating our own European past, we have need of the Master Kung. And that is by no means our whole need. The fact that we have such a past, is but an encouragement. It is perhaps but a tentative reassurance that we have a chance of understanding part of die Orient. The 'value' of Confucius to the Modern World is not, I think we agree, limited to medicinal value for the Occident. There is visible and raging need of the To Hio in barbarous countries like Spain and Russia, but above all questions of emergency, of hypodermic injection or strait-jacket for fever patients and lunatics, there is also a question of milder and continuous hygiene. No one has ever yet exhausted the wisdom of the forty-six ideograms of the first chapter. No one has ever yet attained so complete a wisdom that he can find no further nutriment in this mantram. And no one, least of all a twentieth-century American with only a superficial acquaintance with Oriental intuition and language, should aspire to emit the 'last word' on this subject. I certainly cannot condense the Ta Hio. I have tried to present as much of it as I understand, free from needless clutteration of dead verbiage. I am ready to wrestle in friendly manner over the words used even by S.V.V., but such contest would at this point obscure my main meaning. I hope some day to see a proper bilingual text, each ideogram with full explanation so that the American reader may have not merely the one side of the meaning which seems to one translator most imperative in a given passage, but one full meaning held in such restraint that a hierarchy of imperatives be not lost. In the Dantescan symbol for the universe truth is not lost with velocity. An age-old intelligence is not lost in an era of speed. We are bedevilled with false diagnoses. We are obfuscated with the noise of those who attribute all troubles to irrelevant symptoms of evil. We are oppressed by powerful persons who lie, who have no curiosity, who smear the world and their high offices with Ersatz sincerity. His grace the Wubbok of the Wok dare not investigate this, that and the other, and so forth Neither does so-and-so nor his colleague (protected by libel laws) dare read the Ta Hio. Name, nomen, cognomen etc., dare not be left alone in a lighted room with this document. They cannot face the forty-six characters in the solitude of their library. All this testifies to the strength of the chapter and to their need of it. Men suffer malnutrition by millions because their overlords dare not read the Ta Hio. |
|
| 57 | 1938 |
Pound, Ezra. Mang Tsze : the ethics of Mencius [ID D29085]. 孟子 I am convinced that the most fantastically foolish or at best crassly inadequate notions both of Kungfutsu and of Mang tsze are current not only among the weak minded but among that class which, if it can't quite be considered an intelligentzia, has at least a greater domesticity with books than has the average reader. A Chinese female in the U.S. has been lamenting in print that although chinamen greatly outnumber the Chinese girls in America these girls have the deuce of a time finding husbands. The men go back to China for wives, they say the girls with an American 'education' are brainless. And this I take it arises from our occidental habit of never looking at anything. I may be inattentive. I have no doubt whatsoever that my long-suffering friends consider me inattentive} but on the other hand I am not a distracted infant, and I have on occasion seen more than was meant for me, or even, in the case of Gaudier's sculpture and Wyndham Lewis's drawings back in 1911to 1914 more than some others did. Nevertheless we occidentals do not see when we look. Kim had an education. I doubt if we occidentals ever receive one. Having drawn an ideogram, quite a simple one, three times WRONG, I am humbled but not in any dust of the Occident. It was a simple picture, a bureaucrat (or minister) faced by a member of the public, thereby forming the verb 'to sleep', occurring in the sentence: Mencius put his head on his stool (or head rest) and slept. It was not difficult to write, and it looked wrong when done wrong. I committed the same error three times running before I found out what was wrong, and whatever be my 'low' for idiocy I find traces of at least similar failure in sinologues. This note is the result of an experiment, necessarily personal but which I must describe if the reader is to judge its results. During August and the first half of September 1937, I isolated myself with the Chinese text of the three books of Confucius, Ta Hio, Analects and the Unwavering Middle, and that of Mencius, together with an enormously learned crib but no dictionary. You can't pack Morrison or Giles in a suit case. When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look or the characters and the radicals to go on from. And my contention is that the learned have known too much and seen a little too little. Such of 'em as knew Fenollosa profited nothing. Without knowing at least the nature of ideogram I don't think anyone can suspect what is wrong with their current translations. Even with what I have known for some time I did not sufficiently ponder it. The Ta Hio is of textures far more mixed than Pauthier's version. I see no reason to doubt the statement that it was a family possession, and that the actual bamboo tablets had got out or order and some of them lost, any more than I doubt the ethnographic evidence of the portrait of Confucius, as likely to be authentic as any bust of a Caesar. This diversity is not due to any failure of unity in the meaning of the Ta Hio. No one has brought out the contrasts of style from the magnificence of citation to the terseness and lucidity of Kung's statements. Kung was an anthologist and a shortener. With Pauthier under my hand for 23 or more years and the Confucian matter in that form long familiar I had never read through Pauthier's Mencius. In the french he seemed merely prolix and inferior. The original gives ample reason for the four books appearing together, and my title is for a reason. Mencius nowhere turns against Kung, all of Mencius is implicit in Kung's doctrine. This doctrine is one, indivisible, a nature extending to every detail as the nature of being oak or maple extends to every part of the oak tree or maple. Mencius has gone into detail as, let us say, Van Buren goes into detail from a Jeffersonian basis. By taking the 'ethics of Mencius' I include the ethics of Kung. Yet if I tried to ascribe some of the opinions here about to be exposed, to Kungfutsu I might be accused of trying to modernize them or of seeing too much in the original text. In Mencius several cardinal lines are explicit, the most squirmy Ersatz-monger will have difficulty in worming away from them. What I mean by not looking at the text can be shown by the very nice little story of Kung in discouragement saying— 'It's no go. We aren't getting anywhere. I think I'll get a raft and float about at sea for little. And the one of you chaps who will go along, will be Yu.' The elected disciple throws out his chest at the compliment, and Kung continues, 'Yu likes danger better than I do. But he wouldn’t bother about getting the logs'. Implying I think that logs are used to make rafts. Nevertheless the translator in question talks about 'exercise of judgment', losing we believe the simple and Lincoln-like humour of the original. (2) For the LOGS are there in the ideogram very clearly. Whatever later centuries may have done about political platforms etc., and the raft ideogram appears to show a log and claw and a child, (3) hinting sylvan (if riparian) origin. 材 (1) 桴 (1) Note similar process in meaning in the greek uncut forest, and the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being. I am not denying certain ambiguities in the text or in certain statements in ideogram but there are also certain utterly unambiguous uses of ideogram. You must distinguish between the inclusive and the ambiguous. Ambiguity and inclusiveness are far from the same. The specialist will often want a more particular statement inside the inclusive one, but the including statement can be perfectly categoric, in the sense of having its frontiers clearly defined. And this is not in the least the same as straddling the category's fence. In ascribing ideas to Mang tsze I shall limit myself to what seem to me utterly clear cases of statement. Any borderline cases will be noted as such, and where I am stumped I shall ascribe no meaning. I do, on the other hand, object to under-translation. I do not think that I have a better mind than Confucius. Mencius' great merit is that he did not think he had a better mind than Confucius. (There are numerous cases recorded of Confucians refusing to be had by such suggestions re themselves.) When I get a good idea from the ideograms I do not think it is my idea. If by any chance my ideas are better than those of the Man of Tsau's offspring, then, of course, my tablet should be placed in the Temple and my views replace those of earlier sages. But I consider it unlikely that occasion for this will arise. What matters is the true view. If my views are better than those in the ideogram, pray do accept them, but accept also the burden of proving it. The ethics of Mencius are Confucian. The spelling Mencius is all right if you take count of the way some people pronounce latin. Kung-fu-tsu. Chung Ne, Kung, Confucius all refer to the man of Tsau’s son. Nobody now in anglo-saxon countries pronounces a c as tsz. Serious approach to Chinese doctrines must start with wiping off any idea that they are all merely Chinese. Mencius had an holy fear of cranks and idiots, and nearly all the most recent forms of idiocy had already pullulated in his time, among sectaries of one sort or another. As to subversiveness, the editor of the Criterion may for all I know still be waiting for me to review a volume of chínese philosophy which I found too rancid to mention. After finding the text too rancid for use I turned to the introduction. (The translator has merits of efficiency, his english must have been as slippery as the original, and in this introduction he delighted me with the statement that all except the most hard-boiled Confucians had swallowed his author.) Thanks to nature, destiny, or Kung fu tsu, I did not swallow him. Nevertheless before we can have any serious discussion of Chinese philosophy we must agree on terminology. We must decide more clearly than has, I think, yet been done, which ideograms correspond to what terms of good latin. Directio voluntatis. Dante's view upon rectitude rimes certainly with that of Mencius. Here (Analects IV,IV) is luminous doctrine reiterated in Mencius. 尚志 I cannot think that the translators have been careful enough in correlating their terms either with those having great contents and elaborate precisions in Christian (catholic) theology, or with those of greek philosophy. [Since writing this, though not necessarily altering the mentioned conditions of things, Routledge announces 'Soothill and Hedous' Dictionary of Chinese-Buddhist terms', and Motoschiro's Gree-Japanese dictionary has been published]. Apart from latin (and greek) theologians I doubt if we have any occidental theologians. We have a word 'sincere', said to date from Roman luxury trade in faked marble. The Chinese have a sign which is translated by this word of english. But the Chinese sign implicates quite definitely naming the emotion or condition. 誠 Which you can tie up if you like to the first chapter of Leone Vivante's Originality nel pensiero. There are two ideograms, one middle-heart, which might be translatable by sincere in its now current meaning, and this other sign: the word and the action of fixing or perfecting (just given, ideogram 5). 忠 All of which comes out of the Confucian answer when asked about the first act of government: 'call things by their right names'. 正名 There is a third sign recurring and again recurring, of the man who stands by his word. 信 The conditions of my experiment, if you will consider them, implied not being distracted or led off into the mazes of the dictionary with its infinite (i.e. unbounded) interest and interests. Having been three times through the whole text and having perforce to look at the ideograms and try to work out the unfamiliar ones from their bases, I should have now a better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine, at any rate I believe that I have, and that the constants have been impressed on my eye. Clearly what they translate virtue is the greek arete 仁 it is not mediaeval virtu, though it is radically virtus from vir. It is, in Chinese, the whole man and the whole man’s contents. This is or should be impressed on the eye. The sick part of our philosophy is 'greek splitting', a term which I will shortly re-explain. The Confucian is totalitarian. When the aims of Shun and Wan were set together, though after a thousand years interval, they were as two halves of a tally stick. (Even the greatly learned translator has translated this 'seal' in the text with a foot-note to say 'tally-stick'. 符 That things can be known a hundred generations distant, implied no supernatural powers, it did imply the durability of natural process which alone gives a possibility for science. I take it the Mencian affirmation is of a permanent human process. There is no reason for me to tone that down with the phrase 'I take it'. The doctrine is clear. But the effects of the doctrine are startling when Mr. D. tells me he suspects Soothill of modernizing his version of Analects. Mencius distinguishes a tax from a share, he is for an economy of abundance. Riches are due to exchange. The man who wants to lower the standard of living should end as an earthworm. Simple-lifers are half wits. All this is perfectly clear and utterly non-semitic in the original text. The Semitic is excess. The Semitic is against ANY scale of values. The Church in the middle ages evolved an hierarchy of values. It is mere shouting for the home team to pretend that the so-called Christian virtues were invented A.D.I to A.D.32 in Judea. 'If a man died in a ditch Shun felt it as if he had killed him'. This of the Emperor Shun. 'Is there', said Mang Tsze, 'any difference between killing a man with a club and a sword? ' 'No,' said King Hwuy. 'Is there any difference between killing him with a sword and with a system of government?' This is not the Chemin de Velours. There are perfectly good reasons why this philosophy does not get more publicity. The cabinet ministers who can face it? I know of none in London or Paris. Greek philosophy was almost an attack upon nature. That sentence cannot stand as it is, but may serve to disturb excessive complacencies. The school of Kung included intelligence without cutting it from its base. You can no more fake in this company than you can fake in a science laboratory. But you are not split into fragments. The curse of European thought appeared between the Nichomachean notes and the Magna Moralia. Aristotle (as recorded in the earlier record) began his list of mental processes with TeXne, and the damned college parrots omitted it. This was done almost before the poor bloke was cold in his coffin. Greek philosophy, and european in its wake, degenerated into an attack on mythology and mythology is, perforce, totalitarian. I mean that it tries to find an expression for reality without over-simplification, and without scission, you can examine a living animal, but at a certain point dissection is compatible only with death. I believe Leibniz felt this, and that Gemisto Pleton felt it. Without knowing the Book of Rites it would be foolish to talk on Mencius’ position in this regard further than to note what is actually said in his writing. There is an allusion to banishing the spirits of the fields and grain and electing others. I doubt if this is compatible with pejorative superstition. The point relevant to my title is that at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature. The man who pulled up his corn because it didn't grow fast enough, and then told his family he had assisted the grain, is Mencius' parable. The nature of things is good. The way is the process of nature, one, in the sense that the chemist and biologist so find it. Any attempt to deal with it as split, is due to ignorance and a failure in the direction of the will. Whence the Mencian does not try to avoid concrete application. Marx and Hegel break down when their ideas come to be worked out in conduct. My contention is that you can quite clearly judge what Mencius would have thought of specific situations in our time, and to support this I shall now quote, first from his talks with King Hwuy of Leang: Your dogs and swine eat the food of men and you do not make any restrictive arrangements. Your people are dying from famine on the roads and you do not know how to issue stores for them. When they die you say it is owing to the year. How does this differ from killing a man and saying it was not I but the weapon? and a few lines lower: Is there any difference between killing a man with the sword or with a system of government? Beasts devour one another... there are fat horses in your stables (while people die of famine)... this is called leading on beasts to devour men. In another place he defines 'leading on the earth to devour men', that is in a prince’s wars for more territory. 