Ezra Pound and China (review)

Zhaoming Qian's new book is comprised of ten essays that represent almost a quarter of the papers originally presented at the Eighteenth International Ezra Pound Conference (1999). With it, Qian emerges as perhaps our foremost scholar of Pound and China, and also virtually of American poetic modernism in general and China. Pound, to be sure, was "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time" (in T. S. Eliot's somewhat mischievous and often misconstrued remark), and is the major figure in this field. But the fact that Pound shares space with other poets in both of Qian's earlier books—in Orientalism and Modernism (1995) with William Carlos Williams, and in The Modernist Response to Chinese Art (2003) with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens—may actually serve to highlight some of the limitations or weaknesses in Qian's case for regarding these modernist contemporaries of Pound's as orientalists, or indeed for insisting that modernism itself is close to or even a recovery of a Daoist aesthetic. Although Qian's historical and biographical research is often eye-opening and informative, in terms of what it reveals about the general allure of Chinese art and aesthetics, especially for poets, in the early twentieth century, the "complex and intriguing interchange" with China that Qian accredits to Pound (1) is hard to match in the careers of his other poets. His claim that "Orientalism" plays a broadly constitutive role in the formation of Anglo-American modernism, either via the work of Pound or independently of it, can often seem overstated.

For one thing, "Orientalism" for Qian in his earlier books means essentially the opposite of what it signifies in the work of Edward Said, for whom it represents, most radically, the idea that the Orient the West knows is largely the West's own invention. This is an idea, we may feel, that can be regarded as a specific application of a broader modernist outlook: that what we see when we look at the world is determined to a considerable extent by our own subjectivity. Indeed, Said's idea, in some ways, is anticipated by Eliot's notion of Pound as our inventor of Chinese poetry, the creative figure who makes us believe that we are in touch with "Chinese poetry-in-itself," while what he actually gives us is not the "original" but what Eliot calls "the idiom of our own language and our own time."¹ Qian, however, defines Orientalism in a way that seems overly positivistic, so that he tends to construe it as an empowering influence, an external reality whose aesthetic and philosophical otherness is nonetheless almost wholly available to cultural outsiders through their "interchange" with Chinese poetry and painting.

Thus, in Ezra Pound and China, Qian asserts that the relation between this poet and this nation is "such an intricate and multifaceted topic that it requires numerous scholars to work on it" (3), and acknowledges that the materials provided by the book's contributors "seem to indicate at once linkage to, and revolt against, hegemonic Orientalism, what we now call Saidian Orientalism" (10). Here Qian seems to assume a somewhat modified, more balanced position—although I see little revolt on the part of his contributors, who seem instead, for the most part, to take "Saidian Orientalism" for granted. Christine Froula, for example, points out that in his "vision of a 'world-embracing' language—whether Chinese exemplifies it or not'"—Ernest Fenollosa in effect acknowledges his own [Saidian] Orientalism (59), insofar as the linguistic possibilities he's been led to conceptualize through Chinese may not actually be there in the language itself.

The book, nonetheless, in its variety and scope, is a valuable collection, which displays impressive range. It moves from Barry Ahearn's sometimes micro-level textual consideration of what he sees as Pound's attempts in Cathay (1915) to "minimize his role as translator" (32), and even evade responsibility for his versions of Chinese poems, to Emily Mitchell Wallace's panoramic treatment...