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Fenollosa, Ernest

(Salem, Mass. 1853-1908 London) : Orientalist, Pädagoge, Dichter, Dozent für Wirtschaftspolitik und Philosophie Universität Tokyo ; Leiter der Tokyo Fine Arts Academy und des Imperial Museum ; Kurator für ostasiatische Kunst Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Name Alternative(s)

Fenollosa, Ernest F.
Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco

Subjects

Index of Names : Occident / Sinology and Asian Studies : United States of America

Chronology Entries (17)

# Year Text Linked Data
1 1874 Ernest Fenollosa graduiert in Philosophy and Sociology am Harvard College.
2 1875 Ernest Fenollosa studiert am Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
3 1879-1886 Ernest Fenollosa reist auf Einladung von Edward S. Morse nach Japan. Er unterrichtet politische Wirtschaft und Philosophie an der Imperial University Tokyo.
He studied Chinese poetry under Mori Kainan with Ariga Nagao as his interpreter.
4 1888-1889 Ernest Fenollosa ist Mitbegründer der Tokyo School of Fine Arts und des Tokyo Imperial Museum und wird Direktor des Museums.
5 1890-1896 Ernest Fenollosa ist Kurator des Japanese Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
6 1896 Ernest Fenollosa nimmt Literaturstunden bei Hirai Kinza über Li Bo and Wang Wei.
  • Document: Kenner, Hugh. The Pound era. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971). S. 198. (Pou66, Publication)
7 1897-1899 Ernest Fenollosa ist Professor of English Literature an der Tokyo Higher Normal School.
8 1899-1901 Ernest Fenollosa schreibt zusammen mit Mori Kainan chinesische klassische Gedichte. Nagao Ariga ist Übersetzer.
  • Document: Kenner, Hugh. The Pound era. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971). S. 198. (Pou66, Publication)
9 1901 Ernest Fenollosa kehrt nach Amerika zurück, schreibt und gibt Vorträge über Asien.
10 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.
  • Document: 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). (Pou104, Publication)
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
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.
  • Document: 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. (Pou15, Publication)
  • Document: Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University, 1967). Diss. Princeton Univ., 1967. = (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1969). [Enthält] : Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (Yip20, Publication)
  • Person: Li, Bo
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
12 1915.2 Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (2)
Sekundärliteratur
1915
Arthur Clutton-Brock : "We do not know from the title of this little book whether Mr Pound has translated these poems direct from the Chinese or has only used other translations. But for those who, like ourselves, know no Chinese, it does not matter much. The result, however produced, is well worth having, and it seems to us very Chinese. There is a strong superstition among us that a translation should always seem quite English. But when it is made from a literature very alien in method and thought, it is not a translation at all if it seems quite English. Besides, a literal translation from something strange and good may surprise our language into new beauties. If we invite a foreigner of genius among us, we don't want to make him behave just like ourselves ; we shall enjoy him best and learn most from him if he remains himself. So we think Mr Pound has chosen the right method in these translations, and we do not mind that they often are 'not English'. The words are English and give us the sense ; and after all it is the business of a writer to mould language to new purposes, not to say something new just as his forefathers said something old. So it is the business of the reader not to be angry or surprised at a strange use of language, if it is a use proper to the sense. Mr. Pound has kept to the reality of the original because he keeps his language simple and sharp and precise. We hope he will give us some more versions of Chinese poetry."

1916
Arthur Clutton-Brock : "… His verse is not ordinary speech, but he aims in it at the illusion of ordinary speech ; and, thought this illusion gives an air of liveliness to the poems, it seems to us to be bought at too high a price. Certainly the original poems as well as the translations show that he has talent – one can read them all with some interest – but why should he use it to express so much indifference and impatience ? Why should he so constantly be ironical about nothing in particular ? He seems to have private jokes of his own which he does not succeed in making public. He seems to be always reacting against something ; and the very form of his verse is a reaction against exhausted forms. But nothing can be made of mere reaction or a habit of irony. The world may not be serious, but the universe is. One suspects a hidden timidity in this air of indifference, as if Mr Pound feared above all things to give himself away. A poet must be ready to give himself away ; he must forget even the ironies of his most intimate friends when he writes, no less than tha possible misunderstandings of fools…"

1918
Arthur Waley read a paper on 'The poet Li Bo, A.D. 701-762, before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London, in which he gives his translation of Pomes no 3, 4, 8, and 14 of Cathay. "But I venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give either the first or second place to Li Bo".

