[The following will serve as an introduction to a new book of Wai-lim Yip's English language poetry, to be published next year in Hong Kong.]
It is almost pro forma, in talking of Ezra Pound and Chinese poetry, that we go back to T.S. Eliot’s remark that “Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Hugh Kenner does it. Wai-lim Yip does it. It is a statement that rings true, once one allows that Eliot was making it with tongue securely in cheek and looking for the maximum effect. It is also a two-fold statement, balanced in an obvious way between “inventor of Chinese poetry” and “for our time.” And yet, curiously, Wai-lim Yip omits the second part (“in our time”) when he first quotes Eliot in Pound’s Cathay, and Kenner, with more tongue and more cheek than Eliot, condenses it in the title of the pertinent chapter in his book The Pound Era, to read simply “The Invention of China.” (Reading that last one, here, in
What
did Pound do, then, and what did he fail to do, when his attention turned,
circa 1914, to the domain of Chinese poetry?
For the first question, I will venture an answer on my own; for the
second I will fall back on the work of Wai-lim Yip, who used his own “special
view,” as a poet and a scholar, to reveal an actual Chinese poetry or to invent it anew for the era after Pound.
The
work by Pound to which all of this refers is Cathay , a small book of
sixteen poems published in 1914 and subtitled Translations by Ezra Pound: For the Most Part from the Chinese of
Rihaku [Li Po], from the notes of the
late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. The small scale of the work and the
qualifications around its composition are a first point worth noting – in
particular that Pound is avoiding a claim for authenticity or expertise as the
author/translator. Nor is he setting out
to be an inventor of a country or a language or a poetry not his own. Rather he is taking a series of raw notes at
a notable remove (via Japanese) from the Chinese original, and he is making
poems of a kind that seems new to him in English.
The
rawness of the notes leaves him with the nuclei
from which poems can be made – “[radiant] clusters,” possibly, as he would
elsewhere have it. He had attempted a
few years before to do something of the sort from finished if awkward
translations by Herbert A. Giles, but there was too much interference there –
too much of Giles’s finish – for him to work his way through. But Fenollosa led him word by word,
suggesting what might be there, but not distracting him:
blue blue river
bank, grass
luxuriously luxuriously garden in willowfill/full fill/full storied house on girl
in first bloom of youth
white (ditto) just / face window door
brilliant
luminous
Blue,
blue is the grass around the river
And the willows have
overfilled the close garden.
And, within, the mistress,
in the midmost of her
youth.
youth.
White, white of face,
hesitates, passing the door.
From the perspective of those who practice
poetry, what happened here (and more so elsewhere in Cathay) was that Pound, who had been looking for a way to write a
new but still measured poetry of sharp perceptions [his version of vers libre], moved his work forward by
this contact with masters like Li Po.
Where his famous imagiste poem
of 1913, “In a Station of the Metro,” seems in retrospect to be a naïve example
of a barely suppressed metaphor, the poems in Cathay – no matter their remove from the originals – allow a range
of experience, Pound’s in alignment with those of the Chinese poets, that is a
genuine breakthrough in English and that so far stands the test of time. In the process, then, it pushes his own
practice forward, advances it through an act of translation that goes beyond
translation (where translation itself means
[literally] a “going beyond” or “carrying across”).
What
is Pound’s “invention,” then, his discovery in the act of translating and composing the poems in
There is, however, more to
be said about what Pound discovered in his play among the isolated words in the
Fenollosa/Mori notes and what has changed from that while coming into common
practice in the years after Cathay :
First (and of immediate
importance to much of my own practice), a means for making poetry via
translation that can then function as a comment not only on the past but on our
own time as well. Here we can mention
Kenner’s reading of Cathay in the
context of the First World War or what Pound does a little later, say, in his Homage to Sextus Propertius from the
Latin. This we might speak of as the principle of translation as composition.
Second, the use of a range of appropriative techniques, which have become very common and possibly more radical in the postmodern period. This could include translation but would extend as well into forms of collage and found poetry – as acts of writing through other poets or other texts (to borrow John Cage’s phrase). The Cantos throughout are a marvelous proving ground for this kind of work. And here we might use the term principle of appropriation, to set this approach apart.
3. Moving away from translation and appropriation
as such, Pound’s work in Cathay shows a way of making poetry from lists of
words – connected or not at their origin.
As a form of systemic or process poetry, this has been utilized by
Jackson Mac Low in his Asymmetries
and Light Poems, by David Antin in
his Meditations, by me in The Lorca Variations, and by various
other poets both in America
But what about the invention
of China
What is left to say is that
Pound set a style that came to typify early twentieth-century translations into
English/American and that he later pointed (in Canto 49, say) toward other
styles that were possibly closer to the classical Chinese:
Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field; eat of the grain
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?
And even this of course is the
bringing-to-light of a terse telegraphic style (a poetry of essential words)
while canceling out the other, recognizably formal qualities of the original –
fixed measure and rhyme.