'In the Spring and Autumn there are no righteous wars, some are better than others'. Spring and Autumn is the title of Confucius' history text book. I have found very curious opinions as to Kung's formalism. L. Vivante recently showed me ‘a horrible reference book’ as he called it, where the condensing ass had cited nothing but details of Kung's behaviour and several rules of formality. Anyone who had read the text of Kung and Mencius in even a passable translation would know that at no point and on no occasion do such rules ask one to overstep common sense. There are times for politeness and times for prompt action. Discretion in perceiving the when is basic in Confucianism. There are two elements in the 'rules of propriety'. A. the expression of finer feelings and a resultant standard of behaviour on occasions when no graver and more impelling circumstance demands their abrogation. This is the permanent part. There is (B) the part relative to the times of Confucius. Certain ceremonies served, I think, as passports, such as the complicated Guard's salute. To-day a man not a guardsman would give himself away if he tried it without preparation. When you hadn't a telegraph, some of these ceremonies would have served to show the authenticity and also the nature of the man who turned up at the frontier. The three years mourning is scarcely in the New England blood. It was not universal in China. Mencius justifies it as being more civil and human than allowing one's dead to lie in ditches and be chewed by stray animals. From which he dates the idea of having any burial customs at all. There is no doubt that latins and nordics differ greatly in their feeling for funerals. This is not my prime concern, nor do I introduce it save to protest against taking the Chinese texts on the subject out of focus and out of the Mencian sense of their origin. His ideas on where to begin improving the social order are more to my point and our time. Therefore an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that they shall have sufficient to serve their parents, and sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children: that in good years they shall be abundantly satisfied, and in bad years shall escape danger of perishing. Only men of education can maintain a steady heart without a fixed livelihood. The steady or fixed heart is part of the directio voluntatis. The commendable have it, and work inside themselves, the uncommendable look out for lucky chances. Permit me a longer quotation from (Book VII) Tsin Sin, i, Chap. 22 & 23. At fifty warmth cannot be maintained without silks and at seventy flesh is necessary to satisfy the appetite. Persons not kept warm and supplied with food are said to be starved and famished, but among the people of King Wan there were no aged who were starved and famished. Let it be seen to that their fields of grain and hemp are well cultivated, and make the taxes on them light... so that the people may be made rich. Let it be seen that the people USE (caps, mine) their resources of food seasonably and expend their wealth on the ceremonies, and they won't be able to exhaust it at that. The 'ceremonies' here would cover the equivalents for greek drama, and the outlay for latin processions at the feast of the Madonna, etc. They are of the amenities. People cannot live without water and fire. Knock at a door in the dusk of evening no one will deny you water and fire.... When pulse and grain are as abundant as water and fire, how shall the people be other than humane. (Here the ideogram for ARETE, entire man.) 仁 The question of tax is here specified. Other passages clearly define the root difference between share and impost. 'Nothing is worse than a fixed tax.' A fixed tax on grain is in bad years a tyranny, a tithe proper, no tyranny. If, as he brings out against the simple lifers, a country cannot do without potters it certainly cannot do without governors. As for an emperor tilling his fields, it is mere shop front, no one ever expected him to make his own clothes as well, in fact, 'is', he asks, 'the imperial function the only business compatible with doing one's ploughing, potters and carpenters being exempt? ' In the conditions of 500 and 400 B.C. if you cut the tithe lower than 10 per cent, you could live only as the 'dog and camp-fire people'. If you raised it above 10 per cent, for traders ana people in the centre of empire and above the NINE FIELDS share system for rurals and border folk, you would have tyranny. The analogy of the nine fields system to Rossoni's ammassi in present-day Italy is notable. It is OF the permanence of nature that honest men, even if endowed with no special brilliance, with no talents above those of straightness and honesty, come repeatedly to the same answers in ethics, without need of borrowing each other's ideas. Shun and Wan had a thousand years between them and when their wills were compared they were as two halves of a tally stick. 節符 From Kung to Mencius a century, and to St. Ambrose another six or so hundred years, and a thousand years to St. Antonino, and they are as parts of one pattern, as wood of a single tree. The 'Christian virtues' are THERE in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy. The level of civilization recorded in these ideograms is higher than anything in the near eastern tradition. It is only in the evolved Roman sense of proportion that we find equal sanity. There is a root difference between ah immoderate demand or a law which takes no account of the nature of things and the Mencian hierarchy of values. 'Our' hierarchy of values shines from the Divina Commedia, or one can at least use that work as a convenient indicator of it. Both the catholic mediaeval and the Chinese hierarchies and senses of proportion are infinitely removed from Semitic immoderation. When Europe flopped from the state of mind of St. Ambrose and St. Antonino into pre-Christian barbarisms we suffered a not inconsiderable setback. The thing we flopped back to is unpleasant. It was and still filthily is usurer’s measure. Let us try to avoid words that could give rise to partizanship and say, you can no more consider Western civilization without the Roman component than you can consider the Orient and leave out the Chinese Imperial order, which already in Kung's time recognized an historic process, including the alternating periods of order and of confusion. The ethic of Kung and Mencius is not registered in words of irresponsible fanatics. The Semitic component in Christianity is anarchic and irresponsible. Take the record on its face value, it is of a sect in a rebellious and irresponsible province, and for a kingdom, specificly in the words of its founder, not of this world but the next. The Christian ideal has been recognized as something different, something NOT evolved without Constantine and Justinian and those who built it with them. Civilization consists in the establishment of an hierarchy of values, it cannot remain as a mere division between the damned and the saved ... with alternate wailing and hysterical merriment. Mencius' sense of responsibility is omnipresent. It is in man to himself. Governing of the Empire was specificly NOT among the sage's desires, or at least not regarded by him as a simple pleasure. Out of office he attends to his own internal order, in office to that of as much of the state as is entrusted to him. But at no moment is he irresponsible. His desideratum: to gather and teach the most intelligent of his contemporaries, unless by good fortune he find a sage from whom he can learn, but in any case not to start teaching prematurely and not to teach his own ignorance. The alibi of the irresponsible is often a false one, those who say they can do nothing because they lack talent, could at least refrain from deleterious action. This phase of Mencian doctrine has, I think, been grossly exaggerated in our superstition as to the nature of Confucianism. It is set out as the MINIMUM and universal requirement, not as a maximum. The earlier politico of ammassi was as follows: in a square divided in nine equal parts, the central one was cultivated by the eight surrounding families, and its produce went to the administration, this was commuted to a ten per cent, on central or as you might say in the metropolitan areas where 'things aren't as simple as all that. In irregular country a just equivalence of what would be equal measuring of flat acreage. Marketing customs similarly equitable. The profit motive is specificly denounced. I mean that you will get no more accurate translation of the ideograms in Mencius' talk with King Hwey than 'profit-motive'. Mercantilism is incompatible with Mencius. Cheap evasion and evasiveness are impossible anywhere near him. Naturally men love life. Mencius professes a taste for fish and bears’ trotters, but there is an order of preference. Some things are worth more than others. Life is not above rectitude. If anyone in calm mind will compare the Four Classics with the greatly publicized hebrew scriptures he will find that the former are a record of civilized men, the latter the annals of a servile and nomadic tribe that had not evolved into agricultural order. It is with the greatest and most tortuous difficulty that the Sunday School has got a moral teaching out of these sordid accounts of lechery, trickery and isolated acts of courage, very fine and such as could be paralleled in the annals of Mohawks and Iroquois. Any sort of objectivity, taking the record as it stands, must arrive at something like this conclusion. Jehovah is a Semitic cuckoo's egg laid in the European nest. He has no connection with Dante's god. That later concept of supreme Love and Intelligence is certainly not derived from the Old Testament. Numerous invasions of China have destroyed several strata of civilization, but this in no way detracts from the Mencian wisdom, nor does even Mr. Lin Yutang's brilliant picture of Chinese folly, which latter is a portrayal of universal stupidity. In every country idiots treat the branch as the root. If you deprive Confucianism of its essentials among which are the sense of proportion and timeliness, if you take isolated remarks and cut them off wholly and utterly from the rest of the four books, naturally the text can be quoted in defence of five hundred follies. The Rules of Propriety are to be observed under certain circumstances and at the proper times, obedience and respect have their limits. Some sort of time focus must be applied. It may quite well be that Confucius and Mencius are a hormone that could be more vitally effective in the West today than in a China busily engaged in livening up the business of the Acceptance Houses. Apropos which I understand that a living Kung has stated in private conversation that his Most Illustrious Ancestor is now more regarded here than in Pekin. Foreign loans for munitions do not enter the Analects. When Pih Kwei stated that his irrigation system was better than the Emperor Yu's, Mencius pointed out that the latter had led off the excessive flood water to the sea 'according to the natural law of waters', whereas Pih Kwei had merely dumped his into a neighbouring state. Mencius declined to regard this bit of scaltrezza as an improvement. I have no doubt that if the Acceptance Houses succeed in piling up a sufficiency of Chinese debt to Europe and then induce hefty or half-starved occidentals to try to collect it, even China might wake and the great final and definitive armageddon, yellow peril, etc. become as actual as our American civil warwas, becauseof the South's debts to our (N.Y.) city. Naturally if you neglect the root of the Doctrine the rest will wither, and a neglect of its basic wisdom is undoubtedly apparent among the less wise Chinese. Neither that country nor any other has ever suffered a glut of sages. 'Dead!' said Mencius on hearing that P'wan-shing Kwoh had received a high government post in Ts'e. After execution, a disciple asked M. 'How did you know this would happen?' 'He was a busy fellow', said Mencius, 'with a little talent. Just enough to get himself condemned to the scaffold.' The 'busy' exists in the four classics with just the shade that has given it a derogative sense in the argot of Edgar Wallace's crooks. Not meaning 'cop' in Chinese but indicating why the crook calls the policeman a busy. A better word than busybody and more aromatic. If the reader jumps every verb meaning CHANGE or MOVE, if he remains blind to the verbs meaning RENEWAL and neglects every allusion to 'changing what is not good', naturally he can reduce the rest of Mencius and Confucius to a static and inactive doctrine, inactive enough to please even the bank of Basel and our western monopolists. But this would mean excising a great deal of the original text. In fact it can't be done. You cannot so ignore the bright ideogram for the highest music, 樂 (1) 變 [(1) The central stroke in lower half of this ideogram should be straight not hooked.] although I believe the dictionaries call it something different, though they all agree that it is connected with motion (I should say river ⻍ (1) [(1) Used in composition a spart of a sign.] traffic, but don't want to insist). This constant pageant of the sun, of process, of the tree with its 'small, white, small' (ideogram 12) does not give any clear-headed spectator the feeling of deadness and stasis. There are categories of ideogram not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided really by the feel of their forms, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant. The mountain itself has a 'nature' and that nature is to come forth in trees, though men cut and sheep nibble. Tsin Sin, pt. 1, xxxiii, 2, is our solidest join with Dante. 'What is the scholar’s aim? ' (Scholar here being also officer.) There follows one of the shortest verses, “Mang tse said”, then the sign for “raise” and the sign for "will". (vide ideogram 4.) They translate it 'exalt the aim'. This is definitely Dante's directio voluntatis, with no ambiguity possible. The top of the will sign is the scholar-officer sign, and its base the heart. The lifting up is structural. Nevertheless Dante's 'god above' exists in an ideogram. No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters. The 'above', Plato's power above the heaven; lateral motion; the tree trunks; the man who stands by his word; the qualities of these signs are basic and no one who does not perceive them can read ideogram save as an ape. Man, man, man, humanity all over the page, land and trees. The people who take up one point and spoil the totality 'neglecting a hundred other points' are un-Mencian. They 'lift up and grind one, and hang up and cover a hundred'. Condensing from the Third book of Mencius (the T'ang Wan Kung) and from other passages, I find the belief that 'without government services distribution and use of resources will be insufficient'. I find definite statement as to what conduces to borrowing, and its results. I find an interesting series of five characters, the meaning of which someone may say that I force. The first contains the knife radical, plus pearls or precious shell, and certainly means draw an outline, make a pattern of (it is used also as a particle 'derivative from that'). It is followed by wealth, use, not enough. It might apply to production, but it appears to me to apply equally to the distribution. The 'use' is utterly undodgeable. It does not mean exhaust. 'If he levy a ground tax and do not tax goods or enforce proper regulations without levying tax. . . . Merchants will store goods in his market.' I.e. one OR the other not both. All through there is the sense of need of a proper (not an improper) income for administrative expenses. 'No tax out of season.' 'No better system than mutual aid, none WORSE than a fixed tax.' A tithe is another matter. Government's job is to feed the people, that is its FIRST job. (This not to be confused with Kung's 'get the right names'. That 'Ch'ing Ming' is the first step toward conditioning the government to do its work.) Anyone who mistakes Kung or Mencius for a materialist is a plain unadulterated idiot. Their philosophy is not in the least materialist, it is volitionist. (1) Arms and defences, (2) food, (3) the faith of the people, if they must be given up, be it in this order. 'Let Mulberry trees be planted about the homesteads with their five mow (land measure) and persons of fifty may be clothed with silk. In keeping fowls pigs and swine let not their times of breeding be neglected, and persons of seventy may eat flesh. Let there not be taken away the time that is proper for the cultivation of the farm with its hundred mow, and the family of 8 mouths that is supported by it shall not suffer from hunger. Let there be careful attention to education in schools... All this is on an infinitely higher level than Mosaic lex talionis. It is all out, over, and above the balderdash that was inflicted on my generation of Christians. I am not inveighing against the best Christian ethic or against the quality of Western mind shown in Bishop Grosseteste's treatise on light. I am against the disorderly tendencies, the anarchy and barbarism which appear in poor Christian teaching, fanaticism and superstition; against the lack of proportion and failure of objectivity when dealing with texts extant, and, naturally, against the insularity which credits Byron with having invented a kind of writing that had been used by Pulci. But if we are ever to communicate with the orient, or cohabit a planet rapidly becoming more quickly circum-navigable, had we not better try to find the proportions, try perhaps to collect some of our own better writers (of the ages) to present to our oriental contemporaries, rather than offer them an unmixed export of grossness, barbarities, stove pipes and machine guns? Several young men in Tokio seem pleased to meet Cavalcanti. I have no doubt that even the Ten Remnants [A title given to several elderly gentlemen of the Empress Dowager's time, now, alas, disappearing] could have found something admirable in our tradition had it been more tactfully shown them. Lady Hosie's introduction to a recent reprint tells us that the Four Classics 'have been relegated to University study and are no longer the main preoccupation of Chinese schools'. She dates the essay 1937, which year has brought the natural consequence of unusual idiocy in the form of Japanese invasion. If China had got to this point, naturally there would be an invasion, and quite naturally some Chinese would, as they do, hold the view that such an invasion is to be welcomed. Lady Hosie, M.A. Cantab., regards the degradation as temporary. Tuan Szetsun is old. Certainly a nucleus of sanity exists in China. The West needs the Confucian injection. The Four Books have survived Ch'in Shih Huang (the gorilla who ordered these books to be destroyed) and China was not effaced by that pimple. The blots of my correction are not dry on this quotation from Lady Hosie before a still later bulletin confirms an old belief to the effect that any order in China proceeds from a Confucian centre. Chang Kai Shek 'the Christian general' and the one man who got a little order out of chaos took to using Confucian slogans a little too late, thereby confirming another text of the philosopher. I am not in this essay trying to give a modern Chinese feeling about the effects of such Confucianism as survived in China in 1900, and Mr. Lin Yutang will probably admit that the citizen of a chaos which has long lacked a certain code of ideas and perceptions is bound to see that code differently from the citizen of a chaos wherein such ideas have long been abused. I am putting the original text against Semitic insanity and against Socrates. If the shoving of it into University study in China were intended to bring it with fresh impact on to more thoughtful minds??... if... but was it? and is, in any case, the adolescent any fitter to receive it than the child? Obviously Mr. Yutang knows its worst side — Obviously certain practices come to us dated China 500 B.C. and we brush very lightly over them. They have not affected our lives and cannot. Seven inch planks for one's coffin or cremation is all pretty much one to us. In any case there are or were practices. Soaking our occidental selves in the quite clearly illuminated principles of Confucius would hardly bring us out into certain Chinese forms. In fact, for us to take up odd rites would be, as it were, 'sacrificing to a spirit which does not belong to us, ' and therefore against Mencian and Confucian good taste, anyhow. I do not see the abuse as inherent in the principle of Confucius, whereas the Semitic is schizophrenic essentially. People who talk about 'something deeper in their nature' which laid the Chinese open to Buddhism, seem to me to have failed lamentably to LOOK at the Mencian text. In any case I am dealing with ethics and not with cosmology, imaginary, pneumatic, or 'scientific', granting that Mencius hadn't the Western female to deal with and that the captious may think he over simplifies in this domain, or rather avoids it, though he can't be said to deny its importance. But the abuses of the 'system', mentioned by descriptive writers, are incompatible with the root. This I don't propose to argue save with someone who has passed the Pythagorean time of silence. The putting order inside oneself first, cannot be omitted from Confucian-Mencian practice if that is to be valid. Any other course is sheer fake. Faith without works is fake, and the Mencian suggestion is that one should act right before formulating the axiom tried in act, and thereafter follow it. The ethic of Confucius and Mencius is a Nordic ethic, a Nordic morale, if it has been boggit in laissez faire and tropical indolence that cannot be blamed on its shape. It is not quietistic. It is concentrated in the Mencian parable: 'An Archer having missed the bullseye does NOT turn round and blame someone else. He seeks the cause in himself.' Mencius is very difficult to summarize, yet as Legge cannot be suspected of collusion with credit cranks and new orthologic economists I add a few sentences and phrases from his version: 'Resources arising from government,' that is to say the increment of association. So far as I know this is the earliest clear formulation of it. 'If a man can prevent the evils of hunger and thirst from being any evils to his mind...' 'Hostile states do not correct one another.' 'The way of the people is this: if they have a certain livelihood they will have a fixed heart. If they have not a fixed livelihood . . . there is nothing they will not do in the way of... moral deflection.' 'What leisure have they to cultivate propriety and righteousness?' 'Only men of education are able to maintain a fixed heart without a certain livelihood.' To treat the needy as criminals is not governing decently, it is merely trapping them. |
