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Chapter One POUND No ‹gure of twentieth-century literature has had a more public relation to China than Ezra Pound. From the early moments of his career in London to his ‹nal days in Italy, Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it. In London Pound ‹rst translated Chinese poetry into English, and through that poetry developed an aesthetic theory rooted in a broader, mistaken understanding of Chinese writing. Later, Pound intertwined Chinese characters and philosophy with his Cantos, published translations of Confucian texts, and partially explained his interest by insisting that the texts belonged as much to him as to the Chinese. These ideas stayed with him till the end of his life: a BBC ‹lm taken of Pound in the 1960s shows him carefully explaining to the camera the pictorial relation between the Chinese characters for “sun” , , “wood” , , and “east” , , an idea that had ‹rst surfaced for him in an essay he edited and published in 1918, some forty years earlier (Ezra Pound). The material Pound provides to the scholar of “Western images of China” offers itself up as a complex, variegated tapestry of errors, misperceptions , half-truths seen and unseen, ›ashes of pure genius, and great poetry. It has been the subject of a vast literary critical discourse. Following Pound’s literary canonization in the 1950s, scrupulous attention has been paid to his readings of Chinese history, the sources of his Confucianism, and especially his translations of Chinese poetry. The books and essays thus produced range from meticulously researched discussions of Pound’s original source material—John Nolde’s Blossoms of the East, for instance, compares every single line of Pound’s 1940 “Chinese History Cantos” with Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s thirteen-volume Histoire Générale de la Chine—to more theoretical work on the role of the East in the construction of Western modernism—of which this book is only one example. Between the practical and the theoretical appear a number of takes on Pound’s techniques of translation, ranging from the critical (L. S. Dembo) to the comparatively neutral (Wai-Lim Yip), all struggling to decide how far Pound saw into China, and what, if anything, his vision means for Anglo-American poetry. How a book takes its place within this network is a delicate subject. Much of the criticism centers on the question of whether Pound got it right or wrong, but I do not decide that question here. Neither am I trying to demonstrate (or refute) the genuineness of China’s in›uence on Western modernism. I will not, along the way, identify and amend ethnocentrisms or errors of translation under the assumption that my own perception is “authentic” (instead “authenticity,” and the claims made for and against it, will be one of the subjects of the reading). This is not a reading of Ezra Pound’s relationship to China. It is rather a reading of the still-living subject of “Pound and China,” a subject that forms itself not only in the texts of Ezra Pound and his contemporaries , but also under the shadow of the critical discourse that has been built around Pound’s Cathay, his Cantos, his translations of the Shi jing, his various remarks on Chinese poetry and Chinese writing. On the subject of the possible values of China (and “China”) in the West, critics have as much to say as Pound himself; my reading aspires to understand and sometimes name the historical shifts in the kinds of questions deemed relevant to the subject of Pound and China. In doing so I am tracing a more general critical history of the relationship between “China” and Western thought. Is there still more to say about Pound and China? The ›ood of books on the subject shows no sign of abating; the questions and ideas at stake in the original debate apparently remain both relevant and provocative. Haun Saussy writes, “China has always been, is always still, in the process of being invented; but does one invent it in whatever way one pleases? ‘China’ names a country, of course, but it more accurately names an international culture; and ‘culture’ is the identity-tag of a question having , these days in North America at least, a moral as well as an epistemological side” (Problem, 4). If the question of knowing China...

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