Cathay: Ezra Pound's re-imagination of Chinese Poetry by Kerry Brown

Cathay: Ezra Pound's re-imagination of Chinese Poetry
This slim volume, born from an accidental discovery, set the tone for modern translations of Chinese poetry into English
By Kerry Brown

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Ezra Pound's slender volume of oriental poems, Cathay. While the collection does not have the fame of his epic lifelong work, Cantos, it ranks highly among modern fusion poetry that blends in two different literary traditions.
Pound never claimed to be fluent in Chinese, writes Ira Nadel in his introduction, although in the last decades of his life he did study Confucius's Analects with a dictionary by his side. He used Chinese characters in his work, but Pound's view from early on was that Chinese ideograms or characters, and the culture they represented, had primarily an aesthetic appeal.
The translations, which he based his own works on, came from the work of Ernest Fenollosa, an early Orientalist who mostly used Japanese renditions of classical Chinese works. Cathay is, therefore, a double mediation—a work based on another body of work which itself was derivative — rather than directly linked to the source material.
Pound was criticized for this remoteness once Cathay was published. But in the intervening hundred years, the consensus remains that he did manage to capture something of the spirit and deeper meaning of the Chinese texts.
Pound made a major contribution to the modern western concept of "the Orient", a place of otherness, with a different tempo and emotional register to European or American cultures. He described the dominant feelings of being lost and the sense of solitude within his imagined Orient. "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is the most celebrated of this genre, with its tale of "two small people, without dislike or suspicion" who marry at 14, get separated at 16, with the wife waiting for her husband to one day return.
Exile and absence marks many of the other poems, reinforcing this sense that Chinese poetry is about delicate understatement and restraint, expressed through metaphors concerning the landscape, vegetation, or water.
Pound's imagination and work dealt with a larger "orient" rather than a specific place called China. The ways in which he treated this idea of what is oriental typifies other writers or thinkers from Europe or North America, whose cultures are distinct from that in Japan, China, or across East Asia.
Pound makes certain assumptions. In the Cantos, he described the whole dynastic history of China. Historians would now despair at his idea of such neat divisions between order and chaos. But when we remember that he is writing not so much about what China or the Orient as an actual place might be, but how western imagination configured it and responded to ideas about it this question of how accurate Pound's translations are becomes unimportant. What makes his poetry important not only in and for itself, but because its role in this history of western conceptualization of the Orient, and of China.
The book is also a reminder that Pound was a skilled lyricist. His later political adventures, which almost led to a conviction for treason during World War II for producing propaganda for the Fascist government of Italy, have tended to overshadow awareness of his immense technical skills. The Cathay poems show the intensity, the concreteness and the music that Pound at his best was able to create. Cathay contains hybrid material—most of it related to Fenollosa's renditions of Japanese-Chinese texts, but he also put in his celebrated translation from the Old English, The Seafarer. There is nothing discordant about this. In fact, it stimulates thoughts on how similar the worlds from these two eras—ancient imperial China and the dark ages of Europe—might be. Both describe loss, vulnerabilities, and the creation of beliefs.

Pound is perhaps one of the very few creative figures that succeeded in bridging two very different cultural worlds. Cathay stands as a testament to that.
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College, London. His latest book China's CEO: Xi Jinping will be out in April, 2016Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books

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POUND FOR POUND "Omar Shakespear Pound"

POUND FOR POUND

by Charlie Finch

Today's New York Times includes a small paid obituary, which reads, in its entirety, as follows: "Omar Shakespear Pound, Died peacefully at Princeton, NJ on 2 March 2010, aged 83, after long illness. Survived by his wife Elizabeth, daughters Katharine and Oriana, grandsons Ben and Joshua."

Shall we parse/deconstruct this fine and succinct piece of literary history? Omar Pound bore the name of his putative father, the poet Ezra Pound. A gifted poet and translator in his own right, Omar Pound was the son of the artist Dorothy Shakespear, a close associate of Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Vorticist movement. Dorothy was the daughter of a celebrated lover of the greatest of poets, William Butler Yeats.

Dorothy's art work appeared in seminal issues of the Vorticist Bible, BLAST magazine, and Dorothy, of course, was the wife of Ezra Pound. By the time Pound had taken up with his lifelong lover, the violinist Olga Rudge, Dorothy Shakespear had fled to Italy and given birth to Omar Shakespear Pound, whom many suspected was not the biological son of Ezra Pound.

No matter, for Omar was a loyal son to Pound, seeing him through his grotesque alliance with Mussolini, the anti-Semitism and traitorous radio broadcasts that led to Pound's detention by the U.S. Army, his incarceration at St. Elizabeth's and his exile in Rapallo. We might pause to consider the penance contained in Omar's paid obit: grandsons named Ben and Joshua, leaders of the Old Testament tribes of Israel.

I have a lifelong friend, the critic and curator Alan Jones, author of the seminal book The Art Dealers, curator of the only show of Jeff Koons' works done exclusively by that artist's own hand (student work from Chicago), and a man so enthralled by the legacy of Joyce, Pound, Yeats and their circle that he long ago married royalty and gave up the New York art world that had nurtured him, forever.

Alan makes me think that to drown in the cultural past might be a better fate than a world of navel-gazing panels at dull art fairs. The sins and seductions Alan fell for had consequences, at least. And the death notices of that world, like the one for Omar Pound today, are modest and invite the sweet, subtle probe of collective memory.

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).