首都大学東京 機関リポジトリ
Author(s) Miyake, Akiyoshi
Citation 人文学報 表象文化論(416): 95‑130 Issue Date 2009‑03‑30
URL http://hdl.handle.net/10748/5328 Rights
Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher
http://www.tmu.ac.jp/
95
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay
MIYAKE Akiyoshi
Is Ezra Pound an Orientalist? If he is, in what sense is he an Orientalist? To what extent can Said's discussion in his Orientalism, for example, be applicable to him? Or would some other model be more appropriate for his attitudes towards the oriental cultures? The answer to the first question is undoubtedly yes. He translated some Chinese classical poems and Nob dramas from what is called Fenollosa notebooks. Canto13 is a collage of passages from r , and Canto49 is a poem inspired by eight Chinese ink paintings with Chinese and Japanese poems on them. Canto53 to Canto6l, known as China Cantos, is a condensed translation of 13-volume Histeire Generale de In Chine. Pound translated r twice into English, once into Italy, and 'J1 English twice, and 1f'n1JJ1 into Italian and English once respectively. Then how could we respond to the other three questions?
We have a valuable study on Pound's Orientalism by Robert Kern, who applies Said's concept of Orientalism to Pound's sinology, But his main theme is to situate the poet's China in the great philological fantasy of quest for universal language. Surely the study contains as a sub-theme some examinations of Pound's achievement in the tradition of English translation of Chinese poetry. But it has much of ideological investigation and less of poetical analysis. Of the 17 poems in Cathay, "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is the only one that is discussed amply there, only to illustrate that Pound is not necessarily "defamiliarizing his English" although that is the primary assertion in the study with respect to Pound's Orientalism(Kern, 192). Furthermore, Kern's study makes no clear what relation the poet's
Orientalism has to his ideological stance to civilization in general.
Zhaoming Qian, one of the leading Poundians who have examined Pound's Orientalism most extensively2, asserts that the Said model is an inadequate tool for analyzing the poet's case. For Said the Orient is the Muslim one whereas Pound's Orient is mainly China. Said defines Orientalism, most radically, as 'Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said, 3), but, according to Qian, Pound did not believe in the Western cultural superiority. Furthermore, Qian argues, what the poet found attractive in China was not the differences but the affinities (between what and what Qian does not say explicitly). Thus Qian offers a concept of Imitation as an alternative to Saidian Orientalism.
Pound saw in Chinese poetry, Qian asserts, what he was searching for as his own literary ideal model, and imitatingly incorporated its merits into his poems while he translated Chinese poems into peculiarly Poundian English.
Qian maintains that Pound's China is very similar to Pound himself, and that the concept of Imitation is more appropriate to the American poet's attitude toward Chinas.
Certainly Pound's main concerns are China and Japan while Said's argument is limited to the Middle East. The West dealt with the Middle East coherently as the object of hatred, hostility, disdain or sexual danger, whereas contrastingly China was seen by the Europe sometimes as a utopian society to which it turned for the solution to its problems, and sometimes as an inferior society to which a higher civilization would have to condescend to give an enlightenment4. It seems, therefore, inappropriate to apply Said's theory to China case, and to Pound's, where he saw a great civilization in China. But it was clearly the West's self-evaluation that determined what was valuable in civilization in general before it had China in admiration or
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pounds Orientalism in Cathay 97
contempt for its possession or lack of the values. And the determinant will inevitably invent an idealized or debased image of China rather than a true one. In other words, the West responded to an enlarged version of the inverted shadow of itself projected on China. And this seems to be true of Pound. In this sense, Qian's Imitation theory seems too simple to be applied to Pound's interest in China.
In this article, we will examine the poems of Cathay in terms of the representation of China in order to decide in what sense Pound is Orientalist and what it means in the poet's ideology in general. Of course we need to investigate the whole history of his attitudes towards China, especially his admiration of Confucian philosophy in 1930s and after'. So this study is the first step to that.
Before setting out to the analysis of the poems, it would be useful to elucidate the problems accompanying the translation between two disparate languages and cultuxes. The discussion will reveal that the problems are those of representation, not of linguistic precision. In the next section we will check an influential book in the English world concerning Chinese and
Chinese poetry. James Liu's Art of Chinese Poetry is the book.