1938
Achilles Fang : Es wimmelt von orthographischen Fehlern, falschen Ämterbezeichnungen, verstellten Zeilen oder fehlenden Strophen. Öfter wird kein Dichter genannt oder ein falscher angegeben, noch dazu stets in japanischer Transkription.

1951
Hugh Kenner : "Cathay is notable, considered as an English product rather than Chinese product." These poems serve "to extend, inform, and articulate the preoccupations of the present by bringing the past abreast of it".

1965
A.C. Graham : "The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pounds Cathay".

1970
Akiko Miyake : The vividness and freshness of Cathay as poetry depends more than anything else on Pound's effort to create his own Imagist poetry out of the unfamiliar materials. Fenollosa was a man with strong opinions on everything, and his individuality is shown in the notebooks. Even with his very limited knowledge of Chinese, he tried to reach the depth of the meaning by learning each word, each allusion. He aimed at more than scholarly accuracy, and Pound responded to such depth. He must have been fascinated by the task of groping for poetry underneath the unfamiliar surface. The greatest reward Pound got through writing Cathay comes probably from the fact that he could invent his own poetry even out of so remote a country as China, and of poetry in so ancient a period, for after writing Cathay, China became one of his indispensable themes. In writing Cathay, Pound by no means exhausted the rich resources of Fenollosa's essay. He did not even try the possibility of intellectual search with images in this little book.

1976
Monika Motsch : Im Gegensatz zu Chinese written character as a medium for poetry von Ernest Fenollosa [ID D22141], wird Cathay nicht angegriffen und abgelehnt, sondern anerkannt ; wenn nicht als wortgetreue Übersetzung, so doch als selbständige Dichtung. Die Anerkennung ist erstaunlich, da Pound in der Zeit, als er Cathay schrieb, kein einziges Wort Chinesisch konnte und auf Fenollosa's Notizen zurückgreifen musste, die fehlerhaft waren oder Lücken aufwiesen. Auch wenn Pounds Übersetzung voller Fehler ist, so hat er doch grundlegende Züge der chinesischen Sprache und Lyrik erfasst und im Englischen wiedergegeben : ihre syntaktische Einfachheit, die kommentarlos aufeinanderfolgenden, dynamischen Bilder, eindringliche Naturbeschreibungen und die emotionelle Verhaltenheit. Fenollosa hat Pounds Gesichtskreis ungeheuer erweitert. Er weckte sein Interesse an der Übersetzung alter Literaturen und regte ihn an zur Beschäftigung mit der chinesischen Lyrik und mit Konfuzius.
The River Merchant's Wife : Das Gedicht ist eine ziemlich genaue Übersetzung des chinesischen Originals. Pound hat nur einige Namen ausgelassen, die Europäer nur mit Hilfe eines längeren Kommentars verständlich wären. Der Stil kennt, wie die chinesische Sprache, kaum grammatische Über- oder Unt4erordnung, und logisch ordnende Partikel fehlen fast vollständig.
Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin : Das Gedicht setzt ein mit einfachen, klaren Hauptsätzen, die je eine Zeile einnehmen und dem Rhythmus eine getragene Ruhe verleihen. Die Verben sind teilweise weggelassen und der Rhythmus wird zunehmend dynamischer.
Leave-Taking Near Shoku : Dass es sich um ein Abschiedsgedicht handelt, geht nur aus dem Titel hervor. Die Trauer bleibt unausgesprochen. In drei kurz skizzierten, gegensätzlichen Naturbildern wird die Unsicherheit der Trennung um so deutlicher.
To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud" : Die dritte Strophe ist bei Pound völlig anders als im Original und seine Version ist eher ein selbständiges Gedicht als eine Übersetzung.

