Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

Chinese lady’s I or my beginningMy hair was at first covering my brows(Chinese method of wearing hair) (xix)Comparing the two versions, we can see that Poundextensively revised Fenollosa’s prose, but none of thechanges have any basis in Fenollosa’s glosses. Of hisprincipal changes, the introduction of trochaic meter andthe substitution of “covering my brow” with the moreconcrete “cut straight across my forehead,” the former isas old as the English verse tradition and the second wassomething he arrived at with the help of his English wife,Dorothy Shakespeare. Pound was certainly cognizant ofwhat the Chinese source poem says, thanks toFenollosa’s glosses, but it is clear that he was far lessinterested in representing its verse technique than inusing it as an occasion for a poetic rewriting to bolsterhis effort to “set up a critical standard” for free verse.This was something he had no doubt learned from hisFrench precursors, notably the prose poems of JudithGautier, whose “variations on Chinese themes,” collectedin her Le Livre de jade (1867), had invented Chinesepoetry for her era as Pound’s Cathay translations havefor ours. Gautier’s prose poems were not only formattedin a manner that anticipates vers libre; one of them is aversion of the same Li Po quatrain (chüeh-chü) Poundtranslated as “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.” 14For his verse technique, however, Pound looked lessto French vers libre than to the free verse poems ofEdgar Lee Masters. Pound had been experimenting withfree verse since his 1913 “Pact” with Walt Whitman to“carve the new wood” the great bard had broken fromblank verse, but his few efforts in this direction had beenso self-consciously mannered in their revolt againstmeter, no doubt to mark his distance from Whitman, asto draw more attention to his meter than to his revolt. 15Masters’ free verse, which was modeled on English prosetranslations of the Greek Anthology, demonstrated that amore prosaic line could draw attention to the subjectwithin the poem in a way that left one with the impressionof being “confronted with life, with the objectivefact,” which are precisely the qualities of the dramaticmonologues in Cathay. 16 Pound never directly acknowledgedMasters’ influence, but it may, in fact, have providedthe impetus for him to do Cathay, for he had beensitting on the Fenollosa notebooks for nearly a yearbefore he set to work on the Chinese translations, andthis was shortly after he had gotten his first glimpse of“Spoon River.” 17 In any case, it is clear that Masters’ freeverse was very much on Pound’s mind during the monthshe worked on the Cathay translations, for in one reviewof the period, he compared Masters’ “straight writing,language unaffected” to lines from his version of the secondhalf of Li Po’s “South-Folk in Cold Country,” and inanother, reprinted several “Spoon River” poems that bearcomparison to “The River-Merchants’ Wife: A Letter.” 18Most are quite long, as is Pound’s version of the Li Popoem, but one not only is short enough to quote in fullbut also confronts us with a dramatis persona who, likethe river-merchant’s wife, recounts the painful ironies ofher marriage and speaks of dust, desire, and eternity:Amanda BarkerHenry got me with child,Knowing that I could not bring forth lifeWithout losing my own.In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.Traveler, it is believed in the village where I livedThat Henry loved me with a husband’s love,But I proclaim from the dustThat he slew me to gratify his hatred. 19Masters’ poem and Pound’s translation have differentplots and poetic genres, but they share the same versetechnique. Although none of the Cathay translationsdeploy the convention of a gravestone epigraph, he didmake a significant generic change to both “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and the other great Li Po dramaticmonologue in Cathay, “Exile’s Letter.” The formeris actually a literary ballad (hsing) and the latter a “poemin the old style” (ku-shih), but having seen the “SpoonRiver” poems, Pound must have realized that adoptingthe prosaic convention of a “letter” would give his translationsmore of the “confronting” quality he had admiredin Masters’ work. The change has served them well, forthey are among the three or four most admired andanthologized Chinese translations in English.Neither Gautier’s prose poems nor Masters’ freeverse is quite as “laconic” or “image-driven” as theCathay translations, but even these aspects of Pound’sverse technique were something confirmed, rather thandiscovered, in the Fenollosa notebooks, for they weresimply an extension of the guiding principles of theImagist movement, whose birth he had presided over,when, in October 1912, in his role as foreign editor forPoetry Magazine, he had taken a blue pencil to HildaDoolittle’s “Hermes of the Ways” and christened herTranslation Review 43