"THE STONE IS ALIVE IN MY HAND" ?
EZRA POUND'S CHINESE TRANSLATIONS
Critical opinions are at variance concerning Ezra Pound's
Chinese translations. Those who are familiar with the Chinese
language either claim "the English of Pound has loosed itself com-
pletely from any Chinese mooring" or that his translations "are
based on purely speculative or fictitious, rather than real, etymology."'
And those of literary repute hail him either as "the inventor of
Chinese poetry for our time" or "the first translator of our age."2
Before we are readily persuaded to join camp with either, it is
necessary that we scrutinize the works in question and formulate
our own judgment. Perhaps we may find in the end that the two
seemingly opposed opinions are not entirely irreconcilable, but rather
fair presentations of the two sides of the same coin.
Pound's  Cathay  (1915) is the first fruitful fusion of Chinese
perception and the imagist technique. The material for Cathay was
drawn "from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the deci-
pherings of the professors Mori and Ariga," but the vision and the
creative labor which brought it into a poetical reality were Pound's.
Despite the Nipponized Chinese names and minor inaccuracies, the
poems won unprecedented praise from all quarters. Ford Madox
Ford observed: "If these are original verses, then Mr. Pound is the
greatest poet of this day." He went on to say:
The poems in "Cathay" are things of a supreme beauty.
What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new
breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our
poetry, that new breath these poems bring . . .  .3
And T. S. Eliot dubbed Pound the "inventor of Chinese poetry
for our time" because the excellence of Chinese poetry an  sick  had
not been available to the English world until the publication of
1 George Kennedy, "Penollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character,"  Yale  Literary
Magazine, CXXVI (Dec. 1958), 36; Chen Sbih-hsiang, "Review," Literature  East and
West,  II (Spring, 1955), 16.
2 T. S. Eliot, "Introduction," in  Selected Poems of  Ezra Pound (London:
Faber, 1928), p. 14; Richard Wilbur, on  the blurb of  The  Classic  Anthology Defined
by Confucius, tr.  by  Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954).
3  T.  S. Eliot, Ezra Pound:  His Metric and Poetry  (New York: Knopf, 1917),
p. 26.
278
Cathay.  To be sure there had been other English translators of
Chinese poetry long before Pound, but it was Pound who provided
new advances demanded by a new age. Indeed, no specific sensibility
or perception is needed to detect the natural freshness and the
modern temper of one and the outmoded and bustling bad taste of
another version of the same poem by Mei Sheng:
Pound's:
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.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;
And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.4
Giles:
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
The roses on her cheek blush bright,
Her rounded arm is dazzling white;
A singing-girl in early life,
And now a careless roues wife ... .
Ali, if he does not mind his own,
He'll find some day the bird has flown!5
The success of  Cathay  gave Pound more courage with which
to tackle the more somber Confucian classics, which were often
incised upon stone tablets by decree of Chinese rulers. Translation
to Pound is not merely "chewing food for others," as described by
the great Buddhist translator Kumarajiva (344-413 A.D.); to him it
is like grafting from the Choice arbor for the sake of a richer cultural
fructification. When Ta  Hio  (1928), one of the "Four Books" of
Confucius, was ready for the press, Pound urged his editor, Glenn
Hughes, to state in the prospectus: "In this brochure (or chapbook)
4 Personae: the  Collected Poems of Ezra  Pound (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1926), p. 128.
5 Herbert Giles,  History of Chinese Literature (New  York:  Appleton-Century,
1933), pp. 97-98. 279
Mr. Pound does for the first of the Confucian classics what he did, in
Cathay,  for Rihaku."6 Pound version of the Ta  Hio  in a sense is
not merely a translation. Rather it is an eclectic critical evaluation
by means of translation. His altruistic motive for the task is clearly
stated in a letter to Rene Taupin:
. . . et je viens de donner un nouveau version du Ta  Hio
de Confucius, parce que j trouve des formulations ddees
que me paraissent utile pour civilizer lmerique (tentatif.)