|
| 58 | 1938 |
Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur [ID D29122]. Section I I. DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS that is, of the Philosophic Conversations Said the Philosopher: You think that I have learned a great deal, and kept the whole of it in my memory? Sse replied with respect: Of course. Isn't that so? It is not so. I have reduced it all to one principle. 一 以 貫 之 (yi yi guan zhi) COMMENT: This passage from the XV chapter of Analects, that is of the Philosophic Conversations, gives me my warrant for making a digest. Rapacity is the main force in our time in the Occident. In measure as a book contains wisdom it is nearly impossible to force any printer to issue it. My usual publishers refused the Ta Hio. What hope have I with a translation of the whole Analects? Fan Tchai asked Kung the master (viz Confucius) for instruction in farming. Said the Master: I know less than any old peasant. He made the same reply about gardening: An old gardener knows more than I do. Tseu-Lou asked: If the Prince of Mei appointed you head of the government, to what wd. you first set your mind? Kung: To call people and things by their names, that is by the correct denominations, to see that the terminology was exact. 正 名 (zheng ming) "You mean that is the first?" Said Tseu-leu. "Aren't you dodging the question? What's the use of that?" KUNG: You are a blank. An intelligent man hesitates to talk of what he don't understand, he feels embarrassment. If the terminology be not exact, if it fit not the thing, the governmental instructions will not be explicit, if the instructions aren't clear and the names don't fit, you can not conduct business properly. If business is not properly run the rites and music will not be honoured, if the rites and music be not honoured, penalties and punishments will not achieve their intended effects, if penalties and punishments do not produce equity and justice, the people won't know where to put their feet or what to lay hold of or to whom they shd. stretch out their hands. That is why an intelligent man cares for his terminology and gives instructions that fit. When his orders are clear and explicit they can be put into effect. An intelligent man is neither inconsiderate of others nor futile in his commanding. KUNG on the MAKE MORE WORK FALLACY Analects XI The inhabitants of Lou wished to put up a new public granary. Min-tseu-kian said: Isn't the old one still good enough? Is there any need of a new one which will cost much sweat to the people? Said Kung the Philosopher: If that man opens his mouth, he speaks to some purpose. COMMENT: The old granary was still suited to its purpose. Kung is against superfluous labour that does not serve a purpose. Said Szetsun, or rather so says his translator: 'The sayings of the great sages are ordinary.' This I take to mean that there is nothing superfluous or excessive in them. When one knows enough one can find wisdom in the Four Classics. When one does not know enough one' eye passes over the page without seeing it. 'NO', said the Philosopher. May we not suppose that XII, 9 of the Analects teaches the folly of taxation? May we not suppose that the last phrase of this paragraph denounces the futility of great stores without orderly distribution? May we not suppose that the answers in XIY, 10 of the Analects have been treasured as examples that Kung employed the right word neither in excess nor less than his meaning? 知 人 (zhi ren) Humanity? is to love men. Knowledge, to know men. It is written: Fan-tchi did not understand what Kung meant by these answers. 知 人 (zhi ren) It is difficult to be poor and feel no resentment. It is by comparison easy to be rich and not be puffed up. Said Kung the Master: I have passed whole days without food, entire nights without sleep for the sake of my meditation, and in this there was no real use. It wd. have been better to have studied something in particular. 知 人 (zhi ren) XVI. I. I have heard ever that possessors of kingdoms and the chiefs of great families do not complain of small population, nor of exiguous territory, nor even of the poverty of their peoples, but of the discord between people and ruler. For if each has his part that is due him, there is no pauper, there is harmony, there is no want among the inhabitants. In the first book of the Lun Yu it is written the lord of a feudal kingdom shd. not demand work of his people save at convenient and/or suitable time. I.5 Duty in the home, deference among all men. Affection among all men and attachment in particular to persons of virtu (or virtue). Seek friends among equals. I am pro-Tcheou (inpolitics) said Koung fu Tseu. They examined their predecessors. (The full text being: they examined the civilization and history of the Dynasties which preceded them.) There is one chapter in the anonymous translation that I have tried in vain to improve, that is to say I can not find a more balanced translation: You have heard the six words, and the six becloudings? There is the love of being benevolent, without the love of learning, the beclouding here leads to foolish simplicity. The love of knowing without love of learning, whereof the beclouding brings dissipation of mind. Of being sincere without the love of learning, here the beclouding causes disregard of the consequence. Of straightforwardness without the love of learning, whereof the beclouding leadeth to rudeness. Of boldness without the love of learning, whereof the beclouding brings insubordination. The love of firmness without the love of learning, whereof the beclouding conduces to extravagant conduct. 蔽 (bi) Here in the ideogram called 'beclouding' we find confusion, an overgrowing with vegetation. Yet there is no better word for this in english than beclouding. 'Extravagant conduct' is shown in a dog pawing a king or trying to lick the king's ear, which is said to mean a dog wanting to rule. In the other ideograms there is nothing to give better meaning than the words used by my predecessor. In the 'ONE PRINCIPLE' text we have four common signs: one, by, passing through, emerging. And Pauthier is deeper than the translator who has chosen to interpret this 'pervading'. The second sign is said to be the reverse of fixed, or stopped, in the third sign we have the string passing through the holes in the coins, in the fourth we have the earth, the stem and the leaf. The ch'ing ming text can mean also that functionaries shd. be called by their proper titles, that is to say a man should not be called controller of currency unless he really controls it. The ch'ing is used continually against ambiguity. The dominant element in the sign for learning in the love of learning chapter is a mortar. That is, the knowledge must be ground into fine powder. 學 (xue) 2. The new learning. Part one. Kung (Confucius) we receive as wisdom… The distinction I am trying to make is this. Rightly or wrongly we feel that Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both… If you consider the occident, or all European or Mediterranean life for 2500 years, as something to be watches in a text-tube, you might make the following clinical observations on successive phases of process. As against China or as much as France knew of China in 1837 when Pauthier and Bazin pooled the results of their research… Let us say roughly that Kung lived on into the time of Pythagoras and of Aeschylus, 469 B.C. to 399, 427 to 347, 384 to 322, carry on from the birth of Socrates to Aristotle's death, Plato between them… And herein is clue to Confucius' reiterated commendation of such of his students as studied the Odes. He demanded or commended a type of perception, a kind of transmission of knowledge obtainable only from such concrete manifestation. Not without reason. The whole tone, disposition, Anschauung of Confucius recommending the Odes, of Confucius speaking of music, differs fundamentally, if not from what Pythagoras meant, at least from the way the unfortunate occidental usually supposes Pythagoras to have advised an examination of harmony… Take the whole ambience of the Analects (of Kung fu Tseu), you have the main character filled with a sense of responsibility. He and his interlocutors live in a responsible world, they think for the whole social order…Yet after 2000 and more years, Fontenelle observed that not even a half-masted tyrant wd. give Plato a ten acre lot whereon to try out his republic. In contrast we hear that whenever and wherever order has been set up in china ; whenever there has been a notable reform or constructive national action, you find a group of Confucians ‘behind it’, or at the centre... 3. Sparta 776 B.C. Rome was the responsible ruler. The concentration or emphasis on eternity is not social. The sense of responsibility, the need for coordination of individuals expresses in Kung's teaching differs radically both from early Christian absolution and from the maritime adventure morals of Odysseus… They were serious characters as Confucius, St Ambrose or his Excellency Edmondo Rossoni could and would recognize serious characters… 5. ZWECK or the AIM CH'ING MING, a new Paideuma will start with that injunction as has every conscious renovation of learning. Section II 6. VORTEX The Shang and Chow dynasties produced the convex bronze vases. The features of Tao-t'ie were inscribed inside of the square with the rounded corners – the centuple spherical frog presided over the bronze war drum… The force relapsed and they accumulated wealth, forsook their work, and after losing their form-understanding through the Han and T'ang dynasties, they founded the Ming and found artistic ruin and sterility… When the Ming were losing their conception, these neo-Mongols had a flourishing state. Through the strain of warfare they submitted the Chinese sphere to horizontal treatment much as the Semites had done… PART II Section IV The history of philosophy is… ? In any case, -ologies come out of greek separation and dilettantism. 'Occupy leisure with the arts'. For Kung and co. the arts included riding horses and using the bow and arrow. Kung 'fished occasionally with book and line, never with a net. He used a bow now and then but not snares to take birds'. What China is and came out of, can be divined from the 187th ideogram (MA) meaning horse, 22 pages double column of Morrison of words with the radical horse, and 'all of'em doin' wiff'orses, sir' unless I have missed an exception. PART III 17. SOPHISTS Kung did not pester his son with questions. It is recorded that he once asked the boy had he read the Odes. Pythagoras imposed five years silence. Can't write a book about that. The reason for reading the Book of the Odes, the books of poetry, that is the books of basic poetry whether in Ideogram and collected by Kung (B.C. 500 or whatever) from the 15 hundred years before his time, or by me or even by Dr. Ward (English Poets) is that poetry is totalitarian in any confrontation with prose. There is MORE in and on two pages of poetry than in or on ten pages of any prose save the few books that rise above classification as anything save exceptions. Apart from the Four Classics : Ta Hio ('Great learning'), The Standing Fast in the Middle, the Analects, say the three classics, or tack on Mencius, and Papa Flaubert, certain things are SAID only in verse. You can't translate 'em… 18. KULCHUR : PART ONE When you don't understand it, let it alone. This is the copy-book maxim whereagainst sin prose philosophers, though it is explicit in Kung on spirits. The mythological exposition permits this. It permits an expression of intuition without denting the edges or shaving off the nose and ears of a verity. Byron regretted that Kung hadn't committed his maxims to verse… A summary like the present sins worse than the professoriate, who however neglect Kung's first method of instruction (whereof 4 strands). Literature, practice of virtuous actions, no faking, fidelity. Kung's insistence on the ODES lifts him above all occidental philosophers… 19. KULCHUR : PART Two The Analects have endured. I don't know how many purgatories a man need pass through before he comes to ask himself ; why ?... Kung said : 'This music is utterly beautiful but…' and so forth… Section VI 22. SAVOIR FAIRE I hope to know the Odyssey better. I hope to read the Odyssey and the Ta Hio, someday, without need to look into dictionaries, and, beyond the Ta Hio, the Odes, on Kung's recommendation. The first two I have by me, with such books of reference as allow me to get a good deal of their meaning. For the third, sic : the Odes, the English cribs give me NOTHING, or else a mere annoyance. Beyond the dead English something extends, per forza, extends or Kung wd. not have told his own son to read the old poems. Great intelligence attains again and again to great verity. The Duce and Kung fu Tseu equally perceive that their people need poetry ; that prose is NOT education but the outer courts of the same… The stupidity of my age is nowhere more gross, blatant and futile than in the time-lag for getting Chinese texts into bilingual editions. The Ta hio is so edited… At leas we shd. have in current editions the Odes, the Ta Hio and the Four Classics, Li Po (Rihaku) and at least 400 pages of the post-Confucian great poets, and a few dozen Noh dramas. We shd. NOT be at the mercy of single translators. We shd. have bilingual editions of this lot and MORE done better than the few pages in my last edition of The Chinese Written Character, but on that system. The ideogramic text, and under or beside each ideogram an explanation. Or in case of very common words, an interlinear translation with notes on the less familiar signs… 26. ON ANSWERING CRITICS When a Catholic critic 'makes allowance for' my love of Confucius, I wish I cd. Think he had thought it down and out to this point. If I could think that, I wd. then suggest he go further into the analogies between New Testament thought and that verywhere diffused through the Analects and the Ta Hio… PART IV 32. THE NOVEL AND SO FORTH There is a limited gamut of what will come over from Chinese verse WITHOUT the rigours of Chinese technique - acoustic technique, over and above the universal technique of matter and of visual suggestivity. There is a limited gamut of what will come over from primitive poetry. CONFUCII CHI-KING SIVE LIBER CARMINUM Who, for that matter, will say something solvent and elucidative as to the Penelope web of European awareness ? P. Lacharme ex soc. Jesu. A very learned man most skilled in Chinese and Tartar languages, of whose life no trace remains save this notable work, begun in 1733 and not really finished when he left off about 1752. 