No More Learning

Book cover from Ezra Pound's Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius appears courtesy of Harvard University Press, Copyright ss 1954, 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
To Barry Ahearn, George Bornstein, and
Marjorie Perloff
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations ix List of Figures xi Introduction xiii Notes on the Text xxiii
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9.
10.
F. T. Sung's China Plan for Pound 1 ''China is interesting, VERY''
Miss Tseng and the Seven Lakes Canto 9 ''Descendant of Kung and Thseng-Tsu''
Yang as Pound's Opponent and Collaborator 18 ''To sacrifice to a spirit not one's own is flattery''
Achilles Fang and Pound's Bilingual Confucius 40 ''All answers are in the FOUR BOOKS''
Pound as Miss Jung's Dissertation Adviser 88 ''One's opinions change''
Pound and Carsun Chang 96 ''Confucianism as Confucius had it''
William McNaughton's Memoir: ''What Pound and
Carsun Chang Talked About at St Elizabeths'' 105
Achilles Fang and Pound's Classic Anthology 107 ''The barbarians need the ODES''
Pound's Discovery of an Ancient Economist 161 ''Chao ought not to be wasted''
From Poetry to Politics 172 ''Wang's middle name not in Mathews''
P. H. Fang and the Naxi Rites in The Cantos 196 ''I have found your Muen Bpo & KA MA gyu''
viii contents
Appendix
Ezra Pound's Typescript for ''Preliminary Survey'' (1951)
207
Glossary 229 Index 235
General
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACS autograph postcard signed
ALS autograph letter signed, followed by numeral indicating number of leaves
of the original, e. g. ALS-3 1/4 autograph letter signed consisting of three
leaves
ANS autograph note signed
TL typed letter unsigned, followed by numeral indicating number of leaves of the original, e. g. TL-2 1/4 typed letter unsigned consisting of two leaves
Libraries and Collections
AJP Private collection of Angela Jung Palandri, Eugene, Oregon
Beinecke Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Brunnenburg Ezra Pound Library, Brunnenburg, Italy
HRHRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin Lilly Lilly Library, Indiana University
LL Private collection of Lionello Lanciotti, Rome, Italy PHF Private collection of P. H. Fang, Belmont, Massachusetts
Published Writings of Ezra Pound
Canto
LE Personae
Poetry and Prose SP
The Cantos (14th printing; New York: New Directions, 1998) (references are to canto and page number. )
Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (1954; New York: New Directions, 1968) Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (1926; rev. ed. New York: New Directions, 1990)
Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 10 vols. , ed. Lea Baechler et al. (New York: Garland, 1991)
Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973)
Published Translations of Ezra Pound
Classic Anthology Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954; Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1982)
Confucius Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (1951; New York: New Directions, 1969)
x list of abbreviations Published Letters of Ezra Pound
Letters in Captivity Pound/Japan Pound/Theobald
Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge, Conn. : Black Swan, 1987)
Letters of Ezra Pound and John Theobald, ed. Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau (Redding Ridge, Conn. : Black Swan, 1984)
Works by Others
Gallup Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983)
Legge James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 7 vols. (1865; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960)
Mathews R. H. Mathews, Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (1931; Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1944)
Terrell Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980)
1. 1 1. 2 2. 1 2. 2
2. 3 2. 4 3. 1 3. 2 3. 3 4. 1 4. 2 5. 1 5. 2 6. 1 6. 2 6. 3 6. 4 7. 1 7. 2 7. 3 7. 4 7. 5 8. 1 8. 2 9. 1 9. 2
10. 1 10. 2 10. 3 10. 4
LIST OF FIGURES
F. T. Sung, 1914 4 EP in London, 1916 5 ''Night Rain'' from EP's screen book 12 ''Autumn Moon,'' ''Evening Bell,'' ''Sailboats Returning''
from EP's screen book 12 Pao Swen Tseng, 1928 13 Pao Swen Tseng and Yueh-nung Tseng, 1955 14 EP in Rome, c. 1941 20 Fengchi Yang, c. 1960 21 Letter 10 22 Sample of the Tang Stone-Classics 43 Achilles Fang, 1951 44 Angela Jung, 1952 91 EP at Sant'Ambrogio, 1967 92 Carsun Chang, 1953 98 Carsun Chang, 1957 99 Autographs of EP and Chang, 1953 100 C. H. Kwock and Louis Armstrong, 1958 101 Achilles Fang, 1953 110 EP's sound key to Ode 167 111 EP's seal text of Ode 167 112 Cover of Classic Anthology 113 Achilles and Ilse Fang, 1957 114 EP on the St. Elizabeths lawn, 1957 163 Tze-chiang Chao, 1935 164 David Wang, c. 1955 174 David Wang, c. 1955 174 ''By the temple pool'' 200 P. H. and Josephine Fang with Zhaoming Qian, 2003 200 EP's note to P. H. Fang 201 The Fangs to EP and DP, 1959 202
Figures 1. 2, 3. 1, 3. 3, 4. 1, 5. 2, 6. 3, 7. 2, 7. 3, 8. 1, and 10. 3 ss 2008 Mary de Rachewiltz
and Omar Pound, permission by New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents.
