In earlier posts (“Trying Ezra Pound” and “Ezra Unbound — Trying the Poetry“), I told about a dinner with my cousins Norman and Patricia where, after we made a meal of Ezra Pound for his unrepentant fascism and anti-Semitism during World War II, Norman delivered a dessert morsel in the form of an old memory: he recited Pound’s Liu Ch’e. It was a tasty morsel indeed.
Here once again is Liu Ch’e, a fine example of Imagist poetry:
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
I wanted to know more about this poem, written when Pound was young and ambitious and still just an American expatriate in England, not yet a mad traitor in war-time Italy. I set aside Pound’s political legacy from his extraordinary artistic mind, but I soon found myself Pound-smacked again. Liu Ch’e led me to his celebrated translations of Classical Chinese poetry, where I quickly ran into troubling questions. For one, how could Pound be identified as the translator when he did not know Chinese? How faithful were the translations to the source? And were the translations an act of cultural appropriation (or misappropriation) intended to advance Pound’s own Euro-centric artistic ideas?
Nothing about Ezra Pound is easy. Having addressed those questions, I am ready to look closely at Liu Ch’e. But once again, a nettlesome question surfaces.
Whence, Liu Ch’e?
Any discussion about Pound and his exploration of classical Chinese thought and poetry begins with Cathay, a short volume published in 1915. The book contains 14 Chinese translations that Pound conjured up from the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa, an English professor and historian of Japanese (and Chinese) art. (I discussed this in more detail in the last post.) When Fenollosa died unexpectedly in 1908, his wife gave the unorganized notebooks to Pound, hoping to preserve her husband’s legacy. In this, she was more than successful. Knowing no Chinese himself, Pound transformed Fenollosa’s work into the lustrous poems of Cathay, which burst upon the nascent Imagist and Modernist movements with Fenollosa’s name right on the cover.
Liu Ch’e was not included in Cathay, but it turned up a year later in Lustra, Pound’s next volume of poems published in 1916. Lustra was mostly Pound’s original poetry, but it included all the Cathay poems and a few additional translations. In these volumes Pound was working out and applying the experimental theories and techniques of Imagism, a new form of poetry that juxtaposed images (sometimes referred to as “superposition”) as in Japanese haiku and employed “free verse” rather than conventional meter and rhyme.
In the free edition of Lustra available at the Internet Archive, Pound offers no attribution or recognition of the Classical Chinese authors or of Fenollosa, Giles, or any other English translators. This troubles me, although I haven’t found any complaints about it in the academic materials I have access to. Perhaps other editions made the attributions clearer. Pound was certainly not hiding the fact that he was working off of earlier translations, but anyone picking up Lustrawouldn’t be able to distinguish what was original and what was translated.
Fenollosa wasn’t Pound’s only source for translated Eastern poetry. Another respected English sinologist Herbert Giles published the compendious A History of Chinese Literature in 1901. European interest in the Asian arts had been brewing in Europe for several decades, and Giles’s exhaustive work provided a trove of Chinese history and poetry.
In his preface, Giles explains, “This is the first attempt made in any language, including Chinese, to produce a history of Chinese literature.” Noting the daunting abundance of Chinese literature that ran uninterruptedly from the 6th century B.C.E. to his own day, Giles offered his book “as an introduction into the great field which lies beyond.” It was a little like the first step on the Moon.
I want to quote his next prefatory remark in full: “I have devoted a large portion of this book to translation, thus enabling the Chinese author, so far as translation will allow, to speak for himself. I have also added, here and there, remarks by native critics, that the reader may be able to form an idea of the point of view from which the Chinese judge their own productions.” Allowing the Chinese authors to speak for themselves was certainly not Pound’s aim when he reworked Fenollosa’s translations into Modernist poetry. Pound’s genius was to hear the voices of the old poets — clairvoyantly, one scholar said — and make them speak as 20th century Modernists.
