On the Manipulation of Chineseness: The Case of Ezra Pound’s Cathay

• Main Authors: Ssu-Chieh Fan, 范思婕
• Other Authors: Yiu-Man Ma
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/w2s397

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 翻譯碩士學位學程 === 106 === A seminal yet much disputed literary figure of the 20th century, Ezra Pound has had a great influence on the development of modern poetry. Translations of literary works from different cultural backgrounds constitute a large proportion of Pound’s oeuvre. Indeed, Pound’s poetics is to some degree shaped by his translation activity, for the heterogeneity in the foreign works allows him to experiment with new poetic styles. Among all of Pound’s translations, Cathay has perhaps received the most attention, as it is both acclaimed and criticized for being unfaithful to the original Chinese poems. The term “faithfulness” will not be used in its conventional sense here, for it seems rather futile to blame Pound for the linguistic errors in Cathay, because he had little knowledge about the Chinese language during the time he translated the poems, and had to rely on Ernest Fenollosa’s notes for reference. Instead, comparisons and contrasts between the images in the original poems and Pound’s translations will be conducted to probe into the literary and ideological discourses that dictate Pound’s translation of Cathay. The vivid imageries that permeate Cathay are chronologically related to Pound’s advocacy of Imagism and Vorticism. A cross-textual analysis reveals that the Chinese images depicted in Cathay often deviate from the source texts, especially when they are at odds with Pound’s poetics. The discrepancies of Chineseness between Cathay and the original poems echo with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and Pound’s appropriation of Chinese images may pose threats to the subjectivity of Chineseness. It is in the interest of this study to investigate how Pound deliberately manipulates Chineseness, and to further disclose the motives behind this manipulation. By examining how the images in the original poems are transformed in Cathay, it is hoped that this study can not only shed new light on the poetic discourse in which Pound’s translation activity is embedded, but also attempt to address the thorny issue of perceiving and representing the alien Other.