71 sheets once belonged to a certain Delisle, later handed on to the ministry of marine, then to the society of Astronomers, Paris. Chinese words written in Portuguese style. Julius Mohl wrote 'em in French style when preparing his edition in Paris, 1829, printed or published Stuttgart and Tubingen sumptibus D.G. cotta, 1830… The weariness and fact of war already there in the Songs of Tsao, Odes I.15. Kong lieu etc. had this kingdom of Tcheou 670 years before the Tcheou came to Empire, and so forth. The translation lay 80 years in ms. And I suppose Mohl's edition missed the boat. Latin having by 1830 ceased to be the lingua franca of western culture. Now we WANT the ideograms, even where Lacharme is clear reading. At any rate 3000 years ago the Chinese poets were aware of the unutterable dullness of warfare… 36. TIME-LAG There is at least enough in Lacharme's latin to give one an unde5rstanding of why Kung fu Tseu told his pupils to READ the Odes… 41. ODES : RISKS CONFUCIAN pedagogy in the home seems to have consisted in C's asking his son whether he had read a couple of books, one, the Book of the ODES, the other the Rites. (As recorded at the end of the XVIth chapter of the Lun Yu, second part of the Conversations.) Tching-kang asked Pe-yu (C's sun) whether he had heard 'extraordinary things' or anything his father 'don't tell the rest us us'. Pe-yu replied in the negative, and said : 'He is usually by himself. Onec when he was alone and I was hurrying through his room, he said : Have you studied the Odes ? I said : not yet. And he told me that if I didn't I wd. be unable to take part in conversation. Another time he said : Have you studied the Rites ? Our general notion of Confucius (kung) has perhaps failed to include a great sensibility. The Conversations are the record of a great sensibility. PART V 46. DECLINE OF THE ADAMSES The function of music is to present an example of order, or a less muddied congeries and proportion than we have yet about us in daily life. Hence the emphasis in Pytharoas and Confucius. The 'record of Confucius is the record of a very great sensibility', the history of western philosophers is preponderantly the record of defective sensibilities… Section VI 48. ARABIA DESERTA K. Carl's book on the Chinese court portrays a high culture. Wu Yung gives us perspective (The Flight of an Empress)… The general reflection on the contrasts in Wu's China, might be : A high civilization in decadence. A few people highly cultured, the probability of these people having constituted a very small percentage of the chinese population ? (That is an open question. No one who writes in English has tried to sort out the varying levels of chinese civilization in our time)… 49. KUNG Knowledge is seldom lacking in the degree that will is lacking. Kung's life appears to be in conformity with the best modern views. I suspect that a minority has always held these views. Kung's first public job was a Douglasite assessment of the productivity of the province set for his inspection. Naturally he was the mover. He believed that travel broadens the mind, and that knowledge of local conditions is good antidote for theorists. He visited the best musician he had heard of… He did not bother go give advice on how to produce more to a minister whose sole aim was to push up the amount of tribute sweatable from the peasantry. Tuan Szetsun remarked that he found nothing unusual in the classic. Kung is modern in his interest in folk-lore. All this Frazer-Frobenius research is Confucian…The trial and condemnation of Chao-tcheng-mao a week after Kung accepted the Sse-keou (chief magistracy in Lou) still serves as paradigm for reformers. It was the one condition Kung made before he wd. accept the office… One might note that Wu Yung in the recent Boxer times and Kung B.C. found beheading prevalent. Nevertheless the Chinese chronicle records 'abolition of capital punishment'. It records a law that the Emperor shd. reflect three days in a sort of retreat, no jazz and only necessary food for three days, before pronouncing a death sentence. (Ordinance of Tai Tsoung 627/649). Tai cut down taxes. Tai remobilized the teaching of Kung fu Tseu. At his death the Tartar princes demanded the privilege of immolating themselves in order to serve their Lord in the next world. That might give one perspective, datum for a custom and a conviction that stretched from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. These Tartars were prevented from observing this antient custom only because Tai had foreseen that they wd. ask to do so, and dorbidden it. 1013 de notre ère Tchin Tcoung brought out a new edition of the classics and ordered their distribution. Before thinking that old-age pensions, medical relief, education endowments etc. etc. etc. are news, one shd. at least glance at a summary of the chinese story. To separate what is Chinese and what Japanese needs more knowledge than I yet have or am ever likely to come by. Harakiri for high nobles is pre-Confucian… We have had 150 to 200 years of Chinese scholarship printed in French and/or latin and we COULD have got on with it faster… Kung wnet for the big bad boss. Instant trial ended in seven days. He wnet for the meat monopoly. Tai Tsoung reduced taxes… As working hypothesis say that Kung is superior to Aristotle by totalitarian instinct. His thought is never something scaled off the surface of facts… PART VI 54. AND THEREFORE TENDING Ease might tempt me to use a Chinese philosopher recently edited. I have 40 pages of notes on him hanging at my right. A man's hand is stained in the clay he works with. I have in those 40 pates branded X. as a guide to counterfeiters. I see no excuse for filling the reader's mind, even a little, with refutation of X. 's doctrine. My most enjoyable moment of perusal was when I found his introducer saying that 'only the most rigid Confucians' had resisted the persuasiveness of X... In any case it is crapulous to continue basing curricula on material available 300 years ago, and neglecting all new knowledge. It is not as if Chinese were Fenollosa's discovery… My imaginary opponent may say : well, Aristotle preaches the doctrine of the mean. Kung, however, of the mean that stands fast… Both Kung and Dante have a much firmer hold on the real, and a much deeper intendimento… I am not attacking the conscious part of Aristotle, but the unconscious, the 'everyone says', or 'everyone admits', which wd. be inconceivable in the Ta Hio, in the Steadfast Mean, or in the Analects. Section XIII 58. TO RECAPIULATE I believe that the Ta Hio is veritably the Great Learning, to be taken with the Odes and the rest of Confucius' teaching. |
|
| 59 | 1938 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Katue Kitasono ; 2 June, 1938. I don't know enough to deal properly with the rest of Fenollosa's notes. I have a good translation of the Li Ki (Bk of ceremonies) [Li ji] with the original text. French and Latin. I am in the middle of De Maillac's [sic] Histoire General de la Chine, translation of Tong Kien Kang Mou ; but only in French ; not printed with the original. Do you know any good history of Japan, translated into any European language, FROM original sources ? |
|
| 60 | 1939 | Ezra Pound started traveling to Rome, to the Istituto per il Medio ed Estremo Orient, to look up some Chinese materials and where he met Yang Fengqi. |
|
| 61 | 1940 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to George Santayana ; Rapallo, 16 January (1940). Chinese saying 'a man's character apparent in every one of his brush storkes'. Early characters were pictures, squared for aesthetic reasons. But I think in a sell-brushed ideogram the sun is seen to be rising. The east is a convention ; the west ideogram hasn't the sun in it. Not sure whether it may be sheepfold (this guess). One ideogramic current is from picture often of process, then it is tied to, associated with one of a dozen meanings by convention. Whole process of primitive association, but quite arbitrary, as : two men, city, night = theft. Not the picturesque element I was trying to emphasize so much as the pt. re western man 'defining' by receding : red, color, vibration, mode of being, etc. ; Chinese by putting together concrete objects as in F's [Fenollosa] example : red – cherry ; iron rust – flamingo. |
|
| 62 | 1941-1943 |
Ezra Pound and fascism. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Pound was very direct in his regard of fascism's Confucian precedents. In all of his efforts to bolster Italy's purpose in the war – not only the broadcasts over Rome Radio but the many articles and pamphlets he wrote, the manifestos issued by him and a group of writers local to the Rapallo area, and the posters he designed and printed – Pound includes quotations from the Confucian classics and refers to Confucianism as an ally of fascism. He praised Fascism's efforts to restore economic and social order in Italy. For Pound, both Fascism and Confucianism perceived the state- an ethical economic, social and political totality – as the important contex in which to place the individual, the family, and the community. 2008 Qian Zhaoming : Ezra Pound's radio broadcasts from Rome and his letters are characterized by Italian fascism and anti-Semitism. He tried to convince Yang Fengqi that China's worst enemy was not Japan but 'international usury'. 1940 he asked Yang about the moral foundation of the nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek : "I hear that Chiang Kai-shek was converted to Christianity, which seems WRONG for a Chinese". Yang influenced Pound toward a slightly better understanding of the conflict between China and Japan. He helped Pound locate various Chinese books and identified numerous Chinese characters. In 1940-1941 his assistance became vital when Pound took up translating Da xue and Zhong yong into Italian. Yang approved not only Pound's Italian but also his inserted commentary. Pound's fascism grew so offensive, that Yang began backing out from their correspondence. It was their mutual interest in the Confucian Four Books that saved it. As a Confucian, Yang saw Pound's enthusiasm for Italian fascism and his zeal for Confucianism as two separate preoccupations. Having learned of Pound's reading of the Four Books, Yang encouraged him to 'occupy [himself] with this subject, apparently with the intention of attracting him away from fascism. |
|
| 63 | 1942-1943 |
Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound speaking : radio speeches of World War II [ID D29148]. 30 years or a hundred ; Febr. 3 (1942). …The laws of right government have been known since the days of Yao and Shun, ole Chinese emperors, and from the time of Shun to King Wen was a 1000 years, and from Wen to Confucius 500. And they say when the policies of Shun and of Wan were set together (compared), they were as the two halves of a seal, or it might be of a tally stick. And for nigh onto 4000 years I think no one has dodged the facts of these policies. And from the time of Confucius every dynasty in China that has lasted 300 years has been founded on the law of Confucius, a man or a group, seem' the horse sense of government, as learned by Confucius, I mean he learned it looking at history, talking of Shun and Wan and after him whenever a great man learned it he started or upheld some sort of imperial order. The President hath power ; Febr. 19 (1942). …England's conduct in China has been for the most part an infamy. Let some bloody-minded betrayer of the British people get up in their grimy assembly and tell the world of their kind acts in the Orient. From the sacking of the Imperial Palace in Peking to the Jewsoons', Sassoons' century of infamy and of opium with Robert Cecil their advocate… Napoleon, etc. ; March 2 (1942) …Mencius referred t, the folly of starting a war for something you couldn't GET; something the war could not bring to the monarch Mencius was talking to. So he said, climb trees to catch fish… Why pick on the Jew ? ; March 6 (1942). …Very nice to hear, I mean you are mebbe comforted to HEAR that you got 100 million Chinese soldiers all ready to die for democracy. I mean if you are a democracy. But you ain't got 'em. Well, why lean on what ain't thaar ?... Disbursement of wisdom ; July 2 (1942). …The Chinese have a more monumental exposition of the same theme: In evil time the sage can enjoy his own wisdom; when the land is well governed, the people benefit from his instructions… Financial defeat ; U.S. ; March 26 (1943). …I am perfectly aware that I might as well be writing Greek or talking Chinese with a foreign accent, so far as making this statement clear to the hearer or reader is concerned. And the public can most certainly not be blamed for this, as you could read a hundred books, by no means despicable books, on economics, without finding any hint that such an idea about money is possible… I repeat in quoting these statements that I might as well be talking Chinese or Tibetan so far as the average reader or bearer [hearer?] is concerned. Money is a means of exchange, an implement by which exchanges are effected, it is a measure of exchange, it is called 'a title to goods', a measured claim. It is both a title and a measure… Conscience ; April 24 (1943) … I have mentioned the small boys in Trenton N.J. who played at being Emperor of the World. Infantilism in high places! And Madame Chek, on February 18, made a stirring speech to the American Congress speaking better American than Sol Bloom and half the assembled delegates, and with a better delivery than Mr. Roosevelt. I have no doubt the audience fell for it as leaves in autumn. It was an appeal to one's sympathies. I should have been swept off my feet if I hadn't been lying down at the time, next to my radio. Bedside habit of radio. The Chinese have a very old saying, that it is an ill omen if the hen crows. Canta la gallina. Mme. Chiang's appeal was clear enough. Everyone wants their own country to be governed by their own people. But it is Wang Chin Wei and not Mons. C.K. Chek who has got back the treaty ports, the extraterritorial rights for his country. And the grouped ideograms that are translated, 'man of high character', indicate, unless I miss my guess, the men through whom and in whom one hears the voice of his forebears. Order at home. China with 400 millions IN ORDER would indeed be an element for world stability. But that order must RISE IN CHINA. In 300 or more years of history, in fact in all the history we have of that country, the order must rise inside. At no time has China been at peace in the hands of a government run from outside on loan capital. That is Mme. Chiang's error. Her aim is admirable, but she climbs a tree to catch fish. When Mencius said that to King Huei, of Liang, the King said: 'Is it as bad as that? ' And Mencius answered: 'Worse, for you would do no harm. You would not of course catch any fish. But you would do no further damage'. This loss of Chinese wisdom, under the smatter of Y.M.C.A. dogmatism, and occidental class teachings is not the answer. I have heard from someone who knows him that Chiang himself did not want the war with Japan, but was worked into it, on sheer theory, sheer western nonsense. Kung is to China as water to fishes. Meaning Confucius, the Confucian doctrine is the true habitat of the Son of Heaven, and from the Emperor down to the common people, the duty or root is ONE. And that root is NOT to be found in an exotic government imposed in the interests of foreign loan capital. If the Chinese ever get hold of a few copies of the Talmud, there will be even less room for the servants, Jewish or Goyim, of the doctrines therein contained. And if the root be confusion, the fruit cannot be order. Mme. Chiang appealing for help to a smaller nation may be a stirring figure. But the grab in French Africa in no way assists her husband in Chungking. Japan is NOT the hereditary enemy of China. There are over two millenia of history wherein the two nations did NOT damage each other. Whereas the history of Anglo-Saxon relations with China is one record of infamy. One almost unmitigated stink. And the Japanese have recorded some of the more recent chapters in a work whose translated title reads: 'The British Empire and British People.' Mme. Chiang arouses one's sympathies. BUT the error lies in this idea that a universal theory will govern the world WITHOUT local order. If neither Chungking nor Washington can bring order into their OWN country, what likelihood is there that a still looser and larger bureaucracy having still less definite responsibilities, and still less competent executive offices, would be able to do any better?... An occasional miracle happens. In China men have set up a series of dynasties. Acts of heroic creation, 160 to build or continue, and 160 years to decline. NOT one of the great dynasties, the durable dynasties, was built on gangster grab. Kublai was a great Kahn, but the Ming came 89 years later. The cheap half baked smattering of western half learning, the lies of half trained professors, shot into foolish young students have NOT been of use to China. If the ancient Kings are too far back to be counted, the Chinese would have learned more from Han, Sung, Tiang, Hong-Vou and Tai Tsong, than from Woodrow Wilson and the Sassoons. No one can pronounce Chinese names so as to satisfy everyone. If you don't like my transliterations, that is, if any oriental auditor is puzzled, let me put the sentence: Chinese history itself contains more lessons, and better lessons, than have been learned by a scattered joblot of college students, hurled into jerk water colleges, or into the London Fool of Economics or Oxford. That is perhaps Mme. Chiang's tragedy. Foreign loan capital is NO substitute for the tradition of Wen and Wu, for the lesson of pre-Christian dynasties… [On brains or medulla] ; June 20 (1943) … My proposal was, as I say, tri-lingual. Italian, English, and ideogram. That is, Chinese ideogram used as a written tongue, but with Japanese pronunciation. That gives you the languages of Confucius, Shakespeare, and Dante. There is no sentiment in this selection. You say the Germans would never accept this. That is, you don't say so because you are quite crazy in talking of re-educating nations which are far more educated than you are. I believe our Germans would place unsentimental reasons first, the Germans are more diligent than other men, great numbers of them habitually —. Secondly, my opinion is—I omitted the German language, because that language retains more inflections than the three languages I selected. I say, ideogram with Japanese pronunciation, because almost no foreigner can pronounce Chinese properly, let alone manage the tones, because the pronunciation varies with the different regions of China, and because I find no agreements as how the sounds, such as one can understand, or really hear, should be transcribed in our alphabet. Whereas the Japanese is phonetically simple as the Italian, whose sounds in many ways they resemble. I say Italian, not French, not merely for political reasons. French is hell to pronounce. You have to screw up your nose for the nasals. Apart from the political, Italian is spoken like she is writ. No monkey business. Every letter is pronounced in the same way wherever it occurs. The only apparent exception is the c and ch before a and o. Before a and o, c is hard and before i and e it is soft. The hard sound is written ch before i and e. But the spelling is uniform and follows in all cases and there are no— —. I would suggest that the Japanese sign for the syllables, for the sound of the syllables, be transliterated to the Roman alphabet when they accompany the ideogram. Let me explain. The written Chinese is common in both Japan and China. All those written signs are the same for Japan and all China. Anyone who reads them in one place knows what they mean in another. It is the common tongue or common written tongue for all those millions… Coloring ; July 3 (1943) … Ideas are colored by what they are dipped in. There was a young Chinaman the other day, nearly accusin' me of havin' invented Confucius. He had been UNeducated by contact with half-baked occidental ideas. Lost his own cultural heritage, didn't think Confucius was so modern, that was because he hadn't read him, of course. Mencius was also accused of having brightened up Confucius, but he knew better. He knew he hadn't. Formerly, when Kung died, the disciples after staying together three years, packed their baggage and returned to their homes, but Tzu Kung went back and built a house on the altar ground, and lived there alone for three years. And the disciples thought Yew Jo might serve as teacher, but Tzu said: Washed in the waters of Kiang and Han, bleached in the autumn sun. After that, no. There is nothing to add. Nothing to add to that whiteness. Mebbe the difference between the Greek flash in the pan, and the Chinese persistence is due to Kung's having got the answer. Mencius following and enforcing it… Civilization ; July 24 (1943) … No, the comment on a medieval poem don't just stop there, any more than Frobenius' research just STOPS with some bit of African sculpture, or with some prehistorical drawin' on the side of a rock. Grosseteste writin' on light, hooks up with the ideogram of the sun and moon at the start of Confucius' testament… My edition of the Great Learning is in Italian, not in American, as was my first edition. And it has the Chinese text facin' it. And I know a good deal more now than when Glenn Hughes printed my first version in his University books… |