(Letters,  p. 217)
In spite of his great admiration for Guillaume Pauthier, "a
magnificent scholar," and James Legge, whose stupendous translation
of Confucius is a "monument," Pound feels "no one has brought out
the contrasts of style from the magnificence of citation to terseness
and lucidity of Kung statements." Admittedly he depended upon a
poet intuition and mastery of style to improve upon existing versions
of James Legge and Guillaume Pauthier. And he followed "the
general principle of not putting in mere words that occur in the
original when they contribute nothing to the SENSE of the
translation" (Letter, p. 214). Although there was initial interest
in the concrete images of the "ideograms", it was not fully carried out.
He did, however, sacrifice terseness in order to bring out the con-
crete imagery of light from the ideogram OA  ming (translated by
Legge as "illustrious"), which is composed of the two celestial
bodies, 0 sun and ) moon, by tagging onto the attributives
the phrase, "which we received from the sky" in this passage:
....King Wen succeeded in developing the luminous
principle of reason which we receive from the sky, and of
making it shine with full glory.
....King Tching-thang kept his gaze fixed ceaseless upon
this bright gift of intelligence which we receive from the
sky.
, Yao was able to develop and to make to shine in all its
brilliance the sublime principle of intelligence which we
receive from the sky.8
Pound so-called "etymosinology" (coined by Achilles Fang)
6 Letters of  Ezra Pound, 1907 .1941,  ed.  D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt,
1950), p. 214.
7 Ezra Pound, "Mang Tze or the Ethics of Mencius," Criterion XVII (July
1938), 605.
8 Ta Rio: The  Great  Learning (Seattle: Univ. of  Wash.,  1928),  p.  tr.
280
may have been conceived by Fenollosa essay on the "Written
Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry" (1919), but it took a
long period of gestation before it became a method of translation. In
his essay "Meng Tsze" (1938) Pound describes how the method
evolved:
During August and the first half of September 1937, I
isolated myself with the Chinese text of the three books
of Confucius, Ta  Hio, Analects,  and the  Unwavering
Middle  and that of Mencius, together with an enormously
learned crib but no dictionary . .
When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I
had only the book of the characters and the radicals to go
on from. And my contention is that the learned have known
too much and seen a little too little . .
Without knowing at least the nature of ideogram I
don think anyone can suspect what is wrong with their
current translations. Even with what I have known for some
time I did not sufficiently ponder it . . . .
I do . . object to under-translation. I do  not  think
that I have a better mind than Confucius . . . When I get
a good idea from the ideograms I do not think it is my idea
. .. If my views are better than those in the ideograms,
pray do accept them, but accept also the burden of proving
it.9
The above passage is quoted at length, because I believe it serves
as a transition for Pound increasing use of the so-called ideogrammic
techniques in translation.
Ta Hsueh  or Studio Integrate  (1942), a later, Italian version of
Ta Hio, shows Pound growing interest in Chinese etymology. The
"ideogram"  Afl ming  is explained in a note: "Ideogramma del
capitolo: sole luna illuminare;" the ideogram  itp  eking
(calm and tranquil) is rendered here as "afferrare lzzurro" or
"afferrato azzurro,"  because half of the ideogram is (meaning
blue or "azzurro") and the other half is  (originally picture of
two hands grappling at each other, and thus "afferrare".) By the
9 Criterion XVII, 604-5.
10 Ta-Hseuh: Ta  s'eu dai gakur  studio  integrale.  Version italiana di Ezra Pound
et di Alberto Luchini. (Rapallo: Enailiani,  1942),  p.  9.
281
ame process a quotation from the  Shih  Ching which reads in his
928 version:
The prince whose conduct
is full of equity and wisdom
Will see men in the four corners of
the earth
imitating his rightness
; transformed into
La sua occervanza e la sua pratica
son senza imperfezioni.
Nell'osservar la guiustizia
Non devia.
