Some More Chinois Poetry…Pound on So-Shu via Li Po

Posted: January 29th, 2012 | No Comments »

My new year’s blogging resolution was to include more poetry on this blog – poetry with a Chinoiserie feel. I’ve posted a couple of Vachel Lindsay Chinois poems already (here and here) and today some of the great Ezra Pound. Pound had a long love affair with all things Oriental, Chinese and Chinoiserie and, of course, if a highly problematic character politically and ideologically. His early career in London saw him fascinated by Japan and China and become a translator, encouraged by he great Harriet Monroe.

This poem, entitled Ancient Wisdom, rather cosmic appeared (perhaps not first, but it’s where I first came across it) in the second (and last) edition of Blast, the short-lived but fascinating journal of the Vorticists produced ostensibly by Wyndham Lewis.This edition and poem appeared in 1915 and was entitled the “War Issue” and was hard hitting regarding the mechanised carnage in France at the time. The poem was later included in Pound’s collection Lustra, published a year after Blast (2) in 1916.

So-shu was the Japanese form of Chuang Chou (Tzu), a Chinese Taoist philosopher. This is Pound’s version of a Li Po poem about Chuang Tzu – Arthur Cooper, Li Po’s great translator also translated several versions of this poem. I’ve included Cooper’s translation below out of interest. Pound seems, to me, lighter and more concise but probably (and I’ve not checked the original) Cooper was more accurate to Li Po – but then Cooper was primarily a translator and Pound primarily a poet so perhaps not totally unexpected. So first Pound:

So-shu dreamed,
And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly,
He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else,
Hence his contentment.

— Ezra Pound

and now Cooper:

Did Chuang Chou dream

he was the butterfly

or the buterfly

that it was Chuang Chou?

In one body’s

metamorphoses

All is present

infinite virtue!

– Arthur Cooper

Pound – looking every bit as a radical poet should

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