Knowledge Is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

3. Words

In the twenty years since Ayscough and Lowell had been young women together in Boston, Lowell had been forging her own successful path as a poet and by 1917 had published three poetry collections. One of these, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) had been a critically acclaimed bestseller that catapulted Lowell into celebrity, while her public persona became a lure for controversy . Openly lesbian, obese, cigar-smoking and bellicose, she had become infamous for her feud with the Modernist poet Ezra Pound over ‘ownership’ of the poetic avant-garde. The details of this wrangle reflect on the project she was about to embark upon with Ayscough. In 1913, while Ayscough was delving into Chinese painting, Lowell discovered Imagism. A loosely-connected group of British and American poets, now recognized as incipient Modernists, the Imagists rejected traditional poetic conventions and adopted free verse, aspiring to reflect the cadences of everyday speech. Drawing on her ample financial resources and her influential social and publishing networks, Lowell was able to champion and promote this new group of writers, who included Hilda Doolittle (who wrote simply as ‘H. D.’), Ford Madox Ford, and Richard Aldington. Her initial friendship with Pound soured, 3 Words The ‘sensuous realist’1 76 Knowledge Is Pleasure and he refused to participate in the anthologies of Imagist poets that Lowell edited in 1915, 1916 and 1917. When Ayscough turned to Lowell for help at the end of 1917, she was requesting not just the consolations of friendship but also Lowell’s assistance as an established poet. If Ayscough was to sell her collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in America, she needed to make them as accessible as possible; obviously, her calligraphic paintings required compelling translations. She brought some rough attempts to Lowell, hoping her friend could transform them into something more poetic. Lowell was immediately captivated , explaining, ‘I was fascinated by the poems, and, as we talked them over, we realized that here was a field in which we would like to work.’2 What started as a favour turned into a four-year collaboration resulting in the 1921 publication of Fir-Flower Tablets. This book would contain some startlingly beautiful translations of poets already familiar to the West, and would also introduce some previously untranslated poetry. Their work together was a four-year ‘paper hunt’ across continents and oceans. Lowell knew no Chinese; Ayscough wasn’t a poet. But working together they believed they were producing work in translation superior to anything published by their contemporaries . Having translated enough of the scrolls for Ayscough to use in her lectures, they decided to embark upon the enterprise of translating several of China’s most revered classical poets, including Li Po, Tu Fu and Wang Wei. In doing so they entered into territory fiercely contested by some of the West’s most eminent sinologists and poets. Inevitably there were skirmishes and casualties , but their work was to both women ‘a continually augmenting pleasure’.3 The process, though, was an arduous one. Ayscough would write out each poem word by word for Lowell, giving several 77 Words meanings for each character. Sometimes she provided an explanation of the characters’ etymology. She also provided diligent and copious notes to help Lowell understand the historical and geographical context and the literary allusions. Lowell then used this as the raw material for creating poetry ‘as near the originals as we could make them’, while still being satisfying creations in the English language. When they were together they worked until 2 a.m. Lowell, whose energies were legendary and output prodigious, would continue to work alone through the night, leaving little yellow slips with notes for Ayscough to retrieve the next morning. When Ayscough was in St. Andrews the telephone would habitually ring at midnight, and Florence would rouse herself from bed to perch in her nightgown, responding down a crackling line as to whether the words were tui tzu or toi tao. They frequently agreed to disagree; after such a long friendship Ayscough must have learned her own way of deflecting Lowell’s ‘scorpion’ words, spoken in a flash of anger, though arguing with Lowell ‘was like plunging into a deep blue wave’.4 When she returned to China the process was complicated further by war-delayed mail. Lowell would send the manuscripts back to Ayscough via the Empress of Asia, or another of the liners that plied the Pacific, to...