Precis() come it sole su un meridiano,
Fissa e ordina lo stato
Fino ai quttro angoli.i
Besides the difference in length, the major difference  in  the
wo versions rests with the varied translation of the ideogram  ,t
hih.  In the first version it is given the conventional meaning of  a
opula "is", whereas in the second it is given the full treatment of
tymological analysis in the Poundian fashion, because its top is the
ymbol of  a  (the sun), and its lower part is (meaning
xact or correct). The same ideogram is further explained as "sole
al meridiano 7:: con precisione" in a list of thirteen ideograms
ppended to the text.
The "etymosinological" experimentation here is yet conducted
with restraint when compared with a still later version,  The Great
)igest (1951) in which the same verse quoted above reads:
He practiced equity without
its making him feel
That a javelin were being
thrust into  his heart."
pedal attention is paid now to the ideogram  i& to  (meaning
rror or mistake) which is composed of r y  (heart) and 'C .
Another verse in the same book (p. 41) praising the virtue
11 Ta  Rio,  p. 26; Ta-Hsueh, P. 20.12 Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest, tr. Ezra Pound
\Toxfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), p. 65. Italics mine.
282
of the ruler Wen Wang, contains a unified and sustained imagery of
an agrarian scene:
As a field of grain
White-topped in even order,
The little flowing ears of grain
So glorious was King Wan,
Coherent, splendid and reverent
In  his comings to rest, in his bournes.
Shi King, III, I, I, 4.
The first th ee lines of the verse are all derived from a single
ideogram  mu (glorious, majestic, or profound) which is a com-
posite of /.. (grain), 7 (white), Al(small), and
(originally meaning hair or tassel, and by  a  stretch of imagination,
"the little flowing ears"). This imagery of a rich harvest may not
be intended in the original ode, but it certainly is a great improve-
ment of the general platitude conveyed in the 1928 version of the
same:
Wide and deep was the virtue of Waen-wang
That for all his splendour
Lost not the point of his aim;
Who turned not aside in his mind
Till his deed were brought to the full.13
The 1951 edition of Confucius offers a more whimsical instance
of Pound's etymological interpretation, which is intolerable to most
sinologists.
The Odes say:
In our ceremonial plays,
In the ritual dances
with tiger masks and spears
The archtype kings are not forgotten."
In  this instance, Pound's anthropological finds of the "ceremonial
plays," "the ritual dances/ with tiger masks and spears" are imbed-
ded in the ideogram   hsi (meaning pla or play-acting). How-
ever here it is only part of a binome   , a variation for
D 064-  hu,  which is an exclamation like "alas." It takes
unique poetic vision to re-present a vivid ritualistic scene of a
13 Ta Hio, p. 14.
14  The Great Digest,  p. 45.
283
primitive society long forgotten by posterity."
"The Analects of Confucius"  (1950) is another of Pound
Confucian translations which climaxed his enthusiasm in the ideo-
grammic analysis. The book opens with ". study with the seasons
winging past, is not this pleasant?" My objection here is not so much
his etymologic analysis but rather the lack of thoroughness in his
analysis. "Winging past" obviously stems from the upper part of the
ideogram I  hsi meaning practice; but if the lower part,  or
tfi  an archaic form of "self", is given consideration, then its full
significance can be grasped: "Learn and practiceike the young
trying its own wings ...." In leaving part of the ideogram out Pound
was doing exactly what he objected to in othersundertranslation."
The last, and most ambitious of Pound Chinese translations is
certainly The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius  (1954). Its
original, the  Shih Ching,  owing to its archaism and textual cor-
ruption, is considered one of the most difficult of the Confucian
classics. Yet because of its unsurpassable poetic beauty, its sanction
accorded to it by Confucius, and the social, political, and moral
implications heaped upon it by centuries of commentaries, this
collection of 305 poems has tempted every esteemed sinologist to
try his hand. 16
Pound complained, "Translations of the Odes are so bare one thinks
the translator must have missed something and very annoying not
to be able to see what."  (Letters, p, 292)
Having read Pound previous Chinese translations, one is
surprised with the comparatively less frequent use of quasi-etymology,
although he has not completely outgrown this early obsession.
