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What the Transnational Collaboration Says in the Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry

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What the Transnational Collaboration Says in the Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry American Studies Eurasian Perspective 2014; 1(1): 1–13 ISSN : 2147-3498 (Print) 2149-0481 (Online) DOI: 10.15340/21473498111804 Review Article What the Transnational Collaboration says in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry Abid Vali1* 1 The American University of Kuwait, Kuwait Abstract: This article explores the relationship between the ideal of authorial genius and the reality of collaboration in Ezra Pound’s use of Ernest Fenollosa’s notes to publish Fenollosa’s seminal essay The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry. In doing so we establish the connections and intercessions, the conversations and collaborations that I maintain were a key part of the production of Modernist works as we consider their transnational dimensions. Keywords: Ezra Loomis Pound, Ernest Francis Fenollosa, Modernism, Transnational, Collaboration, The Chinese Written Character * Abid Vali, Department of English, The American University of Kuwait, PO Box 3323, Safat 13034, Kuwait. Email: [email protected] When we discuss the cross-cultural relationships of European modernists we often fall between the poles of either celebrating the ‘coming together of traditions’ or suspiciously decrying the power play involved. This is so despite increasing recognition that transnational modernism involved, in Jessica Berman’s words, a “dynamic set of relationships, practices, problematics, and cultural engagements with modernity rather than a static canon of works, a given set of formal devices, or a specific range of beliefs” (2011, p.7). A case in point is the relationship between Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s1 notes. According to Hugh Kenner, Pound, after he received the notes from Mary Fenollosa,2 made far too many errors to make any serious (read: scholarly) representation of Pound’s renditions from the notes as translations (Kenner, 1971, p.204); said errors may best be neatly explained away by appealing to the aesthetic value of what was accomplished. In seeming opposition to this vision of an aesthetic ideal-for-its-time-and-all-times, arrived at by the application of genius and the miraculous gifts and vagaries of the historical context, we have those who highlight the source material of Fenollosa’s notes to discuss various modes of Pound as translator. Interestingly, these critics, who resist the Kennerian celebration of Poundian genius and insist that Pound is engaged here in an act of translation, “essentially… appropriative” (Xie, 1999, p.232), “as a literary mode” (Yao, 2002, p.32), or otherwise, also reinforce a reading whereby “the precise nature of the translator’s authorship remains unformulated, and so the notion of authorial originality continues,” an effect of the “invidualistic conception of authorship that continues to prevail in the British and American cultures” (Venuti, 1995, p.6). This is the issue I wish to address when we study the disparities between Fenollosa’s notes and Pound’s productions from them—a key chapter in the study of transnational collaboration and of modernism. The attempt to read beyond a study of sources and influences, to the idea that the notion of the individualist ‘author’ is not the sole, or even the key, method of critiquing the choices we see in the text matches the actual condition of the art’s production with the theoretical possibilities that Jessica Berman deals out as transnational modernism (2011, p.7). The critical lens of transnational collaboration allows us to appreciate what the actual practices and relationships of particular collaborations have allowed Pound to accomplish in terms of both what we read, Cathay and the Noh plays as a particular set of precursors to The Cantos, and how we read it, as products of collaborative endeavor, with multiple, transnational voices always, American Studies Eurasian Perspective, 2014; 1(1): 1–13 1 already present. Once this critical lens has been established we can also move out of the limited paradigm of being forced to see his work either, following the Kennerian mold, as original genius, no matter where that work originated, thus taking priority over and being an ‘invention’ separate from the originals, or as another activity that plays out the power paradigm of Orientalism—at best, translation and, at worst, appropriation. It is for this reason that a study of transnational collaboration provides a critical viewpoint that at once synthesizes and provides an alternative to these contradictory readings—i.e. the fact that Pound did subtract and add at will to Fenollosa’s notes as we have already seen and will do below, coupled with the massive change in his own outlook once he had been confronted with the Fenollosan oeuvre—to give us the most complete image possible. This approach recognizes that various voices exist simultaneously in these texts of translational collaboration in a way that parallels the polyphonic elements in Pound’s poetry as a whole thus giving us an overview of both the “dynamic” nature of transnational modernism and the “dispersal” of authority and/or “multiple authority” that characterizes the production of the texts thereof. Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (CWC) was first published through Pound’s unfailing efforts in 1919.3 In “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” the introduction to the recently published critical edition of the essay, Haun Saussy defines the issues at stake in this critical problem: “[CWC] has long been read as if Ezra Pound, not Ernest Fenollosa, were its author” (2008, p.2). It is indeed vital to insist, as Saussy does here, that Fenollosa is not just a footnote to the publication of CWC, Cathay and the Noh plays that Pound and Yeats read at Stone Cottage. By doing so we broaden views like Kenner’s (1971, p.158) and Kern’s (1996, p.7) about Fenollosa’s limited reach. Fenollosa is an integral human contact to Pound. They jointly compos[ed]… contribut[ed] components… modif[ied], by editing and/or reviewing, the document of one or more persons; work[ed] interactively with one or more person and draft[ed]… based on the ideas of the person or persons (Farkas, 1991, p.14) and thus neatly completed the whole set of David Farkas’ definitions of collaboration. The “serial collaboration,” the borrowing, synthesis and appropriation “that cannot easily be accommodated within the Romantic conception of authorship” (Jaszi, 1994, p.50) that resulted, means that their publications are entwined, either definably or inextricably. In certain cases, with the study of images and ideas out of the imagination and work of Fenollosa’s and Pound’s counterparts, those chance-met translators and “native informants” and the classical literary texts and contexts themselves, we have seen how clearly the connections may still be read. The fact that some collaborators were living and some dead, since Pound received Fenollosa’s papers posthumously, is but a small matter in this chapter’s concern. With the “dialogue by deletions” (CWC, 2008, p.17), as Saussy terms it, whereby Pound “finished” CWC by taking an editor’s pen to the notes, translations and arguments Fenollosa made, we have forensic evidence of their “serial collaboration.” The more pertinent issue that emerges after the publication of Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein’s edition of The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry (CWC) is that the neat view of Pound-inspired-by-ideogram, always the “experienced particular” (CWC, 2008, p.6) as Saussy defines Pound’s understanding of it, does not entirely square with Fenollosa’s own view of Chinese writing that Pound had edited and published. For example, the technique supposedly exemplified in Pound’s ABC of Reading would, according to Fenollosa’s way of thinking delineated in his own 1909 notes before Pound worked on them, result in a pyramid with “being” at the top (Pound’s published edition, CWC, 2008, p.56). In this system, once everything has been subsumed under a pyramid, it becomes impossible to represent change or growth, because, of course, these two concepts are unwanted—why change when everything is edenically or primitively perfect? This Poundian explication is hardly the fluid ideal of movement that Fenollosa espouses. Indeed, as the Pound-edited text of CWC makes clear, Fenollosa goes into great detail about the “kind of brickyard” to which he believes “European logic” relegates “thought” and wherein “[w] e may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated concept until we reach the apex “being”” (Pound’s published edition, CWC, 2008, p.56). Furthermore, this European logic of classification, as Fenollosa defines it, cannot “deal with any kind of interaction or with any multiplicity of function” since “[i]t has no way of bringing together any two concepts which do not happen to stand one under the other and in the same pyramid” (Pound’s published edition, CWC, 2008, p.57), a point which Pound appreciated since it passed his eye uncensored. So that when Pound holds that the “ideogram is based on something everyone KNOWS” (qtd. in CWC, 2008, p.6) he seems to be insisting on a fixity that Fenollosa has tried to hold up to ridicule with his own, unexpurgated and unedited, appreciation of “melting sensations,” of 2 American Studies Eurasian Perspective, 2014; 1(1): 1–13 [p]oetry… a more difficult art than Painting or music, because the overtones of its words, the halos of secondary meanings which cling to them, are stuck among the infinite terms of things, vibrating with physical life and the warmth of human feeling. How is it possible that such heterogeneous material shall… blend…? (qtd. in CWC, 2008, p.18) We should contrast this mellifluous paean to the “hard and sane” language of Imagist poetics” which “predominate[s]” (CWC, 2008, p.18) in the Poundian edition of the essay, as Saussy has it.
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