(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 24)
Great Mavericks of Chinese Poetry
The above title for the following piece is, I realize,
problematical. It raises questions: to begin with, aren’t all the ‘greats’ of
poetry in some sense ‘mavericks’? No, at least not in China
But more importantly,
it might be normal to assume that the ‘greats’ of Chinese poetry, maverick or
otherwise, are Chinese poets themselves. What I actually mean in this case is a
couple of Western translators of Chinese poetry whom I consider great, but who
for one reason or another are regarded by Western academics as mavericks, eccentrics,
gate-crashers, unqualified fellow-travelers, or the like.
I am referring to Ezra
Pound and Johan W. Schotman. Pound (1885-1972) is of course one of the great 20th-century
American poets; he also produced a full translation of the ancient Chinese Shijing 詩經 or Book of Odes.[1]
Schotman (1892-1976) is the Dutch translator of Sji Tsjing: Het klassieke Boek der Oden.[2]
These two outstanding
mid-twentieth-century translators have some curious points in common. One: they
were both involved with psychiatry. Schotman was a medical doctor who for years
practiced psychiatry; Pound was a psychiatric patient and actually wrote his
version of the Odes while in a mental
institution.
Two: both produced
their translations of the Odes within
an almost unbelievably short span of time. More on this below.
Three, but this is
entirely personal: I do not hesitate to say that taken as a whole, the Odes versions of both are better poetry
than their original poems, again taken as a whole. I don’t think many Dutch
readers of Schotman’s original poetry would argue with me on this point, but it
is of course very bold and brash of me to say that Pound’s ‘ancient Chinese’
poems are actually better than his lifework the Cantos.
Or...is it really? As
early as 1961, the critic George P. Elliott published an article evaluating
Pound, I think quite fairly, from various points of view.[3]
He said Pound had been ‘oversold,’ and that the Cantos could be seen as a ‘large, occasionally splendid,
disintegrating bundle of poetry and mutter.’ He recommended reading a radically
short selection.
The thing that
originally inspired me to sit down and write about Pound and Schotman was that
I found Schotman being treated unduly as a maverick. Not long ago, there
appeared an extensive piece in Dutch about the history of Chinese literary
studies in The Netherlands. It mentions many translators including myself...but
not Schotman. I was sufficiently upset by this to contact the author, politely
asking him what had happened to Schotman. The answer was that Schotman was ‘perhaps
more of an occasional translator.’ I can only guess that in this case ‘occasional’
means he translated only a single book, albeit one 483 pages long that is the
only full Dutch translation of a perennially-quoted classic which the Chinese
themselves regard as the fons et origo
of their poetic tradition.
I suspect the real
reason is other and more banal. It is that Schotman committed the Twin Sins of
(1) not holding an academic degree in Chinese studies and (2) not being
affiliated with a university.[4]
As for Pound, I cannot
begin to summarize the wide-ranging factors that enter into any attempt at
evaluating him. Like Schotman, he was not academically trained in Chinese.
Unlike Schotman, he was already recognized as one of the poetic giants of his
generation decades before his work on the Odes.
Politically, his standing was and still is debated – he lived in Italy
There is much good background material on
Pound. I have at hand the biographies by Noel Stock, Humphrey Carpenter, and A.
David Moody, and I particularly hope Moody’s second volume will come out soon.
Mary Paterson Cheadle’s Ezra Pound’s
Confucian Translations is an indispensable study of the specifically
Chinese things. Hugh Kenner’s The Pound
Era, though written in a tediously florid style, is also an excellent
source of information on Pound and his writings including those based on
Chinese sources.
But confining our
attention to Pound’s Confucian Odes
when read and approached as poetry, I do not hesitate to say it is ‘great’ and
my favorite among the author’s works.[5]
It is the only version I have ever seen in English that I can take seriously as
poetry. I think the necessity of working to the pre-existing frame of an
ancient Chinese poem gave Pound a steadying counterweight to the manic
brilliancies of his own mind. In most of his own Cantos there was no such guiding anchor.[6]
The result was that the loyal reader – I am one of them – has to find, select,
and treasure up limited passages in which the memorable high points are not
drowned in what seems almost meaninglessly extended rambling.
