Ezra Pound translated Lǐ Bái

Wow, how did I only just now find out that Ezra Pound translated a few Lǐ Bái’s poems? I’m shocked!

Original:

《玉阶怨》
玉阶生白露，
夜久侵罗袜。
却下水晶帘，
玲珑望秋月。

Pound:

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

He even gave the notes “Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore 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 poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.”

Original:

     《长干行》
妾发初覆额，折花门前剧。
郎骑竹马来，绕床弄青梅。
同居长干里，两小无嫌猜。
十四为君妇，羞颜未尝开。
低头向暗壁，千唤不一回。
十五始展眉，愿同尘与灰。
常存抱柱信，岂上望夫台。
十六君远行，瞿塘滟滪堆。
五月不可触，猿鸣天上哀。
门前迟行迹，一一生绿苔。
苔深不能扫，落叶秋风早。
八月蝴蝶黄，双飞西园草。
感此伤妾心，坐愁红颜老。
早晚下三巴，预将书报家。
相迎不道远，直至长风沙。

Pound:

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead (妾发初覆额)
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. (折花门前剧)
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, (郎骑竹马来)
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. (绕床弄青梅)
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: (同居长干里)
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. (两小无嫌猜。)
At fourteen I married My Lord you. (十四为君妇)
I never laughed, being bashful. (羞颜未尝开)
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. (低头向暗壁)
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. (千唤不一回)

At fifteen I stopped scowling, (十五始展眉)
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours (愿同尘与灰)
Forever and forever, and forever. (常存抱柱信)
Why should I climb the look out? (岂上望夫台)

At sixteen you departed (十六君远行)
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, (瞿塘滟滪堆)
And you have been gone five months. (五月不可触)
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. (猿鸣天上哀)

You dragged your feet when you went out. (门前迟行迹)
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, (一一生绿苔)
Too deep to clear them away! (苔深不能扫)
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. (落叶秋风早)
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August  (八月蝴蝶黄)
Over the grass in the West garden;  (双飞西园草)
They hurt me. (感此伤妾心)
I grow older. (坐愁红颜老)
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, (早晚下三巴)
Please let me know beforehand, (预将书报家)
And I will come out to meet you (相迎不道远)
As far as Chō-fū-Sa. (直至长风沙)

In the process of figuring out how in the world Ezra Pound could translate Chinese poems without knowing Chinese (the answer is that a guy named Fenollosa had assembled extensive notes on classical Chinese poetry and characters. Pound relied heavily on Fenollosa’s manuscripts and annotations.), I discovered an overwhelming scorn towards Pound for this effort.

Because Pound, a white man who couldn’t speak or read a word of Chinese, was not even necessarily attempting to faithfully recreate Cathay’s poems in English; he rewrote the poems to fit into American modernist aesthetics, bringing ancient Chinese poetry into his own place and time. Pound’s translations represented the most extreme form of domestication, a practice that theorist Lawrence Venuti called “a manifestation of ethnocentric violence.” (Tracey, 2017)

or

What did Pound’s emphasis on ancient Chinese poetry make possible (or prevent) in his contemporary political project? In Pound’s translations we begin to see the classic modernist/orientalist problem: the “minor” style produced through the literary displacement of a ‘minor’ culture. (Williams, 2009)

Describing something with a negative adjective such as ethnocentric is not enough to ascribe norms. And I am scared that such criticism will stop people from translating. In this fear, I wish to defend Pound.

A shallow response is to question why “bringing ancient Chinese poetry into his own place and time” is a bad thing. I had thought that’s how art works. Art evolves. Art converses. Why must Lǐ Bái’s poem be a static dead cloth, only permitted to be buried in the tomb of the Táng Dynasty? Might the poet not be glad that a thousand years later, he’s still culturally relevant and controversially absorbed into imagism?

A more thoughtful answer is that significance is frequently created in relations. Pound’s poems, Pound’s poems-from-Lǐ-Bái, Lǐ Bái’s poems, are three separate classes of things that acquire their attributes through themselves and each other’s category. By the creation of Pound’s poems-from-Lǐ-Bái, something new happened for Lǐ Bái’s poems. In its relation to imagism, what we previously did not heed in the poem or did not see in a certain way, its concentrated subject and economy of language, we now retrospectively recognize and could even call “advanced”. Without what modernism has advanced upon, there’s no notion of advancement which we could retrospectively attribute to Lǐ Bái.

