Subscribe[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.From Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's Cathay in full and a public domain audiobook version (iTunes link).
But how does Pound’s “fluid, diaphanous body” of “crystalline ethereality,” this mysterious Eleusinian goddess, familiar to us from Pound’s Cavalcanti and other translations, accord with the witty and realistic snapshots of Pound’s male friends in these Cantos? The “she” who “did her hair in small ringlets” is never mentioned by name, and neither are the other women in Pound’s life, beginning with H.D., known in Pound’s poetry as “Dryad.” Tellingly, the men who designed Olga’s dresses—“Decrol or Lanvin”—may be named, but Olga herself can only appear in the guise Cythera or Gea, the earth mother. “Under her influence,” writes Sieburth, “the entire Pisan landscape is eroticized into a soft-focus projection of her giant body.”Pound is the foundation of my understanding of poetry; discovering him in the college bookstore (a copy of the Selected Poems, now beat-up and coverless but still among my most valued possessions—I turned at random to "Ancient Music and was immediately hooked) was one of the formative experiences of my life, and although (as I said in a previous MeFi post on the subject) there are parts of the Cantos I'll never wade through again, it's still an indispensable work of American poetry.
Soft focus indeed! In the world of the Pisans, men are allowed to be men—absurd, charming, endearing, like “Mr James shielding himself with Mrs Hawkesby / asit were a bowl shielding itself with a walking stick” (74.298–9) or “Uncle William” (Yeats) “dawdling around Notre Dame / in search of whatever” (83.23–24), or “Mr Joyce” who “requested sample menus from the leading hotels” (77.279). Possum (Eliot), Fordie (Ford Madox Ford), Bill Carlos (William Carlos Williams): these populate the great memory poem which is the Pisan Cantos, arrested in characteristic poses so as to evoke magic moments and recognition scenes. So too, the actual places cited in the Pisans, from Venice’s “jewel box, Santa Maria Dei Miracoli” (76.271) to “the Bros Watson’s store in Clinton N. Y.” (77.19) to the “WIENER CAFÉ” on the Edgeware Road in London (80. 472) and the “cake shops in the Nevsky” (74.290), are designated by proper names that display the precision he first called for in the Imagist manifesto of 1912.
We know that Pound had seen Herbert Giles's version of the poem before he translated it. Giles, who served at one point as a British administrator in China, was with James Legge a major influence in turn-of-the century English sinology. He translated Mei Sheng's opening as:From page 6 of Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. As Eliot pointed out (not the first nor the last to do so), there are no perfect translations.
Green grows the grass upon the bank,
The willow-shoots are long and lank;
A lady in a glistening gown
Opens the casement and looks down, (qtd. in Kenner, Era 194).
These lines reveal the well-nigh inevitable Anglicization that Chinese undergoes when translated. Metrically, the switch from iambs in the second and third lines to trochees in the fourth doesn't stem from any Chinese pattern or, it would seem, from the content of the English poem. Grammatically, Giles cannot retain the ambiguity of the Chinese. Even the use of "upon" forces a prepositional assumption where the original has none. And syntactically, Giles's removal of the double words that begin each line accedes to the habits of English readers who would find such repetition odd and disruptive.
It is worth remembering that Pound had seen Giles's version and therefore that "The Beautiful Toilet" might have been quite different had he not had something to react against. Here are Pound's first four lines (the fifth has become the poem's tide):
The Beautiful Toilet
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. (Cathay, n. pag.)
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