Cathay

Looking for translations of Li Po I came upon several on this website which included three by EP with the following qualification: "Versions by Ezra Pound, which are (to put it as politely as possible) questionable translations but vintage Pound." I can't find my way to any page of this website which includes the name of the author of the above statement, but the URL is: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Poetry/Li_Po/ Must be someone at the University of Michigan. I hope it is a student. The statement above is wildly not true. Ezra Pound's translations are actually far better than anyone elses (of almost anything). Now, I don't know Chinese, this is true, but comparing Pound's poems to others, including Sam Hamill's which are used on the website without patronizing comment, Pound wins out every day. Sam Hamill's are awful poems, for instance the following Li Po poem:

You said good-bye to that Yellow Crane Pavilion
and sailed west, down the valley
through the flowers and mists of spring
until your lonely sail vanished
in the blue sky's horizon,
and I was left watching the river
flowing gently into heaven.

Now, Ezra Pound was never responsible for anything this bad in English. Phew, you can't get much duller Flowers of mists and spring" " lonely sail" "flowing gently in to heaven." The Poem in Chinese may or may not say all those things, but in fact Hamill's poem seems to be no "closer" to the "original" than any of the ten others collected on this website: http://www.chinapage.com/poem/libai/libai-trs.html

See for yourself. The one I like best is this:

my old friend leaves Yellow Crane Pavilion
he is going to the west

sailing to yangzhou in march
while blossoms curl like smoke on the river

how far away the lone sail
fading into the clear blue sky

only the yangtze river remains
it is flowing at the edge of the world.

The translators are John Knoepfle and Wang Shouyi. This is a much, much more interesting poem in English, "lone sail" vastly preferably to a "lonely sail." As to which poem is more Chinese, I dont' know, but here are some comparisons of certain aspects of the fourteen poems on the website: http://www.chinapage.org/poem/libai/libai-trs.html.

in the last line, its either "edge of the sky" (7 versions use sky in one way or another), or "Heaven" (used in five versions, including Amy Lowell's) or "world" or "horizon" (1 version). Only Knoepfle/Shouyi use "world" which does seem to be so much more appropriate. As to whether the original Chinese word is heaven, sky or world, who knows? I would like to, but I still think that "world" is a better word to use for the earthy, straightforward poet I usually take Li Po to be. I like the fact that Knoepfle/Shouyi don't use caps and present the form in couplets (these things also seem to resonate with my idea of Li Po, anyway, as does the simple straighforward "clear blue sky" in the third couplet. Other translations, by the way include "blue empty," "blue-green void," "blue sky," "blue emptiness,"blue sky's horizon," "emerald-green air," "blue horizon," "blue sky," "emerald Isle,"! "blue emptiness," "jade colored distance," "azure sky," and "green mountains." Now as far as I know both the mountains and the sky may be in the poem, but most everyone leaves the mountains out if they are. Hamill's version "blue sky horizon" is just weird really. I do like those who have made the sky green like David Hinton and Amy Lowell, even if the sky is blue in the Chinese (maybe it is a combination of green mountains and blue sky). Well, in any case, all of these poems seem to have gotten the 'idea' of the poem, but very few of them are good English poems (only 4 or 5 of the fourteen aren't just banal). To assume that there is an exact English equivalent for every Chinese character is of course wrong headed and Imperial. Ezra Pound might have been both of those things some of the times, but his Chinese translations, especially the magnificent Cathay, are spectacular. To patronize his "accuracy" is picking at nits, cats looking at kings, ants crawling on mountains. Ah well.