{"id":17798,"date":"2019-02-12T09:29:42","date_gmt":"2019-02-12T17:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17798"},"modified":"2019-02-13T17:49:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T01:49:06","slug":"on-pounds-translations-from-chinese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/02\/12\/on-pounds-translations-from-chinese\/","title":{"rendered":"On Pound\u2019s \u201ctranslations\u201d from Chinese"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019ve been hearing Ezra Pound\u2019s name for decades, but it recently occurred to me that I didn\u2019t know anything about his life or his poetry. So I went looking online for more information about him, and quickly came across an entertainingly written 1958 takedown of Pound\u2019s and Ernest Fenollosa\u2019s approach to translating Chinese poetry: \u201cFenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character<\/a>,\u201d by American sinologist George A. Kennedy<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

The gist of what Kennedy says in the article, as I understand it, is that (a) Pound appears to have admired the work of American historian Ernest Fenollosa<\/a>, and (b) Fenollosa\u2019s entire approach to translating Chinese was completely wrongheaded. If I\u2019m understanding right, Fenollosa apparently believed that the way to translate a Chinese poem was to look at the radicals (the component parts of a written character) for each character in the poem, and to come up with concepts related to those radicals, and to use those concepts in your English poem.<\/p>\r\n

(I\u2019m not clear on the degree to which Pound agreed with Fenollosa\u2019s approach, but the Kennedy article seems to me to suggest that Pound may have followed a similar method.)<\/p>\r\n

As Kennedy puts it:<\/p>\r\n

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What then is wrong here? [\u2026] Just a complete misunderstanding of what Chinese characters are, how they were created, and how they function as speech symbols.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Here\u2019s my attempt at an analogy for Fenollosa\u2019s process (as I understand it based on the Kennedy article): Imagine that you don\u2019t know much English, but you take a Shakespearean sonnet and attempt to determine its meaning (and translate it into another language) by looking up the etymology of each word and assuming that each word means what its roots once meant. Also, in places where the etymology is uncertain, you guess that the etymology (and thus the meaning) might be based on other words that have similarly shaped letters. Also, you don\u2019t know how the words are pronounced, so you\u2019re oblivious to the rhyme and meter of the original. Also, both your copy of the sonnet and your etymological dictionary include some errors, based in part on sloppy transcription of hard-to-read handwritten manuscripts. Also, you don\u2019t know much about grammar, but you make grandiose and incorrect claims about how grammar works, universally across all languages, claims that are contradicted by both the original sonnet and your own pseudo-translation.<\/p>\r\n

Another quote from the Kennedy article:<\/p>\r\n

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[\u2026] it is impossible to say anything on the subject without emphasizing and reiterating that characters are symbols for sounds, and through sound are symbols for words. They are not a code [\u2026], nor a collection of pictures to entrance the eye. [\u2026] such images as appear through the sort of analysis [that Pound used] are not present in the mind of the Chinese reader[\u2026] It is more than likely that [those images] were unknown to the Chinese poet himself, who used the characters as arbitrary symbols for the words of his poem.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

I think the moral of this story is something like: Don\u2019t try to translate poetry in a language you\u2019re unfamiliar with, especially not based on incorrect ideas about how that language works and how languages in general work. But then again, if you do, you may become known as one of the greatest translators of poetry ever.<\/p>\r\n

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While I\u2019m here, I may as well mention that I went on to look up more about Pound and his life. Turns out he was widely regarded as a brilliant poet, who gave a lot of help and support to a bunch of other prominent literary figures of the early 1900s; also, he was literally a fascist. For lots more, see these articles:<\/p>\r\n