Original Poem Research Articles

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE ECONOMICS OF PUBLICATION: MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE, “A BIRTHDAY,” AND BEYOND

Impelled to seek relief from a “peccant chest” (L233) at the seaside, Christina Rossetti travelled to Hastings in December 1864, taking a carefully wrapped bundle of unfinished manuscript poetry with her. Throughout the winter until the following March, a series of letters to Cheyne Walk kept her brother Dante Gabriel abreast not only of her gradual recovery, but also of her efforts to complete her second book of poetry, two years after she had made a successful debut with Goblin Market. Shortly after her arrival, Rossetti reported that she was struggling to finish “The Prince's Progress,” the long narrative poem that was to lend its title to the new volume: [M]y Alchemist still shivers in the blank of mere possibility: but I have so far overcome my feelings and disregarded my nerves as to unloose the Prince, so that string wrapping paper may no longer bar his “progress.” Also I have computed pages of the altogether-unexceptionable, and find that they exceed 120: this cheers though not inebriates. Amongst your ousted I recognize sundry of my own favourites, which perhaps I may adroitly re-insert when publishing day comes round. . . . Meanwhile I have sent 3 (I hope) pot-boilers to Mac's Mag. (L233) In the past few decades, Rossetti's lifelong effort to see what critics have variously called “the divine spiritual essence of material beauty” (Harrison 56), the “moral and spiritual significance in physical signs” (Arseneau 279), and “the spiritual in the sensuous, the numinous in the material” (Kooistra, Illustration 38) has become a mainstay of Rossetti scholarship. This excerpt from her correspondence, in contrast, reveals her equally profound preoccupation with the materiality and economics of writing. Issues of textual ownership, authorial control, and literary marketability confronted Rossetti in the 1860s as her financial situation forced her to balance book publication with regular contributions to the periodical press, notably Macmillan's Magazine, the magazine owned by Rossetti's publisher Macmillan and Co., which carried more of her poetry than any other British periodical in the nineteenth century. These issues extended beyond Rossetti's personal dealings with Macmillan, however, shaping the material and interpretive consumption of her work throughout her career. This arc may be seen in the publication and adaptation history of one of her most popular poems, “A Birthday,” from its first appearance in Macmillan's Magazine in 1861 until her death. Over time, the poem underwent various types of mediation: reprints in gift books and poetry anthologies, musical adaptation, vocal performance, and quotations in fictional works. Finally, her reaction to the three parodies of her poems published in an 1888 comic magazine – particularly to “An Unexpected Pleasure,” the parody of “A Birthday” – demonstrate her perspective on the increased commodity value of the original poem.

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Application of Larson’s Method in English Translations of The Bustan of Sa‘di

In this research, different English translations of Sa‘di’s Bustan were studied. An anecdote was selected randomly with its three English translations to identify whether or not the translators have managed to convey the messages of the original poem. The three selected translations were examined according to two of the criteria that Larson (1984) has proposed (accuracy and naturalness) for testing a translation. By accuracy, the researcher intended to see whether, the translators have been successful in rendering the SL text accurately and precisely without radical changes, omission and addition; and by naturalness, it was meant whether the translations sound natural or they contain strange and foreign words. The results of the study show that Edwards has been successful in understanding the main idea of the original poem and conveying it into prose. Clarke’s translation is word-for-word and being literal, the natural criterion has been breached in some instances. Wickens’s has attempted to transfer the exact meaning of the original to the target text. Among the three translations studied, that of Wickens is considered to be the most accurate one.

In the Beginning of Penderecki'sParadise Lost

AbstractInstead of using Milton's famous opening lines, librettist Christopher Fry begins the text for Krzysztof Penderecki's operaParadise Lostwith the invocation that opens Book III, which alludes to acts of creation both biblical and literary. While the primordial effects of Penderecki's instrumental introduction to the opera parallel this allusion in easily discernible ways, his melodic lines used within this introduction also parallel this allusion in ways understood using recent theoretical perspectives on the composer's neo-Romantic style. These melodies exhibit a rare feature of paradoxicality, in that they are at once finite and infinite within stylistic constraints. This musical paradox corresponds to notions of paradox in accounts of cosmological creation, in a literary-operatic creation in which the author is character, and in the hypostatic union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ, a union foregrounded more in Fry's and Penderecki's opera than in Milton's original poem.