1967
Yip Wai-lim : Cathay consists of only nineteen poems. Many people have translated at least five times as many from the Chinese ; but none among these has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry and in the history of modern English poetry. Considered as translation, Cathay ought to be viewed as a kind of re-creation. The poems are bound to differ from the originals in the sense that certain literal details are either eliminated or violated ; local tase is modified or even altered to suit the English audience and certain allusions are suppressed in order to relieve the readers from the burden of footnotes.
The criticism of Cathay fall into two obvious patterns : defense and condemnation. Most of Pound's defenders could not discuss the way in which some of the poems are said to be close to the original in the 'sequence of images', 'rhythm', 'effects', and 'tone'. Those who condemn Pound tend to concentrate on the scar and overlook everything els. To understand Pound is to widen the possibility of communication, and a clear measurement of Pound' achievement :
1. To look at the problems of translation from Chinese into English, and in particular, to discuss the difficulty of approximating in English the peculiar mode of representation constituted by Chinese syntax.
2. To look into Pound's mind as a poet, to know the obsessive concepts and techniques he cherished at the time he translated these Chinese poems and to see haw these conditioned his translation.
3. Since Fenollosa annotated these poems under Japanese instructors ('Rihaku', for instance, is the Japanese name for Li Bo), it is necessary for us to examine the triple relation, from the original Chinese to Fenollosa's notes and to the end products, in order to find out how the intermediary has obstructed Pound and how his creative spirit sometimes breaks through the crippled text to resurrect what was in the original.
4. No translator can claim to have actually translated the poetry. This is also true of Pound. How close, then, are the 'equivalents' he gets out of the Fenollosa notes to the original, the 'cuts and turns' of the Chinese poems ? In other words, we need to compare carefully the original and the derivative 'form of consciousness' to see what has actually happened in between.
In his dealing with Cathay Pound is able to get into the central consciousness of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance. Pound has indeed made many philological mistakes as a consequence of his ignorance of Chinese. But it is important to remind readers that not all of them are due to ignorance ; many are done deliberately to heighten artistic intensity, and some, for a less defensible reason, are conditioned by his own obsessions as a practicing poet.
The first poem Song of the bowmen of Shu is a reworking from Ariga Nagao's English version. It has followed the curves of the original's internal thought-form and the undercurrent of sadness. Pound has to admit that he has changed partially the character of the semi-monologue he has all the way dominated.

1967
D.B. Graham : While some of the Cathay poems have drawn wide praise and much analytical attention, Separation on the river Kiang has been faulted for its errors or else ignored. The criticism of this poem raises certain important questions about the critical perspective of the early Chinese translations. The usual charges against Cathay, and Separation on the river Kiang in particular, have to do with Pound's 'failure' to render literally the Chinese of Li Bo. They are chastising Pound for mistranslating and praising him for not translating. In Cathay Pound was not concerned with the quality of verse that he described as 'melopoeia', the 'musical property' of poetry. The 'melopoeia' Separation is achieved through several techniques. The first is the duplication of the monosyllabic pattern that constitutes the basic rhythmic unit of Chinese poetry. Metrically, the monosyllabic base helps Pound achieve a central aim, the breaking up of the dominant measure of English verse, the iambic. In addition to the 'melopoeia' of the monosyllabic structure of the poem, some 'melopoetic' effects are also accomplished by syntactical reduction. Of the prime characteristics of Chinese verse, none is more apparent or important than conciseness, terseness, economy. The key to Pound's succinctness lies in the syntactical order of subject / verb / complement, a formula that Fenollosa saw as central to Chinese verse. The ideogram attracted Fenollosa and Pound precisely because they viewed it as a direct expression of action. The music of Pound's poem is not confined to imitating the 'melopoetic' qualities of Chinese verse. Pound combines specifically Chinese traditions and English techniques to produce something both ancient and new. Like Fenollosa before him, Pound was attracted to the Chinese ideogram as a natural medium for poetry. Both saw the ideogram as bearing a direct, inherent relationship with the thing it names. Linguistically wrong, Pound and Fenollosa were pragmatically astute, for Chinese verse did depend heavily on concrete images, a reliance that made it a perfect medium of imitation for the imagists.

1971
Hugh Kenner : The 14 poems in the original Cathay were selected from some 150 in the notebooks, were the first 'vers-libre' translations not derived from other translations but from detailed notes on the Chinese texts. the Cathay poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry. Perfectly vital after 50 years, they are among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I.

