Journal of Italian Translation

32 Journal of Italian Translation
mism to the power of the fascist anti-semitic State. 23 The essay on
Mang Tsze and its later ramifications raise the classic problem of
the paradoxical proximity of avant-garde and fascism in modernism.
24 In Pound, a past which is both geographically and temporally
distant (twentieth-century Provence, thirteenth-century
Tuscany, and the China of Confucius or Mang Tsze) is used to advocate
for an urgent solution to the problem of a diseased and decadent
society. 25 In this way, translating is ideologically aligned with
a reactionary dynamism which coincides with order, hierarchy,
and authoritarianism. China’s alterity is transformed into a totalitarian
model to emulate, producing a structure able to survive only
by debasing another kind of alterity, which in Pound is Jewishness:
following a classic reactionary model, Pound defines ‘semitism’ as
the omnipresent threat, origin of a degraded and diseased society
which can aspire to its renewal only by blindly obeying a totalitarian
regime. Such a regime is represented by Confucius and Mang
Tsze, who represent a different kind of otherness able to rejuvenate
a decadent society. Such Confucius and Mang Tsze are eminently
Poundian characters, who are said to be different but mirror what
is already there: the totalitarian state. 26
III. The invisible translator: Arthur Waley
Arthur Waley is the first twentieth-century writer to translate
the great names in Chinese and Japanese poetry, giving shape to a
picture of the East which will dominate the West for over a century.
He is also the figure most frequently juxtaposed to Pound’s
modernist take on the Orient. 27 A comparison between Waley and
Pound casts some light on the different connections that these two
writers establish between translation and national identity; it will
also question the frequent role of Pound as the only mediator between
West and East in histories of literature.
Octavio Paz, in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, claims
that he has never been persuaded by Pound’s theories of translation,
but that he has always been fascinated by his activity as a
translator, and in particular as a translator of Chinese poetry. Such
a division enables Paz to praise the fresh quality of Pound’s translations
while rejecting the more problematic ideological implications
of his theories of translation. Paz follows Eliot in saying that
Pound invented Chinese poetry in the West, and both agree that
Pound’s great contribution has been to destroy the myth that trans-