Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Zhaoming Qian

Furthermore, in Fenollosa Notebook 15 entitled "Chinese Poetry, Notes by Pound, including translation," one will find the typescript of Pound's drafts for six of Wang Wei's poems (see Appendix).(8) The sources of these drafts are easily identifiable because their numbers - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 - correspond to those given to Fenollosa's versions contained in his Notebook 7. Although no date is given anywhere, we can still determine that these drafts came after Cathay, because for # 6, the Cathay piece, Pound gives not a translation but a brief note, in which the Latin phrase "vide Cathay" betrays a date later than Cathay.

It is worth noting that in Chinese literary history Wang Wei is known not only as a painter-poet, but, more important, as a poet with strong Zen-Buddhist leanings. True, a number of other T'ang poets, such as Li Po and Po Chu-i, also show to varying degrees the influence of Zen-Buddhist thinking. But it is in the poetry of Wang Wei that we find the full development of a poetics based on the Zen-Buddhist conceptions of nonbeing as being, emptiness as form, and transcendence of the duality between self and world. Fenollosa, who had studied Zen-Buddhist doctrines, was obviously aware of some of the religious implications in Wang Wei's poems. To his word-for-word translation of the seventh poem "Painful Heat," for instance, he has appended such a note: "There must be some Buddhist/Zen conception here, not nearly Confucian. Possibly derived from Roshin [Lao Tzu]".(9) The piece turns out to be one of Wang Wei's best-known Buddhist poems. Pauline Yu in discussing Wang Wei's religious dimension uses this same piece as an example (Poetyy 124).

What might have first caught Pound's eye in these versions of Wang Wei, however, are their distinct imagist-vorticist qualities - their painterliness, their concision, their suggestivity, and their detachment. (In fact Wang Wei derived these strengths from Taoism/Zen-Buddhism.) When Pound began making his modern epic, imagist-vorticist works still had a strong fascination for him. In a note to his "Vorticism" article, he implied that he would like to write "a long vorticist poem" (GB 94). We have reason to believe, therefore, that he had the intention of borrowing certain imagist-vorticist colors for his Ur-Cantos as he studied Wang Wei in 1916 and 1917. (Pound obviosly equates Wang Wei's Taoism/Zen-Buddhism with his imagism/vorticism.) As Reed Way Dasenbrock observes, "Vorticism and Taoism could be prarallel, perhaps, only in a cosmos organized by Ezra Pound" (226). "Farm Field Pleasure," a version of Wang Wei in Fenollosa Notebook 7, # 5, which Pound was to work and rework, shows this:

Farm field pleasure 7poems

1 of them

encloses

Peach crimson also contains inn rain

Peach blossoms are crimson, and also contain the rain

that has lodged there (in the night)(in the petals)

also En

Willow green nearly belts spring smoke

Willow is green, and also belts in with its silhouette

this spring mists

(paralleslism of words of Omar [Khayyam] lines)