Reanalysis Of Pound’s Imagery Translation In Cathay——From A Perspective Of Comparative Poetics

The relationship between Pound’s Imagism and Chinese classical poetry has always been a heated topic for the researchers both in China and abroad. Nonetheless, most of their researches focused on the creative rewriting and appropriation by the Imagists of Chinese classical poetry. And they have almost reached the agreement that: Chinese classical poetry has played a crucial part in the transformation of the British and American poetry in the 20th century, and triggered the onset of modern poetry in America and England. In the author’s opinion, Pound’s understanding of Chinese classical poetry is far from adequate. In fact, Pound had established his Imagist principles before he had learned anything of the Chinese poetry and his interest of Chinese poetry was totally caused by his realization that Chinese classical poetry coincidentally corresponds with his poetic principles. Thus with his principal aim being to make an examplar Imagist poetry out of Chinese classical poetry, Pound has inevitably distorted much of Chinese poetic spirit to cater to his Imagist principles in which case the superficial and surface interpretation is unavoidable. In such background, the communication between the western Imagist poetics and Chinese classical poetics can never said to be successful or even satisfactory as there is still much space left for Chinese poetics to further energize the western traditional poetics, though these all depends on deeper and more exhaustive comparative studies of Pound’s Imagist poetics and the Chinese classical imagery.Besides, upon the very first appearance of Pound’s Cathay, it met with thunderous acclaims and applause. In the mind of literary scholars, it has made much new probability for American poetry and provided it with a variety of forms to take. While to the translators, Pound’s creative rewriting of Chinese classical poetry for the sake of highlighting the Imagist poetic maintenance has opened a vast vista for their exploration in theory and practice and many of his rewriting skills such as the supposition of images, the application of disembodiment and the addition of enjambment have in a certain extent broken away with the strictness and rigidity in syntax and grammar of English to better transfer the spirit of Chinese poetry. While in the author’s viewpoint, Pound has undoubtedly provided a lot of fresh skills and probabilities for the practice of the translation of Chinese classical poetry, and greatly extended the space for further exploration, but we can never say that Pound has successfully transferred the spirit of Chinese poetics in his translation. On the contrary, the imagery in the Chinese classical poetry has lost all of its original depth after Pound’s rewriting, as the spirit of Chinese imagery lies in its creating of the "void" while in Pound’s translation, such critical voids are all turned into concreteness.Based on the previous research and analysis, we may safely land on the conclusion that the most essential difference between Chinese classical imagery and western Imagists’ imagery is that Chinese classical imagery is a concept never separated with the concept of "ideorealm(yijing)", which is a term up to now has not found an defined equivalent in English. That is to say, it is an aesthetic concept existing only in Chinese criticism. If the aesthetic feature of imagery can be defined as "the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery" then that of the ideorealm should be "the interaction between concreteness and emptiness".The "concreteness"here denotes the imagery which fuses human emotion and natural scenery while the "emptiness" indicates the atmosphere created with groups of images which is internally related with the emotion and feeling of the poet and externally connected to the whole human life, human history and the vast universe. Thus we can see that, Pound’s translation has only reflected the internal side of Chinese classical imagery but the profound and elusive external which is the true spirit of Chinese poetics has never been fully comprehended by the western scholars and is almost impossible to be fully exhibited in English version with imagist poetry writing skills.