1978
Antony Tatlow : In making his Cathay translations Pound had employed a method which took as its starting point the Chinese line and phrase. In those poems which stress the context of speech, the Chinese line of often broken up to meet the requirements of his own rhythmus. The form of speech is often stylized but the element of gesture is fundamental and is inseparable from Pound's sense of the present relevance of the poem.

1979
John Kwan-Terry : Pound's contemporaries spoke of the Cathay poems as adding 'a new breath' to the literary atmosphere and as 'like a door in a wall, opening upon a landscape made real by the intensity of human emotions'. I believe that the poems, besides being a stage in the technical development of Pound's poetry, also constitute an important chapter in the development of Pound's poetic sensibility. From the beginning, Pound's poetry sought to relate two seemingly disparate worlds – one, a world of irritating contemporary realities confronted by a vibrant vitality anxious to do battle ; the other, a world of aesthetic and mystic visions that seemed to transcend time and its wars altogether.
In the raw material provided by Fenollosa, Pound saw the possibility, or the possibility presented itself for him, to create or recreate a poetry that can integrate the high and the low, the ordinary and the transcendent.
Like the early poems, the Cathay poems are infused with a sense of loss, of desolation and loneliness, but on a wider scale. Reading these poems, one has the impression of vast distances and the partings and exiles that distances entail ; an empire so huge that its defenders and functionaries cannot know its purposes, and perhaps these purposes are absurd anyway ; distances also in time and history, so great that human glory cannot hope to outlast them. The social scope covered is equally impressive : war and peace, the high-born and the low-born, the intellectual and the domestic, the soldier and the poet, wife, husband, lover, friend. What sets these poems apart, is an achieved sense of harmony, of unity sought and found – the unity that integrates the contemporary reality with the self, the quotidian with the eternal moment. A quality of Chinese poetry that appeals to Pound strongly is the absence of 'moralizing', 'comment', and 'abstraction'. Cathay poems involve the subjective, but they do not convey the sense of being 'abandoned' which seems to be the prevailing ethos in modern literature and is so strong an element in Pound's poetry. There is less sense of the 'anguish' of being without God. There is resignation, but not despair.
The poetry conveys a sense of gratitude, a creative delight in experience, in the small moments of life. One of the greatest values in Cathay is that it can express the human need for relationship, and the ways in which the sense of identity is bound up with love.
For Pound, Fenollosa's theory seemed to come as a powerful criticism of the principles of Imagism. The implications in Fenollosa's essay, as Pound saw them, were that Imagism took too static a view of what poetry could perform. It conceived of the world as so many inert 'things', to be brought into juxtaposition, whereas the world is made up of 'energies', and a poems should be a sort of vortex, concentrating these energies. The Cathay poems mark a unique stage in Pound's career, a stage in which Pound's sensibility, interacting with the Chinese tradition, discovered a creative theme, a sense of the integrated man.

1985
Ronald Bush : Pound, maintaining the beautiful indirection of the poem The river-merchant's wife, transformed its subject. The implied emotional drama of the poem is one of love maturing before our eyes. The wife remembers herself as a little girl, recalls a time when she entered into an arranged marriage without much feeling, and then, spurred by the pain her husband's departure has provoked, slowly realizes how much she cares for him. At the end of the poem she dreams of his returning and achieves a poignant reunion by traveling a considerable distance in her imagination to meet him halfway. In Pound's hands, this poem becomes a dark reflection of its Chinese self and a recognizable cousin to the poems of blocked expression in the suite around it. In Pound's poem, to affirm her love for her husband, the wife must overcome not only the miles between them but also her own fugitive feelings of betrayal.
Comparing the Exile's letter to the notes on which it is based, Pound exaggerated Li Po's nostalgia for a past when poets were joined in true fellowship. Something extraordinary is created in his poem, not by a single friendship but by a poetic community that disdains gold and has forgotten kings and princes. It is this unique fellowship that allows the poets for once to speak out their 'hearts and minds without regret'.