|
| 64 | 1942 | Pound, Ezra. A visiting card (1942). "I believe that the most useful service that I could do for Italy would be to put before you, every year, a few lines of Confucius, so that they might sink into the brain." |
|
| 65 | 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. |
|
| 66 | 1945-1947 |
Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest. Transl. by Ezra Pound. [Zhong yong, Da xue]. [ID D29063]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices. 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : Da xue :The Da xue is composed of seven paragraphs of text, which Pound refers to as 'verses' or the 'canon', followed by a much longer section of commentary. Interpreting Chinese words pictographically after Morrison's example. Pound's translation are more than simple restatements of Pauthier's and Legge's versions. Though he relied on Legge especially for the general sense of any given passage, he diverged from his cribs on numerous crucial points. Where Pound diverges from Pauthier and Legge is with his definition of what constitutes self-discipline, or the rectification of the heart, and this is one of his most significant unorthodoxies. Pound's Confucianism is based in an idealized history beginning with the legendary emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu. And whereas the subject of 'nature' is the relationship of the individual to a whole objectivized world and ultimately to the Christian God, for which that objective world is the metaphor, the Confucian is concerned more specifically with the relationship between individuals in the family or state and the relationship between words and deeps. If the Confucian begins with the ethical and social basis of the doctrine of the rectification of names and extends it to logic, Pound began with a logical or at least aesthetic prescription and, under the influence of Confucianism, extended it to the ethical or social order. The importance of economics in the Confucian system, as Pound interpreted it, was the crucial part it had in the creation of a humane social order. And it was this concern for social order that made Confucianism superior the Christian tradition and, as represented by Homer und Aristotle, superior to the classical tradition. Zhong yong : Zong yong is organized into three parts - metaphysics, politics, and ethics – bit this partitioning is useful in an only limited way. As expected of a tract one of whose ideals is wholeness or thematic integration, there is considerable overlap of subject matter among the three parts. The first and third sections especially are conceptual rather than substantial, and most of the discussion in this chapter will be devoted to central concepts and their place in Pound's Confucian vision in the period centered on 1945. In each of the nine rules listed in the Unwobbling piot and elaborated in subsequent paragraphs, it is clear that Confucian government is concerned above all with the ruler's relations : relations with his family, ministers, and subjects. Good government is based not on laws or institutions, but on good men. Pound's English translation is one of his responses to his personal and historical trauma, just as the Italian version was a response to the greatly weakened hold Fascism had in Italy. The Unwobbling piot occupies the moment at which Pound began disentangling his Confucianism from Fascism, realizing as he did that the survival of his Confucianism depended on such a separation : Pound told to a reporter : "Hitler and Mussolini succeeded insofar as they followed Confucius, they failed because they did not follow him more closely". The Neoplatonic emphasis that Pound gives to his translation is underscored by the fact that he ends his translation seven chapters before the end of the Chinese text, in this way omitting the discussions of the sincere man as sage and ruler that occur in them. |
|
| 67 | 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. |
|
| 68 | 1947 |
[Mengzi]. Mencius, or the economist [ID D29115]. Book One : King Hwuy of Leans or King Benevolent of Woodbridge Chapter I 1. Mencius saw King Benevolent of Woodbridge. 2. The King said: Your Honor has not found a thousand le too long a journey, but you have come. May we take it that you have something that will profit my kingdom. 3. Mencius replied, with due politeness in the tone of his voice: What forces your Majesty to use that word 'profit'? I have my humanity and my sense of equity (honsety) and that's all. 4. If your majesty says: How can I make a profit for my state, the great officers will say: "Where's the rake-off for my family?" and each of the minor officers and people will say: "What's there in it for me?" From top to bottom everyone will try to snatch profits from everyone else and the country will be brought to the edge of the precipice. In a ten thousand war-car state, the murderer of the prince will be the head of a hundred chariot family; a thousand out of ten thousand, a hundred out of a thousand, is not very much but the effect won't be long delayed; if you put honesty behind profits and profits before (anything else), no one will be satisfied until he has swiped everything. 5. There never has been a man fully human who neglected his immediate relatives; there never has been a perfectly honest man who failed in his duty to his sovereign. 6. If your Majesty would turn the conversation to Humanity (discussing the full meaning of humanity) and equity, what need would there be to drag in the question of Profits? Chapter II 1. Mencius saw King Benevolent of Woodbridge. The King took his stand by the bank of a pool contemplating the fat geese and sleek deer. He said: Do men of wisdom take delight in this sort of thing? 2. Mencius replied deferentially, saying: As they are (by definition) men of wisdom (and character) it follows that they take such delight. Those who are not good and wise, even if they have such possession get no pleasure from them. 3. It is said in the Odes : He made the measurements And began the Tower of Augury. He made the measurements and the plan And the people went at it. They didn't miss a whole day's work on the job Until the tower was finished. He began it not urging anyone to exert himself And the whole multitude of the people Came as if they had been children of his family. The King stood in his Park of Augury. The plump sleek does rested about him; White birds were there in their brightness. The King stood by the Pool of Augury With lots of fish there leaping within it. Moving their wing-like feet, (Shi King, III, 1, 8) King Wan used the people's strength to build the pagoda and to make the pool, and the people took delight in doing it; they called the tower the Tower of Good Hope, and the pool the Pool of Good Augury; they enjoyed his sleek deer, his fishes and turtles. The men of old took the people into their pleasures, the whole people, and therefore they (the sovereigns) could enjoy them. 4. The T'ang Manifesto says : Sun, if you would only die We will all come die with you. The people wanted him to die to the point of being ready to die themselves to get rid of him. (This re¬fers to the tyrant Kee.) Even if such a man possessed pagodas and birds and animals, how could he have pleasure in them alone by himself, Chapter III 1. King Benevolent of Woodbridge said: I am pretty small when it comes to running the state, but I do use what heart and mind I possess. When they have bad crops inside the river, I move some of the people to the East Shore, and have grain brought to the people (who stay) on the inside. When the crops are bad on the East shore, I carry on with the same system. When I look over at what is done in the governments of neighboring states, I don't find anybody using his heart like poor me, and yet the folks in the neighboring states don't get any fewer, and the people of your humble servant don't get any more numerous. How's that? 2. Mencius replied: Seems like your Majesty is fond of warfare. Let me draw a military simile. The drums sound, and the sharp blades are crossed, and some men throw away their armor, trail their weapons and run—some a hundred paces and stop, some fifty paces and stop. Is there any way for those who run fifty paces to make fun of those that run a hundred? (The King) said: No go! Clearly they did not run a hundred paces, but they 'also ran'. (Mencius) said: If it is like that, you your Majesty, know that; you needn't expect your population to multiply more than that in the neighboring states. (Economy of Abundance) 3. If the seasonable work on the farms be not in-terrupted there will be more grain than the people can eat; if the small-meshed nets are not set in the ponds and lakes, there will be more fish and turtles than can be eaten; if you don't hack at the mountain forests with your axes, there will be more wood (timber and firewood) than you can use. When you can't exhaust the grain, fish and terrapin by eating them, when there is more wood than you can use, people will be able to feed the living and bury their dead without resentments; and when people can feed the living and bury the dead without feelings of resentment, you have the beginning of the royal process (of government). 4. On a five-mow (five hectaire, say 2 1/2 acre) home¬stead, let them plant mulberry trees. People of fifty can then wear silk (that is, warm clothing). In pig, dog and hog raising, don't miss the breeding seasons. Then people of seventy can eat meat. A farm of a hundred mow, if you don't interrupt the seasons will support a family of quite a few mouths, so that they won't feel the pinch of hunger. Have proper school education, with emphasis on the filial and fraternal observances, and you won't have gray-head-ed men on the roads toting heavy loads on their backs and heads. With people of seventy wearing silk and eating meat, and the black-haired people (the Chinese) not suffering hunger or cold, there is no case of a ruler (of a state) failing to rise to imperial dignity. (I am accepting Legge's note for the meaning o) this 'Wang'—'low 3rd tone', according to Legge. It might mean, I should think, no case of a man not reigning, and not being deprived of his kingdom. The bearing of Mencius' philosophy does not seem to me to require the strong-er statement.) 5. Your big dogs and fat swine eat men's food, and you don't know how to impose restrictions. People die from famine along the roadside and you don't know how to issue provisions. They die, and you say: “not my fault, bad season.” What's the difference between this and stabbing a man and say¬ing, "It wasn't me, it was the sword". If your Majesty will desist from blaming the inclemency of the year's weather, all the people of China will gather round you. Chapter IV 1. King Hwuy of Leans said: Your humble servant (poor me) would like to learn all this quietly. 2. Mencius replied courteously, saying: KILL A MAN WITH A CLUB OH WITH A SWORD - IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE? (The King said: There is no difference. 3. Do it with a sword or a system of government— is there any difference? (The King) said: There is no difference at all. 4. (Mencius) said: In your Kitchen is fat meat; in your stables are fat horses. Your people have the look of hunger; in the waste places, men lie dead from famines. This is marshalling beasts to eat men (or leaving beasts and devouring men). 5. Wild beasts eat one another, and men (who have arrived at the level of having religious rites) despise them (for it—hate them for doing it). But being father and mother of the people and following a mode of government regimenting the beasts and de-vouring men (might even mean training horses), that is a bad basis for being father and mother of the people. 6. Chung-ne (Confucius) said: The man who initiated the use of wooden dummies (in funeral rites) had (probably) no posterity. 7. (There seems to be various ways of taking this ; might even mean that it looked as if this humane substitution of the dummy for sacrificial victims hadn't yet inculcated kindliness. Legge takes is from commentators in a more complicated way.) 8. He made them (the dummies) and used them in place of men. How about a man who causes his people to hunger and die ? |
|
| 69 | 1947 |
Letter from William Carlos Williams to Louis Zukofsky ; Jan. 26 (1947). "I had been thinking and writing (private papers) of Ezra's encounter with Chinese poetry--thinking that at that very point his deterioration began due entirely (tho' the inclination was already in him) to his turning from sound to pronunciamentos. He from that moment imagined himself Kung or equated himself with all wisdom and, by that failing against which all poets must guard themselves went straight to hell." |
|
| 70 | 1949 |
Eliot, T.S. Christianity and culture : the idea of a christian society and notes towards the definition of culture. (New York, N.Y. : Harcourt, Brace, 1949). (A Harvest book ; HB32). "In the literature of Asia is great poetry. There is also profound wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics ; but at the moment I am only concerned with poetry. I have no knowledge whatever of the Arabic, Persian or Chinese languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too ; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility. But generally poets are not oriental scholars – I was never a scholar myself ; and the influence of oriental literature upon poets is usually through translations. That there has been some influence of poetry of the East in the last century and a half is undeniable : to instance only English poetry, and in our own time, the poetical translations from the Chinese made by Ezra Pound, and those made by Arthur Waley, have probably been read by every poet writing in English. It is obvious that through individual interpreters, specially gifted for appreciating a remote culture, every literature may influence every other. The frontiers of culture are not and should not be closed." |
|
| 71 | 1950 |
Pound, Ezra. Confucian analects [Lun yu]. [ID D29065]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices. 1950 Note to Pound's translation of The Analects. In : Hudson review ; no 635 (1950). "During the past half-century (since Legge's studies) a good deal of light has been shed on the subject by Fenollosa (Written character as a medium for poetry), Frobenius (Erlebte Erdteile) and Karlgren (Studies of sacrificial bone inscriptions)." 1997 Mary Paterson Cheadle : The Analects are composed of 482 chapters that are grosped into twenty books. It approaches its many subjects from various exegetical angles. Images of lieght and ideals of orderly government that are crucial in The great digest and The unwobbling pivot are not privileged over other terms and concepts. Other terms and concepts are newly introduced and some of these are poignantly appropriate to Pound around 1950 : the process and practice ; humaneness, total humanity, or manhood ; verbal fidelity and the importance of rites ; also, the role of the Confucian gentleman out of office as well as in office ; the importance of love and friendship, of learning, conscience, and beauty ; the proper attitude toward illness, death, the death penalty, and war. The defeat of Fascism and the crisis of events in Pound's own life jarred him, for the moment, out of the didactic form of study he had pursued for so long, reminding him that there was still as much to be learned as to be taught. The Analects is in part his expression of his relationship to Mussolini's Fascist movement and a preliminary exploration of what his new relationship to post-World War II America might be. The Analects XIII.9 prescribes the priorities of a Confucian government ; XII.7 : armaments are the least important of the three necessities, food is more important, and most important of all is the people's 'faith' in their ruler ; XV.4 is presented as a result of the sovereign's introspectively based self-discipline. The last book Yao, Shun and Yu are celebrated for their realization of ideal rule. Pound continues in The Analects to interpret individual words and passages with respect to the principle of verbal precision. Balanced against the despairing desire for no words are two responsibilities The Analects also gives to the Confucian in respect to language, both having to do with fitting the word to some nonverbal referent, an action or a thing, a subjective or objective experience. The concept of verbal definitions is crucial to Pound's interpretation of Confucianism around 1950 : as a whole, he claims in his 'Note to This New Version', The Analects is not 'a continuous narrative' or 'a collection of fancy ideas', but 'should be considered rather as definitions of words, and a number of them should be taken rather as lexicography, as examples of how Kung had used a given expression in defining a man or a condition'. Precise self-definition is the first responsibility of the Confucian in respect to language ; the second is the correlation of words and actions. Some of the ceremonies referred to in The Analects are performed to the spirits of the land or ground, others to the spirits and powers of air, others to thee spirits of imperial ancestors. Many issues and themes having special personal relevance as well as special didactic value for Pound around 1950 is the ritual of mourning outlined in several passages. War is another subject that because of its relevance to Pound is treated with special expressiveness or, in passages where this may not be the case, should be read with special attention. Regard to military aggression in The Analects presents another contradiction between Pound's Confucianism and his belief in the Fascist project. Another contradiction between Pound's Confucianism and the belief he had in Fascism is posed by the treatment of the death penalty. Subjects such as illness and death, war and the death penalty, have a great deal of poignancy for Pound. Like the word 'conscience', the word 'beauty' is an aspect of his reinterpretation of Confucianism. 'beauty' does not always means 'true' or essential beauty, but sometimes false or merely superficial beauty. The Analects concentrates more on Confucian earthly and celestial realms : the necessity of looking in one's own heart, mind, conscience, and of cultivating knowledge in order to make oneself sincere, or, in Pound's definition, in order to find the 'precise verbal definitions' of one's heart, mind, conscience. |