1
Liu starts his book with an explanation of the different modes of presentation of reality between English and Chinese cultures, from which he deduces the characteristics of Chinese and Chinese poetry. He asserts that
"Chinese , being a completely uninflected language, is not burdened with Cases, Genders, Moods, Tenses, etc". This freedom from "grammatical restriction? creates "a sense of timelessness and universality" (40). Because of the subject being grammatically omittable, Chinese poetry is exempt from that obtrusive viewpoint of the subject in presentation which is imposed on
Western poetry. Side by side with Chinese poetry, Liu argues, "much Western poetry appears egocentric and earth-bound. Where Wordsworth wrote 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,' a Chinese poet would probably have written simply 'Wander as cloud.' The former records a personal experience bound in space and time the latter presents a state of being with universal applications (41)."
Liu observes that Chinese poetry omits not only subjects but also verbs and the connectives that Chinese prose grammar ordinarily requires. As an example he gives a classical Chinese poem in which a verb-less scene "unfolds"
as if in "a scroll of Chinese painting," creating "a sense of stillness in movement, as if these objects had been arrested in time and frozen in an eternal pose" (42).
Liu believes Chinese language's superiority as a medium for poetic expression. Its linguistic obscurity may be a serious drawback in prose but, he asserts, it functions as such an 'advantage in poetry" that "Chinese is a better language for writing poetry" (8).
Liu's book is instructive, but he has made some errors in the explication of the difference between the literary modes of the two cultures. He exemplifies the difference, for instance, by transforming an English line into an English version of pseudo-Chinese, and in another time by comparing a verb-less, preposition-less and article-less English translation of a Chinese poem with a conventional English version. Such manipulations, however, inevitably exaggerate the differences between the modes of the two languages to the extent that they could not be felt when reading the oiiginals only.
Besides, to explain the qualities of Chinese poetry, whatever they are, in an English word or two accompanies a semantic distortion, since English words are a reflection of English culture and English sensibilities. The sense of timelessness, universality, and impersonality Liu says he observes in Chinese
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 99
poetry is, when explained in the English words, no longer the sense of
"timelessness ," "universality," and "impersonality" that exists in Chinese poetry. It has already been transmuted into that of Western kind. Certainly
Liu gives a detailed explanation of what differences lie between the two cultures concerning the concepts of Nature, Time, History, and so on(See Liu, 48-60). But when he identifies the effect of the tenselessness in Chinese poetry with that of "sub specie aeternitatis", or when he associates a visual quality of a Chinese poem with "those figures on the Grecian urn immortalized by Keats," he is viewing Eastern culture with Westernizing glasses on (40-41). Lastly, Liu' believes mistakenly that "Chinese is a better language for writing poetry" (8). It is an illusion. If there are great achievements in Chinese poetry, it is not because their language is free of the grammatical restrictions but, needless to say, because the authors are good at creating such an effective combination of words.
We call these erroneous not because they are untrue but because he is unaware that his arguments have sometimes got into the field of representation. Certainly he is within the field of fact when he is explaining the grammatical structure of Chinese and Chinese poetry. But when he starts to claim that such and such grammatical peculiarities create some poetic effect, he has already entered into the problems of representation. The reader implied there is an English reader, and Liu distills appealing points in Chinese poetry, unconsciously but coherently, in terms of the English reader's sensibilities fostered by English culture and tradition.
The appealing points are made up, therefore, in the form of a harmonious combination of two seemingly conflicting factors. One is what makes Chinese poetry more familiar to Western readers. The other is the factor which emphasizes alien elements in Chinese poetry, rendering it
attractively foreign to them. When Liu compares the line by Wordsworth with
a pseudo-Chinese rewrite, he is making an impression of Chinese poetry being more beautifully alien than it actually is. He is using the former factor, on the other hand, when he explains the peculiarities of Chinese poetry in those terms familiar to the readers of Western poetry. The combination is what makes the discussion appealing. Lacking of either element would have had the exegeses and explications in the book much less impressive and even unpersuasive. The combination creates illusions with respect to the literary potentiality of Chinese language, but the illusions are appealing to English readers because they are a hybrid of the familiar and the foreign. In this sense, the book is a success as a representation of Chinese poetry. His case illustrates well that the successful representation of a foreign culture is attained by a balanced mixture of the two opposite elements, the familiarizing one and the foreignizing one.
