Abstract
First published in 1915 as a modest volume presenting fourteen freshly rendered classical Chinese poems, Ezra Pound’s Cathay fundamentally altered the dimensions of several fields of literary culture within English.2 Most obviously and immediately, the collection redefined the place of Chinese poetry in the West, not only virtually establishing its significance as a literary tradition for England and America, but also permanentl transforming the way in which it was henceforth to be presented to general audiences through translation by poets and even scholars.3 Creating both the predominant idiom and image of Chinese poetry in English for Anglo-American Modernism, Cathay continues to exert an enormous influence on the transmission, and hence popular apprehension, of the Chinese poetic tradition in the West.4 Ask non-specialists about their impressions of Chinese poetry and you are overwhelmingly likely to receive answers indelibly stamped with Pound’s influence. Even relatively seasoned readers with broad exposure to different translators of various poets will probably speak of intense imagery, verbal concentration, and a mystical harmony with nature rather than of “rhyme and strict form,” the two characteristics that Arthur Waley, Pound’s contemporary and closest rival as the chief interpreter and transmitter of Chinese poetry to the West, considers the most salient aspects of Chinese verse. So, for example, the contemporary poet Hayden Carruth offers in his 1989 lyric, “Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets,” a vision of Chinese poetry as a cultural tradition wherein “everything happens at once, no conflicts can occur.”
From “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” in Cathay, Personae, p. 131.
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Notes
Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1983), p. 16.
For a lengthier discussion of the virtual explosion of translation of Chinese poetry during this period by such other figures as Amy Lowell and Arthur Waley, as well as of the previous generation of translators that included James Legge and Herbert Giles, see Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999), especially pp. 3–18 and pp. 211–28.
For a very fine and thorough discussion of specifically American thought on the Chinese language and Chinese poetry, as well as how that thought plays out in the development of Modernist poetry, see Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Arthur Waley, Preface to Translations from the Chinese (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).
T. S. Eliot, “Introduction” to Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), p. 14.
For a critical and historical survey of English translation of Chinese poetry through 1949, see Roy E. Teele, Through A Glass Darkly: A Study of English Translations of Chinese Poetry (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1949). Thesis, Columbia University.
Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 5.
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 358.
For a discussion of the signifiance of Chinese writing in European thought, see Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001)
See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: A Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 267.
For a detailed overview of European Orientalism in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Wai lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 148.
Marianne DeKoven, “Gender and Modernism” in Michael Levenson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 174.
For a much fuller articulation of DeKoven’s position, see her Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
The phrase is Perry Anderson’s, from his article “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (March/April 1984): 96–113
Ezra Pound, Cathay (London: Elkin Matthews, 1915).
For a more detailed discussion of the mediating influence of Japanese sinological scholarship on the movement of Chinese poetry to the West through Pound, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002)
John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, Vol. 2, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1962).
For a discussion of translation as issuing from the “afterlife” of an original work of art, see “The Task of the Translator” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), especially pp. 71–72.
See Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell, Fir Flower Tablets (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921)
Witter Bynner, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, Being Three Hundred Poems of the Vang Dynasty, 618–906 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964, reprint from 1929).
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 201–202.
Sanehide Kodama, “Cathay and the Fenollosa Notebooks,” Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship 11.2 (1982): 213.
Hereafter cited as Kodama in the body of the text. See also Ron Bush, “Pound and Li Po: What becomes a Man” in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 37
Ann Chappie, “Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Compilation from the Fenollosa Notebooks,” Paideuma 17.2–3 (1988), p. 11.
For a full account of this three-year arrangement, see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988).
For the fullest account of Fenollosa’s rather improbable career as the foremost expert on Japanese and Chinese art in the West at the time, see Laurence Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).
The most interesting treatment of the literary consequences of World War I remains Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modem Memory (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975).
For the rules of this genre see James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 22–28.
Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 155.
For an extended discussion of poetry by women and the effect of World War II, see Susan Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
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© 2002 Steven G. Yao
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Yao, S.G. (2002). “to-day’s men are not the men of the old days”: Ezra Pound’s Cathay and the Invention of Modernist Literary Translation. In: Translation and the Languages of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05979-6_2
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