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“Thaar’s where ole Marse Shao used to sit,/ Lord how Iwish he was judgin’ yet” are straight out of Uncle Remusand His Legends of the Old Plantation, whose mockblackdialect Pound, writing to T.S. Eliot in the late thirtiesfrom his cottage in Rapallo, Italy, would put on likesome epistolary version of black-face to amuse andembarrass the Southern poet: “Waaal Possum, my fineole Marse Supial . . ..” 12That Pound would seize upon Chinese poetry as anoccasion for an Orientalist rewriting is not entirely surprisingin light of his politics. What is surprising is thatan editor of Eliot Weinberger’s progressive viewswould reprint such work in an anthology he hopedwould find service “as a collection of poems worthreading, as an introductory survey of classical Chinesepoetry and a celebration of it by American poets”(xxvii). How either of these relics of Pound’s St.Elizabeths years serves any of these aims is a mysteryto me, but then I have similar reservations about thevolume in which they appear, The New DirectionsAnthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. This is a dreadfullydisappointing book, all the more so for the expectationselicited by its subtitle, the Chinese counterpartto Pound’s injunction to the modernists of his generation,“MAKE IT NEW” (“hsin jih jih hsin” ? ?? ?),and by its impressive list of contributors: Ezra Pound,William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, GarySnyder, and the much-laurelled translator David Hinton.Readers who purchase this anthology in the expectationof getting an introductory anthology of classicalChinese poetry are bound to be sorely disappointed. Inlimiting his selection to a handful of poets and translatorson the New Directions backlist, Weinberger leavesimmense expanses of the verse tradition entirely unrepresentedor dominated by the questionable work of a singletranslator. Pound is allowed to lord over the five centuriesof the Shih-ching, the very fountainhead ofChinese poetry, with a score of his dubious “ConfucianOdes” and one translation from Cathay. He also has thelion’s share of the mere eleven translations representingthe next thousand years of the verse tradition, and threeof these are not even translations but rather Imagistpoems, among them, this haiku-like chinoiserie the poet“extracted” from Herbert Giles’s late Victorian version ofa ten-line poem by the Han Dynasty concubine PanChieh-Yü:Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial LordO fan of white silk,Clear as frost on the grass-blade,You also are laid aside. (20)A nice example of Pound’s contribution to the Imagistmovement, but what can it possibly tell us about theChinese poem Weinberger allows it to represent exceptthat it, too, has been laid aside?Of the next seven centuries of Chinese verse, onlythe poetry of the T’ang Dynasty is sufficiently well representedto serve the needs of an introductory survey, butfrom then on the tradition once again falls under theimperious dominion of a single translator: KennethRexroth. All but three of the forty-nine translations representingthe three hundred years of the Sung are by thispoet, whose “Poems from the Chinese” even Weinbergerconcedes “are almost impossible to separate … from hisown poetry; they tend to speak as one” (xxiv). Whilemany of these translations are impressive individually, itis distressing to witness poet after poet — Confuciangentry, bureaucratic functionaries, generals, and widowsalike — transformed into the semblance of a middleagedMidwesterner “speaking in a plain, natural-breathing,neutral American idiom” (xxiv). Curiously, despitetheir generic similarities, some of Rexroth’s translationsare actually the product of a collaborative effort,although Weinberger is so stinting in his acknowledgmentsthat it is likely to escape most readers. I refer tothe seventeen Li Ch’ing-chao and Chu Shu-chen translations,most of which were either co-translated or extensivelyrevised by Ling Chung, a Taiwanese poet andscholar with whom Rexroth collaborated on two volumesof translation: The Orchid Boat: Woman Poets of Chinaand Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems. Rexroth alwaysshared the byline with Chung on the work they didtogether. Weinberger does not even mention her except ina passing reference to their collaboration in a sentencethat begins with a description of Marichiko, a Japanesefemale persona Rexroth invented for a series of eroticpoems he wrote in his sunset years, and ends with anassertion that shows an appalling indifference to the distinctionsbetween real people and Orientalist fictions:“Like Whitman, Rexroth was containing multitudes, butthey were all East Asian women” (xxiv).Weinberger’s anthology includes a number of shortessays and commentaries “On Chinese Poetry,” but theyadd little to his anthology’s value as an introductory survey.Surprisingly, only one of these has a Chinese source,Translation Review 41
