A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations; or follows it.
âEzra Pound
The translation and appropriation of Chinese poetry by some English and American writers in the early decades of this century form the subject of this book. I shall be concerned as much with English translation of Chinese poetry per se as with the relationship between this body of translation from the Chinese and the developing poetics and practices of what is usually referred to as âImagism,â as much with the question of historical influence or ascription as with certain interpretive and critical aspects of this correlative relationship.1 Critics and commentators have often emphasized the direct influence of Chinese poetry upon the theory and practice of Imagism, attributing to Imagist poets in general and Ezra Pound in particular the perception in Chinese poetry of the essential qualities and principles for rejuvenating English poetry in the early decades of the century. In his informative and valuable âIntroductionâ (1968) to his Poems of the Late Tâang, for example, the noted scholar A.C. Graham observes, âThe art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Poundâs Cathay (1915), Arthur Waleyâs One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), and Amy Lowellâs Fir Flower Tablets (1921).â2 Graham thus echoes T.S. Eliotâs judgment in 1928 that âChinese poetry, as we know it to-day, is something invented by Ezra Pound.â3
In the process of poetic translation and assimilation it is possible now, retrospectively, to recognize how these Anglo-American writers had construed and appropriated certain aspects of classical Chinese poetry according to their own preconceptions and creative needs. Yet when the results of such translation or adaptation are successful English poems in their own right, it is often tempting to assume that they are in fact closely and directly derived from their Chinese models. In this book, such assumptions and their poetic and critical consequences will be closely examined and tested against the evidence. For creative misreading, or âmisprision,â for that matter, can be very successful and influential, so that historically a corpus of translations or adaptations from the Chinese can itself become an invisible tradition and establish for the Western reader a particular mode of poetic perception and canon of composition. Writing in 1965, Donald Davie offered a salutary warning that âthere is a sort of illusion (a very happy one, of course) which explains why Chinese poetry so often reads well in English dressâ: âThe quality of Chinese poetry is exactly that quality which our poetry, in the present century, has adapted itself specifically to secure. In particular, one of the 20th-century English poetic styles, imagist vers libre, might have been (and in fact it partly was) devised deliberately to give the translator from the Chinese just what he wants and needs to perform intelligently.â4 Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, and Amy Lowell were all influential in shaping this perception, and because Pound himself influenced Waley and Lowell and was by far the more original poetic intelligence, it is upon his early development and practice that this book will concentrate. This introductory chapter, in particular, will provide a closely demonstrated chronology in order to show up the various distinct stages, which often tend to be blurred, of the Imagist movement in relation to the work of Chinese translations.
In the immediately preceding historical context of Western literary culture, Chinese poetry was first invoked by some of the French symbolist poets during the second half of the nineteenth century. ThĂ©ophile Gautier, for example, composed a number of poems in which he expounded a new poetic of âhardnessââa quality he perceived to be inherent in Chinese poetryâas opposed to the prevailing didacticism in French poetry of the time. Emaux et CamĂ©es (1851), his poems embodying such new poetic principles, were later to be recommended by Pound as the model to emulate.5 His daughter, Judith Gautier, produced highly influential French adaptations and imitations of Chinese poems published as Le Livre de Jade (1867), but Gautierâs French versions had only a tenuous relation to their supposed Chinese originals.6
By the end of the nineteenth century there already existed a fairly large corpus of English translations from classical Chinese poetry. These were largely done by professional sinologists, chief among whom were James Legge and Herbert Giles.7 Neither of these two sinologists entertained any serious literary pretensions, yet they did not translate exclusively for fellow sinologists, for they also aimed at a much larger, non-professional readership. The forms of poetic expression which Legge and Giles adopted in their Chinese translations were invariably appropriated and transferred, often in a much diluted form, from mainstream Victorian âpoeticâ treatment. As such their versions were a typical product, and often a second-hand rehashing, of the reassuringly familiar and conventional âpoeticâ staple of the Victorian era. Thus the Chinese poems translated seemed well within normative English poeticism, with recognizably familiar features of meter, rhyme, and poetic diction, and whatever strangeness and otherness that might have existed in the original Chinese all but vanished, except in the immediately detectable exoticism in names of persons and places and in a certain kind of landscape imagery. As J.M. Cohen says, âthe Victorians conferred on all works alike the brown varnish of antiquarianism.â8
The beginning of this century saw the first burgeoning of Anglo-American interest in classical Chinese poetry, and there followed numerous volumes of English translations from the Chinese. There appeared Helen Waddellâs Lyrics from the Chinese (1913), a volume of adaptations mostly based on the English versions of Legge and the Latin of PĂšre Lacharme. Waddell remarked of certain Chinese poems adapted therein that they were âsurely snatches of some Chinese âRubaiyat.ââ The following, for example:
The world is weary, hasting on its road;
Is it worth while to add its cares to thine?
