A Study Of Resistancy In Ezra Pound's Translation Of Shijing

Throughout his life, Ezra Pound had been an enthusiast for Chinese culture. In his later years, especially during his stay at the Italian town of Rapollo (1924-1945) and the St. Elizabeths Hospital (1946-1958), Pound translated a number of Confucius canons, such as The Great Learning (????), The Doctrine of the Mean (????) and Shying (????). His translation of Shijing, published under the title Shih-Ching:The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, was the last piece of work among the Confucius translation series. Significant as it is, studies on this translation have been relatively few in number, as L.S. Dembo's comment said, the Confucian Odes have naturally resisted comment, both in quantity and quality. This is because the critic who is able to judge them as poetry often fails to judge them as translations, and the critic who can judge them as translations cannot judge them on literary merit.Not much better equipped than them, we therefore focus our study on Ezra Pound's translation methods employed in his Shijing translation from the perspectives of resistancy and fluency. We carried out a close analysis of the text of Pound's Shijing translation, seeking to find out how resistancy was demonstrated. The text is approached first from lexicon, then from syntax and stanzaic forms. Our major findings are:1) Resistancy in Pound's text is achieved not by resistant elements alone, but rather through a combination of resistancy and fluency. These two at once contradict and complement each other.2) This combination of resistancy and fluency is not a simple cline with each of them at one end, but rather a complex multilevel structure.3) On the level of lexicon, resistancy is achieved mostly through employing such marginal lexicon as dialectal words, archaisms and innovative expressions, namely cultural values that belong to the specialized, the residual and the emergent.4) On the level of syntax, Pound's resistancy comes down to juxtaposition and omission:aligning several "carrier + attribute" structures without copulas, or creating "attribute" without carrier, "possessed" without possessor, and "process" without actor and goal. He also, in many cases, bends to western poetic traditions, as illustrated in his handling of rhetorical questions and hypophora.5) On the level of stanzaic forms, Pound displays a stronger tendency towards fluency than other Shijing translators. Twists are added to the originally repetitive lines through careful manipulation of words, lines and images, creating a balladic form more suitable to western readers' taste.