1990
Qian Zhaoming : Cathay is a beautiful translation of classical Chinese poetry. It is considered as such because it has translated the charm and simplicity of the classical Chinese poems. To this one may add that it takes a great poet plus a great critic to translate great poetry. Though Pound is handicapped by his own ignorance of the Chinese language and Fenollosa's numerous misrepresentations, with his poetic sensibility and critical experience he is able to penetrate the shell and catch the quintessence. It is true that there are many deviations in his translation. But compared with what he has preserved, the presentation, the mood, and the whole image, his flaws are negligible and his triumph is great. It is through Pound that the English readers first get the original of such great Chinese poets as Li Bo. But Pound himself has also benefited from translating Chinese classical poetry. He is exposed to new sensibilities and new techniques, which in turn exert an important impact on him in his literary career, and through him also exert an important impact on modern English poetry.

1996
Robert Kern : Cathay is very much a production of creative reading, where 'creative' means not only inventive or fictionalizing but insightful and penetrating, both psychologically and philologically. Pound is nonetheless able to recover the movement of consciousness in his texts, even to the point of occasionally capturing elusive realities of voice and tone, an achievement which virtually demands that he go beyond strict dictionary meanings. Therefore, if he is also guilty of errors because of his ignorance of Chinese, or because he is misled by the uncertainties of Fenollosa's notes, sometimes his inaccuracies are conscious and deliberate, committed for the sake of greater artistic intensity and even on behalf of 'his own obsessions as a practicing poet'. The poems in Cathay are not only sometimes acutely 'accurate', despite their deviations from dictionary sense, but are continuous, thematically and in other respects, with the rest of Pound's work. What need to be stressed is the extent to which he as deliberately pursued this continuity, and it is under the category of his 'obsessions as a practicing poet', that Pound's acts of Orientalizing or creative reading should be placed. Cathay appropriates Chinese poetry for purposes other than those of Chinese poetry itself. Pound is using the Chinese texts as a drawing board for the creation of a modernist style or technique, he is also already practicing it, in the sense that modernism in general may be defined as an activity of appropriation, a series of strategies, such as allusion, collage, and what Pound would later call 'the ideogrammic method', for incorporating other texts, other voices, other perspectives within one's own, and for shoring up, the ruins of the modern world, amassing the cultural valuables of the past and increasingly of other, non-Western cultures in order to restore coherence and stability to modern experience, or to create them anew. At the same time, he seems to be moving beyond imagism, and in many of the Cathay poems, which reflect Pound's reading of Fenollosa's essay, we find less of an emphasis on the image as 'itself the speech', less reliance on the technique of superpositioning as a structural resource, and less of an appeal in general to strict imagist orthodoxy as a means of producing the Chinese poem. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader by defamiliarizing his English. This process takes several forms in Cathay, one of the most important of which is both Fenollosan and imagist. Writing for Pound, during this period, is a process of stripping words of their associations in order to arrive at their exact meanings and this process is itself a form of defamiliarization, of discovering and presenting arrangements of language that emphasize their own strangeness with respect to more conventional, or historically and culturally conditioned, modes of expression.

1998
Grace Fang : Pound found Chinese poetry and ideograms to be the perfect means of expression for his creative resources and convictions. His translations provided him with a new opportunity to recreate the source text and to activate dynamic responses in the reader, which reflect a vivid Chinese picture through Western eyes.
Not every character is a picture, and even when most Chinese people use a character originally created as an imitation of the shape of a object, they will not be aware of its etymology. Chinese language derives much of its poetic power from its three-thousand-year development of these phonetic and semantic devices. It also functions as a normal communicative language in which the form of the character does not stand for its original visual form but for the meaning it conveys. There is an arbitrary relationship between sign and meaning, and the character represents not the original natural image but the conventional signification. A Chinese character can stand by itself as 'a word' or can be combined with one or two or three other characters to from 'a word', which would lead the character to lose its own original meaning and to gain a new significance in the combination as a compound word. Therefore, the ideogrammic method either risks over-emphasizing the etymological meaning of the separated part of the character or mistaking the individual signified for the significance of a whole compound word. Fenollosa and Pound show great concern for the language they deal with, but to over-emphazise the philological sense at the expense of other considerations, such as the total textual structure, rhyme, and 'original meaning' refined by the original poet, is dangerous, particularly when the translator has not established his expertise in the source language. Misinterpretations and mistakes are bound to happen.
Pound's Cathay is a poetic performance across three culture, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, English), to be synchronized in his own poetic voice. Although Pound may sometimes have conveyed certain wrong meanings, most of the time he has conveyed the right feeling. Although he does not understand all the words, he has remained as faithful as possible to the original poet's sequence of tone, voice, rhythms and images.

