Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

“H.D. Imagiste”; he even used the word “laconic” in hiscover letter to Harriet Monroe. 20 In his genealogy of the“new, laconic, image-driven free verse” exemplified byPound’s Cathay translations, Weinberger makes a ratherfeeble effort to show that Chinese poetry had a formativeinfluence on the Imagist movement by pointing out thatmost of Pound’s early Imagist poems were “extracted”from the “weed-choked verbiage” of Herbert Giles’s versions(xviii). But this only shows that Chinese poetrywas not a source for the Imagist principles but merelymaterial upon which to exercise them. His real sourceswere the poems and fragments of the Greek Anthologythat he and other poets in the Imagist circle had beenreading and, as we saw earlier, English translations ofJapanese haiku, which provided the specific formalmodel for “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord” and thisclassic expression of the Imagist aesthetic Pound claimedto have whittled down from a 30-line poem:In a Station of the MetroThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. 21And so we move on to the other editorial hopes of TheNew Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry.Had Weinberger made a broader but more discriminatingselection of poems and translations influenced byPound’s “invention of China” and arranged them in theorder in which they were made, interlarded with briefintroductory comments, his anthology could have foundservice as both “a collection of poems worth reading”and “a celebration of Chinese poetry by American poets”(27). Unfortunately, many of the selections in his anthologyhave no more merit as poetry than as translations. Tohis credit, Weinberger has included a fair share of thebetter Cathay translations, but it is not easy to find themamong the thickets of Cathay outtakes and uncollectedwork like this version of a drinking poem attributed to LiPo that is so befuddled I am unable to identify its source,and there is no list of Chinese sources to make the searchany easier:WineDew, clear as gilt jewels, hangs under the gardengrass-blades.Swift is the year, swift is the coming cold season,Life swift as the dart of a bird:Wine, wine, wine for a hundred autumns,And then no wine, no wine, and no wine. 22Pound left such work uncollected precisely to avoid havingCathay turn into a “democratic beer-garden,” as heoft complained of Amy Lowell’s appropriation of theterm Imagist to refer to anything written in free verse butespecially her own “looser work.” 23 Now, with the entrepreneurialfervor of an Amy Lowell, Weinberger hasserved up some of the poet’s best vers libre with thepickings from his dustbin.Nor has William Carlos Williams been well servedby having fifteen of his unpublished Chinese translationsincluded in The New Directions Anthology of ClassicalChinese Poetry. Vide this bizarre version of a differentLi Po drinking poem Williams, then in his mid-seventies,made with the help of an obscure first-generationChinese-American named David Rafael Wang, whowrote, we are informed, “in the Greco-Sino-Samurai-African tradition” (xxiv-xxv):Drinking TogetherWe drink in the mountain while the flowers bloom,Apitcher, a pitcher, and one more pitcher.As my head spins you get up.So be back any time with your guitar. (88)Surely there’s a typo or two in the first line. Li Po wasn’tin the mountain but among the flowers growing on it;and, despite his reputation for being “rapt with wine,” heimbibed by a cup not much larger than a shot glass. 24 Notall of their translations are as unworthy of reading as thisone, but most amply justify the good doctor’s lack ofinterest in seeing them published. Of the few exceptions,only one seems equal to Williams’s reputation as a poet:an untitled version of Li Yü’s “To the Tune ‘At the Joyof Our Meeting,’” a tz’u, or poem set to one of the populartunes of the metropolitan pleasure quarters:Silently I ascend the western pavilion.The moon hangs like a hairpin.In the deep autumn gardenThe wu-t’ung stands alone.Involute,Entangled,The feeling of departureClings like a wet leaf to my heart. (142)44 Translation Review