‘Every Irishman is an Arab’: James Clarence Mangan's Eastern ‘Translations’

This article examines James Clarence Mangan's ‘Literæ Orientales’, six articles he published in the Dublin University Magazine between 1837 and 1846. Many of the translations of Persian and Turkish poems Mangan offers in these articles are, in fact, original poems masquerading as translations, and Mangan uses them, and his reflections on orientalism and contemporary translation theory, to critique the ignorance and arrogance of Western attitudes to Eastern literature and culture, and undermine facile notions of transparent translation. He also plays on the long-standing association of Ireland and the East, seen in Mangan's Dublin University Magazine colleague Samuel O'Sullivan's labelling of papists and nationalists as ‘Affghans at home’, to plant subversive comparisons of the Irish and Oriental colonized in the journal of Anglo-Irish cultural hegemony.

Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

<i>Stella P. Revard</i>, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.<i>Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700</i>. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts &amp; Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

Lexical Gaps in Translation of Qur'anic Allusions in Hafez’s Poetry: Strategies and Difficulties

Translating culture-bound elements in literary translations seems to be one of the most challenging tasks to be performed by a translator. Taking this into account, this paper discusses the treatment of Qur'anic allusions in translation of Hafez’s Divan from Persian into English. For this purpose a number of instances have been collected and the strategies applied by various translators have been identified. All these examples are highly-specific cultural references or words that are commonly known in Persian culture, but are generally unknown for the target culture reader. The examination of such items has been carried out through the English translations of Clark (2005) and Ordoubadian (2006) based on Venuti’s overall strategies of domesticating and foreignizing. At the same time, the model of this research has been developed by using some of the translation strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997). It was revealed that various strategies adopted by Ordoubadian (2006) are generally toward domesticating a term and by Clarke (2005) towards preserving its local color and cultural strangeness. Therefore, as demonstrated in this paper, the allusive language of the original poems and connotations conveyed by them were largely ignored by the translator.

The Color of Water: Observations of a Brown Buffalo on Water Law and Policy in Ten Stanzas

This article invokes Chicano Movement lawyer, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and his literary persona of the “Brown Buffalo” to bring the perspective of LatCrit Theory into exploring and understanding the rights, remedies, and policies associated with water resource management. Perhaps owning to water’s scarcity, humans have developed complex and sophisticated legal regimes surrounding the use, acquisition, and distribution of water as a resource. Accordingly, this article is meant to draw attention to some of the ways that law has directly contributed to an unequal and inequitable distribution of water problems; including access to domestic water supplies, maintenance of water and sewage infrastructure, contamination of drinking water, and safe levels of floodplain occupancy. Although such problems have been associated with developing countries and their subordinated racialized communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they are present as well among certain communities of color in the United States. Yet, outside of a very narrow range of exceptions — namely environmental justice and the water rights of political and cultural minorities such as American Indians or Hispanos in New Mexico — legal scholars or policy makers of the United States who think about, study, and write about race or water law rarely if ever address the racial intractability of these problems. The article argues that water organizations and legal institutions are too often color-blind in their legal and policy orientation. The article is organized in five parts; each introduced by stanza or stanzas of an original poem, El Grito de la Agua, I penned in preparation for my plenary remarks at the Fifteenth Annual LatCrit Symposium held in Denver, Colorado in October 2010. As such, it has been republished in 1 University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 107 (2011). The article is not meant to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive of the many insidious ways that water law and policy creates, reinforces, and reproduces the Brown, Black, White, Red, and Yellow color lines that have become so salient a feature of social inequality in the modern world. It highlights, as well, the across-the-board neglect about the racial impact of water rights and administration by not only main stream policymakers and academics, but by progressives and the LatCrit project in particular. By invoking Acosta’s Brown Buffalo, I hope to begin a lasting conversation about water, race, and the role of water lawyers and policy makers in an ever thirsty world.

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

It’s Never Too Late: Restructuring the Department of Homeland Security’s Regional Framework

Once, a walrus and a carpenter were walking along the beach, chatting about many fundamental issues affecting the security of the nation, including the workings of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things:Of shoes – and ships – and sealing-wax – Of cabbages – and kings –And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” “and how to fix the current DHS regional structure…”The last line is not in the original poem.1 However, it represents the subject of this analysis, which not only gives the history of and rationale for the need to restructure the DHS at the regional level, but also presents a proposal for how to do so.

