Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

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