Seek for some grassy place to pour the wine,
And find an idle hour to sing an ode.9
Other volumes of Chinese translations in this period include those by Charles Budd, Launcelot A. Cranmer-Byng, and W.J.B. Fletcher.10 These translations invariably continued the Victorian tradition of âpoeticâ treatment established by Legge and Giles, and the debased Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite line of archaic diction and exoticism.
But the whole situation changed radically when classical Chinese poetry began to exert considerable influence upon the development of modern English and American poetic composition in the second decade of this century: classical Chinese poetry was enlisted into the avant-garde movement of poetic innovation, specifically the program of Imagism as advocated chiefly by its central figure Ezra Pound, who published his Cathay translations in 1915, and to a lesser extent also by Amy Lowell, who a little later put out a volume entitled Fir-FlowerTablets (1921), done in collaboration with Florence Ayscough. There also appeared at about the same time a large body of translations from Chinese poetry by the English scholar and translator Arthur Waley, in various volumes, starting with the privately printed Chinese Poems of 1916 and including One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), More Translations from the Chinese (1919), and The Temple and Other Poems (1923). Waleyâs Chinese translations were no doubt meant to meet the challenge represented by Poundâs Cathay. Though initially he also translated a number of poems by Li Po,11 Waley soon proceeded to produce a far greater number of poems by Po ChĂŒ-i,12 and eventually completed a fairly representative sample of traditional Chinese poetry as evidenced in his 1946 selection Chinese Poems. Waley tacitly criticized and challenged Poundâs taste in translating almost solely from Li Po by disputing Li Poâs own standing in the Chinese poetic tradition: âI venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give either the first or second place to Li Po.â13 Waley preferred Po ChĂŒ-iâs more prosaic and colloquial poems and praised Poâs simpler style, his freedom from archaisms and literary allusions.14 But even with Po ChĂŒ-i, Waley only selected the simpler samples. Po ChĂŒ-iâs long poems, âThe Lute-Girlâs Songâ (Pâi-pâa-hsing) and âThe Ballad of Everlasting Remorseâ (Châang-heng-ko), for example, are conspicuously absent in Waleyâs various collections of Chinese translations.
Lytton Strachey, reviewing Gilesâs Chinese Poetry in English Verse in 1908, found the Chinese poems there to be specimens of âimpressionismâ as compared with âthe most exquisite of the lyrics in the Greek Anthologyâ which are fundamentally âepigrams.â In contrast, the Chinese lyric is âthe very converse of the epigram; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, must be merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings.â âBetween these evanescent poems and the lyrics of Europe there is the same kind of relation as that between a scent and a taste. Our slightest songs are solid flesh-and-blood things compared with the hinting verses of the Chinese poets, which yet possess, like odours, for all their intangibility, the strange compelling powers of suggested reminiscence and romance. Whatever their subject, they remain ethereal.â Strachey concluded that âperhaps the Western writer whose manner they suggest most constantly is Verlaine.â15 Among the Imagist poets, the American John Gould Fletcher claimed that âif French Symbolism be taken for the father of Imagism, Chinese poetry was its foster-father,â16 and that his Visions of the Evening, first published in 1913, was influenced by classical Chinese poetry, though he did not have any knowledge of Chinese at the time. âWhat had happened was that I had somehow, as a poet, guessed at the way the Orientals had constructed their poems. The parallelism of construction, casting back and forth from the observer to thing observed, is surely manifest: and the self-same quality is omnipresent in Ezra Poundâs Cathay.â17 Yet initially this was not so, for the models Fletcher adopted for most of his poems of this period were the Japanese tanka form, as was evident in his Goblins and Pagodas (1916) and Japanese Prints (1918). But Fletcher came to see the limitations of Japanese forms like tanka and hokku: âWe who are aware of the immense cultural debt long since owed by Japanese literature and art to the Chinese, are also aware of how little effect these Japanese forms ⊠can have had upon developing the Imagist group in the direction of a bette...