Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel

Notes

Notes preface 1. And more recently: reading the New York Times this morning, I came across a review of a new book by William C. Hannas, in which he apparently “blames the writing systems of China, Japan and Korea for what he says is East Asia’s failure to make signi‹cant scienti‹c and technological breakthroughs compared to Western nations” (Eakin). 2. Going the other way, from China to the West, has also been a burgeoning topic. The ‹eld of “Chinese comparative literature,” which usually engages Chinese literature and Western theory, has its intellectual home in the Association of Chinese Comparative Literature, founded in 1987. For a brief history of that ‹eld, see Yingjin Zhang. 3. The phrase “Chinese dreams” is, as far as I know, my own; it echoes, however , the title of Rêver l’Asie, a collection of essays published in 1994. In the introduction to the collection, editor Denys Lombard imagines the mode of exotic literature as an “exorbitant” expression of a particularly Western habit (11). 4. One corollary of this is that in French, l’est, unlike l’orient, has referred not so much to East Asia as to Eastern Europe. This is discussed more fully in the Tel quel chapter. For a concise treatment of the historical meanings of Western, see Williams, 333–34. 5. Or, as Rey Chow puts it, “The theorization of Chineseness . . . would be incomplete without a concurrent problematization of whiteness within the broad frameworks of China and Asia studies” (“On Chineseness,” 8–9). Likewise, much work has been done and remains to be done on China’s own “Chinese dreams.” 6. In the context of Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” this line is about the impossible desire to escape Western modernity for something prior to or outside of it—as against a “use” of the Orient as a site for pilgrimages or (military, economic) pillaging , in which it is already captured inside the West’s ‹eld of political and economic interest. chapter one 1. Qian shows that Cathay underwent several revisions, from an original sequence of eleven poems to the ‹nal version Pound submitted to Elkin Matthews (60–61). 189 2. The character qing can mean both blue and green in different contexts. Fenollosa’s notes are reprinted here from Wai-Lim Yip’s Ezra Pound’s “Cathay.” The words in brackets below Fenollosa’s transcriptions are Yip’s corrections to those notes. 3. For a good introduction to the discipline of translation studies, in which questions such as this one are answered in a variety of possible ways, see Bassnett. 4. For more on Pound’s repetitions, see Kenner, Era, 193–94. 5. Despite these criticisms, Waley would later tell John Gould Fletcher that his own translations owed a debt to Pound’s Cathay (see Yip, 163–64). Yip also insists that Waley in many cases “took over Pound’s diction and sentence structure” (164). 6. Kenner argues in The Pound Era and elsewhere that Pound’s “errors” are in fact produced by a consistent aesthetic rather than wild guessing. Pound’s other, earlier translations from Anglo-Saxon and Latin came in for expert criticism of much the same order as did Cathay. Writing in 1953 about Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer (published in Cathay), for instance, Kenneth Sisam argued that the problems in the translation were produced by either “careless ignorance or misunderstanding” (Carpenter, 154). 7. Ming Xie writes that “Waley recognized that Giles belonged to the older order, making Chinese lyrics sound like W. S. Gilbert, and that Pound was actively experimenting with advanced techniques which were hammering nails into the cof‹n of traditional rhyming forms” (174). 8. In Transpaci‹c Displacement, Yunte Huang writes, “the desired immediacy of ethnographic truth cannot be achieved by means of the Imagistic ‘direct treatment of the “thing”’; instead, it is contingent upon the intertextual relations in the world of intertexts (92). Though I have not used the word intertext here, it captures well the movement back and forth between Cathay’s ethnographic Chineseness and the poetic newness that would come to di‹ne its modernism. 9. “Fan-Piece” was included in the ‹rst Imagist anthology, Des imagistes, which ‹rst appeared in 1914 as a number of The Glebe. According to Donald Gallup, Pound sent the manuscript for the anthology to Glebe editor Alfred Kreymborg in the summer of 1913 (137). But Zhaoming Qian dates the poem’s composition to November 1913, by which...