Making It New: Ezra Pound’s “Luminous” Mythmaking of China

Image Credit: Maria Paula Calderon

白皛 (Bai Xiao)

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As an influential figure in the history of Western literature, Ezra Pound marked the epochal transformation of English poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. Besides his pioneering theory of imagism, Pound is also known for his bold translation of ancient Chinese poetry and Confucian classics, through which he presented a highly positive and even glorious image of “China” to the Western world. Although many of Pound’s contemporaries belittled China only as “a vast potential market for American goods, American culture, and American democracy,” Pound’s unusual enthusiasm for the Orient helped usher in the second taste for China in the West after the Enlightenment (Divine 25). However, instead of presenting China in its true sense, Pound’s “China” is rather a myth created by the author himself. Pound’s works translating Chinese literature to English, notably the Confucian classics and Cathay, are more than a collection of involuntary inaccuracies mixed with intentional manipulations; more intriguingly, considerable assimilation and metamorphism of the Chinese ideology, submerged under the surface of his Chinese-related texts, distinguish his works from any conventional translations. To be more exact, Pound’s creative image of China in his “translations” shapes an effective myth of China, which he proposed as a medication to save the Western world from serious crises and degradation in the 20th century and to lead the West to a brighter future.

Studying China persistently for more than forty years, Ezra Pound spares no efforts in eulogizing China’s culture and ideology, fundamentally Confucianism, in his most exemplary works such as The Cantos. His interest in China was largely kindled by orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, who, in his “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” expressed hearty admiration of China:

Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. (42)

It is noteworthy that at the root of this effulgent civilization, Confucianism became the cardinal representative of Chinese philosophy and ideology in Pound’s mind, with all the meritorious essence of Chinese wisdom aggregated in the Confucian canon. Confucianism constituted one of the major pillars in Pound’s prolonged development of The Cantos—from Canto XIII written as early as around 1920, which combines several important flashes of Confucian thought into one piece, to Canto LIII, the finale of his China cantos, which vigorously concludes the first 2000 years of recorded Chinese history with an allusion to Confucius’s honorable lineage.

Pound’s attachment to Confucius was not only intellectual but also personal. During those most gloomy days when he was confined at St. Elizabeths, he had James Legge’s translation of Confucian odes with him. Angela Palandri quotes Pound as saying, “This little book has been my bible for years, the only thing I could hang onto during those hellish days at Pisa…. Had it not been for this book, from which I drew my strength, I would really have gone insane” (qtd. in Flack 124n44). Here, we see the first glimmerings of Confucianism as a kind of medication, first for Pound himself, and, as he would later propose, one which could radiate healing throughout the West.

Although Pound appreciated China and made profound contributions in introducing China to the West throughout his life, his presentation of China largely remained a deficient myth due to his peculiar ideogrammic interpretation of the Chinese language. One of the biggest problems with Pound’s “China” was his lack of knowledge of Chinese, which caused him to deviate from the true meaning of original texts from time to time. An interesting moment in Pound’s journey of studying Chinese sheds light on his maverick view: when reading James Legge’s bilingual edition of the Four Confucian Books without a glossary in 1937, he professed, “When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from” (Sun 111). Without knowing sufficiently the meaning of Chinese characters as organic entireties, he often focused on their graphic components.What became the paradigm of his ideogrammic approach was the juxtaposition of unrelated particulars to arrive at an imagined abstract meaning. However, subjective assertions about the Chinese language actually overemphasized the apparent forms of Chinese characters while neglecting the inseparability of all integrals in a character to convey abstract concepts. Pound’s approach incurred the illusion that someone without any knowledge of Chinese would be able to access the meanings of characters instantly by simply looking at these “semi-pictorials” (Fenollosa 43).

Such a subjective approach explains why Pound made mistakes in his translation of Da xue, commonly translated as The Great Learning but what Pound called The Great Digest. For instance, from his selected terminology before the text, he dismantles shen 慎 into its radical on the left, xin 心, meaning “heart,” and a fragment of its right segment, mu 目, meaning “eye,” which results in the interpretation of the whole character as “the eye (at the right) looking straight into the heart” (Pound, Great Digest 21). However, not only does he fail to recognize that the so-called “eye” is only a fraction of the right part zhen 真 (“truth”), but he also distorts the meaning of the whole character, which should denote “cautiousness.” In contrast to Pound’s ideogrammic analysis of Chinese, “Chinese characters, at least the vast majority of them” are “morphosyllabic—a heavy (if rather clunky and esoteric) term intended to convey the dual semantic-phonetic nature of the majority of the Chinese characters” (Williams 158-159). That is to say, most Chinese characters should not be taken as purely “ideograms,” but Pound might not have identified the phonetic segment of a character and imposed the meaning conjectured from the partial form to the overall understanding instead. Even if Pound did not bungle every Chinese character in his works, many of his cognitions about China are actually problematic, as a result of his unfamiliarity with unique characteristics of the Chinese language.