Lu Chi’s “Rhymeprose on Literature,” a third-century arspoetica, so nicely translated by Achilles Fang that itshould have been included in the survey rather than itsappendix. The rest of Weinberger’s “collage of commentaries”are by the American contributors, not all of whomwere well versed in the classical verse tradition. Snyder’sthree brief essays on hills and mountains in Chinesepoetry are as beautifully composed and firmly groundedas the topics on which he writes, but Pound’s contribution,an excerpt from the Ernest Fenollosa essay he editedand published under the title “The Chinese WrittenCharacter as a Medium for Poetry,” is notoriously unreliable.Although it provided the basis for the “ideogrammicmethod” Pound began to bruit a few years afterCathay, its central thesis, that the Chinese characters areideographic, had been soundly discredited by sinologistsmore than half a century before Fenollosa took up thedesultory study of Chinese poetry under Japanesetutors. 13 William Carlos Williams’s contribution to thecollage, a review of Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems fromthe Chinese, has nothing to say about Chinese poetry andoffers few insights on the translations: “Mr. Rexroth is agenius in his own right, inventing a modern language, orfollowing a vocal tradition which he raises here to greatdistinction” (197). Rexroth’s contributions, a short essayon Tu Fu and a statement of “Chinese Poetry and theAmerican Imagination” from a published symposium, aremore informative, but the details tend to get lost in thewelter of his bewildering comparisons:. . . almost none of Tu Fu’s verse is lyric in thesense in which the songs of Shakespeare, ThomasCampion, Goethe, or Sappho are lyric. Rather, hisis a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardi’s“L’Infinito,” which might well be a translationfrom the Chinese, or the better sonnets ofWordsworth. (198)So Chinese poetry has come to influence the Westas a special form of Chinese verse — whichannoys some of the more pedantic Sinologists ofChinese ancestry. It is a special kind of free verseand its appearance happened to converge with themovement toward Objectivism, Imagism, and eventhe Cubist poetry of Gertrude Stein and PierreReverdy — “no ideas but in things,” as Williamssays rather naively. (209)Rexroth’s statements on the influence of Chinese verseon American poetry were often bent to the service ofpromoting free verse, but at least he had the probity tomention that “Chinese poetry, in fact, bears no resemblance”to the free verse translations of the Americanpoets (209). Weinberger never even points this out, muchless provide an actual description of the poetry his surveyrepresents. On the contrary, he begins his introductionwith the extraordinary thesis that “American poetryis inextricable from classical Chinese poetry and theChinese language itself” (xix). One is tempted to thinkthat he is speaking in jest, especially in light of his observation,a few pages later, that the wellspring of this“inextricable” relationship — “the new, plain-speaking,laconic, image-driven free verse” exemplified by theCathay translations — was “written by an American whoknew no Chinese, working from the notes of anAmerican who knew no Chinese, who was taking dictationfrom Japanese simultaneous interpreters who weretranslating the comments of Japanese professors”(xix–xx). It is soon clear, however, that Weinberger is inearnest, for he devotes much of his introduction to a ramblingaccount of the influence of the Chinese languageand classical verse tradition upon American poetry, oneso bereft of supporting evidence and riddled with contradictionsthat even he is forced to conclude:How classical Chinese entered into American poetryis a simple story, but its effect may never befully unraveled, for it is often impossible to determinewhether the Americans found in it a revelationor merely the confirmation of what they hadalready discovered. (xxv-xxvi).Literary influence is often difficult to determine, butthis much is certain: none of the free verse poets in theformative years of the American romance with Chinesepoetry — not Pound, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, noreven Rexroth a generation later — could read the classicalpoems they translated. But all of them could read theEnglish translations in the sources they actually workedfrom. In Pound’s case, his sources, the notes of ErnestFenollosa, did not even include the Chinese, only aromanized transcription and a word-for-word gloss heappears to have largely ignored, judging from his versionof this excerpt (reprinted in Weinberger’s introduction) ofthe “first line of what was to become . . . ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ (‘While my hair was still cutstraight across my forehead’)”:Sho hatsu sho fuku gakuMistress hair first cover brow42 Translation Review
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