1999
Eric Hayot : The differences between Arthur Waley and Pound notwithstanding, it is vital to notices how far they both are from Herbert A. Giles' attempts to turn the Chinese poem into an English one. Relative to Giles's, Pound's translations allowed the poems to stay strange, English enough to read but Chinese enough to represent their own difference. He was essentially 'rebuking' Giles for not making his translations Chinese enough, for bringing them too far into English. Waley's rebuke of Pound criticizes Pound for doing exactly what Pound didn't like about Giles, namely for making the poems too English, and for not adequately respecting their originals. Pound's translations impress more than Waley's precisely because they have something poetic about them. Pound was, at times, wrong both about the specifics of his language and the general tone of the poem.
Despite the vast differences in their literary reception, it can be helpful to consider differences between Giles, Pound, Waley and Yip matters of degree rather than king. Each translator attempts to bring across more or less of the Chinese difference by putting it in a literary or cultural language more or less comprehensible to English readers, most of whom know little about China. Inevitably, the translation will carry with it aspects of English language and culture not justified by any mood or motive of the original text.

1999
Ming Xie : The connection between Pound's haiku images and his earlier epigrams might be viewed as the logical precedent for what Pound set out to do in Cathay. Pound's apparent ignorance of Chinese and Chinese literary forms has perhaps enabled him to modulate and transpose freely the original Chinese poems in terms adapted to his own generic experiments and expressive consideration. He was perhaps fortunate enough not to be in a position to render literally from the original Chinese ; he evidently derived a stimulus to innovate forms of a more immediate expressiveness from this ostensibly unpromising activity, that of translating from a language not fully understood. The Cathay poems display the importance of a certain kind of provincialism of feeling, feeling deeply rooted in details of the actual circumscribed world of the protagonists. Pound and Thomas Hardy are often concerned with the reality of memory and retrospection, regret and melancholy, time and isolation.
The use of natural imagery in the poems is often of primary importance. There is a natural relation of the natural setting to the speaking and observing persona in the Cathay poems, as well as a sense of distance that separates the observer or speaker from the natural world that he or she observes. But the resulting tension is precisely what is most important in any good poems.
The individual perspective in Cathay is for the most part retrospective and is almost always tinged with an elegiac coloring. This elegiac coloring is not a general, all-pervasive mood or atmosphere enveloping or devouring the individual speakers in the poems. It also often tends to leave the emotional stance of the translating poet in a kind of sympathetic neutrality, not by any implicit collusion expressing his own personal elegiac feeling.
The Cathay poems as a whole do not provide some extraordinary moral perspective in which the reader would be invited to judge morally ; rather, they almost invariably invite the reader to participate and sympathize in an ordinary highly individualized emotional or psychological perspective, except that the exotic and unfamiliar context makes this for the Western reader 'ordinary' only by an act of consciously maintained vicarious projection.
The river-merchant's wife : In Pound's version the emotion of the woman speaker is presented within her confined perspective through particular stages of emotional development and psychological retrospection, out of which emerge different shades of meaning and significance. Pound divides the poem into different stanzas or strophes, in order to delineate more sharply and contrastively the successive stages of retrospection and revelation. In the Chinese poem, due to lack of specified relations of tense or number, the narrative sequence is not explicitly established by syntactical markers.
Pound has largely ignored Fenollosa's theory of the transitive verb. His Cathay displays a surprisingly wide variety of poetic techniques and rhetorical structures neglected in Fenollosa's treatise, especially in the use of paratactic and anaphoric constructions. These devices do not in fact originate with Cathay ; rather they are a continuation of Pound's earlier practices and experiments. But it is nevertheless evident that Pound's extensive use of these structures is based upon his intuitive sense of their importance and significance in the original Chinese poems, as confirmed in large part by Fenollosa's often detailed notes and literal versions.
The language of Cathay was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary ; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian English, as was often Pound's practice. Cathay is an example of a strong tendency in Pound to regard translation as not historical but contemporary or timeless. Pound's versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry, because he has largely stripped away most of the supposed or fictitious qualities that late-Victorian poetic treatment (by James Legge, Herbert Giles) had imposed upon classical Chinese poetry. The success of Cathay is also largely due to Pound's tacit and skillful reliance upon a stylized evocation of China. The use of Chinese landscape seems to provide a powerful confirmation of the kind of 'otherness' which Western readers tacitly identified with an emotional coding linked to understood conventions of feeling in Chinese art and poetry.