In fact, Pound’s ideogrammic myth of the Chinese language gives rise to his idealization of the Confucian ideology, which became a luminous component of his mythmaking. Let us take Pound’s interpretation of one key character in Confucian writing under scrutiny:  de 德, which is usually paraphrased as all kinds of virtue a human could possess in line with Confucian morals, including benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, sincerity, and so on. According to Pound, de refers to “the action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart” ideographically, and thus revealed specifically “the ‘know thyself’ carried into action” rather than general virtue (Great Digest 21). Strikingly enough, here Pound emphasizes the significance of self-knowledge, namely “know thyself,” over all the other qualities embedded in de, while there is no evidence at all that self-knowledge was given such a priority in the original meaning of the character. Though it might appear unintelligible at first sight, this uncommon illustration uncovers how Pound’s ideogrammic interpretation was subtly colored by the Confucian ideals. On the one hand, aligned with Pound’s translation of The Great Learning, Pound deemed Confucianism as a morally and ethically virtuous system that vitalized human nature through self-reflection and self-cultivation; on the other hand, Pound identified in The Great Learning that the ultimate catalyst of self-knowledge was rooted in gewu 格物, “sorting things into organic categories” in his own words, which resonated with knowledge of the laws of nature (Great Digest 31). Inspired by the Confucian classics he was working on, his ideogrammic method with a biased focus on specific components of characters helped further consolidate his Confucianism as a “totalizing philosophy” where Heaven (“nature”) went hand in hand with humanity (Zhu, “One-Principle Text” 397). His complimentary presentation of the harmony of Confucianism—both pointing inwardly towards the bottom of the heart and stretching outwardly toward  prodigious nature—significantly burnished his mythmaking of China.

For Chinese readers, Pound’s flawed image of China might seem quite bizarre; however, as Pound’s works on China were intended for his Western audience, this oriental myth functioned surprisingly well. Eric Hayot points out in his book Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel that there have been long-term effects of Pound’s works on the Western view of China in so far as that “everything after him has to look like his work to seem ‘Chinese’” (21). Even though Pound was vulnerable to potential criticism on his deficient knowledge of China, the Western audience at his time was even more ignorant of China than he was. That is to say, “Pound [could] imitate and persuade with utmost economy not because he or his reader [knew] so much but because both [concurred] in knowing so little” (Steiner qtd. in Hayot 21). Considering the existing knowledge gap between the West and China, Pound ingeniously sorted out the most conspicuous elements closely related to the image of China—those luminous details “whose strangeness needed no explanation” for Western people (Hayot 23). His colossal handwritten Chinese characters standing out abruptly in his Cantos were among the best examples to render such percussive oddness. It is exactly the “cultural shorthand” “easily recognizable as ‘Chinese’” in Pound’s works that eventually “established the authenticity of the Eastern setting,” resulting in an enduringly appealing impression of China in the Western view (Hayot 21). By taking advantage of such a stylized conception of China from the Western perspective, Pound laid the foundation for effectively utilizing the myth to make his prescription later for what he perceived to be a  degraded modern Western society.

Entangled in the turbulence of the 20th century, Ezra Pound’s advocacy for China was  deeply rooted in the social environment of the Western world at that time, which galvanized his pungent depression and anxiety. It is quite noteworthy that among the tens of thousands of surviving ancient Chinese poems on various topics, the fourteen translations in Pound’s Cathay seem to be purposefully selected, concentrating on only a few themes such as war, exile, lovesickness, unwilling farewell, and nostalgia. The pervasive inner bitterness and loneliness shared by these motifs underscore Pound’s Chinese poetry with subtle pathos and mirror the poet’s torment during a desperate quest to salvage Western society.