Pound knew Giles’ History, which includes translations of poetry (and other texts) from China’s many dynastic eras. Tucked away on page 100 of the online edition is Giles’ translation of two poems by the sixth emperor of the Han dynasty, Liu Ch’e (156–87 B.C.). Giles explains that the emperor was a fervent patron of the arts and an accomplished poet. One of the untitled poems reads:
The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door
For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.
First Things First
Set Pound’s Liu Ch’e beside Giles’s untitled poem:
It is clear that Pound worked from Giles’ translation. Pound could not create a new translation from the ancient original because he could not read Chinese. But he could read Giles’ English version and envision improvements that would better express values common to avant garde Modernism and Classical Chinese culture and language.
It seems more accurate to say that Pound edited or reworked Giles’ 19th century translation than to say he is a translator of the 2nd century B.C.E. original.
That Pound was an extraordinary editor is certain. He famously offered substantial revisions to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland and turned it into Modernist gold. He told Ernest Hemingway to strip out the adjectives from overwritten sentences. His red pencil changed the later poetry of William Butler Yeats, sometimes quite literally when he struck the vague, romantic terms that Yeats tended toward. He had an unerring eye for the higher possibilities in the works of others.
In the case of the poem he entitled Liu Ch’e, Pound clearly improved Giles’ translation by “making it new.” Both poems invoke the same sense of emptiness and grief in the courtyard, and Pound retained many of Giles’ distinctive words (“rustling,” “footfalls,” “heaps”). But with his deft changes, he created a poem for the new 20th century.
In Giles’ translation, he uses an AA BB CC rhyme scheme. This is consistent with 19th century prosody, but it also reflects the presence of rhyme in the original. Pound, however, dispensed with rhymes altogether. Giles’ lines are iambic tetrameter, meaning each line has four strong syllables evenly spaced (dah-DUM-dah-DUM-dah-DUM-dah-DUM). To maintain the metronomic rhythm, the syllable count in Giles’ poem is very regular: 8–8–8–9–10. Since Pound sought to break what he called “the cuckoo clock of traditional British metric,” the stresses in his own version are put to a different kind of work, as with “dust drifts,” which I discuss below. His syllabic count, too, is uneven: 11–7–9–8–13–9.
Pound’s poem feels more like an internal monologue than a carefully shaped poetic form. It is more like what thinking to one’s self sounds like than Giles’ romantic cry of grief to the world.
Significant as his changes are, is Pound the “translator” of emperor Liu Ch’e’s poem? That title goes to Giles who sat with the Chinese characters and literally translated them into the English language, using an established poetic form. Pound edited, remade, improved. But he didn’t “translate” the poem in the ordinary sense.
At last — Liu Ch’e
And now, finally, on to Liu Ch’e, the poem by the eponymous emperor Liu Ch’e, as rendered by Pound via Giles.
First stanza, first line
First lines are important, and this one is a grabber.
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
In only seven words, the line conjures an image at a moment in time: a delicate fabric, perhaps a kimono, that was — but is no longer — in motion. In addition, the visual image has an aural element: the sound of rustling. Per Pound’s dictum, each word serves an integral purpose.
Narrative questions instantly arise. Whose silk is this? What made it rustle? Why did the rustling stop? Is the silk a garment worn by someone or simply a cloth blowing gently in a breeze? And where, by the way, are we?
Look how much a single line of well-chosen words can accomplish!
What of the word “discontinued”? What an odd choice. Norman likes it, I don’t. It differs from the other words in the line (and in the poem) in its Latinate root and its syllabic length. Semantically, it implies some kind of agency, whether human, natural, or divine. Things don’t just discontinue on their own; they are discontinued. Further, its modern usage (to my ear) connotes commerce (“we’ve discontinued that product line due to the high cost of silk”) or euphemism (“military operations have been discontinued,” i.e., “we lost”).
Yet much depends on the word “discontinued” because it is key to the line’s rhythmic properties. Intriguingly, the line can be scanned either as old-style iambic pentameter or with a more natural spoken rhythm. Here is iambic pentameter:
the RUS/tling OF/ the SILK/ is DIS/ conTINued
Pound would decry such a reading. I am sure he wanted the line read more naturally with three strong stresses evenly spaced:
the RUS/tling of the SILK/ is disconTINued
That leaves a lot of soft syllables “rustling” amid stronger syllables. And no iambic metronome is ticking away.