Curiously, Carpenter says in his biography[7]
that Pound’s version of the Odes was ‘made
during 1949,’ which sounds as if the whole text must have been written inside a
single year – phenomenally fast, I would say, for such good writing. (Carpenter
does not share my enthusiasm for it; on the following page he says that
although there are ‘many good passages,’ the ‘collection as a whole’ is ‘not
the product of concentrated energy.’ I personally, as I have suggested, would
rather apply that criticism to Pound’s original Cantos ‘as a whole.’)
According to Schotman’s
presentation of himself in Het Boek der
Oden, the publication of his book in 1969 fulfilled the dream of more than
half a lifetime. Proudly referring to his six years of residence in China , he relates how in the 1920s in Beijing Holland
In any event, both
Schotman and Pound initially found top-grade academic publishers for their
versions. Schotman’s was published by Kluwer, a venerable house in Deventer
But lest anyone think Schotman
the ‘maverick’ had finally broken through into mainstream respectability, eventually
the very fact that his book had to be reprinted led to what was probably a fall
from grace in the eyes of intellectuals. The 1976 reprint was issued not by
Kluwer but by Ankh-Hermes, well known as a publisher on esoteric and occult
subjects. Their other books included the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, the Dao De Jing,
and the I Ching or Book of Changes, none of which
self-respecting academics in those days would have touched with a ten-foot
pole.
But now, given that
both these translators ‘had’ their knowledge of Chinese from unorthodox
sources, let us look at an example of their work. Pound’s version of Ode 42
begins:
Lady of azure thought, supple and tall...
goes on to praise her:
...red flower
flamed less
than thy
delightfulness.
and says in reminiscing:
fair as streamlet did she pass.
In the original, the poem’s beginning makes no reference to ‘azure
thought,’ or to any kind of ‘thought.’ The adjective used for the girl, jing 靜, is usually translated in this context as something like ‘demure’
or ‘well-behaved.’ (In other contexts it just means ‘quiet.’) But in Pound’s
theory of translation from Chinese, it is legitimate to take visual
sub-components of the written characters into consideration as if they were
independent characters functioning as notes or supplements to the text. In this
case, for example, the character jing
靜 could be
dissected into its left and right halves; qing
青 is in itself
a word for ‘blue,’ while zheng 爭 means ‘compete or struggle for’...so
that together they might seem to be saying ‘blue struggling’ or ‘struggling for
blue.’
Pound himself did read
this character this way. In his version of the The Great Digest or Da Xue
大學, one of the
basic Confucian moral texts which formerly all Chinese students had to learn by
heart, one of the first passages involves jing
in the sense of ‘quiet.’ In Chinese, it is 知止, 而后有定, 定, 而后能靜...The classic translation by James Legge, titled The Great Learning, reads this as:[9]
The point where to rest being known, the
object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm
unperturbedness may be attained to.
In Pound’s version, which pre-dates his Confucian Odes, this passage reads:[10]
Know the point of rest and then have an
orderly mode of procedure; having this orderly procedure one can “grasp the
azure,” that is, take hold of a clear concept...
In other words, in saying the ‘supple and tall’ girl was possessed ‘of
azure thought,’ Pound was simply falling back upon his own understanding of
what ‘quiet’ was: it was the attainment of a coveted ‘sky’-clear state.
As for ‘fair as
streamlet did she pass,’ this is an unusually suggestive case of how Pound sometimes
threw in something he had seen in a dictionary even if it seemed contextually
out of bounds. The original is 洵美而異. Legge[11]
reads this as ‘truly elegant and rare,’ adding in a footnote that 洵 is ‘here, as often, an adverb,
meaning “truly”.’ Another eminent translation, Bernard Karlgren’s which tries
to avoid poetic pretensions and stick closely to the original, has ‘truly
beautiful and remarkable.’[12]
Both Legge and Karlgren take this phrase as referring not to the girl but to a
gift, a reed, which she has given to the speaker who is the lyrical subject of
the poem.
In the Mathews
Chinese-English dictionary, which was in standard use internationally in the
mid-twentieth century and which Pound had at his disposal while working on the Odes,[13]
there are three different definitions of洵. The first is ‘really, truly’; the second is ‘distant, remote’ –
and the third is ‘water flowing out from a whirlpool’ or ‘a river in Shensi .’ It seems pretty clear that Pound took up the
notion of ‘flowing’ or ‘river’ and applied it to the girl.
Schotman’s Dutch version reads this phrase
as ‘fraai en ook heel zeldzaam,’ that is, ‘attractive and very rare as well.’
