Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) led a life of such variety, which covered so many important places and events of the twentieth century, it is impossible to summarize his achievement in this brief space. Pound was probably the most original poet since Walt Whitman. His intercultural epic, the Cantos, is－like its author－a mixture of fragments of various cultures. In the pages which follow, we have prepared a"Table of Important Dates, Events, and Anecdotes"which divides his life into six major chronological and geographical periods; these pages list some of the important political, social, and literary crises that surrounded his tormented life.

One point in Pound's poetry, however, requires special consideration; the historical and linguistic inaccuracy of his poetry vs. its very obvious literary excellence. This point is particularly relevant to Pound's use of China in his poems and requires some elaboration to avoid misunderstanding.

Having all your facts straight is not always a high priority among authors. Shakespeare himself made some obvious mistakes, but who would correct those lines of lyric beauty for the sake of historical accuracy. In Pound's case, it is difficult to know how much knowledge of China he had before 1913. When he was given the Fenollosa manuscript in 1915, he began a serious study of the language and culture. In this"sea of strangeness"that was ancient china, Pound discovered the island of Confucianism from which vantage point he re-examined all civilization. He looked again at life through the Four Books（四書）and declared: "Had it not been [for] this book, from which I draw my strength [during imprisonment], I would have gone insane….read it constantly, [for] if you have grasped the import of this volume nothing can really hurt you, or corrupt you-not even the America[n] civilization or uncivilization."Although his vision of China was not through physical contact of personal experience, but through the spectacles provided for him by Fenollosa, etc., he communicated its essential cultural content. On the other hand, Pound worked hard on translating from classical Chinese and found it more challenging than Homeric Greek. As he himself said,"Looking eastward even my own scant knowledge of ideogram has been enough to teach me that a few hours' work on it is more enlivening, goes further to jog a man out of fixations than a month's work on a great Greek author."

Our annotations indicate that Pound frequently"mistranslated"or"misinterpreted"the original Chinese texts from which he was working. Whether this was deliberate or not is not so important as the fact that even linguistic accuracy was sacrificed to literary excellence. He does not always follow the literal meaning of the original text if he can achieve a literary triumph through imagery or an ironic twist. (e.g., see explanation of 習 on Canto LXXIV, line 448-452) As one critic has observed. "it is true Pound occasionally wanders off the main road when he is side-tracked by the pictorial effects of the ideogram and even gets lost at times but in his quandary he finds sometimes new paths much more interesting and scenic than the well trod."In short, Pound's knowledge of the Chinese language was limited, in spite of his long application, but he worked wonders within those limitations. While he may have failed in sinological accuracy of detail and scholarly precision of expression, Pound succeeded as the inspired master of words and rhythms. He often hit on the exact artistic combination that is great art, and great art is always a kind of distortion through interpretation. [top]

Pound, Modern American Poetry