The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere,is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, propertions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. - T.S.Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

It is also better to justify why retrospective attribution should be an accepted mode of analysis. The other side may object that if the poet had not written the poem with imagist doctrine in mind, then we could not hang imagist attributes onto the poem. I think given the larger cultural context shift and vast span of time between Lǐ Bái and modernity, this attribution is not exactly parallel to Goehr’s attribution of the regualtive force “work-concept” onto pre-1800s composers such as Bach, a process she has justified at length in the Imaginary Museum. I wonder if an alternative explanation consists in appealing to the nature of artistic movements such as imagism, namely that its trend and qualities existed before the formal definition of the concept ‘imagism’. This a claim that could be validated or invalidated empirically in historical records. That is of course not to be mistaken as the claim that imagism always existed—it could not. Artistic movements are by definition an accumulation of and response to history that came before. Elements of its content existed before it became a formal concept (concepts have rise and falls of their own; think “Gothic,” which once referred to a specific subset of 18th- and early 19th-century novels; over time, it has been used to analyze everything from medieval architecture to modern horror), which was brought into existence by the 20th-century English and American poets. Until these elements were developed and categorized and gained their significance through the categorization, their presence was insufficient and unnecessary for us to call Li Bai’s poems imagist.

It seems that in adopting the role of poetry translation, Pound laid his commitment to the English language instead of to Chinese culture, making it unfair to call him a “quasi-multiculturalism” (Williams 2010, 148). It seems that the argument used to attack Pound is precisely the explanation and justification for his exclusively language-committed endeavor.

For Lawrence Venuti, the word “scandal” refers as much to the impossibility of translation as to the widespread refusal to admit this impossibility (Scandals 1-8; “Translation Studies” 1-10). Venuti is quick to point out that this impossibility is hardly the exclusive malaise of translation. His understanding of this impossibility and its implicit scandal relies heavily on the post-structuralist unraveling of language as such. Venuti thus sees language (and not merely translation) as “a collective force, an assemblage of forms that constitute a semiotic regime” (Williams 9).

I don’t think Pound was trying to do what he’s accused of failing to do. It seems that Pound acknowledges this impossibility by his choice of admission and omission of ideographs. Looking at the specific cases above and compare the original to the translation line by line suffices to show that lots of literal meaning of the original was left out. For example, ”坐尘红颜老“ means “sitting (坐) in dust(尘), beauty (红颜) ages (老)” was translated to “I grow older”. Words such as 红颜 (‘beauty’, where 红 means ‘red’, and 颜 could mean ‘color’, ‘dye’, ‘face’, depending on which word it appears in) and 尘 (‘dust’) are in themselves powerful and classic symbols that no student of rudimentary Chinese poetry will omit. Their omission in the translated poem is Pound clearly and intentionally discarding meaning datum in order to reach an emphatic climax in the flow of the new poem. This is evidence that preservation of the original literal meaning, or a resistance towards ”post-structuralist unraveling of language”, was not the translator’s goal.

Rather than accusing Pound of attempting the impossible task of “domestication” of a text, why not go with the simpler explanation that he was developing modern English poetry with Li Bai’s original as an input?

Further evidence supports the view that Pound’s effort of translation is a lot more about his new modernist project rather than preserving the old. He does it indiscriminately, not just in a langauge at risk of “minoritization” (Williams 2010, 148). Take this example given in Ezra Pound as Translator with Pound’s version of The Seafarer. Pound preserves the Old English poem’s distinctive rhythms and word order while subtly altering the literal meaning. The opening line in Old English

Maeg ic be me sylfum sothgied wrecan

which has the literal meaning of “I am able to tell a true song about myself.” Pound translated it as “May I for my own self song’s truth reckon”. Alexander notes that this reveals Pound’s greater interest in forging a new English style than in delivering a strictly faithful translation (27). By analogy, with Lǐ Bái’s work, Pound “felt no obligation to render [it] with strict fidelity” (Alexander 1997, 29). Pounds displayed what Alexander called a “philological lust”, by physically preserving words in another language into his translation, such as “Chō-fū-Sa” in The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, which although is a name of a place, could have been easily overwritten for the symbolism it carries and given Pounds lack of hesitation to alter meaning where he saw fit (e.g. translating 床 (bed) to “seat”). This preservation is a “philological lust”, indeed.

Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? This would seem to explain adequately the fact that the translation and the original have very different standing in the realm of art. Moreover, it seems to be the only conceivable reason for saying "the same thing" over again. For what does a literary work "say"? What does it communicate? It "tells" very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not communication or the imparting of information. Yet any translation that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but communication—hence, something inessential. (Benjamin, 253)

In any rate, I thought Pound was saying something. And a self-aware and intentional misunderstanding is always better than unaware no-understanding. So, thanks, Mr.Pound.

Reference

Li Bai. The Jewel Stairs' Grievance. Translated by Ezra Pound, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48687/the-jewel-stairs-grievance.

Li Bai. The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter. Translated by Ezra Pound, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47692/the-river-merchants-wife-a-letter-56d22853677f9.

Alexander, Michael. "Ezra Pound as Translator." Translation and Literature, vol. 6, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40339757.

Tracey, Janey. "The Modernist Revision of a Foreign Culture in Ezra Pound’s Cathay." Ploughshares at Emerson College, December 3, 2017.

Williams, R. John. “Modernist Scandals: Ezra Pound’s Translations of ‘the’ Chinese Poem.” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, pp. 367–393.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996.