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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Eric Hayot

This would seem to suggest that Eliot's understanding of cross-cultural influence is more complicated than Said's. But Said's complication is not in the same place as Eliot's. Said never demands that the West stop representing the East. When he declares that the "brute reality [of Eastern nations and cultures] is obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West," Said puts the West in a difficult position, one it cannot escape simply by shedding the burden of representation. Even when the representation seems substantially accurate, it still must confront the strictures of orientalism. For instance, if I reproduce (as Pound did) Chinese poetry's tendency to make each line a complete sentence in my English verse, I am taking something from genuine Chinese poetry, and yet I am still (if I announce to the world that my methodology is Chinese) participating in a Western invention of China--I am helping the West create a China as it knows it. While any single Western perception of China m ay be accurate and true to the real China, it is also necessarily inflected to some degree by Western ethnocentrism, in its reception as well as its production. (The reverse of this is also the case: just because something is orientalist doesn't mean it's not true.)

In both cases, the basic problem revolves around the possibility or impossibility of truth in representation, more specifically the capacity of representations to seem real while being unreal. What is for Eliot, however, an ontological and aesthetic problem becomes for Said a political and historical one. This difference depends as much on the difference between Eliot's and Said's historical periods and interests as on anything else. Ultimately, the demand or need for representation outweighs the fear that it will fall to adequately represent its object; both Eliot and Said are well aware of the repercussions of that demand.

There is a persistent tendency in Pound criticism to oppose orientalism to modernism, and especially to defend modernism against orientalism. Against this tendency I have been trying to find in both Eliot and Said a common attempt to solve the problem of representation. When it comes to Pound, such an approach is interesting because it offers a way to think about the persistent need to define Chineseness (or its absence) in Pound's work, a need shared by both Pound and his critics. Its persistence also offers an opportunity to consider the terms of critical takes on East/West influence as they are articulated and understood through Pound's work. The primary articulation of those understandings has come through reaction to Pound's translations, especially Cathay, to which I now turn.

CATHAY AND THE TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE

Cathay was 14 translations of Chinese poems gathered together in a flimsy volume the color of a brown paper bag. It was also, in 1915, a radical example of the new English poetry, a substantial break from traditional Anglo-American poetics and previous translations of Chinese. Its most remarkable aspect today is its endurance. Pound may have been the inventor of Chinese poetry for Eliot's time; he remains in many ways its inventor for our time as well. There are no substantial corrections or revisions to the theory of Chinese translation that he introduced and developed in Cathay.