Figure 1. 1 ss 2008 Hongru Song, permission by Hongru Song.
Figures 2. 1 and 2. 2 ss 2008 Mary de Rachewiltz, permission by Mary de
Rachewiltz.
Figure 3. 2 ss 2008 Lionello Lanciotti, permission by Lionello Lanciotti. Figures 4. 2, 7. 1, and 7. 5 ss 2008 Ilse Fang, permission by Ilse Fang.
Figure 5. 1 ss 2008 Angela Jung Palandri, permission by Angela Jung Palandri.
xii list of figures
Figures 6. 1 and 6. 2 ss 2008 Diana Chang and June Chang Tung, permission by Diana Chang and June Chang Tung.
Figures 6. 4 and 8. 2 ss 2008 C. H. Kwock, permission by C. H. Kwock. Figures 10. 1, and 10. 4 ss 2008 P. H. Fang, permission by P. H. Fang.
For figures 2. 3, 2. 4, 9. 1, and 9. 2, see disclaimer in ''Notes on the Text,'' p. xxiv.
INTRODUCTION Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.
I predict that the next century will see, even be dominated by, a dialogue between the U. S. and China in which Pound's poetry will take on an importance and weight not obvious at the moment: that not only has he woven a new wholeness, at any rate potential wholeness, out of European and American, but also of Chinese, elements.
Tom Scott2
No literary Wgure of the past century--in America or perhaps in any other Western country--is comparable to Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still Wnd it puzzling that this inXuential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese lan- guage, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism.
A package of notes and manuscripts Pound received from the widow of the American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) in late 1913 Wrst opened his eyes to the Imagist strength of Japanese Noh drama, Chinese classic poetry, and the Chinese written character. His 1915 volume Cathay from Fenollosa's Chinese poetry notes paved the way for his transition to high modernism. It also earned him recognition as ''the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. '' This Wrst success led to his inquiry into Confucianism. In Guillaume Pauthier's French version of the Confucian Four Books (Les quatre livres) he discovered a philoso- phy that would correct Western civilization. 3 Consequently, Confucius recurs again and again in Pound's long poem The Cantos. His Canto 13 is a eulogy of Confucius' respect for the individual. Cantos 52-71 juxtapose early Republican America with China from Confucius' ideal kings Yao and Shun to Qing emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng as a way to suggest the right forms of government. Cantos 85 and 86 pay tribute to the Confucian tenets found in Shu jing or the Book of History, and Cantos 98 and 99 to Kangxi's ''Sacred Edict. '' In the 1940s and early 1950s, Pound translated into English three of the Confucian Four Books and all 305 odes of the Confucian Book of Odes. 4
How well did Pound know Chinese? How did he go about rendering Chinese texts into English? He is known to have owned a set of Robert Morrison's
1 2 3
Chine (1846; rpt. Paris: Librairie Garnier Fre`res, 1910).
4
Ezra Pound, trans. , ''Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot & The Great Digest,'' Pharos, 4 (Winter [1946] 1947); ''The Analects,'' Hudson Review, 3/1 (Spring 1950); The Classic Anthology DeWned by Confucius (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1954).
T. S. Eliot, introduction, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), xvi. Tom Scott, ''The Poet as Scapegoat,'' Agenda, 7/2 (1969), 57.
