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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Eric Hayot

Such claims, which offer a powerful explanatory narrative of the history of Western literature, have been less often applied to twentieth-century literature (and to modernism) than they have to the writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Orientalism's appearance in the titles of two books about Pound and China may not point to a general trend in scholarship, but it offers the opportunity to consider the value of the paired terms modernism and orientalism as a frame for thinking about Pound and China, the modernist and the Oriental.

Inconveniently, Pound, who said much about genre and style, said very little about his relation to China, and therefore makes a poor theoretical foil for Said (even though he makes a good subject of investigation). Both Kern and Qian therefore choose another figure as the avatar of a modernist conception of literature's relation to the Orient: T. S. Eliot. This choice depends largely on one sentence, which appears in Eliot's 1928 introduction to Pound's Selected Poems: "Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." This entrancing declaration has exerted such an influence on Pound scholarship that it is nearly impossible to find work in the field that does not cite it. And yet, as Kern points out, Eliot's remark, "often quoted as unqualified praise,... actually seems intended to indicate the limits of what Pound had accomplished" (3). Eliot had written:

As for Cathay, it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. I suspect that every age has had, and will have, the same illusion concerning translations, an illusion which is not altogether an illusion either. When a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been "translated"; we believe that through this translation we really at last get the original.... His [Pound's] translations seem to be--and that is the test of excellence--translucencies: we think we are closer to the Chinese than when we read, for instance, Legge. I doubt this: I predict that in three hundred years Pound's Cathay will be a "Windsor Translation" as Chapman and North are now "Tudor Translations": it will be called (and justly) a "magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry" rather than a "translation." Each generation must translate for itself.

This is as much as to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a Chinese-poetry-in-itself, waiting for some ideal translator who shall be only translator. (14-15)

Eliot says at both the beginning and end of this quotation that Pound effectively "invented" Chinese poetry for his readers. In writing that the poems seem like "translucencies" and imagining Cathay a "magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry," Eliot makes clear the degree to which the sheer force of Pound's language makes its China believable. Eliot is thus in the difficult position of making two points at once: first, that Cathay is not Chinese poetry, and second, that it is great poetry. The effect of the second of these points is to make the first difficult to hear.