Possibly because most of the odes were already laden with concrete,
visual imagery and "phalanx of particulars," to add more embellish-
ment would be like adding legs to the body of a snake. Be this as it
may, examples of "ideogrammic" analysis still abound. He could not,
for instance, resist to translate: (a particular type of bream)
into "square fish," since the ideogram is composed of  1, fish and
square; tx, (big rats) into "stone-head rats," since
the first ideogram is composed of stone and k head; At
(peach-tree) into "omen trees," since this ideogram is composed of
15 Concerning this "mistranslation" of the exclamatory expression I remonstrated
with Pound in 1952, and was gratified to find that it was omitted in Ode 269. I was
thoroughly mortified ten years later when I had occasion to see an Italian motion
picture, a travelogue of China, in the western region of which identical ceremonies
described by Pound are still enacted after a successful tiger hunt.
16 Among the translators of the  Ching are: Bernard Karlgren, James Legge,
Cramner-Byng, Romilly Men, S. Couvreur, V. von Strauss, P. Lacharme, and W.Jennings.
284
tree and  A  signs on oracle-bones used for divination, and
thus omen.17
A subtler interpretation of the ideogram is exemplified in the
opening verse of the Classic Anthology:
"Hid! Hid!" the fish-hawk saith,
by isle in Ho the fish-hawk saith:
"Dark and clear,
Dark and clear,
So shall be the prince fare.
(Ode 1)
"Hid! Hid!" no doubt is Pound onomatopaeic attempt to reproduce
the fish-hawk mating call, which sounded "kuan kuan" to the
ancient Chinese poet. Since it is pointless to imitate a sound which is
alien and meaningless to his .
pictograph  kuan  (a double-door with a cross bar passing
through the slots like a shuttle passing through the warp) and
brings out its meaning of "close or closed" which by extension
becomes "secluded", "hidden" or "hid."
An occasional, unobtrusive use of the ideogrammic deciphering
to create a concrete imagery for metaphorical purposes is com-
mendable, provided it does no violence to original intention of the
poem. But no poetic licence can justify his rendering the ideogram
giL  fu into "robe" in the same ode in which it loses its usual
meaning of "robe" and serves as a non-functional particle for the
purpose of rhyme.
To seek and not find
as a dream in his mind,
thinking how her robe should be,
distantly, to toss and turn,
to toss and turn.
(Ode 1)
Albeit plausible, sustained imagery, it changes  the  pervading
mood and morale of the poem. In the original the "tossing" and
"turning" are descriptive of the prince restlessness; Pound has
unwittingly attributed them to the imaginary robe of the "prince
fare".
17 Odes Nos. 10, 113, 6 in  The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius,  tr.
Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1954).285
Chinese scholars who hold every word in the Shih Ching
sacred find Pound "charlatanic" translation an act of desecration
 rehacking of the revered Chinese monument into a Statue of
Liberty! Such allegations are justifiable especially in the following
verse, in which the forehead of the mythical animal has become
its "path", and its horn, "tooth":
Kylin foot bruiseth no root,
Ohe, Kylin.
In Kylin path, no wrath,
Ohe, Kylin.
Kylin tooth no harm doth,
Ohe, Kylin.
Wan line
and clan.
(Ode II)
Yet among those who are critical of Pound Chinese, some
are even less equipped with the language than he. Professor L. S.
Dembo, for instance, inadvertently betrays his own limitations when
he tries to disclose Pound false etymology. True enough that the
word "azure" in "Lady of azure thought" (0d 1  42) is part of the
ideogram citing, which is composed ofd   ch'ing  and
cheng.  But when he informs us that "strictly speaking,  ch'ing  is a
phonetic, not a pictograph,"" he is trapped in his own ostentation.
Indeed, there is a host of compound ideograms in hich
ch'ing  functions as a "phonetic and not a signific," (e.g.
A , , ,  etc.) Unfortunately
there are a few exceptions in which  ch'ing  is unmistakably
a signific. The ideogram happens t. be one of these-
, and
the entire repertory.
Incidentally, Dembo shares,another weakness of Pound. His
explanation of the ideogram Ali  dean,  rendered by Pound as
"Lady of silken word," in ,the second stanza of the same poem,
illustrates his inattentiveness to detail.