|
| 72 | 1950-1953 | Ezra Pound was engrossed in Confucian translations. Apart from making draft versions of The Analects and the Odes he prepared the bilingual edition of The great digest & The unwobbling pivot with reproductions of rubbings from the Tang Stone-Classics. Willis Meeker Hawley (1896-1987), a Hollywood bookseller and sinologist have him the idea of the Stone-Classics. James Laughlin of New Directions forwarded him a letter from Fang Achilles, suggesting consistent and correct spelling of Chinese names in Cantos 52-61. Fang offered to compose a note on the Stone-Classics and decided to come to Washington to meet Pound. During this meeting, Fang handed over to Pound a list of recommended changes in the Romanization of Chinese names and Pound accepted them. The first meeting was followed by vigorous exchanges of letters. Fang sent him the Shu-jing in the original and at Pound's request Fang gave him an account of the 'Thirteen Classics'. After reading though some of these volumes, Pound came to the conclusion "All the answers are in the FOUR BOOKS". As a dictionary compiler, Fang was able to answer Pound's trying queries about Chinese dictionaries, evaluating in specific terms their respective strengths and weaknesses. With Mathews' Chinese-English dictionary he was able to study Chinese sound, even its tone. |
|
| 73 | 1951 |
Ezra Pound reads the Shu jing, Yi jing and Tang Song qian jia shi in the original. After reading Arthur Waley's version of Laozi, Ezra Pound asked Fang Achilles : "Does Lao contain anything useful that is not in the Four Books (and their preludes, the Shih and the Shu)?" |
|
| 74 | 1952 |
Angela Jung Palandri chose Ezra Pound for her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature : Ezra Pound and China [ID D29081]. "My first contact with Pound was in 1952. I was then a foreign student from China still struggling with the English language. Early that year I attended a seminar at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sitting next to me was a young man who kept on writing Chinese characters in his notebook. Mistaking him for a student of the Chinese language, I pointed out that some of his ideograms were written incorrectly. He showed me the book from which he was copying. It was The cantos of Ezra Pound. My initial interest in Pound was aroused primarily by the poet's interest in Chinese. When research failed to satisfy my curiosity, I decided to write to Pound at St Elizabeths Hospital. Imagine my surprise when Pound's first letter dated Febr. 27, arrived : 'I will try to answer your questions when you get here in April. I like to get letters but can not do much in the way of replay'. The second letter from Pound was dated March 4. Along with this letter was a separate page containing a Chinese quatrain of sixteen ideograms. The four-character line is typical of the Confucian odes which Pound had translated… During my four months in Washington D.C., I visited Pound regularly once a week. Upon arriving, I wrote to Pound. I was given an appointment on the following Saturday… First he brought a chair for me and then he brought two armsful of books. Among them were the Analects and Fenollosa's essay, his Money pamphlets, the bilingual edition of Cavalcanti's Rima and the Stone classic edition of his translation of Confucius interleafed with Chinese text. 'The only way to learn the literature of a foreign language is to have the original text with the translation', he explained'. There was a pirated, bilingual edition of James Legge's translation of the Four books of Confucius. The margins inside were covered with notes or comments. 'This little book has been my bible for years', remarked Pound, 'the only thing I could hang onto during those hellish days at Pisa. Had it not been for this book, from which I drew my strength, I would really have gone insane, so you see how I am Indebted to Kung'… 'I have never heard how Chinese poetry should be read, but I like to play with it my own way'. He began to chant his Chinese verse in the old fashioned sing-song Manner I had been taught as a child. He drummed his fingers on his knee to mark the duration and stress of each syllable. 'Occidentals have a lot to learn from the Chinese, the ideogrammic method as well as the metrics, the Chinese tones are very musical. They make you sing. That's the way poetry should be in any language'. My visits thereafter were less exciting but more pleasant. The most important event for Pound and for me, was T.S. Eliot's visit on June 21. Pound turned to me and said : 'If you have any questions to ask Mr. Eliot, here is your chance. After all, it isn't every day that you meet such an eminent personality. I had prepared a list of question…" |
|
| 75 | 1952 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Marianne Moore ; 29 Jan. (1952). 'If the esteemed ed eggregia Marianne will merember [sic] that Kung [Confucius] did not claim invention but transmission only'. |
|
| 76 | 1953 | Ezra Pound composed at St Elizabeths Hospital Cantos 85-89. Zhang Junmai was taken to the hospital by William McNaughton, a student at Georgetown University and a regular visitor. Zhang Junmai was at work on The development of Neo-Confucian thought (1957). He was enthusiastic as Pound about their meetings and their exchange of ideas. Zhang made the usual objections to Fenollosa's treatment of the Chinese written character. The talk then turned to James Legge and Arthur Waley. Pound remarked : "The trouble with Legge's versions is, whenever Confucius disagrees with St Paul, Legge puts in a footnote to say that Confucius must be wrong." |
|
| 77 | 1953-1955 |
William McNaughton's Memoir: / "What Pound and Carsun Chang [Zhang Junmai] Talked About at St Elizabeths". I met Dr Chang through mutual friends in the intellectual Chinese community in Washington, DC. Chang then had a private cubicle at the Library of Con¬gress, where he was working on his book on neo-Confucian philosophy. When he heard that I was acquainted with Pound, he asked if it would be possible for me to introduce him to Pound. Having received Pound's permission to do so, I took Dr Chang with me the next time I went to St Elizabeths. It was almost certainly the second or third Tuesday in November 1953. Over the next eighteen months Dr Chang went to see Pound many times. I would judge that there were a total of about ten interviews between the two men, all taking place not later than May 1955. During their first meeting Pound told Chang—rather frankly, I thought, in view of Chang's absorption at that time in his work on neo-Confucianism - that he (Pound) wanted Confucianism as Confucius had it and that he "found little of interest in later dilatations." Among "late dictations" it was clear that Pound intended to include neo-Confucianism. Pound and Dr Chang talked about Pound's work ; about Leopoldine reforms ; and about Thomas Jefferson. Chang knew a good deal about Jefferson. He told Pound how he had come to draft a constitution for China on Jeffersonian principles. The draft later became the basis of the Constitution which was adopted and which is still supposed to be in effect in Taiwan. On one of my visits to St Elizabeths with Carsun Chang. Pound said to him, "if there were only four Confucians in China who would get together and work with each other, they could save China." "Four ?” Dr Chang laughed. "One is enough." In the exchange Chang showed himself, perhaps, to be the more orthodox Confucian. But into the Rock-Drill cantos, Pound did write from the Canonic Book of History the idea that it may depend on one man. Before Dr Chang and I left that day, Pound said to me, "Bring him out again. He is somebody you can talk to. He is interested in the definition of words." Mrs Pound also asked me to bring Chang out again. "Eppy," she said, "is very hungry for adult company out here." Later on Chang asked Pound to write an introduction for his book on Chinese philosophy. Pound wrote one page in which he said he thought that the reader would be delighted with a book about a thinker who once clapped his hands with joy at the sight of a leaf. Chang dccided not to use the introduction. He had wanted something more scholarly, and Pound had written the introduction "like a poet". (In addition to his formal Chinese education, Dr Chang had been a post¬graduate student in Germany, and his attitude perhaps had been colored by Germanic ideas of scholarship.) From Chang's manuscript Pound got the "rules for a man in government" which appear at the beginning of Canto 89 : To knew the histories / to know good from evil / And know whom to trust. |
|
| 78 | 1953-1956 | Conversations between Ezra Pound and Fang Baoxian about the mysterious Naxi rites that fuse Confucian ancestral worship with Taoism and Buddhism. Their conversations, along with Joseph Rock's descriptions of the Naxi rites, inspired Pound's haunting poetry about the'wind sway' ceremony that focuses on possibilities of life after death. |
|
| 79 | 1953-1956 |
Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Fang Achilles about the Confucian Odes [Shi jing] project. In 1948 Pound consulted Willis Hawley about typesetting the characters of the Odes. Hawley sent Pound the photocopies of three Chinese texts. Pound chose the seal script text for his edition. In 1949-1950 the Odes seal text supplied by Hawley passed from James Laughlin of New Directions to Laughlin's printer Dudley Kimball. Numerous letters concerning the layouts of the project were exchanged between Pound, Hawley, Laughlin and Kimball. 1951 Pound was losing patience. At that point Fang Achilles came to his rescue. He approached the director of Harvard University Press, Thomas Wilson, and succeeded in stirring an interest. The letters provide a detailed record of Pound's and Harvard's conflicting desires and of Fang's role as a mediator. Harvard's enthusiasm was for Pound's translation. Pound absolutely would not pull out from his manuscript the singing syllables and the characters. The negotiation of a contract broke down in 1952. In 1953 John Kasper reported to Pound Macmillan's and Twayne's interest in this project. Meanwhile, Fang assured Pound that Harvard University Press would carry out his wishes. Pound changed his mind. Harvard Press offered him two contracts in 1953, first to publish a 'trade edition' and then to bring out a three-way 'scholar's edition'. Pound signed both contracts. In 1955 Fang Achilles corresponded with Pound's family and friends in efforts to get Pound released from St Elizabeths Hospital. In 1956 he put aside all other projects to work on the sound key and the seal text. Fang neglected to inform Pound of the progress of the project in 1957. Pound questioned Wilson as to what was holding up the 'proper edition of the Confucian anthology'. Wilson's reply was that the press did not yet have the complete manuscript. Pound turned to Fang for an explanation : "this put ALL the blame on you for the delay in publication of the Odes in the ONLY form that interested me in the least". According to Fang, everything essential had been held in the office of the Harvard Press editorial department. The only thing that he had not turned in was an introduction. For Pound, this was an excuse. In his last letter to Fang in 1958 he wrote : "The sabotage, the blocking of my work remains… The infinite vileness of the state of education under the rump of the present organisms for the suppression of mental life is not your fault." In a reply Fang assured Pound that Harvard University Press would start working on the project after summer vacation. By then Pound had lost confidence in Harvard. He wrote 1958 to Wilson from Italy requesting return of the manuscript and photographs of the complete edition of the Odes. With the termination of the contract regarding the scholar's edition the correspondence with Fang also came to a close. |
|
| 80 | 1953 |
Moore, Marianne. "Teach, stir the mind, afford enjoyment". [From a series of commentaries on selected contemporary poets, Bryn Mawr, 1952 ; betr. Ezra Pound]. Mr. Pound admires Chinese codifyings and for many a year has been ordering, epitomizing, and urging explicitness, as when he listed "A Few Don'ts" for Imagists… Confucius says the fish moves on winglike foot ; and Prior, in his life of Edmund Burke, says Burke "had a peculiarity in his gait that made him look as if he had two left legs… "As for Cathay, it must be pointed out", T.S. Eliot says, "that Mr. Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry of our time" ; and seeing a connection between the following incident and "the upper middlebrow press"… In The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot of Confucius, as in his Analects, Ezra Pound has had a theme of major import. The Great Digest makes emphatic this lesson : He who can rule himself can govern others ; he who can govern others can rule the kingdom and families of the Empire. The men of old disciplined themselves. Having attained self-discipline they set their houses in order. Having order in their own homes, they brought good government To their own state. When their states were well governed, the empire was brought Into equilibrium. We have in the Digest, content that is energetic, novel, and deep : "If there be a knife of resentment in the heart or enduring rancor, the mind will not attain precision ; under suspicion and fear it will not form sound judgment, nor will it, dazzled by love's delight nor in sorrow and anxiety, come to precision." As for money, "Ill got, ill go". When others have ability, if a man "shoves them aside, he can be called a real pest." "The archer when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of error in himself." There must be no rationalizing. "Abandon every clandestine egoism to realize the true root." Of the golden rule, there are many variants in the Analects : "Tze-kung asked if there was a single principle that you could practice through life to the end. He said sympathy ; what you don't want, don't inflict on another" (Book Fifteen, XXIII). "Require the solid of yourself, the trifle of others" (Book Fifteen, XIV). "The proper man brings men's excellent to focus, not their evil qualities" (Book Twelve, XVI). I am not worried that others do not know me ; I am worried by my incapacity' (Book Fourteen, XXXII). Tze-chang asked Kung-tze about maturity. Kung-tze said : To be able to practice five things would humanize the whole empire – sobriety (serenitas), magnanimity, sticking by one's word, promptitude (in attention to detail), Kindliness (caritas). As for "the problem of style. Effect your meaning. Then stop" (Book Fifteen, XL). |
|
| 81 | 1953 |
Letter from Marianne Moore to Dorothy Pound and Ezra Pound ; July 31, 1952. I take an avid interest in Mommsen, in the zealous Achilles Fang ; could he be a relative of Mei Lan Fang ? a masterpiece of whom I would be ignorant had it not been for Gilbert Seldes, who warned me not to miss him. And (an interest in) The Great Digest – one of the principal reasons for my coming to Washington (and in facsimiles of Vivaldi manuscripts). |
|
| 82 | 1954 |
Letter from W.M. Hawley to Ezra Pound ; 21 March, 1957. He provided the stone-text characters for Pound's bilingual translations of The great diegest and Unwobbling pivot, counseled Pound that his 'chief trouble seems to be trying to make sense out of all parts of a 'character' when for 75 % of them, half is only phonetic selected because it had the desired sound and wouldn't interfere adversely by meaning. |
|
| 83 | 1954 |
Pound, Ezra. [Message to Confucius's birthday]. In : Chinese world ; no 23 (Sept. 1954). "Kung is to China as water to fishes." [See also : Ezra Pound speeches ; April 24 (1943).] |
|
| 84 | 1954 |
As a response to a letter from Ezra Pound, dated 7 September 1954, Marianne Moore refers on the envelope to Confucius. Shih-ching : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. [Transl. by] Ezra Pound : "4 misdemeanors in one letter profanities & blasphemy But I confess, Confucius, Well as my French sage has said, 'Sweet speech does no harm None at all'. I refer to The anthology." |
|
| 85 | 1957 |
Frye, Northrop. An anatomy of criticism. (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1957). On the literal level of meaning, metaphor appears in its literal shape, which is simple juxtaposition. Ezra Pound, in explaining this aspect of metaphor, uses the illustrative figure of the Chinese ideogram, which expresses a complex image by throwing a group of elements together without predication. Predication belongs to assertion and descriptive meaning, not to the literal structure of poetry. |
|
| 86 | 1957 |
Ezra Pound reads Forgotten kingdom by Peter Goullart. He learned about the connection between the Naxi and Confucius. The book is dedicated to Dr. Josphe F. Rock. Goullart's dediction was sufficient to set Pound on the course of collecting and studying Rock's articles and books and the theme of the Naxi in The cantos comes directly from Rock's studies. Pound quarried the poetry out of Rock, quoting so carefully that we can match dozens of gemlike descriptions and powerful incantatory images, from Canto 98 on, with Rock He learned about the connection between the Naxi and Confucius.s words. He wrote in his Notebook, Nov. 8 : "Rock's land and Goullart's paradise ; air blown into word-form." |
|
| 87 | 1957 |
Letter from William Carlos Williams to Ezra Pound ; Febr. 1957. Williams praised David Rafael Wang's eight classic Chinese poems in the Poundian journal Edge : "I do enjoy EDGE – the last translations from the chink by / of David Rafael Wang are worth the trip half way round the world to have encountered." |
|
| 88 | 1957 |
Letter from Ezra Pound to Marianne Moore ; March 9, 1957. Pound noted an 'immensely important' book : Belden, Jack. China shakes the world. (New York, N.Y. : Monthly Review Press, 1970). |
|
| 89 | 1958-1960 |
In 1958 Ezra Pound had been released from St Elizabeths. Around 1960, he was entering a period of a confused, personal despair deeper than any he had lived through before, one produced perhaps by the combined shock of finding himself in a country, Italy, considerably altered by technology and events from the one he had left in 1945, and of finding himself, as if suddenly, old. The long period of silence that began about this time - "I did not enter into silence, silence captured me" – continued to his death in 1972. Pound was doubtful in this period about the wisdom of his faith in Confucianism, as he doubted perhaps all his former certainties. He doubted the effectiveness of adopting Confucianism as a platform from which to teach. He did resign from his lifelong, informal profession as teacher. In 1962 Pound explained to James Laughlin, that he was silent 'because no one would listen to his economic ideas'. |
|
| 90 | 1958 |
