Journal of Italian Translation

30 Journal of Italian Translation
The hybrid nature attributed to the Chinese character enables
Pound to believe that ‘the Chinese written language has not only
absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second
world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been
able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigour and
vividness that any phonetic language.’ 15 The Chinese written character
thus seems to possess the energy towards which poetry aspires
and which attempts to reproduce by crowding – since it has
no better tools – the highest number of meanings into one word or
one line. 16
Energy, a very important concept within Pound’s process of
innovation and one which finds a home in the Chinese character,
will lead him to claim in 1937 that his ‘version’ of Confucius’ Ta
Hio is his ‘most important work in the last three decades.’ 17 In this
essay Pound asserts that a ‘diseased’ and ‘degraded’ West is in urgent
need of Confucius; connecting Confucian will and Dantean
directio voluntatis, and ranging through a wide spectrum of medical
metaphors spanning from the hypodermic needle to the straight
jacket, Pound hails the forty-six characters of the Ta Hio as the beginning
of a process of renewal which will invigorate a paradoxically
ill-fed West. Translation, the moving across cultures, and the
publication of works with both original and facing translation are
thus presented as a way of regenerating the West linguistically and
culturally.
The necessary character of the Ta Hio will be violently expanded
upon in the essay ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, 18 in which
Pound defends his previous work from the accusations of having
modernised Confucius and distinguishes between inclusion and
ambiguity in translation. Pound’s attacks against what he calls ‘under-translation’
(paradoxically seen as a sign of the translator’s lack
of humbleness) can be traced back to the difference he drew in
1920 between two kinds of obscurity in translation, one unjustifiably
linked to the expression and one inherent in the ‘thing’, and
thus defended in the name of modernist experimentalism:
Obscurities not inherent in the matter, obscurities
due not to the thing but to the wording are a botch, and
are not worth preserving in a translation. The work lives
not by them but despite them. Obscurities inherent in the
thing occur when the author is piercing, or trying to pierce