ME'ÂLÎ'nin MELÂLİ HİRRE-NÂME veya MERSİYE-İ GÜRBE

Composed more than half a millennium ago, Me'âli's elegy to his beloved cat stands as a unique tribute which, at the same time, pokes fun at the time-honored qaside(panegyric) tradition of Arabo-Persian-Ottoman verse. It is not only an encomium but also a gracious satire. In stanzaic form, prosody, and rhyming scheme, the translation remains loyal to the original poem.

“Arms and the Man I Sing . . .”: A Preface to Dryden’s Aeneid by Arvid Løsnes

Reviewed by: “Arms and the Man I Sing . . .”: A Preface to Dryden’s Aeneid by Arvid Løsnes Taylor Corse Løsnes, Arvid. “Arms and the Man I Sing...”: A Preface to Dryden’s Aeneid. Newark: Delaware, 2011. Pp. 370. $85. Building upon Mark Van Doren, J. McG. Bottkkol, Helene Maxwell Hooker, [End Page 249] Richard Proudfoot, Earl Miner, William Frost, Robin Sowerby, Taylor Corse, Tanya Caldwell, and others, Mr. Løsnes’s work on Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1697) stands out for its scope, learning, originality, and detail. Mr. Løsnes looks freshly at the earlier Aeneid translations in English, starting with Gavin Douglas and ending with Denham and Lauderdale, showing Dryden’s affinities with each of his predecessors. In the best account of literary translation theory in the seventeenth century, he explains how Dryden constantly revises and refines his own ideas about translation. Mr. Løsnes also firmly establishes Dryden’s comprehensive and creative use of contemporary Virgilian scholarship (Segrais, Ruaeus, and the Delphin Virgil). Seeking to rehabilitate Dryden’s reputation as a re-creator of Virgil, Mr. Løsnes anticipates or confirms the insights of modern Virgil scholars such as Jackson Knight and Kenneth Quinn. In the second part of his study, Mr. Løsnes argues convincingly that the prevailing Augustan framework of Dryden’s age provided the cultural conditions for Dryden’s re-creation of Virgil’s epic. Even more interestingly, Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime is vital to Dryden’s approach to Virgil. This is perhaps Mr. Løsnes’s most valuable insight, since it accounts for Dryden’s critical understanding of Virgil and his re-creating the Roman poet to an English audience. According to Mr. Løsnes, Longinus (whom Dryden discovered in 1677) helped Dryden unlock the sources of Virgil’s success as an epic writer. Passion, energy, empathy, imagination, figurative language, heightened diction—all these Longinian qualities Dryden writes about explicitly and extensively in his critical prefaces, including The Dedication of the Aeneis. These features emerge fully in selected passages that Mr. Løsnes analyzes in his final chapters. I especially admire his discussion of the famous night scene passage (4.757–772), one of many fine examples interpreting Dryden and Virgil. Although Mr. Løsnes calls his book a “preface” and an “introductory study,” this magisterial work of scholarship and criticism is exhaustively researched, judiciously argued, and lucidly written. He makes good his claim that Dryden’s translation is essentially an original poem that manages to be a “composite matrix of Virgil’s world and the world of Dryden’s own day and age.” Delaware Press should also be thanked for a beautifully designed book. Taylor Corse Arizona State University Copyright © 2013 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

Mireille's Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral, and the Midi

Abstract In 1899, six years after Gounod's death, his Provençal opera Mireille (1864) suddenly became a focal point for regionalist celebration and debate in the South of France. It also, in a paradoxical sense, came “home” to Arles—a town that the original poem's author, Frédéric Mistral, made clear his heroine had never visited. In this article the resulting invented tradition, which began thirty-five years after the opera's Paris premiere and rested on standard notions of authenticity and belonging, is contextualized by reference to the very different life it led in the Midi as a standard “municipal” opera sent out, after significant revision, from Paris. Joep Leerssen's theory of cultural nationalism provides a frame for analyzing how and why this opera, which set a regionalist manifesto to music but was not a manifesto itself, could be only incompletely appropriated by Mistral and his félibres as an emblematic “national” work.