Liu's is so successful a book on Chinese language and poetry that some Poundians turns to him for authority. Christine Froula, for example, depends utterly on Liu's arguments from which she lead a conclusion about the impact of Chinese poetry on English one in and after Modernism: the introduction of
"a lyric," "translucent I/eye" into English poetry*. Robert Kern is another instance. He employs what is useful out of Liu's arguments as a support for his contention that Pound's Imagist poetics is in harmony with the merits of Chinese poetry, a delightful minglement between English and Chinese ones*.
Yet Liu sometimes confuses the issues of the factual with those of the representational. And the error has been handed down intact to the Pound scholars above. They are all producing and reproducing a distorted image, a representation of Chinese poetry rather than truth. They respond not to Chinese poetry itself but to the Western preceding work on the subjects.
What is more important here is, however, that the above discussion concerning Liu is true of Pound's fascination with China, and his Cathay. The
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 101
collection consists of the same two factors as Liu has invented when he explains the peculiarities of Chinese poetry. The theme is to be dealt with in section3, 4, and 5 of this article.
In the case of Pound, however, discovery precedes invention. Unlike Liu , who is of a Chinese descent and a bilingual, the American poet did not understand a word of Chinese language when he set to the translation of Chinese poetry based on Fenollosa notebooks. In the next section , we will have to adumbrate the process of the poet's "discovering" China, which consists partly of that of sharing the popular interpretations of Chinese culture circulating around the Western world, and partly of the process of making up remarkable images of China consolidated by his own penetrating insight into the culture. The processes combined have created in Pound a representational basis on which his version of an idealized China was made.
Cathay is one of the first products of such a "discovery".
2
Recent Pound studies have shown that Pound had been quite familiar with Chinese cultures long before he got Fenollosa notebooks from his widow in 1914s. Philadelphia, where Pound grew up, was a central site of the American national fever with Chinese art. The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition was held in 1876, in which the Chinese and Japanese pavilions enchanted the public. Pound's parents and some of their neighbors were among such fascinated people who got a collection of Oriental art. Indeed, there was placed a Min vase in the parlor of Pound's house. The poet's beloved
"Aunt" Frank
, whom he visited frequently, had showed him a watercolor screen book of waterscape scenes with manuscript poems in Chinese and Japanese on them. The University of Pennsylvania had started a new display of a rich collection of Chinese art in its museum just before he became its
student. And another big exhibition of a private collection of Chinese artifacts was held at the museum in 1903. It seems certain, as a Pound scholar infers, that the poet visited both galleries at the museum. Pound wrote to Dorothy in 1913 that he seemed to 'be getting orient from all quarters" (ED, 264), but the situation looks like having been coming to him more than a decade earlier.
If it can be said that Philadelphia offered the poet an environment for his basic and general understanding of Chinese culture, we will be able to consider his London years to be an advanced step on which he worked a deeper insight into Chinese cultures under the guidance of some specialists.
Among the specialists Pound had Lawrence Binyon and Allen Upward, both of whom gave him a great influence Abut Chinese art and poetry. Binyon was a superb director of the British Museum 1910-12 Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings. Pound attended the lectures on Chinese art given by Binyon and often stood before the display of Oriental art in the Museum. The poet and the scholar-curator became close friends and enjoyed discussing poetry and Chinese art in a lunch restaurant. Pound had already, before making Cathay, had an ample amount of knowledge and experience about Chinese art on which basis he was to make his version of idealized Chinese culture.
Allen Upward was an enthusiast for Chinese poetry and thought under the influence of Lancelot Cranmer-Byng, a poet famous in London at the time for his translation of Chinese poetry. They founded a printing firm which was soon to start the 'Wisdom of the East" series. Upward's New Word was a book the poet admired greatly for its reference to Chinese wisdom. Pound was introduced in 1911 to him, who became the poet's mentor in Chinese things and introduced him to his China freak circle, including Craiamer-Byng.
