“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

SHAGI/STEPS 6(3)

Keywords: neoclassicism, classical Chinese poetry, Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa, Lytton Strachey, “The Renaissance”, “Lawrence Binyon”, Cathay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”, “Poem by t

Abstract: The article treats Ezra Pound’s ideas during the 1910s concerning classical Chinese poetry. Neoclassic tendencies in Anglo-American Modernism and its quest for a new type of normativity functioned as the main context for these ideas. Ezra Pound saw a source of the new normativity in classical Chinese poetry, he suggested that modernist poetry would “find a new Greece in China”. In Pound’s “The Renaissance” this type of normativity was defined by analogy with modernist painting. He employed the “pure color” metaphor while describing the poetic language of classical Chinese poetry. As Lytton Strachey did before, Pound compared classical Chinese poetry to French Symbolist poetry, but put Chinese poetry in the position of literary authority. He pronounced Ernest Fenollosa’s lecture on the Chinese written character a new Ars Poetica. This text facilitated the development of Pound’s idea of classical Chinese poetry as a sort of utopian language that he was eager to apprehend, and as a kind of paradise lost that he would like to regain. As the critical edition of Cathay (2019) makes clear, Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations of the 1910s display his intention to reproduce the way of poetic expression in classical Chinese poetry as close to the original as possible.

To cite this article: Polovinkina, O. I. (2020). Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations and the utopia of “Peach-blossom-fountain”. Shagi/Steps, 6(3), 28–49. DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2020-6-3-28-49.