18 L. S. Dembo,  The  Confucian  Odes of Ezra  Pound (Berkeley & Los Angeles:
Univ. of CaSfornia, 1963), p. 28.
286
The bottom part of the character -s indeed the word
for lady; the left and right middle  A is the root affixed
to all words referring to silk, and s that affixed to all
words associated with speakingo that with the exception
of the top --" (meaning roof), the character, pictorially,
can be made to come out as Pound says it does, although the
sense that he has given it is clearly not that intended in the
original.19
In his eagerness to castigate Pound, he has rashly chopped off the
indispensable top of  6  for "roof," which is and not ?1-
Without its top the ideograph  a  will be a headless ghost non-
existent in the realm of Chinese language.
Language incompetence, however, does not obliterate the use-
fulness of Dembo book, which contains some poignant critical
insight and sound analyses of many poems in the  Anthology.  His
attitude towards Pound is somewhat ambivalent. He seems to believe
that Pound, essentially a lyrical poet, is successful so long as he
takes advantage of his lyrical talent; that Pound failure rests in
his use of colloquialism, slang, and trite expressions. To me, the
apparent discordance in the various modes of expression, as well
as the medley of the metrics in the  Anthology  could very well be
intentional. After all, the original poems represent a people of
various social strata, distantly removed in time and space not only
from us but from one another in that vast Chou empire during a
period of several hundred years.
Ever since the Shih Ching  received the sanction of Confucius,
it has been studied and interpreted by Chinese scholars like a Bible,
in spite of the fact that 10 of the odes originally were folk songs
created by simple folk to express the sorrows and joys of their
everyday life. Through the passage of time, the language has become
archaic, and the original ideas have been fossilized by moral and
political interpretations. Pound attempts to bring the petrified
beauty into life, and he succeeds by not allowing his own personality
to dominate the scene. Instead, he conjures up  personae  within the
range of his imagination and creates the characters (and  their
speech rhythms) to approximate their Chinese counterparts. Thus we
hear the southern drawl of a hero-worshiper:
Don chop that pear tree,
Don spoil that shade;
19 Ibid. p. 29.   287

aust
Thaar's where ole Marse Shao used to sit,
Lord, how I wish he was judgin' yet.
(Ode 16)
Or the uncouth and weary tongue of a hill-billy:
Ole Brer Rabbit watchin' his feet,
Rabbit net's got the pheasant beat;
When I was young and a-startin' life
I kept away from trouble an' strife
But then, as life went on,
Did I meet trouble?
aye, my son;
Wish I could sleep till life was done.
(Ode 70?"Aliter")
Or the unrestrained complaint of the pauper:
North gate, sorrow's edg e,
Purse kaput, nothing to pledge.
I'll say I am broke
none knows how, heaven's stroke.
(Ode 40)
Or the speech of a disgusted migrant farm-hand:
Yaller bird, let my corn alone,
Yana bird, let my crawps alone,
These folks here won't let me eat,
I wanna go back whaar I can meet
The folks I used to know at home,
I got a home an'  I  wanna' git goin'.
(Ode 187)
Pound does not depend upon  dramatis personae  alone, with
their particular dialects and accents, to capture moments of reality,
or the equivalent of reality; he recreates a series of lively visions or
aesthetic moments through word magic, music and poetry. Poem 95
gives the quick, jubilant tempo much in keeping with the frolicking
young crowd  in  a pastoral setting:
Chen and Wei
flow thereby
touching together,
Man and girl, girl and man
to pluck valerian:
288
"The play?" says she.
"Seen it," says he.
"If so, let's go
Over Wei
pleasantly."
Playing there, girls and men
Prescribe this mutual medicine.20
end both the auditory and visual imageries of the following poem
strike home the forlorn state of mind of a forsaken girl after she
has been figuratively scotched:
Dry grass, in vale:
"alas!
"I met a man,
met
a man
"Scorched, alas, ere it could grow"
A lonely girl pours out her woe.
"Even in water-meadow dry."
Flow her tears abundantly,
Solitude's no remedy.