Guillaume Pauthier, Confucius et Mencius: Les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la
T. S. Eliot1
xiv introduction
multivolume Dictionary of the Chinese Language since 1914, carried a small Shanghai Commercial Press Chinese-English dictionary to the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa in 1945, and purchased a copy of Mathews' Chi- nese-English Dictionary around 1947. 5 Did he learn the Chinese language from dictionaries? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth-to nineteenth-century orientalists' versions in his various Chinese projects?
Among the archival materials kept at the Beinecke Library of Yale University and the Lilly Library of Indiana University are over two hundred letters and postcards Pound received from his Chinese friends--F. T. Sung (1883-1940), Fengchi Yang (1908-70), Achilles Fang (1910-95), Veronica Huilan Sun (b. 1927), Carsun Chang (1886-1969), C. H. Kwock (b. 1920), Tze-chiang Chao (1913- c. 1985), David Wang (1931-77), and P. H. Fang (b. 1923). Did Pound seek guidance from any of them? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. 6 No one was able to do so until a few years ago since the letters Pound wrote to the above and other Chinese were sealed or had not been found. 7
This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and his Chinese friends, eighty-Wve of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by my introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the Wrst time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese
5
See Robert Morrison, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts (Macao: The Honorable East India Company Press, 1815); Zhang Tiemin, Chinese-English Dictionary (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1933); R. H. Mathews, Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary (Shanghai: China Inland Mission and Presbyterian Mission Press, 1931; rpt. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1944).
6
Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, Me. : National Poetry Foundation,
1983); Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound's Confucian
Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the
Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999); and Feng Lan, Ezra Pound
and Confucianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Cheadle is the only critic to have
devoted some attention to Achilles Fang's impact on Pound. Nevertheless, relying on one side of
their correspondence Cheadle's discussion of Pound and Fang is unavoidably less than satisfactory.
7
In 1999 Mrs Ilse Fang lifted the seal her late husband Achilles Fang (1910-95) had Wxed to 108 letters Pound wrote to him between 1950 and 1958. This breakthrough was followed by my discovery of six letters and a postcard of 1939-41 from Pound to Fengchi Yang in the private collection of Lionello Lanciotti (Rome). Pound's 1955-8 correspondence to David Wang was considered lost after Wang's mysterious death in 1977. Fortunately, in the mid-1970s Wang left a photocopy of the correspondence with Hugh Witemeyer. In 2003 Witemeyer graciously donated this photocopy (perhaps the only copy of the correspondence) to the Beinecke Library of Yale University. Meanwhile, Pound's surviving Chinese friend Angela Jung (Palandri) kindly permitted me access to six letters Pound wrote to her in 1952 and two letters Pound's companion Olga Rudge wrote to her on behalf of Pound in 1967. Furthermore, three postcards inappropriately Wled in the Beinecke and Lilly Pound Archives escorted me to an ''unknown'' friend of Pound (P. H. Fang), a ''lost'' sourcebook, and two additional Pound letters. Once the newly-found Pound correspondence joined the Chinese friends' correspondence in the Pound Archives, the fascinating stories of Pound and his Chinese friends came to light.
See Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); John Nolde,
introduction xv
friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-Wve years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled eVorts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.
This project has been conceived as a companion volume to Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Whereas my previ- ous studies forgo personal dramas in favor of intertextual and inter-arts criti- cisms, this volume brings the inXuence of China into a lively and powerful social context. Rather than making their way through another critical work, readers will be able to hear Pound and his Chinese friends speak for themselves through their correspondence. And instead of weaving fragments of their exchanges into a study, I keep my critical opinions within my introductions to ten coherent dialogues. Pound's own words and his Chinese friends' words, rather than those of any critics, will make the most convincing arguments about Pound and China.
This book will matter to those who are interested in Ezra Pound as well as to those among the wider public who are interested in literary modernism and East Asian humanities. Catching exceptional glimpses of Pound's private dia- logues with the Chinese, his shifting visions of China, and the evolution of his China-related works, Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends will stand to change the way we think of Pound and China, and modernism and China.