Analyzing the Transforming Process of the Original Poem Texts Written by Sin Dong-Yeop

Analyzing the Transforming Process of the Original Poem Texts Written by Sin Dong-Yeop

"What an Englishman in Parliament oughto be": The Politics of Dryden's "To My Honour'd Kinsman"

John Dryden uses one of his final, original poems, "To My Honour'd Kinsman," published barely a month before his death, to define his political and poetic legacy. Couched in the guise of traditional verse forms—retirement poetry, panegyric, familiar verse epistle—"Kinsman" voices the oppositional politics of Country Party ideology. Dryden recognized fully that real political power had, by 1699, shifted from monarch to Parliament. With this poem, he seized the opportunity that his cousin's return to a Parliamentary seat afforded him to create a portrait of an ideal MP and the views that he should hold. Dryden's kinsman, however, is not that ideal, and the poem is about Dryden himself, rather than his namesake cousin. "Kinsman" articulates the tenets of the Country Party: the natural suitability of the landed gentry for governance; the necessity of individual integrity and virtue; an isolationist foreign policy; an emphasis on naval power, rather than land forces in Europe; and a nostalgic English chauvinism. For Dryden, writing "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a patriotic act, appropriate to the public role of the poet. At the end of his life, he employed the cultural power of oppositional poetry to dictate to Parliament the direction that he wished English politics to follow and to leave what he calls a "memorial" to himself.

Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 77 Anne Swärd Breathless Deborah Bragan-Turner, tr. MacLehose Press Six-year-old Lo and thirteen-year-old Lukas meet in the aftermath of the brush fire that signals the end of Lo’s idyllic childhood. By turns tender and sinister, their relationship will leave Lo marked forever. Swärd weaves a tapestry of wellworn themes with a fresh vision that makes them seem new again. Su Tong The Boat to Redemption Howard Goldblatt, tr. Overlook Press When the truth of their ancestry is revealed, Secretary Ku and his son flee and attempt to rebuild their lives among the boat people. Set during the Cultural Revolution, The Boat to Redemption depicts a people trapped by desire while under the constant watch of the Communist Party. Nota Bene also affected the rest of the world because the direct murders were part of World War II. In addition to its literary merits, this anthology is a reminder in 2012 of what happened in the 1940s. The original poems of this book were written in Hungarian, texts of a belletristic tradition, and were translated by the two editors as well as by the English poet Clive Wilmer. The poets include Radnóti, the Anglo-Hungarian poet George Szirtes, Vas, Castro and Gyukics, Lakatos, Zollman, Mezei, Feldmár, Csoóri, Liebert, Székely, Roberts and Kurdi, Tótfalusi, Orbán, Gorman , K. Miklós, Szilágyi, McKendrick, Daróczi, Berengarten, Sumonyi, Bosley , Turczi, Munzel, and Borbély. In his foreword to the collection , Sir Martin Gilbert writes: “Each poem in this volume is a world of its own, an assertion of the struggle of the human spirit faced with inexplicable torments.” And so it is—the Holocaust lacks merriment, even optimism; the poems are a cycle of Jeremiads each showing that living at the time would have been equal with staying in hell. The three outstanding poets of the anthology had different fates. Miklós Radnóti, a Catholic convert, was arrested as a Jew and martyred in Lager Heidenau in Serbia. His final poems were found in the pocket of his greatcoat, among them this fragment : “I lived on this earth in an age / When man fell so low he killed with pleasure / And willingly, not merely under orders . . .” János Pilinszky suffered the fate of a POW and transmitted his experiences into haunting poetry: “And like a cattle-yard prepared / for the herded beasts outside – / its gates flung open violently – / death, for them, gapes wide.” István Vas, a man of letters and an exceptional intellectual, survived the Hungarian fascist regime hiding in the flat of a friend. He commented on the order to wear a yellow star: “It’s not those who today wear stars, / under my own I bear the scars; / my country’s yellow mark of shame.” The anthology contains a wide range of poets: those Jews who died, those who survived the Holocaust, whose relatives persisted, those who were Romani, those who are now middle-aged, and those who are young. It is a reminder to remember and to remain vigilant. Thomas Kabdebo Newcastle, Ireland Alan Mintz. Sanctuary in the Wilderness : A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry. Stanford , California. Stanford University Press. 2012. isbn 9780804762939 Alan Mintz’s Sanctuary in the Wilderness represents a grand undertaking of the emergence and development of Hebrew poetry in America. Only with language, the magical vehicle of human expression, is it possible to tell such a story—all at once a group story, a personal story, and a national story. Robert Graves writes in “To Juan at the Winter Solstice” that “there is one story and one story only that will prove worth your telling , whether as learned bard or gifted child.” Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that objects come to us to be named; one sits and waits for the words to come. Writers and poets anywhere sit and wait for the tale to unfold. Indeed, there is one story and one 78 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews story only that will prove worthy of the telling. And so it is also with Sanctuary in the Wilderness. But this story is a story with a clear imperative...