In parallel with these friendships, Pound was in quest of a new poetics fitting for the new century instead of the Victorian literary tradition, which
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 103
he thought was utterly out of date. For a model for the new poetics, he searched places temporarily and/or spatially far from his now and here—ancient Greece and Rome, 12-13th century Province and Italy. The poet was anxious to bring in a disparate poetics from distant traditions in order to revivify the contemporary English literary scene. And now into his sight had come China, whose poetry he thought had what the very best of the Western literary achievements had barely attained. Inspired by H. A. Giles' History of Chinese Literature, Pound wrote "After Ch'u Yuan", "Ts'ai Chi'h", "Liu Ch'e"
and "Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord", which are experimental pieces for the new poetics. In "Renaissance," first published in Poetry in 1914, he called China "a new Greece" (LE,215). In his letter to a friend dated January 10, 1917, he remarked that "China is fundamental,... China is solid" (L,155). And In the preamble (written and first published in 1919) to the famous essay "The Chinese Written Character", Pound observed that "[i]n his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognized in the West,...His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between eastern and western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification."(Ins, 357) Here the poet is telling of his collaborator, but we can safely read this as a self-explanation of himself by Pound himself.
China was a "discovery" to Pound just as it had been to Fenollosa. Thus Pound is doing here what we have seen done by Liu when he compares English poetry and Chinese one: an idealization of Chinese language and its poetry in contrast with the depreciation of Western culture as an inferior. In short, the poet sees an inverted West in East, and vice versa, and what he sees is a representation, a distortion, a mixture of the factual and the inventive of cultures domestic and foreign.
Now we are ready to read Cathay as a representation of China. We will find in the collection an idealized, complex hybrid of popular images and
inventive presentations of Chinese culture. Some of them will exist in the original. Some will be based on Western image of things Chinese which is shared between the poet and the English readers. And others will not exist in the cribs of the Fenollosa notebooks nor even in the originals but will be remarkably Chinese as the result of invention by the American poet. In the next three sections, we will examine what representation of Chinese experience is created in Cathay by comparing Pound's translations and the originals, while correcting some interpretations of them by other Poundians.
The comparisons will be made in order not to decide whether his translations are linguistically precise, but to ascertain how inventive the poems are in their presentation of China and the Chinese. If the comparisons cause some distortion, certainly this step will also be an Orientalist one. But to our best understanding, the intentional Orientalism is the only way out from the Orientalism that involves us inevitably.
3
Cathay are full of many Chinese images popular among Western world, such as big rivers and mountains, great city walls, courts and music, flowing clouds and rain and deserts, and so on. Vegetations and birds are peculiarly
Chinese, just as buildings and their roofs are of exotically quaint color. Here are a few examples:
March has come to the bridge head,
Peach boughs and apricot boughs hang over a thousand gafes, (from "Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin") A yellow stork for a charger, and
The purple house and the crimson are full of Spring softness.
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 105
South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer,
(from °The River Song')
She made the name for herself: 'Gauze veil,'
For she feeds mulberries to silk worms.
(from "A Ballad of the Mulberry Road")io
They appear on the poems' background so recurrently that they have an effect of cross-reference as a whole, implying that Chinese world is of a sensibility sophisticated and discriminative enough to enjoy the delicate and exquisite changes in nature and human things.
The refined sensibility is implied also in the poems which depict miseries in Chinese life. "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance" shifts its focus from one thing remarkably Chinese to another, each of them fragmentary and suggestive, and they work all together as if the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, making a whole picture of court lady in solitude. "Song of The Bowmen of Shia' employs a slightly varied repetition of fern-picking images, whose suggestiveness makes the miseries of the frontier guard more touchingly miserable. "Lament of the Frontier Guard' also suggests the eyesight of a keen sensibility, which, in the 7th and 13th lines, finds sorrows in the seasonal things such as frosts and 'spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn'.
Surely they are not peculiarly Chinese, but the sensibility ends the poem with a bewilderingly Chinese image: "And we guardsmen fed to the tigers".