Moore, Marianne. Idiosyncrasy and technique. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1958). Laurence Binyon, reflecting on the state of letters after completing his Dante, said : "How indulgent we are to infirmity of structure…" and structural infirmity truly has, under surrealism, become a kind of horticultural verbal blight threatening firmness to the core ; a situation met long ago in The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius [by Erzra Pound]: Enjoy the good yet sink not in excess. True scholar stands by his steadfastness… Lamb-skin for suavity, trimmed and ornate, But a good soldier who will get things straight. |
|
| 91 | 1962 |
Pound, Ezra. The art of poetry No. 5. Interviewed by Donald Hall [ID D29185]. Hall : You are nearly through the Cantos now, and this sets me to wondering about their beginning. In 1916 you wrote a letter in which you talked about trying to write a version of Andreas Divus in Seafarer rhythms. This sounds like a reference to Canto 1. Did you begin the Cantos in 1916? Pound : I began the Cantos about 1904, I suppose. I had various schemes, starting in 1904 or 1905. The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn't exclude something merely because it didn't fit. In the first sketches, a draft of the present first Canto was the third. Obviously you haven't got a nice little road map such as the Middle Ages possessed of Heaven. Only a musical form would take the material, and the Confucian universe as I see it is a universe of interacting strains and tensions. Hall : Had your interest in Confucius begun in 1904? Pound : No, the first thing was this: you had six centuries that hadn't been packaged. It was a question of dealing with material that wasn't in the Divina Commedia. Hugo did a Légende des Siècles that wasn't an evaluative affair but just bits of history strung together. The problem was to build up a circle of reference—taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance. That was the psyche, if you like. One had to deal with one's own subject. … Hall : Well, was there a point at which poetically and intellectually you felt further apart than you had been? Pound : There's the whole problem of the relation of Christianity to Confucianism, and there's the whole problem of the different brands of Christianity. There is the struggle for orthodoxy—Eliot for the Church, me gunning round for particular theologians. In one sense Eliot's curiosity would appear to have been focused on a smaller number of problems. Even that is too much to say. The actual outlook of the experimental generation was all a question of the private ethos. … Hall : I suppose your interest in words to be sung was especially stimulated by your study of Provence. Do you feel that the discovery of Provençal poetry was your greatest breakthrough? Or perhaps the Fenollosa manuscripts? Pound : The Provençal began with a very early interest, so that it wasn't really a discovery. And the Fenollosa was a windfall and one struggled against one's ignorance. One had the inside knowledge of Fenollosa's notes and the ignorance of a five-year-old child. Hall : How did Mrs. Fenollosa happen to hit upon you? Pound : Well, I met her 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. … Hall : Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder? Suppose good language is used to forward bad government? Doesn't bad government make bad language? Pound : Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out… … Hall : What kind of action can you hope to take? Pound : … It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it. An Indian Circe of negation and dissolution… … Hall : During those years in the war in Italy did you write poetry? The Pisan Cantos were written when you were interned. What did you write during those years? Pound : Arguments, arguments and arguments. Oh, I did some of the Confucius translation. … Hall : Since your internment, you’ve published three collections of Cantos, Thrones just recently. You must be near the end. Can you say what you are going to do in the remaining Cantos? Pound : It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio. I am trying to collect the record of the top flights of the mind. I might have done better to put Agassiz on top instead of Confucius. ... |
|
| 92 | 1964 |
Yoshikawa, Kojiro. An interview with Ezra Pound. Transl. into English by Burton Watson. In : The East-West review ; vol. 1, no 2 (1964). When Professor Yoshikawa met Pound, the poet was exposing himself to the sun, half-naked, standing on the grass. Around him were several young people, among whom a lady, a painter. "We were just protesting against Western civilization". This seemed to be the gist of his first words. I supposed he was referring to the exercises they had been doing. His next words I caught clearly. "I am a Confucian". Though I was aware it might sound like flattery, I asked pointedly if this was true. He repeated once more, "I am a Confucian". At this the young lady seated at his side kissed his left hand with a look of joy… A number of oil paintings on canvas and on board were scattered about the grass, already there when the exercises were going on. One of them was turned face down. On the yellow grain of the wood I could see written the three characters Hsin, Hsin, Hsin. I pointed to the painting and asked why there were Chinese character written on them… I did not catch his answer, but only the question he asked in return. "The character means new, doesn't it ?" "Fresh", I added. "Creative". Hsin tso nan men - "We built anew the southern gate" ; the passage in the Spring and autumn annals came to my mind. His eyes narrowed behind the beard and the young lady once more pressed her face against his hand. The board was turned over, revealing the face of a young girl ; she looked like the girl sitting beside us. |
|
| 93 | 1966-1967 | Angela Jung Palandri took a nine-month sabbatical leave in Florence to work on a Pound book Italian images of Ezra Pound [ID D29082]. 1967 Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Pound suggested her to write to Pound at Sant' Ambrogio above Rapallo and she received the reply from Olga Rudge : "Mr. Pound thanks you for your letter and would be happy to see you again and meet your husband. You could arrive her in time for lunch with us & get back to Florence the same day, leaving after tea". Pound didn't talk much, but on a walk he posed her for a picture. |
|
| 94 | 1968 |
Interview Ezra Pound with Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini : I want to ask you, Pound. You have never been to China on any of your travels ? Pound : No. Pasolini : You've never been there. Is this a disappointment for you, not to have seen China, which inspired you so much ? Pound : Yes. I have always wanted to see China. It's awfully late now, but who knows ? |
|
| 95 | 1969 |
Scott, Tom. The poet as scapegoat. In : Agenda ; vol. 7, no 2 (1969). "I predict that the next century will see, even be dominated by, a dialogue between the U.S. and China in which Pound's poetry will take on an importance and weight not obvious at the moment : that not only has he woven a new wholeness, at any rate potential wholeness, out of European and American, but also of Chinese, elements." |
|
| 96 | 1995 |
Eliot-Pound Society formed in Dalian, Oct. 1995. Professor Lu Wenbin was elected president. In : Newsletter / T.S. Eliot society ; no 28 (Spring 1996). http://www.luc.edu/eliot/newsletter/28%20spr%2096.pdf. Members of the society have decided to put both T.S. Eliot’s and Pound's works into Chinese and to write a series of books to introduce their works and literary theory to Chinese readers. |
|
| 97 | 1999 | Ezra Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz and his granddaughter Patrizia de Rachewiltz fulfill his unfulfilled dream by going on pilgrimage to Confucius's birthplace Qufu and climbing Taishan. |
|
Bibliography (35)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1914 | M.M. [Pound, Ezra]. The words of Ming Mao "least among the disciples of Kung-fu-tse". In : The Egoist ; vol. 1, no 25 (15 Dec. 1914). | Publication / Pou33 |
|
| 2 | 1914 |
Pound, Ezra. Des Imagistes : an anthology. (London : Poetry Bookshaop, 1914). http://ia600301.us.archive.org/8/items/desimagistesanan00alberich/desimagistesanan00alberich.pdf. |
Publication / Pou92 |
|
| 3 | 1915 |
Pound, Ezra. Cathay. Translations by Ezra Pound, for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Bo], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga. (London : E. Mathews, 1915). = Pound, Ezra. Lustra. (London : Elkin Mathews, 1916). = Repr. (New York, N.Y. : Haskell House, 1973). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay und Exile's letter]. Pound, Ezra. Exile's letter. In : Poetry : a magazine of verse ; vol. 5, no 6 (1915). http://ia600404.us.archive.org/3/items/cathayezrapound00pounrich/cathayezrapound00pounrich.pdf. |
Publication / Pou15 | |
| 4 | 1915-1916 |
Clutton-Brock, Arthur. Poems from Cathay. In : Times literary supplement ; April 29 (1915). Clutton-Brock, Arthur. Lustra : the poems of Mr Ezra Pound. In : Times literary supplement ; Nov. 16 (1916). In : Gross, John. The modern movement : a TLS companion. (Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1992). |
Publication / Pou93 |
|
| 5 | 1918 | Pound, Ezra. Chinese poetry. In : To-day ; vol. 3 (April 1918). | Publication / Pou28 |
|
| 6 | 1919 |
Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. In : The little review ; vol. 6, no. 5-8 (Sept.-Dec. 1919) = In : Pound, Ezra. Instigations of Ezra Pound ; together with an essay on the Chinese written character. (New York, N.Y. : Boni and Liveright, 1920). [Die Ausgabe von 1936 enthält einen Appendix mit fünf Tafeln eines chinesischen Textes mit Notizen]. = Fenollosa, Ernest ; Pound, Ezra. Das chinesische Schriftzeichen als poetisches Medium. (Starnberg : J, Keller, 1972). (Kunst und Umwelt ; Bd. 2). |
Publication / SauH1 | |
| 7 | 1928 |
[Confucius]. Ta Hio : The great learning. Newly rendered into the American language by Ezra Pound. (Seattle : University of Washington Book Store, 1928). (University of Washington chapbooks ; no 14). = Confucio. Ta s'eu dai gaku : studio integrale. Versione italiana di Ezra Pound e di Alberto Luchini. (Rapallo : Scuola tipografica orfanotrofio emiliani, 1942). [Da xue]. [http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices.] |
Publication / Pou20 | |
| 8 | 1928 | Pound, Ezra. Selected poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. with an introd. by T.S. Eliot. (London : Faber and Gwyer, 1928). | Publication / Pou67 | |
| 9 | 1933 |
Confucius. Confucian analects. Transl. and introd. by Ezra Pound.In : Hudson reviews ; Spring-Summer (1950). = (London : P. Owen, 1951). [Lun yu]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices. |
Publication / Pou21 | |
| 10 | 1934 |
Pound, Ezra. ABC of reading. (London : Routledge, 1934). http://de.scribd.com/doc/38969804/Ezra-Pound-ABC-of-Reading. |
Publication / Pou13 |
|
| 11 | 1936 | Pound, Ezra. Jefferson and/or Mussolini : l'ideal state : fascism, as I have seen it. (London : S. Nott, 1936). | Publication / Pou102 |
|
| 12 | 1937 | Pound, Ezra. Immediate need of Confucius. In : The Aryan path ; Aug. (1937). In : Pound, Ezra. Selected prose 1909-1965. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1950). | Publication / Pou96 |
|
| 13 | 1937 | Pound, Ezra. Immediate need of Confucius. In : The Aryan path ; August (1937). In : Pound, Ezra. Selected prose 1909-1965. Ed., with an introd. by William Cookson. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1950). | Publication / Pou98 |
|
| 14 | 1938 | Pound, Ezra. Mang Tsze : the ethics of Mencius. In : The criterion : a literary review ; vol. 17, no 69 (1938). | Publication / Pou30 | |
| 15 | 1938 |
Pound, Ezra. Guide to Kulchur. (London : Faber & Faber, 1938). [Enthält Eintragungen über China, sowie chinesische Zeichen, die nicht alle berücksichtigt wurden]. http://de.scribd.com/doc/75207054/Guide-to-Kulchur-by-Ezra-Pound-1938. |
Publication / Pou61 |
|
| 16 | 1945-1947 |
Confucius. The unwobbling pivot and The great digest. Transl. by Ezra Pound ; with notes and commentary on the text and the ideograms ; together with Ciu Hsi's Preface to the Chung yung and Tseng's commentary on the Testament. In : Pharos ; no 4 (Winter 1947). = Confucius. The great digest and, the unwobbling pivot (Chung-yung). Stone text from rubbins supplied by William Hawley ; a note on the stone editions by Achilles Fang ; translation & commentary by Ezra Pound. (London : P. Owen, 1951). [Zhong yong ; Da xue ; Zengzi]. [Enthält] : Confucius. Ta Hio : The great learning. Newly rendered into the American language by Ezra Pound. (Seattle : University of Washington Book Store, 1928). (University of Washington chapbooks ; no 14). [Da xue]. = [1st ed.]. [Confucius]. Ciung jung : l'asse che non vacilla : secondo dei libri confuciani. Versione italiana di Ezra Pound. (Venezia : Casa editrice delle edizioni popolari, 1945). [Zhong yong]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html : Appendices. |
Publication / Pou19 | |
| 17 | 1947 | [Mengzi]. Mencius, or the economist. Transl. from the Chinese by Ezra Pound. In : The new iconography ; no 1 (1947). | Publication / Pou56 | |
| 18 | 1953 | Pound, Ezra. The translations of Ezra Pound. With an introd. by Hugh Kenner. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1953). | Publication / Pou91 | |
| 19 | 1954 |
Confucius. Shih-ching : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. [Transl. by] Ezra Pound. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1954). (Harvard paperback ; HP103). = Confucius. The Confucian odes : the classic anthology defined by Confucius. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions Paperbook, 1959). [Shi jing]. http://www.ostasien.uzh.ch/sinologie/forschung/chinaundderwesten.html. Appendices]. |
Publication / Pou18 | |
| 20 | 1954 |
Pound, Ezra. The literary essays of Ezra Pound. (Norfolk, Conn. : New Directions, 1954). [Enthält Aussagen über China]. http://books.google.ch/books?id=uOQMlH_zYNAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ezra+pound +the+literary+essays+books.google.ch&hl=de&sa=X&ei=1PfjULnSF4mxhAfGyIHQBg&ved =0CEMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. |
Publication / Pou60 |
|
| 21 | 1962 | Pound, Ezra. The art of poetry No. 5. Interviewed by Donald Hall. In : Paris review ; vol. 28 (Summer/Fall 1962). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound. | Publication / Pou101 |
|
| 22 | 1964 | Confucius to Cummings : an anthology of poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound & Marcell Spann. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1964). (A New Directions book). | Publication / Pou105 |
|
| 23 | 1964 | Confucio [Confucius]. L'antologia classica cinese. A cura di Ezra Pound ; curata e volta in italiano da Carlo Scarfoglio. (Milano : All' insegna del pesce d'oro, 1964). (Serie ideografica a cura di Ezra Pound ; 4). | Publication / ScaC1 | |
| 24 | 1967 | Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University, 1967). Diss. Princeton Univ., 1967. = (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1969). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. | Publication / Yip20 |
|
| 25 | 1971 |
Pound, Ezra. Letters, 1907-1941. Ed. by D.D. Paige. (New York, N.Y. : Harcourt, Brace, 1950). = The selected letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. (London : Faber and Faber, 1971). http://ia700501.us.archive.org/18/items/LettersOfEzraPound1907-1941/letters.pdf. |
Publication / Pou71 | |
| 26 | 1976 | Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. | Publication / Mot3 |
|
| 27 | 1978 |
Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound speaking : radio speeches of World War II. Ed. by Leonard W. Doob. (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1978). (Contributions in American studies ; no 37). http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/pound_ezra/radio75.html. |
Publication / Pou78 | |
| 28 | 1980-1985 |
Pound, Ezra. Shi san shou. Pangde ; Du Yunxie yi. [Three poems]. In : Wai guo xian dai pai zuo pin xuan. Vol. 1 [ID D16726]. 诗三首 |
Publication / YuanK2.8 |
|
| 29 | 1985 |
[Pound, Ezra]. Meiguo xian dai liu shi ren xuan ji. Pangde deng zhu ; Shen Ao yi. (Changsha : Hunan ren min chu ban she, 1985). (Shi yuan yi lin). [Übersetzung von Gedichten von Pound]. 美国现代六诗人选集 |
Publication / Pou2 | |
| 30 | 1993 | Antiche poesie cinesi. Versione italiana dal cinese di Alessandra C. Lavagnino e Maria Rita Masci. (Torino : G. Einaudi, 1993). Übersetzung von Pound, Ezra. Cathay. Translations by Ezra Pound, for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Bo], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga. (London : E. Mathews, 1915). | Publication / MasM4 | |
| 31 | 1998 | [Pound, Ezra]. Bang de shi xuan Bisa shi zhang. Pangde zhu ; Huang Yunde yi. (Guilin : Lijiang chu ban she, 1998). (Da shi shi xuan). Übersetzung von Pound, Ezra. Pisan cantos. In : Pound, Ezra. The cantos of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 1948) (New Directions book). | Publication / Pou1 | |
| 32 | 1998 |
Wen xue xin lu : Ying Mei ming jia fang tan lu. Shan Dexing bian yi. (Taibei : Shu lin chu ban gong si, 1998). (Wen xue cong shu; 7). [Interviews aus Paris review mit Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer]. 文學心路 : 英美名家訪談錄 |
Publication / ShanD1 |
|
| 33 | 2003 | The New Directions anthology of classical Chinese poetry : translations by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, David Hinton. Ed. by Eliot Weinberger. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions, 2003). | Publication / Pou24 | |
| 34 | 2008 |
Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound's Chinese friends : stories in letters. Ed. and ann. by Zhaoming Qian. (Oxford : University Press, 2008). [Enthält] : Briefwechsel mit Song Faxiang (1914), Zeng Baosan, Yang Fengqi (1939-1942), Veronica Hulan Sun, Fang Achilles (1950-1958), Angela Jung Palandri (1952), Zhang Junmai (1953-1957), Zhao Ziqiang (1954-1958), Wang Shenfu (1955-1958), Fang Baoxian (1957-1959). Appendix : Ezra Pound's typescript for "Preliminary survey" (1951). http://cs5937.userapi.com/u11728334/docs/901475cb4b3c/Zhaoming_Qian_Ezra_Pounds_Chinese_Friends _Sto.pdf. |
Publication / Pou16 | |
| 35 | 2010 |
Pound, Ezra. New selected poems and translations. Ed. and ann. With an afterword by Richard Sieburth ; with essays by T.S. Eliot and John Berryman. (New York, N.Y. : New Directions Publ. Corp., 2010). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay. London : E. Mathews, 1915. |
Publication / Pou17 |
Secondary Literature (81)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1917 |
Eliot, T.S. Ezra Pound : his metric and poetry. (New York, N.Y. : Knopf, 1917). http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7275/pg7275.html. |
Publication / Pou95 |
|
| 2 | 1950 |
Porteus, Hugh Gordon. Ezra Pound and his Chinese character : a radical examination. (1950). In : An examination of Ezra Pound : a collection of essays. Ed. by Peter Russell. (Norfolk, Conn. : New directions, 1950). http://www.pdfs.name/gardan. |
