Pound’s Imagism and his translations of Chinese Poetry “Cathy” 英语专业毕业论文.doc

pounds imagism and his translations of chinese poetry “cathy”abstract: the opinions of pounds imagism absorb rich nutrition in chinese poetry while his poetic translation and creation also reflects his theory of imagism truly and vividly. in this paper, some of his translations are chosen to be analyzed according to his imagism.keywords: pound, imagism, cathay when ezra pound appeared on the scene in the first years of the twentieth century, the west presented a panorama of a wasteland. it was a world in which pound saw pervasive and impenetrable gloom, and chaos and disorder and barbarism were rampant everywhere. he considered it his mission to save a tottering civilization. trying to derive standards from the cultures of the past and resurrect lost principles of order, he became, as m.l.rosenthal calls him, “the prophet of the open spirit.” 1（p166）and the nuclear idea is “make it new”. in 1912, pound and flint laid down three imagist poetic principle as an imagist manifesto: i direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective。ii to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentationiii as regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.” 2(p301)then in 1915, he published his translations of chinese poetry “cathay”. at that time, it was the critical point of the word war i, which made all the people in the world in panic and resulted in the suspicion of western culture relics efficiency. this also made pound realize history is not only a valuable treasure house but also a stage which repressed people and distorted the exchange of idea. as a result, pound tried to find some value system to help him get rid of the situation. then he got the greatest cultural influence from ancient china. during the 1870s an american named ernest fenollosa had gone to japan to become an instructor in rhetoric at the imperial university. fascinated by chinese and japanese art, he had worked to conserve their traditions as a collector, a student of language and literature, and eventually as imperial commissioner of art. he died in 1908, and in 1913 his widow was introduced to ezra pound in london. having read some of his poetry, she felt that she had finally found someone to whom she might entrust her husbands papers-sixteen notebooks filled with transcriptions, literal translations, and glosses of chinese and japanese poetry and noh dramas, plus her husbands essay on the chinese written character as a medium for poetry. ezra pound sought the correspondence, which reflects his viewpoints about imagism poetics, and also got the pure color of the palette in the treasure house of chinese poetry he says that it is beyond question that so long as we understand chinese poetry, we can find the very pure color. moreover, this color has been reflected perfectly in the translations. the pure color referred to here indicates the specific, visual and pictorial image of chinese poems. what pound accomplished in cathay was the application of imagist principles of composition to poems which had previously been translated only into the overelaborate and sometimes precious diction of late nineteenth-century verse. he created a style whose lucid simplicity seemed to parallel the precise use of line and space in a japanese watercolor, and the effect was so immediately convincing that t. s. eliot, in 1928, called him “the inventor of chinese poetry for our time.”3in a brief poem like “the beautiful toilet,” for instance, pound places a few simple images in juxtaposition, letting their suggestive power define the mood of a young woman who has been left alone by her drunken husband: blue, blue is the grass about the riverand the willows have overfilled the close garden.and within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,white, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.slender, she puts forth a slender hand.some of the poems qualities do represent conventions of chinese verse, such as the repetition of words-though pound varies the technique from line to line to avoid the monotony that western readers might feel. but the poem achieves its effect primarily through images of nature which, if traditional to chinese verse, also conform perfectly to imagist doctrine. the willows have “overfilled” a garden which is “close” (enclosed, but inevitably carrying the more common meaning as well), while the woman, who is “within” and also in the midmost of her youth, reaches out through the door in a simple, hesitant gesture which focuses all the oppressive sense of enclosure built up by the previous lines. then pound introduces the facts of her situation that she had been a “courtesan”, and that her husband is a “sot.” having known the freedom and excitement of a life among people, perhaps at court, the young womans aura of innocent, wasting youth, created in the first stanza, is complicated by irony in the second. with only the simplest details of plot, pound charges the poems images (grass, trees, garden) and its single action (the slender hand reaching out) with a rich complexity of emotion which involves (at