The words clearly refer to the gift, not the girl. So far so good. But in the
passage which Pound made ‘...red flower flamed less/than thy delightfulness,’
Schotman seems to have done some dictionary-inspired emendation of his own. In
the original, in 說懌女美 or ‘delighted in the girl’s beauty,’ it is perfectly normal
Classical Chinese to read 說 not in its present-day meaning of ‘speak, say, tell’ but as an
alternate form of 悅 which means ‘enjoy, take pleasure in.’ This usage, and its
relevance to this poem, is clearly mentioned by Mathews, which quotes both the
original line and Legge’s ‘I delight in the beauty of the girl.’ But Schotman
seems to have overridden this, choosing instead the modern Chinese meaning and
expanding the passage into
Ik zei, toen zij
me ’t rietje bood
hoe mooi ’k
haar vond, hoe ’k hield van haar
which means
I told her,
when she gave me the reed,
how beautiful
I found her, how I loved her.
In the original as ‘correctly’ or academically read, there is no indication
that the lyrical subject ever said anything to the girl. If this had been an
examination question for a course in Classical Chinese, the teacher’s red
pencil would have been justly wielded. Yet...we must assume Schotman knew what
he was doing: in his Boek der Oden he
appends a list of existing books against which he claims to have ‘carefully
checked’ his translations, and one of them is Karlgren’s massive scholarly tome
Glosses on the Book of Odes, which
contains an extensive philological discussion of this very passage.
In other words (I
think), it was a case of the poet winning from the pedant. In his preface,
Schotman points out that even the expert translations by Waley and Karlgren
occasionally disagree, concluding that a translator who has empathetically ‘entered
into the atmosphere and the sense’ of one of the Odes may well doubt that
either of them has got it right.
But in another respect,
I suspect Schotman of having sided with the pedants of this world. It seems to
me ‘remarkable,’ to say the least, that Schotman never so much as mentions
Pound although his own book came out fifteen years later than Pound’s and I
assume he must have been aware of it. Neither in his preface nor in the list of
consulted translations does he offer any comment, positive or negative, on The Confucian Odes.
Was Schotman, proud of
his ‘establishment’ publisher and his subsidy from a government ministry,
starting to feel that he had now won Insider status that he must uphold? Did he
think it unscholarly or unseemly even to be drawn into discussion of an
Outsider version like Pound’s?
We’ll never know. He
passed away in the same year (1976) that Het
Boek der Oden was reprinted in the arcane-and-occult sector. And by now, it
is liable to be only his fellow occasional translator who studies and admires
him.
-- Lloyd Haft
[1] I will be quoting from the 1959 New Directions reprint The Confucian Odes: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius; the original
publication was Harvard University Press 1954.
[2] Deventer
[3] ‘Poet of Many Voices,’ originally published in Carleton Miscellany vol. 2, summer 1961. I have read it as included
in Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology,
edited by J. P. Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970. The words I quote are on
pages 260 and 267 of that edition.
[4] There is an excellent biography of Schotman, and perhaps
appropriately, it has its own kind of ‘maverick’ status: privately printed and
available only from the author. A. H. Huussen jr., Johan W. Schotman, Oegstgeest 2011.
[5] It defies my imagination why L. S. Dembo, on the first page of his
otherwise excellent The Confucian Odes of
Ezra Pound (University of California Press 1963) called it a ‘minor work.’
[6] Notable exceptions are the so-called Chinese Cantos (nos. 52 to
61), described in detail by John Driscoll in his The China Cantos of Ezra Pound, Uppsala 8 in general.
[7] A Serious Character: The Life
of Ezra Pound, London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988, page 797.
[8] Huussen, sections ‘Voorlopige bibliografie...’ p. 20 and ‘Documenten’
p. 106.
[9] I am quoting from the one-volume bilingual The Four Books published in Hong Kong
by Guwen Bianyi She in 1962, page 3.
[10] Quoted from Ezra Pound, Confucius,
published by New Directions in 1951, page 29.
[11] in the five-volume bilingual set of his The Chinese Classics published by Hong Kong University Press in
1960: volume 4, ‘The She King’, page 69.
[12] Bernard Karlgren, The Book of
Odes, Stockholm : Museum of Far Eastern
Antiquities
[13] Cheadle, p. 48, says a copy of it was sent to Pound ‘in late 1946
or early 1947.’
