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1、Pounds Imagism and his translations of Chinese Poetry “Cathy”Abstract: The opinions of Pounds imagism absorb rich nutrition in Chinese poetry while his poetic translation and creation also reflects his theory of imagism truly and vividly. In this paper, some of his translations are chosen to be anal
2、yzed according to his imagism.Keywords: Pound, Imagism, Cathay When Ezra Pound appeared on the scene in the first years of the twentieth century, the West presented a panorama of a wasteland. It was a world in which Pound saw pervasive and impenetrable gloom, and chaos and disorder and barbarism wer
3、e rampant everywhere. He considered it his mission to save a tottering civilization. Trying to derive standards from the cultures of the past and resurrect lost principles of order, he became, as M.L.Rosenthal calls him, “the prophet of the open spirit.” 1（P166）And the nuclear idea is “make it new”.
4、 In 1912, Pound and Flint laid down three Imagist poetic principle as an Imagist manifesto: I Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective。II To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentationIII As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical p
5、hrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.” 2(P301)Then in 1915, he published his translations of Chinese poetry “Cathay”. At that time, it was the critical point of the Word War I, which made all the people in the world in panic and resulted in the suspicion of western culture relics efficiency. Th
6、is also made Pound realize history is not only a valuable treasure house but also a stage which repressed people and distorted the exchange of idea. As a result, Pound tried to find some value system to help him get rid of the situation. Then he got the greatest cultural influence from ancient China
7、. During the 1870s an American named Ernest Fenollosa had gone to Japan to become an instructor in rhetoric at the Imperial University. Fascinated by Chinese and Japanese art, he had worked to conserve their traditions as a collector, a student of language and literature, and eventually as imperial
8、commissioner of art. He died in 1908, and in 1913 his widow was introduced to Ezra Pound in London. Having read some of his poetry, she felt that she had finally found someone to whom she might entrust her husbands papers-sixteen notebooks filled with transcriptions, literal translations, and glosse
9、s of Chinese and Japanese poetry and Noh dramas, plus her husbands essay on The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry. Ezra Pound sought the correspondence, which reflects his viewpoints about imagism poetics, and also got the pure color of the palette in the treasure house of Chinese poe
10、try He says that it is beyond question that so long as we understand Chinese poetry, we can find the very pure color. Moreover, this color has been reflected perfectly in the translations. The pure color referred to here indicates the specific, visual and pictorial image of Chinese poems. What Pound
11、 accomplished in Cathay was the application of imagist principles of composition to poems which had previously been translated only into the overelaborate and sometimes precious diction of late nineteenth-century verse. He created a style whose lucid simplicity seemed to parallel the precise use of
12、line and space in a Japanese watercolor, and the effect was so immediately convincing that T. S. Eliot, in 1928, called him “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.”3In a brief poem like “The Beautiful Toilet,” for instance, Pound places a few simple images in juxtaposition, letting their sugge
13、stive power define the mood of a young woman who has been left alone by her drunken husband: Blue, blue is the grass about the riverAnd the willows have overfilled the close garden.And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.Slender, she pu
14、ts forth a slender hand.Some of the poems qualities do represent conventions of Chinese verse, such as the repetition of words-though Pound varies the technique from line to line to avoid the monotony that Western readers might feel. But the poem achieves its effect primarily through images of natur
15、e which, if traditional to Chinese verse, also conform perfectly to imagist doctrine. The willows have “overfilled” a garden which is “close” (enclosed, but inevitably carrying the more common meaning as well), while the woman, who is “within” and also in the midmost of her youth, reaches out throug
16、h the door in a simple, hesitant gesture which focuses all the oppressive sense of enclosure built up by the previous lines. Then Pound introduces the facts of her situation that she had been a “courtesan”, and that her husband is a “sot.” Having known the freedom and excitement of a life among people, perhaps at court, the young womans aura of innocent, wasting youth, created in the first stanza, is complicated by irony in t