Giles used the word “stilled.” I like it better than “discontinued,” but it does two things Pound is not interested in. One, it introduces the 4-beat iambic tetrameter that persists through the rest of the poem. (The RUS/tling OF/ the SILK/ is / STILLED.) Two, it rhymes with “filled” on the next line. Giles, God bless him, was converting classical Chinese poetry into the English poetry’s 19th century rhyming and metrical conventions because that is what defined poetry at that time. Pound was aiming for the new poetics.
Advantage: Pound.
(On a side note, Pound’s first line has either 11 or 12 syllables, depending on how you read or hear the word “rustling.” How onomatopoeic that the word “rustling” flutters somewhere between two syllables and three. The sound of rustling silk, moreover, is amplified by the line’s three alliterative “s” sounds.)
First stanza, second line
Dust drifts over the court-yard.
Another complete sentence, this time telling us where we are: in a courtyard. And when: the present tense.
Moreover, the first two words — “Dust drifts” — function as a complete thought. As it drifts “over the courtyard,” the image in the reader’s mind is complete.
The rhythm and meter of line 1 have disappeared. Another poet might have written “The dust drifts over the court-yard,” keeping the iambic rhythm more or less intact. Removing the “the” satisfies the Poundian edict against any superfluous words. More importantly, the phrase “dust drifts” is a spondee, that is, two equally-stressed syllables in one measure, or foot. A spondee slows the pace, breaks the rhythm, and induces the reader to pause and fully pronounce both words. The effect is further heightened by the fact that the two words — “dust drifts” — are alliterative and a little tongue-twisterish.
Giles says, “With dust the marble courtyard filled.” Awkward. The opening phrase “with dust” would more naturally end the sentence, but then the rhyme scheme doesn’t work. Plus, Pound’s dust “drifts” in the courtyard in the dynamic present tense. Giles’ dust has already “filled” it.
Advantage: Pound.
In any event, whether drifting or filling, the presence of dust hardly bodes well.
First stanza, third line
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
“No sound of footfall” evokes both silence (“no sound”) and absence (no “footfall”). Another spondee — “no sound” — paradoxically makes sure the silence is emphasized. We are left to wonder whose footfall echoed in this courtyard where the dust drifts. Hard not to think it might have been the mysterious wearer of silk.
We also have the poem’s only enjambed line: “and the leaves” leaves us wondering what the leaves are about to do.
Giles: “No footfalls echo on the floor”. Three problems here may have troubled Pound. First, sounds don’t echo “on the floor,” do they? They echo off the walls, I think. Further, “on the floor” is arguably surplusage because when it comes to “footfalls,” where else but “on the floor” is the action (in this case the sound) taking place? Last, Giles has now completed three lines, each of which is a complete sentence and a self-contained thought. Pound enjambed the line and left the thought of the leaves hanging.
Advantage: Pound.
First stanza, fourth line
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
The enjambment between line 3 and 4 splits the phrase “the leaves/ scurry.” Thus, “the leaves” passively stay behind on line 3 in silence and absence, separated from all the activity on line 4, that is, scurrying, heaping, and becoming still.
Giles: “Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door.” Again, Pound creates a dynamic present in which the leaves “scurry” to their place, invoking the missing woman who once gracefully scurried across the courtyard. By contrast, Giles creates a static image. And again, another complete sentence on one line.
Advantage: Pound.
First stanza, fifth line
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:
All at once we sense what is going on. There is a subject of the poem — a “she” who is “the rejoicer of the heart.” Surely it is she whose silk garb rustled when she crossed the courtyard in the past. And we learn that she is beneath the drifting dust and the still leaves. Oh-oh.
Where once she scurried, now she lies. You knew that drifting dust in the courtyard wasn’t a good sign.