Scholars such as Carroll Terrell have identiWed Se ? raphin Couvreur's trilingual and James Legge's bilingual Book of History (Shu jing) as sources of Pound's Cantos 85-7; and Joseph Rock's monographs on the Naxi (Na-khi) ethnic group in China have been identiWed as guides for the Naxi passages in Cantos 101, 104, 110, 112, and 113. 8 But the correspondence included here will testify to the active involvement of his Chinese friends in these projects. Just as educator Pao Swen Tseng (1893-1978) oVered Pound an oral translation of eight Chinese poems that led to his Seven Lakes Canto (Canto 49),9 so Harvard scholar Achilles Fang prepared his use of Shu jing in Cantos 85-7 and Lijiang native P. H. Fang Wrst introduced him to the Naxi rites of Thrones (1959) and Drafts and Fragments (1969). Relevant letters will also reveal that poet-translator Tze-chiang Chao, rather than Professor Lewis Maverick, dup up for Pound's Canto 106 the
8 See Terrell, 466-7, 652-3, 713. See also Se ? raphin Couvreur, Chou King (Paris: Cathasia, 1950);
Legge, iii; Joseph Rock, ''The Romance of 2K'a-2ma ? -1gyu-3mi-2gkyi, A Na-khi Tribal Love Story,''
Bulletin de l'E ? cole Franc ? aise d'Extre^me-Orient, 39 (1939), 1-155, plus 157-213; and ''The 2Muan 1Bpo ? 12
Ceremony or the SacriWce to Heaven as Practiced by the Na- khi,'' Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies of the Catholic University of Peking, 13 (1948), 1-160.
9
Angela Jung Palandri, ''The 'Seven Lakes Canto' Revisited,'' Paideuma, 3/1 (Spring 1974), 51-4. See also Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottes- ville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 123-4.
xvi introduction
seventh-century bc economist Guan Zhong (Kuan Chung). Before Pound acquired a copy of Maverick's Economic Dialogues in Ancient China (1954), Chao had already provided him with translations of Guan's sayings, biography, and a chronology of the Chinese legalist tradition initiated by him. 10
Among Pound's Confucian translations only Ta Hio: The Great Learning of Confucius (1928) and Confucius: Digest of the Analects (1937) were made without the aid of a Chinese. 11 In retranslating two of the Confucian Four Books into Italian he obtained assistance from Fengchi Yang. 12 As to his late Confucian transla- tions, Achilles Fang contributed more than a ''Note on the Stone-Classics'' to The Great Digest & The Unwobbling Pivot (1951) and an introduction to The Classic Anthology DeWned by Confucius (1954). 13 He oversaw the production of the two books from cover designs through corrections of romanized spellings and lining up Chinese characters with English translations.
The letters will convince the reader that the exchange between Pound and China was richer and more complex than often portrayed in modernist studies. It is not always true that Anglo-American modernists and their Chinese coun- terparts echo more than they diVer. The anti-Confucian stance of F. T. Sung, for instance, alienated Pound. During their meeting in London, Sung handed over to Pound an article in English that criticized Confucian teachings. Despite his disapproval Pound arranged to have it published in the London Egoist. This article, along with a British orientalist's anti-Confucian piece, sparked Pound into writing his Wrst pro-Confucian essay, ''The Words of Ming Mao 'Least among the Disciples of Kung Fu-Tze' '' (1914). 14 The opposite directions Pound and his Wrst Chinese contact took signal the complexities of East/West dialogue.
Although one may assume that the Chinese correspondents all speak respect- fully, this shouldn't lead us to think they would not contradict Pound on questions of principles. For example, Fengchi Yang, an ''enemy alien'' in Mussolini's Italy, never Xinched from resisting Pound's fascism. For two and a half years the two debated in correspondence about China's war against Japan. Every time Pound observed something provoking, Yang would jump to a blunt
10
Lewis Maverick, ed. , T'an Po-fu and Wen Kung-wen, trans. , Economic Dialogues in Ancient China: Selections from the Kuan-tzu (Carbondale, Ill. : Maverick, 1954).
11
based on Guillaume Pauthier's Les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine. Pound's
guide for Confucius: Digest of the Analects (Milan: Giovanni Scheiwiller, 1937) was James Legge's
bilingual edition of The Four Books (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1923).
12
OrfanotroWo Emiliani, 1942); Chiung Iung: L'Asse che non vacilla (Venice: Casa Editrice delle Edizioni
Popolari, 1945).
13
Achilles Fang, ''A Note on the Stone-Classics,'' in Confucius, 11-15. Achilles Fang, Introduction to Classic Anthology, xi-xviii.