Publication / Pou82 | |
| 3 | 1951 | Kenner, Hugh. The poetry of Ezra Pound. (London : Faber and Faber, 1951). | Publication / Pou94 | |
| 4 | 1955 | Palandri, Angela C.Y. Ezra Pound and China. (Ann Arbor : University Microfilms, 1955). Diss. Univ. of Washington, 1955. | Publication / Pou26 | |
| 5 | 1957 |
Fang, Achilles. Fenollosa and Pound. In : Harvard journal of Asiatic studies ; vol. 20, no 1-2 (1957). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2718526.pdf. |
Publication / Pou29 | |
| 6 | 1958 | Kennedy, George A. Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese character. In : Yale literary magazine ; vol. 126, no 5 (1958). | Publication / Pou62 |
|
| 7 | 1963 | Dembo, L.S. The Confucian odes of Ezra Pound : a critical appraisal. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 1963). (Perspectives in criticism ; 12). [Shi jing]. | Publication / Pou14 | |
| 8 | 1964 | Davie, Donald. Ezra Pound : Poet as sculptor. (New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 1964). | Publication / Davie1 | |
| 9 | 1965 |
Wang, John C. Ezra Pound as a translator of classical Chinese poetry. In : The Sewanee review ; vol. 73, no 3 (1965). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27541320.pdf?acceptTC=true. |
Publication / Pou86 |
|
| 10 | 1966 | Lee, Pen-ti ; Murray, Donald. The quality of 'Cathay' : Ezra Pound's early translations of Chinese poems. In : Literature East & West ; vol. 10 (1966). | Publication / Pou38 |
|
| 11 | 1967 | Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University, 1967). Diss. Princeton Univ., 1967. = (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1969). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. | Publication / Yip20 |
|
| 12 | 1967 | Stock, Noel. Reading the Cantos : a study of meaning in Ezra Pound. (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). | Publication / Pou68 |
|
| 13 | 1969 | Graham, D.B. From Chinese to English : Ezra Pound's "Separation on the river Kiang'. In : Literature East & West ; vol. 13, nos 1-2 (1969). | Publication / Pou42 |
|
| 14 | 1970 | Miyake, Akiko. Between Confucius and Eleusis : Ezra Pound's assimilation of Chinese culture in writing the Cantos I-LXXI. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1981). Diss. Duke University, 1970. | Publication / Pou100 | |
| 15 | 1971 | Fukuda, Rikutaro. Ezra Pound and the Orient : some Oriental figures behind E. Pound. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 2, no 2 (1971). | Publication / Pou41 |
|
| 16 | 1971 | Kenner, Hugh. The Pound era. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971). | Publication / Pou66 | |
| 17 | 1972 | Wand, David Happell Hsin-fu [Wang, David Rafael]. Cathay revisited : the Chinese tradition in the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder. (Los Angeles, Calif. : University of Southern California, 1972). Diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1972. | Publication / Pou97 | |
| 18 | 1973 |
Tatlow, Antony. Stalking the dragon : Pound, Waley, and Brecht. In : Comparative literature ; 25 (1973). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1770068.pdf. |
Publication / Pou87 | |
| 19 | 1974 | Eoyang, Eugene. The Confucian odes : Ezra Pound's translations of the 'Shih ching'. In : Paideuma ; vol. 3, no 1-3 (1974). [Shi jing]. | Publication / Pou31 | |
| 20 | 1974 |
Palandri, Angela. Homage to a Confucian poet. In : Paideuma ; vol. 3, no 3 (1974). [Ezra Pound]. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/5760/Homage_to_confucian_ poet.pdf?sequence=1. |
Publication / Pou34 | |
| 21 | 1974 | Mancuso, Girolamo. Pound e la Cina. (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1974). (Materiali ; 39). | Publication / Pou44 |
|
| 22 | 1974 |
Palandri, Angela Jung. The "Seven lakes canto" revisited. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/5770/Seven_lakes_canto _revisited.pdf?sequence=1. |
Publication / Pou55 |
|
| 23 | 1974 | Mancuso, Girolamo. Pound e la Cina. (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1974). (Materiali ; 39). | Publication / Pou57 | |
| 24 | 1975 | Tay, William. Between Kung and Eleusis : Li chi, The Eleusinian rites, Erigena and Ezra Pound. In : Paideuma ; vol. 4, no 3 (1975). | Publication / Pou23 |
|
| 25 | 1975 | Tay, William. Cheng ming : the new Paideuma of Ezra Pound. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 6, no 1 (1975). | Publication / Pou35 |
|
| 26 | 1977 | Tay, William Shu-sam. The sun on the silk : Ezra Pound and Confucianism. (San Diego, Calif. : University of California, 1977). Diss. Univ. of California, 1977. | Publication / Pou84 | |
| 27 | 1979 |
Comprehensive study guide to seven poems by Ezra Pound. = Pangde de shi. Ann. And ed. by the Literary Study Guides Association, Taipei ; Tan Deyi, Li Dasan [John J. Deeney] zhu bian ; Teng Yilu et al. bian ji. (Taibei : Xue sheng ying wen za zhi she, 1979). 龐德的詩 |
Publication / Pou4 | |
| 28 | 1979 | Tay, William. History as poetry : the Chinese past in Ezra Pound's 'Rock-drill cantos'. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 10, no 1 (1979). | Publication / Pou36 | |
| 29 | 1979 | Kwan-Terry, John. Ezra Pound and the invention of China. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 10, nos 1-2 (1979). | Publication / Pou43 |
|
| 30 | 1979 | Chung, Ling. Ezra Pound's interpretation of 'cheng ming' and his literary theories. In : International Comparative Association. Congress, 7th, Montreal, 1973. = Actes du VIIe congress de l’Association international de literature comparée. (Stuttgart : Kunst und Wissen, E. bieb er, 1979). | Publication / Pou58 |
|
| 31 | 1980 | Bacigalupo, Massimo. The forméd trace : the later poetry of Ezra Pound. (New York, N.Y. : Columbia University Press, 1980). | Publication / Pou73 | |
| 32 | 1983-1984 | Walther, Y.T. Juxtaposition and its limitations : an explanation of obscurity in Ezra Pound's poetry. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 14, no 1-4 (1983-1984). | Publication / Pou37 |
|
| 33 | 1983 | Driscoll, John. The China cantos of Ezra Pound. (Stockholm : Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983). (Acta universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia anglistica Upsaliensia ; 46). Diss. Uppsala University, 1983. | Publication / Pou59 | |
| 34 | 1983 | Nolde, John J. Blossoms from the East : the China cantos of Ezra Pound. (Orono, Maine : The National Poetry Foundation, The University of Maine, 1983). (Ezra Pound scholarship series). | Publication / Pou77 | |
| 35 | 1985 | Bush, Ronald. Pound and Li Po. In : Ezra Pound among the poets. Ed. by George Bornstein. (Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1985). | Publication / Pou76 |
|
| 36 | 1985 | Chang, Yao-hsin. Chinese influence in Emerson, Thoreau, and Pound. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1984). | Publication / Pou103 | |
| 37 | 1987 | Wilson, James Alan. Ritual and reception : Ezra Pound's translation of troubadour and Chinese lyrics. Diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley 1987. MS. | Publication / Pou45 |
|
| 38 | 1987 | Wilson, James Alan. Ritual and reception : Ezra Pound's translation of troubadour and Chinese lyrics. (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California, 1987). Diss. Univ. of Calif., 1987. | Publication / Pou53 | |
| 39 | 1988-1989 | Eoyang, Eugene. Waley or Pound ? : the dynamics of genre in translation. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 19, nos 1-4 (1988-1989). | Publication / Pou40 | |
| 40 | 1988 | Chang, Yao-hsin. Pound's Cantos and Confucianism. In : Ezra Pound : the legacy of Kulchur. Ed. by Marcel Smith and William A. Ulmer. (Tuscaloosa, Ala. : University of Alabama Press, 1988). | Publication / Pou75 |
|
| 41 | 1990 |
Qian, Zhaoming. Translation or invention : three Cathay poems reconsidered. In : ScholarWorks@Uno / University of New Orleans (1990). http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=engl_facpubs. |
Publication / Pou54 | |
| 42 | 1992 |
[Lander, Jeannette]. Pangde. J. Lande zhu ; Pan Bingxin yi. (Beijing : Zhongguo she hui ke xue chu ban she, 1992). (Waiguo zhu ming si xiang jia yi cong). Übersetzung von Lander, Jeannette. Ezra Pound. (Berlin : Colloquium Verlag, 1968). 庞德 |
Publication / Pou6 | |
| 43 | 1993 |
Qian, Zhaoming. Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei : toward the 'ideogrammic method' of The cantos. In : ScholarWorks@UNO / University of New Orleans (1993). [Enthält] : A typescript of Pound's drafts for six poems of Wang Wei in Fenollosa Notebook 15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/441687.pdf?acceptTC=true. |
Publication / Pou48 | |
| 44 | 1993 |
Cai, Zong-qi. Poundian and Chinese aesthetics of dynamic force : a re-discovery of Fenollosa and Pound's theory of the Chinese written character. In : Comparative literature studies ; vol. 30, no 2 (1993). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40246878.pdf?acceptTC=true. |
Publication / Pou90 | |
| 45 | 1993 | Huang, Guiyou. Cross currents : American literature and Chinese modernism, Chinese culture and American modernism. Dissertation Texas A & M University, 1993. – Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1993. [Betr. Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell]. | Publication / WhiW43 | |
| 46 | 1994 | Eoyang, Eugene Chen. The many 'worlds' in world literature : Pound and Waley as translators of Chinese. In : Reading world literature : theory, history, practice. Ed. and with an introd. by Sarah Lawall. (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1994). | Publication / Pou74 | |
| 47 | 1995 | Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and modernism : the legacy of China in Pound and Williams. (Durham and London : Duke University Press, 1995). | Publication / Pou52 | |
| 48 | 1996 | Kern, Robert. Orientalism, modernism, and the American poem. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996). (Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 97). [Enthält] : Modernizing orientalism / orientalizing modernism : Ezra Pound, Chinese translation, and English-as-Chinese. | Publication / Pou64 | |
| 49 | 1997 | Cheadle, Mary Paterson. Ezra Pound's Confucian translations. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 1997). | Publication / Pou50 | |
| 50 | 1998 |
Fang, Grace. Mirrors in the mind : 'Chinoiserie' in Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry. In : Norwich papers ; vol. 6, Dec. (1998). http://www.uea.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.33260!np_vol_6_article_6_by_grace_fang.pdf. |
Publication / Pou81 |
|
| 51 | 1999 | Hayot, Eric. Chinese dreams : Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : The University of Michigan Press, 2004). Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1999. | Publication / HayE1 | |
| 52 | 1999 | Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the appropriation of Chinese poetry : Cathay, trnslation, and imagism. (New York, N.Y. : Garland, 1999). (Comparative literature and cultural studies ; vol. 6. Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 2042). | Publication / Pou70 | |
| 53 | 1999 |
Hayot, Eric. Critical dreams : Orientalism, modernism, and the meaning of Pound's China. In : Twentieth-century literature ; vol. 45, no 4 (1999). http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/441950.pdf?acceptTC=true. |
Publication / Pou89 |
|
| 54 | 2000 | Ieong Sao Leng, Sylvia. The sources of Ezra Pound's "Cathay" : Fenollosa's notebooks and the original Chinese texts. In : Comparative literature : East & West ; vol. 2 (2000). | Publication / Pou104 | |
| 55 | 2001 |
[Ackroyd, Peter]. Aizhela Pangde. Bide Aikeluode zhu ; Xie Yaoling yi. Taibei : Mao tou ying chu ban she, 2001). (Zuo jia yu zuo pin xi lie ; 14). Übersetzung von Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound and his world. (New York, N.Y. : Scribner, 1980). 艾哲拉龐德 |
Publication / Pou3 | |
| 56 | 2001 |
Jiang, Hongxin. Ying shi xin fang xiang : Pangde Ailüete shi xue li lun yu wen hua pi ping yan jiu. = New directions of English poetry : research on the poetic theories & cultural criticism of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. (Changsha : Hunan jiao yu chu ban she, 2001). 英诗新方向 : 庞德艾略特诗学理论与文化批评硏究 |
Publication / Pou5 | |
| 57 | 2001 | Gao, Qingxuan. The difficulty in translating Chinese poetry as exemplified by Ezra Pound. In : Comparative literature : East & West ; vol. 3 (2001). | Publication / Pou99 |
|
| 58 | 2002 |
Chinese poetry : Prof. Mori's lectures, recast by Pound from Fenollosa's notes. Transcribed and annotated by Zhaoming Qian. In : ScholarWorks@UNO / University of New Orleans (2002). [Mori Kainan]. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=engl_facpubs. |
Publication / Pou47 |
|
| 59 | 2002 | Cai, Zong-qi. Configurations of comparative poetics : three perspectives on Western and Chinese literary criticism. (Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, 2002). | Publication / Pou69 | |
| 60 | 2003 |
Suo, Jinmei. Pangde 'Shi zhang' zhong de ru xue = Confucianism in Pound's cantos. (Tianjin : Nankai da xue chu ban she, 2003). (Nankai ren wu ku). Diss. 龐德詩章中的儒學 |
Publication / Pou7 | |
| 61 | 2003 | Ezra Pound & China. Ed. by Zhaoming Qian. (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2003). | Publication / Pou32 | |
| 62 | 2003 | Kraushaar, Frank. Ezra Pound als 'Erfinder der chinesischen Dichtung für unsere Zeit'. In : Crossings and passages in genre and culture. Hg. von Christian Szyska und Friederike Pannewick. (Wiesbaden : Reichert, 2003). | Publication / Pou88 |
|
| 63 | 2003 |
Qian, Zhaoming. The modernist response to Chinese art : Pound, Moore, Stevens. (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2003). http://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Modernist_Response_to_Chinese_ Art.html?id=S0AHhe2a0NoC&redir_esc=y. |
Publication / SteW10 | |
| 64 | 2005 |
[Wilson, Peter]. Pangde dao du. (Beijing : Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2005). (Yingguo wen xue ming jia dao du cong shu). Übersetzung von Wilson, Peter. A preface to Ezra Pound. (London : Longman, 1996). 庞德导读 |
Publication / Pou9 | |
| 65 | 2005 |
Zhu, Chungeng. Ezra Pound's Confucianism. In : Philosoh and literature ; vol. 29, no 1 (2005). http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/philosophy_and_literature /v029/29.1zhu.pdf. |
Publication / Pou51 |
|
| 66 | 2006 |
Tao, Naikan. Pangde Yu Zhongguo wen hua = Pound and Chinese culture. (Beijing : Shou du shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2006). (Zhong xue xi jian cong shu). 庞德与中国文化 |
Publication / Pou8 | |
| 67 | 2006 |
Wu, Qiyao. Pangde yu Zhongguo wen hua : jian lun Waiguo wen xue zai Zhongguo = Ezra Pound and the Chinese culture. (Shanghai : Shanghai wai yu jiao yu chu ban she, 2006). 庞德与中国文化 : 兼论外国文学在中国文化现代化中的作用 |
Publication / Pou10 | |
| 68 | 2006 |
Zhu, Zhaowei. Gou jian yu fan si : Pangde fan yi li lun yan jiu. (Shanghai : Yi wen chu ban she, 2006). (Yi xue xin lun cong shu). [Abhandlung über Ezra Pound]. 构建与反思 : 庞德翻译理论研究 |
Publication / Pou12 | |
| 69 | 2006 |
Qian, Zhaoming. Ezra Pound and his first Chinese contact for and against Confucianism. In : ScholarWork@UNO / University of New Orleans (2006). http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=engl_facpubs. |
Publication / Pou49 | |
| 70 | 2007 | Macdonald, Sean. Montage as Chinese : modernism, the avant-garde, and the strange appropriation of China. In : Modern Chinese literature and culture ; vol. 19, no 2 (2007). [Enthält : Ezra Pound]. | Publication / Pou46 |
|
| 71 | 2007 |
Choi, Hongsun. A strata of 'Cathay' : Ezra Pound and the translation of Chinese poetry. In : Journal of English and American studies ; vol. 6 (2007). http://jeas.co.kr/sub/cnt.asp?num=55&volnum=6. |
Publication / Pou80 |
|
| 72 | 2008 |
Yip, Wai-lim. Pangde yu Xiao Xiang ba jing. (Taibei : Guo li Taiwan da xue chu ban zhong xin, 2008). (Xue shu cong shu). [Pound and the eight views of Xiao Xiang]. 龐德與瀟湘八景 |
Publication / Pou11 | |
| 73 | 2008 |
Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound's Chinese friends : stories in letters. Ed. and ann. by Zhaoming Qian. (Oxford : University Press, 2008). [Enthält] : Briefwechsel mit Song Faxiang (1914), Zeng Baosan, Yang Fengqi (1939-1942), Veronica Hulan Sun, Fang Achilles (1950-1958), Angela Jung Palandri (1952), Zhang Junmai (1953-1957), Zhao Ziqiang (1954-1958), Wang Shenfu (1955-1958), Fang Baoxian (1957-1959). Appendix : Ezra Pound's typescript for "Preliminary survey" (1951). http://cs5937.userapi.com/u11728334/docs/901475cb4b3c/Zhaoming_Qian_Ezra_Pounds_Chinese_Friends _Sto.pdf. |
Publication / Pou16 | |
| 74 | 2008 | Li, Qingjun. Ezra Pound's poetic mirror and the 'China cantos' : the healing of the West. In : Southeast review of Asian studies ; vol. 30 (2008). | Publication / Pou83 |
|
| 75 | 2009 | Liu, Haoming. 'Pharmaka' and 'volgar' eloquio' : speech and ideogrammic writing in Ezra Pound's Canto XCVIII. In : Asia major; 3rd ser. ; vol. 22, pt. 2 (2009). | Publication / Pou39 |
|
| 76 | 2009 | Qian, Zhaoming. Against anti-Confucianism : Ezra Pound's encounter/collision with a Chinese modernist. In : Orient and Orientalisms in US-American poetry and poetics. Sabine Sielke, Christian Kloeckner (eds.). (New York, N.Y. : P. Lang, 2009). (Transcription ; vol. 4). | Publication / Pou63 | |
| 77 | 2009 |
Williams, R. John. Modernist scandals : Ezra Pound’s translations of 'the' Chinese poem. In : Orient and Orientalisms in US-American poetry and poetics. Sabine Sielke, Christian Kloeckner (eds.). (New York, N.Y. : P. Lang, 2009). (Transcription ; vol. 4). http://english.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Williams%20Pound%20Essay.pdf. |
Publication / Pou79 |
|
| 78 | 2010 | Ricci, Roslyn Joy. Romancing the Chinese characters in classical Chinese poetry : Ezra Pound's productive error from misinterpretation and its effect on his translation and poetry. (Saarbrücken : VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010). | Publication / Pou22 | |
| 79 | 2010 | Ning, Xin. Picking the blossoms of the apricot : Ezra Pound's ideogramic thinking and his vision of Confucius. In : East Asian Confucianisms : interactions and innovations : proceedings of the Conference of May 1-2, 2009. (New Brunswick, N.J. : Confucius Institute at Rutgers University, 2010). | Publication / Pou65 |
|
| 80 | 2010 |
Morrison, Madison. More Asian importations in Yeats, Eliot and Pound. http://www.madisonmorrison.com/books/particular-and-universal /more-asian-importations-in-yeats-eliot-and-pound.html. |
Web / Yea6 | |
| 81 | 2012 |
Öztürk, A. Serdar. The influence of the Chinese ideogram on Ezra Pound's Cathay. In : Journal of transciplinary studies ; vol. 5, no 1 (2012). http://www.ius.edu.ba:8080/iusjournals/index.php?journal=epiphany &page=article&op=view&path[]=62&path[]=54. |
Publication / Pou85 |
|