This short poem, we now realize, is about loss and memory and grief and death, all brought forward with short powerful bursts of visual, tactile, and aural imagery. The line ends with a colon, so we still have a threshold to cross to reach the poem’s one-line finale.
Giles: “For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost.” He tells us everything, introducing both lover and beloved, and leaving nothing about the narrator’s emotional state to the reader’s imagination. He might as well have said: O woe! Alas! Alack!
Advantage: Pound.
Second stanza, first line
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
In a more traditional poem, the final line might have used a simile and said “Like a wet leaf…” The rejoicer of the heart, we would be told directly, is like that wet leaf, clinging to the threshold. Cue the violin. But the elision of unnecessary words and the juxtaposition of images are central tenets of Pound’s imagist poetics. “Like” disappears, and a colon at the end of the first stanza is substituted.
The best description of juxtaposition comes from Fenollosa, whose poetic theories come from his study of Asian poetry, art, theatre, and music:
“Here I lay a spot of red paint down on my canvas. Next I choose a green which I dot near it. The red is immediately changed, and so is the green. In contrast to the green the red has taken fire, and the green now glows inwardly like an emerald. The reaction is mutual. […] So I might go on creating, that is, finding added colors, each one of which would modify all the previous reactions…”
So it is with words and the mental images they create. Pound’s colon links “the rejoicer of the heart” and the “wet leaf” across the stanza break like two colors on a canvas. With minimal strokes, Pound creates a poetic entanglement of powerful images. We realize the woman whose silk garb once rustled in the courtyard is the rejoicer of the heart, and she lies — perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively — beneath the blown heap of leaves. And from that we intuit the tearful meaning of that “wet leaf” clinging to the threshold, one leaf wishing not to be blown from the courtyard and away from memory.
Giles told us in the previous line that his “lovely one” is lost. Now he adds: “And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.” She is lost, I am left. Yes, we get it.
Advantage: Pound.
End of poem. Pound wins, 6–0.
Giles tells us little about these lines of ancient poetry other than that they “were written upon the death of a harem favourite, to whom [the emperor] was fondly attached.” The woman’s life and death are missing from history except in this short poem of loss and sorrow written by an emperor 2,000 years ago. Where Giles was explicit about the loss and grief, Pound shrouded the courtyard scene in greater mystery. Gone is the “I” in the poem, the subjective voice, the emperor-author. We readers are in the forlorn courtyard with “she, the rejoicer of the heart,” buried in memory or in body, or both, beneath the fallen leaves.
And sadly we are left to wonder: How long will that wet leaf cling to the threshold?
Pound Unwound
Pound’s version of the emperor’s poem is superior, and this is hardly a surprise. Pound was a brilliant poet and editor, and Giles was a brilliant scholar and translator. Yet, as I noted above, when Liu Ch’e appeared in Lustra, nothing about its provenance is mentioned anywhere. It is mixed in with Pound’s original poetry and, indeed, appears one page before In a Station of the Metro, Pound’s most anthologized creation. He made Liu Ch’e his own.
I can’t stop picking fights with Pound.
Someone asked me, “if you dislike Ezra Pound so much, why are you writing so much about him?” Great question. Too many great poets, many of whom I greatly admire, have looked past his legacy of hatred and madness to find real inspiration in his poetry. I’ll still read some more of his poetry, but I am done wrestling with the guy. He hated the contemporary world he lived in. He found it sterile, chaotic, ordinary, defiled. And he exalted and longed for golden ages in the worlds of Classical China, Ancient Greece, or medieval Provence. This led to great poetry and evil deeds.
In all of his original works, in the poems he created himself, there is not a single love poem, as far as I know. (And more than one academic has noted that fact.) What kind of poet, especially one steeped in the tradition of the Provencal troubadours, doesn’t write a love poem?
If you’ve read all 3 of my posts on Ezra Pound, thanks for hanging in. If you think I’ve got Pound all wrong, I’d love to hear why. And if you want to hear Norman recite Liu Ch’e, you’ll have to come over for dinner.
