Chinese Shadows

Chinese Shadows: American writers and the dream of China

“China is no less stimulating than Greece . . . these new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex… they cannot help ringing about changes as great as the Renaissance changes, even if we set ourselves blindly against it. As it is, there is life in the fusion.”
Ezra Pound. New Age (January 1915)

“The work is heavy. I see
bare branches laden with snow”
William Carlos Williams. To the Shade of Po-Chu-I,” (1921)

“The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or exploit their markets, but to study and come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. . . . We need their best ideals to supplement our own---ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.”
Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920)

The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”
Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

“Let me State at the outset that I know no Chinese.”
Amy Lowell. Fir Flower Tablets (1922)

A fascination with things Chinese percolated through Western consciousness, from the 17th century Jesuit “discoveries” through the idealizations and exploitations of the Nineteenth Century, cresting in the literary pre-occupations of the Twenties. Imitation, translation and appropriation of Chinese culture became central elements in the modernist movement, pictorially, verbally and ethnographically. Most of the writers, who explored China, did so through books and museums, including most notably the British Museum in London and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both of which contained glorious collections of Eastern art. Asian themes were to be found in fiction and theatre from Eugene O’Neill to Pearl Buck (whose novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931). Japanese prints and Chinese ceramics, wallpaper and screens decorated many an American home and the pagoda and other Asian architectural themes became important elements in American buildings.

Of course, central to both the promotion of China and the rise of modernism, was Ezra Pound, whose book of translations, Cathay was published in 1915 and whom T. S. Eliot called “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Pound was to go on to translate and publish a number of Chinese classics including the four books of Confucius , and developed a line of literary translation which eclipsed the more staid work of Herbert Giles, Arthur Waley and others. Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and many others were drawn to Chinese poetry and art and incorporated Chinese aesthetics into their own work.

Some Examples:

Ezra Pound. Cathay. London, Elkin Matthews, 1915.
Ezra Pound Canto XIII, in Transatlantic review (January, 1924)

Ezra Pound. A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris, Hours Press, 1930.
Exra Pound. Translation of Confucius .Ta Hio (Seattle, 1928)
Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character” in Instigations (New York, Boni & Liveright, 1920)

Ezra Pound. “Cathay” from Personae. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1926.

Wallace Stevens. Harmonium. “Six Significant Landscapes,” from Harmonium. New York, Knopf, 1923.

Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough. Fir-Flower Tablets. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

Babbette Deutsch. “And Again to Po-Chu-I,” The Dial (1921)

Marianne Moore. “The Fish” in The Egoist 7 (August, 1918)
Marianne Moore. “Bowls” in Secession 5 (July 1923)

Arthur Waley. A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. New York, Knopf, 1919.
Arthur Waley. More Translations from the Chinese. New York, Knopf, 1919.

Harriet Monroe. Review of Waley in Poetry, March 1920

Witter Bynner. The Jade Mountain, A Chinese Anthology of the T’ang Dynasty 618-906
New York, Knopf, 1919

Eunice Tietjens. Poetry of the Orient; an anthology. New York, Knopf, 1928.

Joseph Lewis French. Lotus and Chrysanthemum, an anthology of Chinese and Japanese Poetry
Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Eugene O’Neill. Marco Millions. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1927.

William Rose Benet. Merchants from Cathay. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920.

Pearl Buck. The Good Earth. New York, The John Day Company, 1931.

Dream of the Red Chamber [by] Tsao Hsueh-chin. Translated and adapted from the Chinese by Chi-chen Wang. With a pref. by Arthur Waley. New York, Doubleday Doran, 1929.