Tag Archives: Ernest Fenollosa

Logan on Billings’s Critical Cathay

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William Logan’s long review of the new Cathay: A Critical Edition, edited by Timothy Billings

The New Criterion has published William Logan’s long review of the new Cathay: A Critical Edition, edited by Timothy Billings (Fordham, 2019).

Logan likes the book. He summarizes:

As Mori’s English was poor, and Fenollosa’s Japanese probably not advanced, an expert in both, the professor of international law Ariga Nagao, was employed as a translator. Also fluent in classical Chinese, he prepared the crib for one of the most important poems in the book, “Song of the Bowmen of Shu.” Mori and Ariga used what is called the kundoku method of reading and translating. This is Timothy Billings’s quite remarkable discovery in this extraordinary edition of Cathay. Kundoku allowed scholars who couldn’t speak Chinese, who could pronounce the characters only in the Japanese fashion, to read the texts closely. This is reminiscent of the study of Latin in the West, where for centuries the texts were pored over by students and scholars who sometimes could not speak the language and whose pronunciation would undoubtedly have driven ancient Romans mad—though ancient Romans in their polyglot city were used to foreigners mangling their tongue and delighted in making nasty remarks about it.

The full book is very worth reading for anyone interested in Ezra Pound’s Cathay and/or in Chinese poetry in English translation (and its history). But Logan’s review is also an excellent summary of what is most important and urgent in Billings’s edition.

Click here for the full review.

Shan on Yu Yoyo and Translation

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Yu Yoyo, whose poetry is discussed by Xiao Yue Shan on the Asymptote blog.

The Asymptote blog has posted Xiao Yue Shan’s take on Yu Yoyo 余幼幼, as translated by Henry Zhang. Shan writes:

Floating signifiers are especially insecure in translation, in which one often has to choose between music and intention, double meanings or single ones, visual effect or faithful retellings. They present a particular dilemma because a floating signifier in one language may not be one in the other. The Chinese language, painting with a full palette of the pictorial, the symbolic, the historical, and the literal, has a tangibility that does not lapse into the vague as easily as English does. Ernest Fenollosa, in his (flawed but admirable) studies, characterized Chinese characters as a medium for poetry. It is not that Chinese is inherently more possessive of the elusive idea of poetics, but rather that the facets of Chinese language that enchanted Fenollosa with their invocation of poetry are also what result in headaches for translators. We do not count our losses in translation. Instead, we admire the growth a poem may undergo as it leaves its writer’s hand and wanders onto the page, how it may cross oceans and national borders, how it lives, how it is alive, the way we know language to be.

Shan notes that in Henry Zhang’s English version of Yu’s poem “Letter of Regret,” the word “‘love’ is applied much less liberally, turning up only four times” to Yu’s six for aiqing 爱情. “There is no retracing the tangled process of translation,” she says, “but one may guess that it has something to do with how ‘love’ weighs lighter in the Chinese language, which has ceded less value to the word in its public consciousness.”

I don’t know about that. But looking at the first stanza of the poem in Chinese and English, I wonder if Zhang was working with another version.

忏悔书

我写了那么多爱情
却从来没有
相信过
爱情到了最后
都让我变成
老死不相往来

Letter of Regret

I wrote so much love
but never
believed
love would make me
two cities, each ignoring the other

Click here to read the piece in full.

Turner on Cheng and Métail from Calligrams

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Cha has published Matt Turner’s review of two French studies of Chinese poetry, Michèle Métail’s Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems, translated by Jody Gladding, and the re-release of François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing, translated from by Donald A. Riggs with classical Chinese poems translated by Jerome P. Seaton, released as part of the Calligrams series by New York Review Books and Chinese University Press.

Turner explains:

NYRB’s Calligrams series publishes titles relating to traditional Chinese literature and Euro-American modernism, calling to mind Guillaume Apollinaire’s book of visual poetry, Calligrammes (1918), and Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written language, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1919). It should also call to mind Ezra Pound, who saw in Chinese literature the tools to “make it new.”

About the books, he writes that Cheng, “a Chinese-French structuralist who trained with Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan—offers

that the Chinese written language has an emptiness or void at its heart; its written language demonstrates the shifting relationships of person to world, expressing ontological truths … Cheng states that these relationships translate into poetic images … Subject and object become a matter of language, in which the terms serve to reflect each other—not signifying themselves, but projecting outwards as a comprehensive image … Another way of saying this is that the poet and the poem do not unite, but refract each other.

As for Michèle Métail, “French sinologist and OuLiPo member,” her study of “reversible poems,” which “can be written in grids, in which all directions yield different readings or narratives; written in circles that have no discernible starting or ending points or be poems that, although written conventionally, can be read backwards, like palindromes”—reading one poem discussed by Métail, Turner writes:

The message is clear: lust is bad. Yet one has the sense that in a similar poem one could continue the permutations and end up with something very different. Perhaps that’s because of the “void” at the heart of the Chinese written language as much as the form of huiwenshi. The fine line between the “inside” of the poem and the “outside” of the poem functions as an image that refracts the world. So the question this poses is if this theory applies to literature in English today, to Chinese-language literature today, and if the theory can be implemented as a writing method, or only read backwards?

Click on the image above for the full review.

A Closer Look at Yunte Huang’s SHI

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Gina Elia: A Closer Look at Yunte Huang’s SHI

Huang’s book of translations, SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry, clearly identifies itself as, in part, a response to the Fenollosa/Pound argument concerning Chinese poetry and its proper translation. However, the primary purpose of the work, as Huang states in his introduction, is to deal “with…the often-invisible face of translation…brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work…exposed to the reader’s view.” The translations reveal the difficulties and problematics of ripping a literary work from its cultural and linguistic context, a process that is too often smoothed over in editions that aim to hide the invisible, yet irrevocable changes committed by translation’s hand.

Announcing Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews

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Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews

We are delighted to welcome a new member to the Dissertation Reviews family. Lucas Klein will be the editor of our Chinese Literature series, set to launch fully in early 2013. If you are interested in reviewing for the new series, or having your dissertation reviewed, please contact chineselit@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our New Field Editor
Lucas Klein is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong. His dissertation, “Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, & World Literature in Chinese Poetry” (Yale 2010), looks at the intersections of concepts of World Literature and Chinese Poetry in both the modern and medieval eras to trace the shifting configurations of “Chineseness” against foreign poetic influence. He is the co-editor, with Haun Saussy and Jonathan Stalling, of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (Fordham University Press 2008), and the translator of Notes on the Mosquito, the selected poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions 2012).