The images above are all a result of literal translation. The same images exist in the original poems also. Indeed, those are a good example of literal translation which makes Chinese things conspicuously Chinese. These only would have made Cathay a projection of an exaggerated image of China. In fact, the exaggeration consists of not only the literal translations but also of inventive presentations of Chinese things. They are not in the original poems,
but they also work together with the literal translations, rendering the poems exaggeratingly Chinese. In this sense, they may be erroneous as literary translation. But they are a success or more than "a success' as cultural one.
Here is an example of such invention in "Separation on the River Kiang', which is an translation of Li Bo's r
Ko-Jin goes west from Ko-Kaku-ro,
The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.
His lone sail blots the far sky.
And now I see only the river,
The long Kiang, reaching heaven.ii
What Pound represents in the English second line is precisely the pictorial sense of the original 42t.E. fi "F. WM, that is, flowers blurred in mists, yet its presentation being made much less dynamic. The image of a lone sail blotting the far sky in the English third line is the opposite of the original, which depicts a lone sail disappearing far into the horizon. And yet the word "blots"
gives the poem a focal point, emphasizing the gist of the whole poem:
desolation at parting. These inventive details make the whole poem a kind of reminder of a scene of the Chinese mountain-water picture. What is important here is that the poem reminds us not of any particular Chinese picture, but of
a prototypical one, which means that the poem is a representational "success", projecting a prototypical picture of a beautiful China onto the readers. This can be called an aestheticization, idealization of a foreign culture.
We can find another example of such a representational invention in
"Taking Leave of a Friend" , whose latter half is as follows:
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 107
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing.12 •
According to Qian, Fenollosa notebook glosses the above third line as
"Shaking hands" and "Brandishing"(Qian2003, 55). This means that Pound considered the cribs to be no Chinese and instead invented the images of bowing and clasped hands from his own repository of Chinese imagery. They are linguistically an erroneous translation, since the meaning of #11 is
"wave hand" . But they are culturally more Chinese than Giles's "To wave a last adieu we sought" or Yip's "We wave hands, you go from here" is. Indeed , any translation closer to the original would impress the English reader as less convincingly Chinese. In other words, Pound's invention is strikingly precise as a presentation of China.
It is noteworthy,that the inventive image is employed in the climax of the poem. As the result, the translation has become more dramatized than the original, making more aesthetic the silent communion between the old friends at parting. The invention has made the English poem more beautifully Chinese than the original.
The first line of "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter' is perhaps the most remarkable instance of such invention by the American poet:
While my hair was still cut straight across my foreheadi4
It is worth noting that the above vivid presentation has an inkling of explication. It speaks in a way Chinese people would never speak among their circle but an English speaker to another. If the picture presented by the English line is, as Yip asserts it is, precisely what the original brings to the
Chinese mind, it is because the line is a cultural translation and no literal one.
In comparison, a literal translation by Yip "My hair barely covered my forehead" is vague and even misleading to English readers (Yip1976, 380).
And we do not agree with Yip's argument that it is of no importance whether the image results from Pound's own observation in Chinese prints and drawings in the British Museum (Yip1969, 90). To the contrary, it is supremely important because, if it does, it means that the presentation is actually a representation of an artistic Chinese image circulating among the Western intellectuals, and, as Qian indicates (Qian2003, 59), the image does, and the presentation actually is. In short, it is a response by Pound to the aesthetic image of China accumulated in the Western world.
What is important in our discussion is not to identify the Chinese picture that inspired the poet in his creation of a particular image or phrase as Qian does. Of course, it is generally meaningful to explore the source that gave a creative impetus to the author. But in terms of the representation of a foreign culture, it is not the writer's creative secret but the whole of the cultural experience shared among the author and readers that matters in our discussion. It is important because cultural representation is a product from a matrix of cross-index, cross-indication, cross-reference, cross-reading of the culture between the author and the readers. There the readers participate in the (re)creation of concepts, images, fantasies on foreign things in cooperation with the author, who realizes, embodies, confirms and authorizes the cultural expectation of the readers, identifying them with his own internal images. In the case of Pound and his Cathay, his Philadelphia and London experience of Chinese art led him into internalizing Western aesthetic images on things Chinese, which are a cultural invention circulating among us, while the very cultural invention was crystallized into the verbal expression by Pound, and the crystallization is the exquisite hybrid of popular images and
A Dance with China: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 109
inventive presentations of Chinese culture discussed above.