least) loneliness, regret, yearning, perhaps bitterness, a feeling of being trapped, and the necessity to live in memory many years too soon.though all the poems in cathay reflect pounds imagist values to some extent, one of the purest examples is “the jewel stairs grievance.” the poem is very brief, consisting of just four lines which describe jeweled steps white with dew, dew soaking the gauze stockings of the woman who speaks, and then her action of opening a curtain and watching the moon. pound added a note which tells us a great deal about how he thought a poem should be read, as well as what he valued in poetry at the time:the jeweled steps are already quite white with dew,it is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,and i let down the crystal curtainand watch the moon through the clear autumn jewel stairs, therefore a palace. grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. the poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.in commenting on the poem so explicitly, pound offers a clear explanation of how much information he expects his images to bear. character and setting, for instance, are defined by just two details: jeweled stairs and gauze stockings. like “the beautiful toilet,” this poem builds its story of a woman whose lover has failed to appear at their rendezvous-out of a series of small details which then come to focus in an action which, by itself, would seem meaningless: opening a curtain, watching the moon. properly prepared, however, that action implies all the feelings of anger and disappointment which “grievance” would lead us to expect. in these two poems, pound was working toward the achievement, in practice, of what his imagist theories had described: the creation of images which convey meanings of great complexity and power to move, in far less space than would have been possible in any of the old, abstracting forms of discourse.throughout cathay, pound applied his imagist techniques, with a variety of consequences. in addition to the use of “luminous details” to communicate the complex emotions of particular situations, he avoided any hint of elaborate, unnecessary diction. sometimes his language was very informal, even conversational. but even where his tone was less colloquial, he followed the imagist dictum that poets must use “no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” thus “clear autumn” (in “jewel stairs grievance”) not only tells us about the weather, but also carries its traditional associations to a human relationship which, like the year, is dying. the same careful choice of words is true of “separation on the river kiang,” a poem about friends parting: ko-jin goes west from k-kaku-ro,the smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.his lone sail blots the far sky.and now i see only the river,the long kiang, reaching heavenpuffs of smoke or mist which had looked like flowers become blurred, while the sail actually growing smaller as the boat recedes, appears so large to the speaker that it “blots” the sky. pound reveals emotion by showing us emotions power to distort perceptions. and in choosing precisely the words he does, he also communicates a sense that something has been destroyed by this parting, that a transitory beauty has been shown to be insubstantial (“smoke-flowers”), blurring and finally disappearing in the emptiness of the last line. any one of the poems in cathay could offer such examples of diction and image chosen precisely without forcing his own moral rules or opinions on the readers, and on the contrary manipulated to convey the greatest amount of insight-generally into some emotionally charged human situation-with the least amount of supporting explanation and the objective presentation and nestification. imagism had already ceased to be a public program for pound, but its method had become a permanent part of his craft.finally, the rhythms of the cathay poems owe more to the model of anglo-saxon accentual meter than to iambic pentameter; these meters sounded fresh to modern readers, contributing to the spare but evocative nature of the poems. in an example like the following one from “the lament of the frontier guard,” we can see how the spondaic and trochaic rhythms reinforce the imagery:there is no wall left to this village,bones white with a thousand frosts,high heaps, covered with trees and grass.these lines cannot be read fast. they are weighted down by the heavily accented rhythms(both the second and third lines begin with a spondee), and by the predominance of monosyllables and the lack of verbs(in the three lines, the only verb is the weak copula “is”). the slow progression of the lines functions as a verbal equivalent for the lives of the frontier guards themselves, who must stand and wait by the north gate.” cathay stands at a critical point in the development of pounds art and thought. looking back with sadness to an outworn age, it was also a volume which looked ahead to a world exhausted and demoralized by war. cathay anticipated a mood which everyone knew by 1922, when eliot named it in the waste land. but pound, in 1915, was already looking for alternatives to the cheapness, the waste,