14
Ezra Pound, ''The Words of Ming Mao 'Least among the Disciples of Kung-Fu-Tse,' '' rpt. in Poetry and Prose, i. 320.
Ta Hio: The Great Learning of Confucius (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore, 1928) was
Ezra Pound, trans. , Confucio: Ta S'eu. Dai Gaku. Studio integrale (Rapallo: Scuola TipograWca
introduction xvii
rebuttal. Similarly, the Pound-Achilles Fang correspondence is best viewed as a prolonged, contentious dialogue between two learned men. It aVords an unpredictable tale of collaboration and strife. Domineering as he was, Pound could be surprisingly Xexible. Though his tone was always warm and civil, Achilles Fang frequently proved to be unyielding in his positions. He could be caustically critical of Pound's interpretation of one Confucian term and unex- pectedly open to his deWnition of another. The most breathtaking letters between Pound and Achilles Fang perhaps occur in 1956-8 when their friendship was strained by the delays in the publication of a three-way, scholar's edition of the Confucian Book of Odes.
The letters gathered here document how much Chinese Pound understood at any given point. In September 1928 he confessed to his father that although he knew how the character worked, he could not read a Chinese poem: ''For CathayIhadacribmadebyMoriandAriga. . . ForyourbookMissThseng. . . read out the stuV to me'' (Letter 8). Hugh Kenner told us that Pound's forte in 1936 was ''looking up characters one by one in Morrison. ''15 As late as 1941 he could do little more than that. On 7 November of that year he wrote: ''I have had to think half a night to come up with an equivalent of the Wre underneath what Morrison calls 'house' '' (Letter 22). By 1951, nevertheless, he was able to read Shu jing in the original, ''at least recogniz[ing] a few terms without having crib on next page'' (Letter 31). Shu jing was one of many Chinese classics Achilles Fang sent him that spring. From Shu jing and Yi jing (Book of Changes) he moved on to Tang Song qian jia shi (Poems by a Thousand Tang and Song Poets) and Chu ci ('Southern Anthology'). A year later, he began borrowing Chinese anthologies also from Angela Jung. ''[N]ot a lot all @ once as I still read very slowly,'' he stressed in a letter to her of 29 February 1952 (Letter 65). There are letters showing that by February 1957 he still had trouble comprehending writings such as Yongzheng's expansion of Kangxi's ''Sacred Edict. '' He tried to get David Wang to translate into English Yongzheng's text, which he found ''very damnbiguous'' (Letter 149).
The letters selected for this volume also record Pound's engagement with Confucius during the early 1940s and throughout the 1950s. They not only disclose what editions Pound used and how much he understood at any one moment but also highlight the circumstances of his Confucian translations. Around 1940 Pound undertook to retranslate the Confucian Four Books into Italian. After Wnishing Da xue or Ta S'eu (1942) he originally planned to move to the fourth book, Mencius. It was Fenchi Yang's friend Sig. Tchu (Zhu Ying), who persuaded Pound to take up Zhong yong or Chiung Iung (1945) instead. As previous scholarship has shown, Pound was working on an Italian version of Mencius in May 1945 and his interest shifted to the third Confucian book, Lun yu
15
Hugh Kenner, ''More on the Seven Lakes Canto,'' Paideuma, 2/1 (Spring 1973), 43-4.
xviii introduction
or The Analects, when he was taken into detention outside Pisa. 16 In 1951-2, Achilles Fang succeeded in bringing his attention back to Mencius. Although Pound never resumed his translation of the fourth Confucian book, he incorp- orated some key Mencian notions into his Rock-Drill cantos. This volume includes letters illuminating Pound's otherwise baZing uses of the Mencian doctrine of ''four TUAN'' or the four virtuous beginnings of human nature. In the early 1950s Achilles Fang also prevailed on Pound to expand his reading of Confucius beyond the Four Books. It is true that after going over some of the ''Thirteen Classics'' with Achilles Fang, all Pound got to say was ''All answers are in the FOUR BOOKS. '' But as it turned out, the opening Rock-Drill cantos center on Shu jing, which Achilles Fang hailed as ''the liber librorum. ''
The correspondence calls into question several stereotypical assumptions about Pound's Confucianism. Some Pound scholars have pointed to Pound's Confucian studies during World War II as being responsible for his fascism. 17 Their opinion is based solely on Pound's misleading labeling of Confucian teachings as ''totalitarian'' and ''fascist. ''18 Drawing on Confucian works includ- ing those translated by Pound, Feng Lan has refuted this oversimpliWcation. 19 The Pound-Yang correspondence will reinforce Lan's contention. In 1940-1 Pound's fascism grew so oVensive that Yang began backing out from their correspondence. It was their mutual interest in the Confucian Four Books that saved it. As a Confucian, Yang saw Pound's enthusiasm for Italian fascism and his zeal for Confucianism as two separate preoccupations. Having learned of Pound's reading of the Four Books, Yang encouraged him to ''occupy [himself] with this subject'' (Letter 21), apparently with the intention of attract- ing him away from fascism.