A Chain of Misattribution: Phillis Wheatley, Mary Whateley, and "An Elegy on Leaving"

Ever since its discovery by Mukhtar Ali Isani in 1986, the poem believed to be Phillis Wheatley's last publication during her lifetime, An on Leaving, has struck scholars as displaying an atypical weariness and lack of hope (Isani, Elegy on Leaving 611). From its opening lines, the poem evokes a scene of unwelcome departure from a pastoral haven: FAREWEL! ye friendly bow'rs, ye streams adieu, I leave with sorrow each sequester'd seat: The lawns, where oft I swept the morning dew, The groves, from noon-tide rays a kind retreat. (Wheatley, Complete Writings l02-03) John C. Shields, in his survey of Wheatley's employ[ment] of [the] subversive pastoral, identifies it as one of her bleakest, for she appears to bid adieu to the entire world of poetic creativity (Phillis Wheatley's Subversive Pastoral 632, 646). Vincent Carretta, in his remarkable new biography of Wheatley, sees in the poem a fittingly poignant farewell to more than just a life of seclusion (189). Those who mark the propinquity of its publication to Wheatley's death--it was published only months before in the July 1784 issue of London's Arminian Magazine--welcome its uncharacteristic directness of pastoral sentiment; it symbolically sounds a mournful endnote for her tragically abbreviated life and work. This elegiac mood pervades most scholarly discussions of the poem, and few other substantive analyses exist. (1) Indeed, when compelled to discuss its literary merits in his introductory essay, Isani asserts that its importance is mainly historical and admits that the poem does not escape the conventions of [Wheatley's] day (Elegy on Leaving 612). The sensitivity of previous scholars to these differences in tone and quality between this poem and the rest of Wheatley's oeuvre is better explained, however, by new evidence that proves that the work is not Wheatley's after all. Rather, it is the work of English poet Mary Whateley (1738-1825), who included it as Elegy on Leaving in her 1764 collection Original Poems on Several Occasions (see Figure 1). Whateley was the daughter of a gentleman farmer of Beoley village in Worcestershire. (2) Though her mother was barely literate and her father owned only a parcel of old books, her close friendship with the daughter of the local vicar gave her access to an Oxonian's more substantial library (Messenger 15). Moreover, the location of her village in the Midlands brought her to the attention of William Shenstone, a landscape gardener and poet known for the pastoral mode, who acted as a mentor. She also came to the attention of poet and translator John Langhorne, who wrote the prefatory poem to her first book and commended her writing in the Monthly Review. (3) These two men introduced her to additional literary connections and assisted her in the publication of her verse. (4) In her early twenties, she moved to Walsall in Staffordshire, where she was to keep house for her brother Henry (Messenger 24-25). Though she was initially reluctant to move, she grew to appreciate the town's artistic and intellectual community. After returning to Beoley for a period and publishing her book, she came back to Walsall and married a local curate, John Darwall. Marriage and motherhood slowed but did not end her literary career; a widowed Mary Whateley Darwall published a two-volume work of poetry in 1794, the similarly titled Poems on Several Occasions. According to her biographer, Ann Messenger, the undated Elegy on Leaving was undoubtedly composed in 1759/60 as it obviously chronicles her feelings about having to trade [the] rural peace of Beoley for the more populous Walsall. Messenger admires the poem, which she deems conventionally and simply pastoral, more for its insight into Whateley's emotions than for its art (24-25, 65), (5) an opinion that resonates with many Wheatley scholars' assessments of the misascribed work. The poems themselves are identical, with the exception of occasional changes in orthography, punctuation, capitalization, and italicization. …

An Athenian Tradition of Dactylic Paeans to Apollo and Asclepius: Choral Degeneration or a Flexible System of Non-Strophic Dactyls?