It fell to Wai-lim Yip – a
poet first and foremost – to unearth all this for us – not to invent China
The central works in Yip’s
writings about poetry as it moves between China and America (or America and
China) are in three books published over the last thirty years: Pound’s Cathay, Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, and Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics.[1] Throughout there is an attempt to
differentiate and in some sense to reconcile the way two languages and
traditions – Chinese and English – frame reality in the act of making
poetry. The work of American poets – of some not all American poets – pursues a poetry of juxtapositions that arises
more readily in the open – relatively
open – syntax of Chinese poets like Li Po
and Wang Wei. In Yip’s chronology the
starting point is Pound’s Cathay, but
the stronger (theoretical) underpinning is from the great Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein, who also worked from an interest in the Chinese written
character, not only as a “medium for poetry” (to use the title of Fenollosa’s
famous essay) but as a “medium for montage,” which for Eisenstein was the basis
of the new art of film, of “moving images.”
Thus Yip brings together the following: Eisenstein’s definition of montage, “the juxtaposition of two
separate shots by splicing them together,” and Pound’s similar comments, from
more than a decade earlier, comparing “In a Station at the Metro” with a
traditional Japanese haiku (and, by implication, other Asian poetry as well):
“The ‘one image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one
idea set on top of another”[2] [rather
than a comparison, in the manner of metaphor and simile].
Here
Yip writes as a poet, understanding that to achieve these results to maximum effect, syntax itself – the grammar
of connectives – gets in the way, or gets in the way until Pound and others
begin to break it, leading to the relatively open syntax of later American
poetry. Here are some examples cited by
Yip:
Ezra Pound: lines from various cantos
Rain;
empty river, a voyage
.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Autumn
moon; hills rose above lakes
.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Broad
water; geese line out with the autumn.
from
Canto 49
Prayer:
hands uplifted
Solitude:
a person, a Nurse.
from Canto 54
William Carlos Williams: “The Locust Tree in
Flower”
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
Gertrude Stein (who is also grist for
Yip’s mill): Orange
Why
is a feel / oyster / an egg / stir. / Why is it orange / centre.
/ A show at
tick / and loosen / loosen it / so to speak / sat. /
It was an extra leaker / with
a sea spoon, / it was an extra licker /
with a see spoon.
[Yip’s division into short verse lines to highlight the juxtaposed
elements.]
And later, Gary Snyder:
First
day of the world
white
rock ridges
new born
Jay
chatters the first timeRolling a smoke by the campfire
New! never before.
bitter coffee, cold
dawn wind, sun of the cliffs.
To which let me add the following [complete
poems], which I have cited elsewhere, comparing them to traditional forms of
verbal juxtaposition in many cultures:
Kenneth
Koch: In the Ranchhouse at Dawn
O corpuscle!
O
wax town!
Robert Kelly [one of a longer series]
the
last days like this
a
red stoneall we know of fire
The examples multiply as we think about
them and the topics raised by Wai-lim Yip really take off from here. In the process of course Yip himself enters
as a poet, to give his writing an authority that can only, from my perspective,
ring true from within poetry. Here, therefore, is an example of Yip,
writing in English, as a poet, like many others [Reznikoff, Hollo, Codrescu,
Joris, Waldrop, Bukowski], who has himself made the move between languages:
conception –
wind
penetrates
roots
pulsating
grip :
absorbed
gaze
&
immediate mounting
.
quiet
flare-up from
rocks
crystal-blue
feathers and clouds
a thousand piles
a million piles
break up
distant wars
in brain's lobes
fruits fall
one
by
one
To this I will add, by way of conclusion, a
small poem that I wrote some 15 years ago in Taiwan, while attending another
seminar on Yip’s work, both scholarly and, as we say, “creative.” Yip, for his part, prepared and read a long
poem to the gathered conferees: a testimony to his art and to a search for
meaning that can take us into dangerous areas as well as safe ones, “blinding
images” (in his formulation) as well as clear ones. Sitting in the hall of Fu Jen University I
wrote down fragments of what he said and what was said about him, calling it
A Poem of Longing (for Wai-lim Yip)
ghosts
of the underworld
&
fishy smells
the
real world, broken
incomplete
it
brings forth doubts
&
longings
after
some other world
we
search for
like
the eye behind
the
movie camera, says
I want to be in the land of Lu
but I am blocked by mountains
END NOTES
1 He has also been a distinguished translator of
Chinese poetry, both classical and contemporary, into English – Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei
and two volumes of “modern Chinese poetry,”
together covering the period from 1930 to 1965.
2 This “principle” is articulated throughout early
European modernism, not usually from Chinese models and often with more radical
results than in Pound’s imagiste
phase. Thus Pierre Reverdy, in a definition,
roughly contemporaneous with Pound’s,
that underlay the work of the Surrealist poets of the 1920s: “The image cannot spring from any comparison
but from the bringing together of two more or less remote realities. … The more
distant and legitimate the relation between the two realities brought together,
the stronger the image will be … the more emotive power and poetic reality it
will possess.”
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