Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Eric Hayot

In this paragraph, Yip contrasts two types of information that come across in translation, a difference perhaps clearest between the second and third sentences, which differentiate "all the details" from "luminous details." Yip says that while Pound could not get "all the details," he reproduced the ones that were "luminous," that is to say, the ones that illuminate the "essential poems." Yip puts "essential poems" in scare quotes, as if to warn the reader against taking that idea too seriously. But "essential" seems to be exactly what Yip means when he says that Pound preserves the "'cuts and turns' of the mind in the originals." He is claiming that Pound, while not following the exact letter (all the details) of the Chinese poems, has nonetheless seen enough to illuminate their spirit. Both "essence" and "cuts and turns" suggest that Pound in fact reaches the heart of the Chinese originals as such and not simply as he knew them, that he manages to retain the crux of the original even though he misses out o n some of the details. Like Tiresias, whose blindness produces a heightened ability to "see" into the unknown and there discern the truth of things, Pound as translator appears to know China with an understanding epistemologically beyond book learning, beyond his own ignorance or Fenollosa's mistakes.

The strictures of Kenner's simple division, English product/Chinese product, have been passed by. And while it may make some sort of binary sense to think about Cathay as either English or Chinese, the most interesting scholars of Pound seem to wind up somewhere in a complicated and confusing middle ground. For instance, Guyng-Ryul Jang makes Yip's point more boldly: "we can tentatively, but safely, conclude that Pound could invent Cathay--not in spite of his ignorance of the Chinese language, but because of his ignorance of the Chinese language" (353). In this world of learning turned upside down, ignorance allows Pound to avoid being trapped by a desire for a literal or accurate translation. Freed from the shackles of knowledge, Pound can discern the spirit of the original Chinese, leading Jang to conclude that "Pound is truly 'an inventor of Chinese poetry,' even though he may be a 'devious' translator, as far as Cathay is concerned" (362). [5]

Jang's acknowledgment that Pound may be a "devious" translator would appear to grant that the carrying over of the Chinese originals to Europe does not happen without distortion. Following Pound's own sense of what could come through translation, Jang declares that Pound might have adequately translated the visual quality and logic of the Chinese originals, but that reproducing their rhythm or their music would be nearly impossible. And yet Jang's Pound displays an uncanny ability to reproduce the music of Chinese poetry. While translations by Waley, William Acker, and James Hightower do not sound "natural" to the "mind's ears" of the English reader (352), Pound's modifications of the Chinese original give the reader some impression of its musicality.