AbstractThe different epigraphic versions of the so-called Erythraean Paean date from the early fourth century BCE to the mid-second century CE and are generally thought to trace the degeneration of an original monostrophic lyric poem attested in the eponymous late-classical version. I argue that such an approach is inadequate and that the later versions of this poem are witnesses to a hitherto unappreciated genre of paean to Apollo and Asclepius composed almost entirely in dactyls and organized into segments of varying length, which generally begin with a dactylic tetrameter and end with a version of the traditional paeonic cry (the so-called epiphthegma): Παιν or Παιν. The space between the opening tetrameter and the closing cry can, however, accommodate between four to eight additional dactylic feet. The late Hellenistic paean composed in Athens by Macedonicus of Amphipolis is yet another witness to this tradition, which probably dates back at least as early as a famous—albeit almost entirely lost—paean of Sophocles and is reflected in the first two strophes of the parodos of his Oedipus Rex.

Poetic Compression

Poetic Compression James Longenbach (bio) What did Chinese poetry sound like in 1914 to speakers of English who knew nothing about the Chinese language and had to rely exclusively on translations? It sounded like this. O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver's loom,Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow—See! friendship fashions out of thee a fan,Round as the round moon shines in heaven above,At home, abroad, a close companion thou,Stirring at every move the grateful gale.And yet I fear, ah me! that autumn chillsCooling the dying summer's torrid rage,Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf,All thoughts of bygone days, like them bygone. This translation, by Herbert Giles, sounds today like a mockery of Chinese poetry. But you must remember that when the translation was made, there was no other way for English-language poetry to sound: if the translation was going to present itself as a poem, rather than prose, then it needed to be metered. And since Giles was not a very good poet, this translation is ineptly metered. In 1914, Ezra Pound made what seems like a translation of the same poem. In fact, it is an adaptation of Giles's translation. Without any knowledge of Chinese, without any literal trot, with nothing but Giles's clumsy pentameters to work from, Pound produced this poem, called "Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord." O fan of white silk, Clear as the frost on the grass-blade,You also are laid aside. If this translation does not sound to us like a mockery of Chinese poetry, it is because Pound invented the poetic idiom with which we now associate Chinese poetry; if the poem is in any way more scrupulously attuned to the letter or spirit of the original poem, the accuracy is purely an accident. As T. S. Eliot once remarked, Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry in the English language. How and why did that invention take place? [End Page 164] Recall Pound's three famous principles for writing an Imagist poem, first published in 1913 in an essay written by Pound but signed by the poet F. S. Flint: 1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. Although Pound knew that Giles's translation was badly written, he nonetheless saw something with which he could work, and he produced his version of "Fan-Piece" as if by feeding the translation into a computer programmed with Imagist principles. To compose in the sequence of the musical phrase: not "O fair white silk, fresh from the weaver's loom" but "O fan of white silk." Direct treatment of the thing: not "Clear as the frost, bright as the winter snow" but "Clear as the frost on the grass-blade." To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation: not "And yet I fear, ah me! that autumn chills / Cooling the dying summer's torrid rage, / Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf" but "You also are laid aside." Pound once admitted that his most compressed Imagist poem, the two-line "In a Station of the Metro," began as poem of thirty lines from which he distilled his famous couplet: the poem depended upon the same editorial acumen that allowed Pound to carve "Fan-Piece" from Giles's translation. But whether the Imagist poems were actually compressed from longer poems or not, they inevitably give the impression of having been compressed. The aura of the unsaid is always palpable, and that aura is the poem's tone. And without an immediately identifiable tone, a highly compressed poem would seem merely thin or perplexing, not enticing or seductive, given its dearth of narrative material. What exactly do we mean by tone? The most semantically charged word in "Fan-Piece" is "also"—"You also are laid aside." The word suggests that the speaker of the poem shares the fate of the fan, and, more than that, the word acknowledges...