(Ode 69)
And through the power of metamorphosis the song of a common-
place tryst is clad in rare lyric beauty:
Sun's in the East,
her loveliness
Comes here
To undress.
Twixt door and screen
at moon -rise
I hear
Her, departing sighs.
(Ode 99)
Slang and colloquial idiom, and even levity of expression
20 "Mutual medicine" is Pound own product sprouted out of the ideograms
slum ya , commonly translated as peony or peonies which, however, isbelieved to have medicinal value. Some commentators have also discovered that in
archaic Chinese the term could mean a species of scented grass symbolizing love and
union. 289
(frequently used in "Folk Songs," and occasionally in "Smaller
Odes") are replaced by archaism and solemnity in the "Greater Odes"
and, in particular, "Odes of the Temple." Typical is Ode 235, a
panegyric which begins:
Bright, aloft,  Wen, glitteringly,
Chou, tho' an old regime, get new decree;
Had not Chou been there like the sun's fountainhead
the supernal seals had never caught sun's turn
that King Wen tread
up, down, to stand
with the heavenly veils to left hand and right hand.
And the epic grandeur scintillates in lines such as these:
Mankind began when Kiang Yuan poured wine
to the West sun and circling air
and, against barrenness, trod the Sky's spoor.
Then, as a sudden fragrance funnelled in
and to its due place,
a thunder-bolt took body there to be
and dawn Hou Tsi, whom she bare on his day
and suckled presently.
(Ode 245)
Pound has by now progressed a long way since his initial
pilgrimage to "Cathay". When he was translating  Cathay,  he "had
no inkling of the technique of sound in Chinese poetry;" by 1937
he was convinced that music "must exist or have existed in Chinese
poetry." (Letters, p. 293) Even though it is impossible to reproduce
the music of the original odes, Pound finds it possible to approximate
the various Chinese  metrical patterns  with the traditional folk songs,
ballads, panegyrics, and hymns, which are familiar to his Western
audience.
In his first chapter of Ezra  Pound: Poet as Sculptor  (1964),
Donald Davie draws an interesting comparison of Ode 246 with a
sixteenth century English folk song "Back and side go bare, go bare."
He points out shrewdly that in translating these Chinese poems;
Pound has to search within the Western literary tradition for
equivalents to approximate the Chinese sentiment. But when the
21 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound:  Poet as Sculptor  (New York: Oxford Univ.,1964), P
p. 12, 8-14 passim.
290
Chinese sentiment goes beyond the range of Western perception and
can no longer be paralleled, Pound deviates from the conventional
pattern "so as to jar the reader into attending to what is said."21
While agreeing with Davie's keen observation on Pound's
technical mastery as a poet, I am mindful of Pound's violation of
linguistic niceties, which warrant the righteous indignation of the
formidable scholars and sinologists. To vindicate Pound the culprit
as a translator, his strongest defense is perhaps that of Mencius
(372-289 B.C.), who warned millennia ago against over-literal as well
as over-fanciful interpretations of the Odes: "Do not insist on the
rhetoric so as to distort the language, nor insist on their language so
as to distort their intention  (city),  but try with your thoughts to
comprehend that intention." 22 Whatever his inaccuracies in trans-
lation, Pound's attempt is to comprehend the poems. To what degree
he has succeeded is a matter of opinion. However, one thing is
certain. He has put into practice the theory he preached:
The poet, in dealing with his own time, must also see
to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must
prepare for new advances along the line of true metaphor,
that is interpretive metaphor, or image, as diametrically
opposed to untrue, or ornamental metaphor.23
The best attribute to Pound's Chinese translations is perhaps
summed up succinctly in his own words: "The stone is alive in my
hand." Without his breathing life into them, the ancient Chinese
classics would remain inaccessible to the West, like those stone
tablets upon which they were inscribed.
University of Oregon   ANGELA JUNG PALANDRI
22  Quoted by Achilles Fang, "Introduction" in Classic  Anthology, p. xvi.
23 Ernest Penose, The  Chinese Written Character as a Medium  for Poetry
(New York: Spate Dollar Series, 1951), p. 73, n.291