From Pound’s point of view, the cardinal cause of Western society’s sickness was economic breakdown. With the cruelty of World War I still carved in mind, “Pound came to the conclusion that poverty and war result from the inequitable distribution of consumer purchasing power in a capitalist economy” through the control of credit from international private banking and usury (Farahbakhsh 1450). In other words, “the evils of unchecked capitalism,” featured in vicious rivalries of international capitalists, accompanied by recessive monetary policy and heavy taxes, was the culprit to blame for the severe disorder in the western society (Farahbakhsh 1450). In Pound’s Canto XLV, the repetition of sentences beginning “with usura” demonstrates Pound’s sharp denunciation of usury, a “sin against nature” and “CONTRA NATURAM” (229-231). Although he  seems to hold his discussion in the context of fifteenth century Italy and northern Europe, it was exactly usury, this determinant for the failure of the authoritative Medici bank, that was eroding modern Western society again. Such a pessimistic outlook on the economy also found its way to the Chinese cantos. When Pound describes the Spring and Autumn period in Chinese history in Canto LIII, he highlights, “Usurpations, jealousies, taxes / Greed, murder, jealousies, taxes and douanes,” which might be regarded as a vividly realistic portrait of the 20th century here—a startling metaphor of troubled times (274). This premonition of chaos made Pound perceive an urgent need for peace, welfare, and order, through which he aspired to “prevent a second international war” (Farahbakhsh 1451). However, this aspiration was difficult to achieve without the presence of strong leaders.

Pound re-discovered “China” from ancient legacies and found that its honored Confucian philosophy “offered the best hope for an enduring and just social order,” which turned out to meet exactly his needs (Farahbakhsh 1451). The idea of order and good national governance took up a key position in Pound’s image of China according to Confucian values. In Canto LIII, the tyrants who ruled by misdoings, like King Wang who intended to vary the currency “against council’s opinion, / and to gain by this wangling,” are all punished by anomalies from the wrath of heaven, for example, “never were so many eclipses” (273). In  sharp contrast, those virtuous emperors who followed Confucian teachings and governed with wisdom all achieve great success in their administrations, and are held in awe and commemoration by the people. For example, Pound sings his praises to one of the benevolent emperors explicitly:

                       Honour to Chao-Kong the surveyor.

                                      Let his name last 3000 years

                       Gave each man land for his labour

                                               not by plough-land alone

                       But for keeping of silk-worms

                                     Reforested the mulberry groves

                                     Set periodical markets

                       Exchange brought abundance, the prisons were empty. (LIII/268)

From this hymn, we can clearly assess that Pound witnesses, or rather “realizes” his propositions of a well-governed and prosperous economy in his representation of China. The gracious images of those wise emperors in ancient times also embody his other ideals of the right form of governor, by “keep[ing] down taxes” (LIII/267), “fitting words to their music” and ritualistic odes (LIII/262), giving people freedom to “make verses” and “play comedies” (LIII/270), and reigning by righteous law “of the just middle, the pivot” (LIII/269). More importantly, he makes his powerful appeal for the stability of the state and the well-being of the people through Tching-ouang’s weighty testament: “[T]his is my will and my last will / Keep peace / Keep the peace, care for the people” (LIII/267). Having suffered heartbreaking devastation after war, Pound believed he could turn to Confucius for remedies, in a similar way that he looked to the Odyssey in Canto I “in order to heal the wounds opened by the Great War” (Flack 105).

Order, calibrated to the Confucian teachings and beginning at the level of the individual, appealed to Pound. Confucius’s recurring reference to “order” underlines its significance:

                                      If a man have not order within him

                       He can not spread order about him;

                       And if a man have not order within him

                       His family will not act with due order;

                                      And if the prince have not order within him

                       He can not put order in his dominions. (XIII/59)

The uniqueness of “order” here consists in “the Confucian emphasis on the individual as the origin and expression of a society’s values,” with the on-going spiral of cultivation toward perfection originating from the individual and then extending to the sphere of family and society (Flack 106). This emphasis on individualism is further expounded in The Great Digest: “[F]rom the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root” (Pound, Great Digest 33). Everyone, whatever identity and social status he or she enjoys, must carry out a responsible surveillance of himself or herself first and foremost.Confucius’s call to establish order through good rulers first from internal strengths of individuals turns out  to be the best and the most innovative solution to external disorders and conflicts in the Western world, as Pound longed for effective “ideas which are intended to go into action” (Guide to Kulchur 34).