Another problem in Pound scholarship is the tendency to overemphasize his exclusion of and hostility to Taoism and Buddhism. Pound was radically biased against Taoism and Buddhism during the 1930s and 1940s. Starting from the early 1950s, however, he opened himself up to non-Confucian Chinese tradi- tions. In November 1951, after reading Arthur Waley's version of Taoist founder Laozi, he asked Achilles Fang: ''Does Lao contain ANYTHING useful that is NOT in the Four Books (and their preludes, the Shih [Odes] and the Shu)? '' (Letter 82). Seizing this opportunity, Fang brought up Laozi's most vocal proponent, Zhuang Zhou, as being ''of great importance to sensible Confu- cians'' (Letter 83). Between 1953 and 1956, moreover, Pound intermittently
16
470. Ronald Bush, ''Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos,'' in Ezra Pound
and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 163-92, esp. 167-8.
17 18
(1938; New York: New Directions, 1970), 279; and Romano Bilenchi, ''Rapallo 1941,'' Paideuma, 8/3
(Winter 1979), 431-42, esp. 435.
19
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971),
See, e. g. Cheadle, Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations, 81.
For Pound's labeling of Confucius as ''totalitarian'' and ''fascist,'' see SP, 85; Guide to Kulchur
Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism, 216-17.
introduction xix
chatted with P. H. Fang about the mysterious Naxi rites that fuse Confucian ancestral worship with Taoism and Buddhism. Their conversations, along with Joseph Rock's descriptions of the Naxi rites, inspired Pound's haunting poetry about the ''wind sway'' ceremony that focuses on possibilities of life after death, a departure from Canto 13, where Confucius is quoted as saying ''nothing of the 'life after death. ' ''20 Going over all of this material makes it easy to understand why in the mid-1950s Pound would admit his oversight to William McNaughton: ''There's no doubt I missed something in Taoism and Buddhism. Clearly, there's something valid, meaningful, in those religions. ''21
No stereotypical portrayal of Pound's China is more widespread than his association with an approach that dismisses phonetic elements in the Chinese language. This association has to do with Pound's promotion of Fenollosa's essay ''The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry'' (1919, 1936). 22 For George Kennedy this essay is ''a small mass of confusion'' based on a ''complete misunderstanding'' of the Chinese language. 23 For James Liu it is responsible for the fallacy ''common among Western readers outside sinological circles, namely, that all Chinese characters are pictograms or ideograms. ''24 The aim of Fenollosa's essay is to push for concrete, natural thinking and writing as suggested by the primitive Chinese character. Nowhere in his essay does Fenollosa claim that ''all Chinese characters are pictograms or ideograms. '' What he states is that ''a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes'' (emphasis added). 25 Fenollosa does not altogether deny the existence of sounds in the Chinese character. Instead he stresses that the Chinese character ''speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. ''26 But yet in the second half of the past century the critical opinion of Kennedy and Liu
20
dying, but on ways of responding to the death of a loved one and to the possibilities of life after
death. '' See Wallace, '' 'Why Not Spirits? '--'The Universe Is Alive': Ezra Pound, Joseph Rock, the
Na Khi, and Plotinus,'' in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Qian, 213-77, esp. 252.
21
See William McNaughton, ''A Report on the 16th Biennial International Conference on Ezra Pound, Branto^me, France, 18-22 July, 1995,'' Paideuma, 27/1 (Spring 1998), 130.
22
Little Review, 6/5-8 (1919). Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed.
Ezra Pound (London: Stanley Nott, 1936).
23
George Kennedy, ''Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character,'' Yale Literary Magazine, 126/5 (1958), 26-36.
