“Essential Witnesses”: Imagism’s Aesthetic “Protest” and “Rescue” Via Ancient Chinese Poetry

Abstract

Studies which criticize the English Imagists’ “manipulation” of ancient Chinese poetry fail to account for the Imagists’ motive for studying these “alien” and very nearly inscrutable poems. Too often the criticism has narrowly searched only for philological mistakes and ignored the literary tenets, from the very earliest, contemporaneous studies such as Arthur Waley’s 1918 attack entitled The Poet Li Po, A.D. 701–762, to the more recent scrutiny of Pound’s linguistic mistranslations in Pen-ti Lee’s and Donald Murray’s study “The Quality of Cathay: Ezra Pound’s Early Translations of Chinese Poems.” Focusing on Pound as the chief practitioner among the Imagist translators, sinologists have noted Pound’s inexpert manipulation of Chinese ideogram, syntax, structure, and cultural history: “everyone” in the business now-a-days knows, for instance, that the chief Poundian “howler” is “The River Song” in Cathay which Pound failed to see were actually two different poems by Li Po. And the defenses offered for Pound’s “howlers” can be themselves quite amusing, especially if one wishes to exuse Pound by citing Hugh Kenner’s discovery that Pound never “dealt with the Chinese characters directly, but has always followed” an English, French, or Latin “crib.” Furthermore, when it is revealed that the crib itself is grossly inaccurate, the comedy of errors is greatly compounded.