Apart from war and social disorder, the Western world was experiencing a profound spiritual degeneration at the turn of the 20th century as well. Under the intensive impact of industrial civilization and the age of machines, there was an increasing concern that human beings would gradually be alienated from nature by their materialistic desires and the fast-paced lifestyle of modern society. Pound was determined to summon human “nature” back with the help of Confucian China. According to Alireza Farahbakhsh, Pound strongly resisted the “debasement of human life within the contemporary conditions of bourgeois economics,” which “distorted the nature and purpose of work, time, and wealth” (1452). To tackle the predicament, “Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both” (Pound qtd. in Zhu, “Pound’s Confucianism” 58). From the Confucian Chinese culture and values rooted in agricultural civilization, Pound attained a clean cut from what he thought of as the rotten industrial society and warmly embraced the beauty of simplicity and the charm of primitivism. In Canto XIII, when commenting on his pupils’ answers on how to become known, Confucius makes a perfect response: “‘They have all answered correctly, /‘That is to say, each in his nature” (58). Here Pound actually adapts Confucius’s sayings to express his enthusiasm for the natural, unstained state of soul. Similar to what Tian gracefully describes in Canto XIII—going swimming, flopping off planks, and playing mandolins in the underbrush— Pound’s ideal headed for a nobler mode of harmony, where edification was as gentle “wind over grass” (LIII/266). Sharply different from “the ‘stupidity’ of extreme asceticism born of hatred of the body” in Christianity, Confucian teachings on nature and spiritual life made good sense to Pound, giving him the useful treatment for curing the inward disease of the Western world (Romer).

Of course, it is no coincidence that Pound looked to China, particularly ancient China, for his prescription for the Western world. Ultimately, this choice of “medicine” reflects the thinking behind his famous command to “make it new.” In Canto LIII, among all the Chinese characters Pound appended to his text, he places Confucius’s name, Zhongni 仲尼, between two zhou 周, meaning “Zhou Dynasty.” It is true that there were exactly two Zhou Dynasties, the Western and the Eastern Zhou; Confucius lived in the restless Eastern Zhou. In his paper “Pound’s Quest for Confucian Ideals: The Chinese History Cantos,” Hong Sun raises the thought-provoking observation that “although the master himself lived in the Eastern Zhou dynasty, his heart went back to the good old days of King Wen’s Western Zhou and often lamented the demoralization of his contemporaries” (115). Pound’s romantic, nostalgic application of Confucianism to his time and place mirrors Confucius’s own nostalgia for a better, wiser society. Just like Confucius, Pound was anxious to give appropriate treatments for almost all social problems at his time, but “what he was seeking was not so much a revolution as ‘a renewal, a revivification of an old tradition’” (Firchow qtd. in Sun 116). Pound’s declaration of his looking to “an American renaissance” in “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” further proves his standpoint—“renaissance” instead of radical and thorough transformation. Interestingly enough, if we recognize that Greek and Roman antiquity served as the paradigm for reviving Western culture during the Renaissance in the 14th through 16th centuries, we can see the essence of Pound’s “renaissance” actually remained the same, except with “China” as the tool this time.

Through the lens of Pound’s works on China, it can be clearly seen that his presentation of China derives from his way of viewing “others” and the “self.” The mythicized image of China provided Pound a valuable opportunity to conscientiously reflect on the severe crises in the Western world during the 20th century. Some people may attack Pound’s distortion of China in his translations of Chinese classics, criticizing him as a bad translator; however, Pound never wanted to be treated as a literal “translator.” It is true that he may not have been a good or even qualified translator because of his lack of knowledge of the Chinese language, but he was definitely an excellent preacher of China and a voluntary ambassador of ancient Chinese legacies to the modern West; he made great efforts to bring “China” closer to Western people, though his image of China is still confined to an effective myth. Pound longed to “make it new”—a vigorous “remaking of the old” to catalyze the process of renewal of the West, and he was successful (Firchow qtd. in Sun 116). He would not feel satisfied to become only “a passive reflector of light from another culture”; instead, he took the mission of Prometheus, “an active agent not simply carrying forward the light of Chinese philosophy, but rejuvenating Western poetry with its ideals” (Sun 96). History is sometimes strikingly similar: from Voltaire during the Enlightenment period to Pound in the 20th century, the West always stumbled on its way to getting to know China, starting from myths and misunderstandings, but Pound clearly tries to initiate a leap. His mythmaking is an ambitious construction of his own world of China—a luminous one to make the Western world new with the flame of hope.

Works Cited

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Romer, Stephen. “The great imitator: Ezra Pound may have been declared insane by an American court but, says Stephen Romer, the notion of ‘Mediterranean sanity’ that illuminates his best work still has lessons for his homeland.” The Guardian, 3 July 2004, www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/03/featuresreviews.guardian review12. Accessed 6 Nov. 2016.

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Zhu, Chungeng. “Ezra Pound’s Confucianism.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 57-72. ProQuest Central, https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/central/docview/220552581/fulltextPDF/5AA17F4AEDA430APQ/1?accountid=12768. Accessed 6 Nov. 2016.

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