The cultural crystallization is attained, of course, in Pound's English, as to which, Kern claims that in Cathay "Pound's imagism, Fenollosa's Emersonian theorizing, and Chinese itself (at least Fenollosa's understanding of it) all seem to converge°(Kern 193). Certainly the style of the Cathay poems are under the influence of Fenollosa's view of ideal language, which the poet finds to be "the fundamentals of all aesthetics" (Ins, 357). But Kern is inaccurate. Of the 17 poems in Cathay what can be called Imagistic is only one,
"The Jewel Stairs' Grievance"
, and the rest are fairly unfaithful to the principle of condensed, terse expression held by Imagism movement. It is worth analyzing the peculiarities of Pound's English in Cathay that have established the representation of an aestheticized China. That is what we will do in the next section.
4
What is the most remarkable as to Cathay's English is its vers libre form.
Most of the translation poems are written basically in an English of ordinary syntax, consisting of single lines of simple sentence of varied length and with no inversion. They are free of any of the traditional regular rhythm and rhyme patterns in English verse, let alone the regulated forms of classical Chinese poetry.
Cathay is very striking also in its much use of Chinese personal and place names. Some 40 Chinese nouns appear in 17 poems on 17 pages. To be sure, many of them are spelled in Roznanized Japanese, since Fenollosa, Pound's source, worked under the instruction of two Japanese scholars. But, as Kern points out properly, that would make practically no difference on most readers of English language. They would read them as Chinese.
Archaic English usage is another characteristics of the Cathay poems.
For instance, the word "courtezann is used for irsi*A in "The Beautiful Toilet", and "jewelled flute and pipes of gold" for ff* ifi R rig* is translated into "Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace" in
"The River-Song" . The subsequent passage from "Old Idea of Choan by Rosorin":
The jeweled chair is held up at the crossway, Before the royal lodge:
A glitter of golden saddles, awaiting the princess;
They eddy before the gate of the barons.
The canopy embroidered with dragons
drinks in and casts back the sun.is
is full of peculiarly Chinese images, and a little archaic in diction and style.
We sometimes find strange English in the Cathay pieces, which is also one of the remarkable peculiarities in the poems. The most conspicuous one is
"flowers to cut the heart" in "Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin":
At morning there are flowers to cut the heart,
And evening drives them on the eastward-flowing waters,is
The phrase, a kind of transliteration of Witt, would be embarrassing to English readers.
The combination of "flowers' and "to cut the heart" is an extraordinary but perfect English. We find imperfect English expressions in some poems. For example, the phrase "Here we must make separation" in the third line of
"Taking Leave of a Friend" is
, if not not-English, considerably curious English, for the combination of "make" and "separation" is unusual in customary
A Dance with Chin a: An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 111
English collocation. The "close garden" in the second line of "The Beautiful Toilet" is another instance. No "close" garden is imaginable for English readers, for the adjective describes something impossible to enter or go out of17.
Kern is insightful in referring to these characteristics as
"defamiliarizing" as opposed to Pound's predecessors' English
, which he regards as "colonizing" or "domesticating", seemingly depending on Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism. Certainly few Chinese personal names or place names appear in Giles's and Cranmer-Byng's translations.
Tennysonian style plays in Giles's work, while Cranmer-Byng adopts Pre-Raphaelite one, both basically on the rhythm of iambic pentameter and its variations. Those are results of their intention to domesticate Chinese poetry into traditional English verse, eliminating the foreign elements from their rendering as much as possibleis. So we have no objection in respect of his labeling them as domesticating. But closer examination shows that Pound's English in Cathay is not as defamiliarizing as Kern asserts it is in terms of Cheyfitz's theory of colonization by translation. Rather, it is an exquisite mixture of the defamiliarizing and the domesticating elements in style, which is best illustrated by the first half of "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter":
While my hair was still cut straight across my head,
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village,of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever,
Why should I climb the look out? is
The English version has a stanza structure, which is familiar to the Western readers but does not exist in the original. Furthermore, no conjunction exists in the original first line, which means that Pound inserts the 'While' in order to make explicit the function of the first lines in the stanza structure. These alterations are familiarizing elements for the English readers.