2000
Sylvia Ieong Sao Leng : Ezra Pound's Cathay had gone through two rearrangements before it was brought out by Elkin Mathews in April 1915. Originally, the sequence was made up of eleven poems. The Cathay typescript at the Beinecke Library shows that Pound had added four poems to the original eleven when he submitted the sequence to Mathews. In the last minute, pound ‘suppressed the four appended poems and added 'Lament of the frontier guard' and 'South – folk in cold country'. In 1916 when Pound incorporated Cathay into Lustra, he restored the four suppressed poems.

2003
Barry Ahearn : Pound leads his readers to believe that the original Chinese verses are of such high quality that even inexpert translators cannot greatly harm them. In Chinese poetry he cites two poems as examples of how Chinese and Western poetic practices share common ground. In respect of The jewel stairs' grievance he illustrates how the Western reader should approcach the poem : "I have never found any occidental who could 'make much' of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, no merely by 'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poems. You can play Conan Doyle if you like."
Pound first shares the burden with Fenollosa, Mori Kainan and Ariga Nagao (though on closer inspection, he calls their abilities into question and transfer credit to the poems themselves. Second, he contends that the poems have qualities (some of which he specifies and some of which he does not) that make them amenable to translation. There is also a third strategy Pound employs to divert the readers' attention from his role as translator. This third strategy is to include images in the poems that will strike the reader as recognizably Chinese because these images already seem Chinese, thanks to existing Western preconceptions about China. He adopted various strategies to suggest the virtual identity of Chinese poetry and Western literary forms. But he also 'foreignized' the translations to remind his readers that there were unavoidable differences. Pound uses complicated means to make his translations seem authentically 'foreign' – complicated because they depend upon delicate adjustments of diction.
In his attempt to make the language of Cathay on occasionally bizarre form of English, Pound does not limit himself to nouns and verbs. He well knew that some of the most perplexing problems for a novice translator arise from some of the simplest words. The effect of verbal perplexities is to produce a strange impression, the impression that this translation has been produced not by Ezra Pound, but by a native speaker of Chinese whose command of English is less than fluent. Pound inserts a sufficient number of odd expressions in the poems, with the intention of leaving the reader with the impression that even though these English versions may be imperfect, there must lie behind them a superior Chinese original.
Pound's treatment of the poems in the Fenollosa papers adopts a divided stance : the Chinese poems are like Western ones ; the Chinese poems are in many respect alien.

2007
Choi Hongsun : Pound departs from his Anglocentric conversion and takes a centrifugal attitude toward otherness of the other. He attempts to foreground the cultural and linguistic otherness of Chinese poetry and to revive its own poetic qualities in his translated poems. Pound the poet searches for 'dynamic equivalence' in consideration of the receptor language and culture. This target language oriented approach has a centripetal focus on a new poetic English that is filtered through translation. Thus, such otherness is incorporated into the Pound's own creative work. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry maintains the precarious tension between two different translating strategies : formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Cathay demonstrates Pound's attempts to foreground the otherness of the Chinese original to further the potential of English poetry through the appropriation of such otherness. In regards to formal equivalence, Pound the translator pursues a text to be equivalent, rather than equal, to the distinctive aspects of Chinese poetry. He thus foreignizes English in an attempt to reflect the poetic otherness of the original. At the same time, while his translation is oriented toward dynamic equivalence, such otherness is incorporated into his whole poetic arsenal of English, so that Pound the poet invents a new English stranger than the original Chinese. Even concerning dynamic equivalence, his translated language never gets domesticated conventionally, but rather it must be identified as somewhere between the source language and the target language. In this way, Cathay marks an important turning point in the history of Chinese translation as well as in Pound's own literary career.