24 25
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (1936; rpt. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 9.
26
Ibid. Thanks are due to Haun Saussy, who called my attention to passages in Fenollosa's manuscript (at Yale) about the sounds and rhythmical patterns of Chinese verse, which EP elected to drop when he published it in 1919. See Fenollosa/Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
For Emily Mitchell Wallace, Canto 110/797-8 ''focuses not on the manner of death or ways of
Ernest Fenollosa, ''The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,'' ed. Ezra Pound,
James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 3.
xx introduction
was echoed and reechoed until Fenollosa's name, along with Pound's, became synonymous with the so-called pictographic approach, an approach that refuses to recognize phonetic elements in Chinese.
Defenders of Fenollosa and Pound assert that the essay is intended not for philologists and students of the Chinese language but for poets and students of creative writing. In Pound's words, Fenollosa ''did not claim that the average Chinese journalist uses this instrument as a 'medium for poetry' but that it can and has been so used. ''27 This argument is valid, but it cannot clear away the condemnation of Pound's disregard of Chinese sound in favor of its pictorial quality. The correspondence in this volume will bring our attention to the changes in Pound's understanding of the Chinese language. After all, he did not ignore the value of Chinese sound throughout his career. 28
Elsewhere I have shown that in the late Cantos Pound's use of Chinese is both pictographic and phonetic. 29 Cantos 85-9 and 96-8 are replete with Chinese characters accompanied by their phonetic symbols. Canto 99 experiments with English-Chinese mixed alliteration. Canto 110 even oVers a single-line poem in Chinese syllables: ''yu ? eh4. 5 j ming2 j mo4. 5 j hsien1 j p'eng2. '' The correspondence will conWrm that in the early 1950s Pound made strenuous eVorts to learn the pronunciation of Chinese characters. In a letter of February 1951 to Achilles Fang, Pound inquired, ''What could save inWnite time and labour fer pore mutts trying to learn a little chinese, esp/ SOUND'' (Letter 32). In another letter to Fang (February 1952) he expressed his regret for not having done so earlier: ''For years I never made ANY attempt to hitch ANY sound to the ideograms, content with the meaning and the visual form'' (Letter 56). Later that year, when Angela Jung reminded him that he had belittled the usefulness of Chinese sound, he protested: ''one's opinions change . . . He should not be held responsible for what he said or wrote decades earlier. ''30 During that period Pound was also trying to learn some conversational Chinese from visiting Chinese student Veronica Huilan Sun. In a letter to Fang (12 October 1951) he made an attempt to distinguish between the Shanghai dialect and the so-called Mandarin Chinese: ''Very hard for senile ignoramus to attain vocal Xuidity. What does Ni hao ma? [How are you? ] sound like in the North Kepertl [Beijing]?
27
Beinecke. For a French version, see EP's note to Mary de Rachewiltz, trans. , Catai (Milan: Strenna
del Pesce d'Oro, 1960), 45.
28
recognize its importance until about 1950. On 11 March 1937 he told Katue Kitasono: ''When
I did Cathay, I had no inkling of the technique of sound, which I am now convinced must exist or
have existed in Chinese poetry. '' See EP, Selected Letters 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; New York:
New Directions, 1971), 293.
29 30
Quoted in Angela Jung Palandri, ''Homage to a Confucian Poet,'' Paideuma, 3/3 (Winter 1974), 307.
EP's 1958 typescript entitled ''Mori's Lectures on the History of Chinese Poetry'' kept at
Pound discovered the existence of Chinese sound in the mid-1930s, though he did not
Qian, Modernist Response to Chinese Art, 217-20.
introduction xxi
A rose of Shanghai pronounces: 'manchu,' in way almost impos / disting / fr / 'damn yankee' '' (Letter 80).
One further evidence of how hard Pound worked at the detail of Chinese sound and sense is a typescript of forty-Wve pages entitled ''Preliminary Survey,'' which he sent to Achilles Fang in January 1951 (Beinecke; see Appendix below). ''It is even permitted us to suppose that the original Chinese speech was not only inXected but also agglutinative,'' he contended. As a poet he was looking for sound symbolism. Even with practically no access to archaic Chinese pronunciation, he speculated: ''Despite exceptions a good many ch sounds can be read as indicative of place or of motion . . .