On the other hand, we come across defamiliarizing ones in the poem. We have already discussed the remarkably Chinese image in the first line. And the word choice in the second line is strange enough to make the reader feel a sense of foreign sensibility. Flowers are to be "picked" or "plucked' or
"gathered" in customary English
, and the English readers would consider the
"pulling flowers" to be a result of trying to transfer the nuances in the original into English. The "seat" in the fourth line is also a strange word choice. Most readers would take it for some chair or stool, and after wondering why the translator should not select a clearer word, guess that the original has a word difficult to translate into English. These slightly clumsy dictiolis lead us all the more to perceive there exists in the original a sensibility foreign to the English world.
Oriental details confirms this perception. According to Yip, the third line is culturally inaccurate and confusing, but still suggestive enough of Chinese
A Dance with China; An Essay on Ezra Pound's Orientalism in Cathay 113
children's playing activities (Yip1969, 91). Western world has no habit of
"playing with blue plums", which also evokes an oriental sentiment in the English readers along with the seemingly Chinese place name of "Chokan".
The first stanza is thus full of alienating elements, in comparison with which the second and the third stanzas contains a few. The first stanza has set a Chinese stage. And a young girl's shyness, which Western readers would consider to be typically oriental, can be depicted well enough in ordinary English. So the second stanza does not need to use conspicuously foreign diction as much as the first one. This is the reason the second stanza has, in its first line, nothing but one alienating phrase "I married My Lord you", which evokes a quite clear picture of an oriental girl to the English readers, since no Western woman call her husband "My Lord".
Since the first two stanzas have come out so well, the third stanza has still less need to be singular with respect to diction. Certainly its second line is of remarkably oriental sentiment. The verb choice of "desired" is singularly archaic, and it is extremely rare for the verb to take the object and to-infinitive. But in the next line Pound refuses the allusion of Itiaia, whose acceptance would make the line effectively local for the defamiliarization, and instead inserts Shakespearian "Forever and forever and forever"zo. As a result the whole stanza has become quite acceptable for the English readers.
The second half of the poem is in ordinary English. There is nothing foreign except three place names, which barely remind us of the poem being a translation from a Chinese poem. But now that the first half has created an oriental girl on the Chinese setting so perfectly, and since two of the place names appear in the last few lines of the whole poem and its very last word
"Cho-fu-sa" is especially impressive , this is a well balanced decision. The poem is an estimable achievement in foreignizing English gradually mixed with domesticating one.
We can find the similar gradual mixture of the two elements as illustrated above also in other Cathay poems. The defamiliarizing start is gradually replaced by ordinary English in many of the Cathay poems, ending again with alienating one. For example, "The River Song" has a framework structure which sets a Chinese court as the present stage at the beginning and the end of the poem, and the speaker buries himself there in his reminiscence in between. The middle part of ordinary English in "South-Folk in Cold Country" is inserted between the starting and the ending part which both include Chinese place and personal names. "Lament of the Frontier Guard" is another instance, whose structure has been discussed earlier. And the introductory part of "Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin" has that phrase 'flowers to cut the heart' while it concludes with the episode of "Han-rei" . Indeed, the gradual mixture is a general characteristic of Cathay poems.
Now we have made it clear that what is innovative as to Pound's English in Cathay is not its defamiliarizing aspect as Kern claims it is, but it being an exquisite mixture of the alienating and the domesticating one as is discussed in this section. This is precisely what James Liu has done in his influential book, which was discussed in section 1. And this is the crux in Cathay in its
linguistic aspect, because it is in parallel with an Orientalist mixture of the aestheticization of China illustrated in the previous section and of Westernization of China, which will be illustrated in the next section.
5
The issue of Orientalism is an issue of the exoticism that the West creates and projects onto the Orient. The exoticism is a re-presentation of the foreign world by the West to the West. That reflects expectations concerning it which are shared among Western minds while the very expectations are derived in part from the self-definition of the West. Exoticism is, therefore, a