2012
A. Serdar Öztürk : The image, the ideogram itself, if it is to be effective, depends greatly on the beauty and the force of the image, the ideogrammic component. That Pound was successful in translating the Chinese image is everywhere attested in Cathay. Which ties the poem together is not so much the narrative as the succession of images. The Imagists concern for concentrated expression and Pound's definition of the image as 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' would lead one to believe, that most of the poetry in Cathay would tend toward brevity. Although there are a representative number of short poems, the greater number is rather long. To account for the ability to sustain an image in a poem of more than a few lines, or even a few stanzas, one must turn again to the effectiveness of ideogrammic juxtaposition.
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  • Document: 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    . (Pou85, Publication)
  • Person: Li, Bo
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
13 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."
14 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).
  • Document: 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). (SauH1, Publication)
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
15 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.
  • Document: 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). (SauH1, Publication)
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
16 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.
  • Document: Kennedy, George A. Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese character. In : Yale literary magazine ; vol. 126, no 5 (1958). (Pou62, Publication)
  • Document: Miyake, Akiko. Between Confucius and Eleusis : Ezra Pound's assimilation of Chinese culture in writing the Cantos I-LXXI. (Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms, 1981). Diss. Duke University, 1970. S. 128. (Pou100, Publication)
  • Document: Motsch, Monika. Ezra Pound und China. (Heidelberg : Winter, 1976). (Heidelberger Forschungen ; H. 17). Diss. Univ. Heidelberg 1971. S. 18-19. (Mot3, Publication)
  • Document: Chinese-Western comparative literature : theory and strategy. Ed. by John J. Deeney ; with preface by Horst Frenz ; and foreword by A. Owen Aldridge. (Hong Kong : Chinese University Press, 1980). S. 147-150. (Dee3, Publication)
  • Document: 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. (Pou90, Publication)
  • Document: Cai, Zong-qi. Configurations of comparative poetics : three perspectives on Western and Chinese literary criticism. (Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, 2002). S. 172, 191, 195-196, 203-238. (Pou69, Publication)
  • Document: Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound's Chinese friends : stories in letters. Ed. and ann. by Zhaoming Qian. (Oxford : University Press, 2008).
    [Enthält] : Briefwechsel mit Song Faxiang (1914), Zeng Baosan, Yang Fengqi (1939-1942), Veronica Hulan Sun, Fang Achilles (1950-1958), Angela Jung Palandri (1952), Zhang Junmai (1953-1957), Zhao Ziqiang (1954-1958), Wang Shenfu (1955-1958), Fang Baoxian (1957-1959).
    Appendix : Ezra Pound's typescript for "Preliminary survey" (1951).
    http://cs5937.userapi.com/u11728334/docs/901475cb4b3c/Zhaoming_Qian_Ezra_Pounds_Chinese_Friends
    _Sto.pdf    . S. XIX. (Pou16, Publication)
  • Document: Ning, Xin. Picking the blossoms of the apricot : Ezra Pound's ideogramic thinking and his vision of Confucius. In : East Asian Confucianisms : interactions and innovations : proceedings of the Conference of May 1-2, 2009. (New Brunswick, N.J. : Confucius Institute at Rutgers University, 2010). (Pou65, Publication)
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
17 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.

Bibliography (5)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 1893 Fenollosa, Ernest. East and West : the discovery of American and other poems. (New York, N.Y. : T.Y. Crowell, 1893). Publication / FenE10
2 1912 Fenollosa, Ernest. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese arts. (London : Heinemann, 1912). [New and rev. ed., with copious notes by Raphaël Petrucci, 1921]. Publication / FENE1
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 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
5 1923 Fenollosa, Ernest. Ursprung und Entwicklung der chinesischen und japanischen Kunst. (Leipzig : K.W. Hiersemann, 1923). Publication / FenE2

Secondary Literature (3)

# Year Bibliographical Data Type / Abbreviation Linked Data
1 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
  • Cited by: Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich (AOI, Organisation)
  • Person: Fang, Achilles
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
2 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
  • Cited by: Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich (AOI, Organisation)
  • Person: Cai, Zong-qi
  • Person: Pound, Ezra
3 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
  • Cited by: Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich (AOI, Organisation)
  • Person: Pound, Ezra