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spacestationtrustfund's review
1.0
Ernest Fenollosa didn't know a goddamn thing about Chinese. I don't blame the man directly for Ezra Pound—I can blame Ezra Pound directly—but his were the first of a long line of misconceptions of Chinese that did incalculable damage to popular Western perceptions of China, the Chinese, and the language(s). Fenollosa believed that Chinese logograms were entirely ideogrammatic (they're not), and that their meanings were analogous with Japanese kanji (they're not). The point being, Fenollosa, a Japanese professor who did not speak fluent Chinese, didn't know what he was talking about. This is a critical edition, edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. While the book itself is, as a whole, more or less respectful of Pound and Fenollosa, it's pretty obvious how the editors feel about the pair—the book opens with two quotations, one from T.S. Eliot ("Chinese Poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound") and one from Pound himself ("Really one DON’T need to know a language. One NEEDS, damn well needs, to know the few hundred words in the few really good poems that any language has in it") which serve to make Ezra Pound look like a damn idiot. I'm a fan of that. We should always make fascists look like idiots.
The editors have done their best to replicate Fenollosa's writing as properly as possible, freed from Pound's ministrations. The influence Fenollosa has had on the anglosphere is perhaps the most interesting facet of the whole situation (despite the fact that no wholly ideogrammatic languages presently exist beyond the theoretical, you will still encounter people who genuinely believe that every Chinese character is an ideogram). The essay proper "separates its readers into two groups," writes Saussy, i.e., "those who care about poetry and those who care about the Chinese written character." (He further notes that "[Achilles] Fang’s knowledgeable and patient survey 'Fenollosa and Pound' is one of the earliest studies to show concern for both subjects.") This is also the issue with Pound's interpretation not only of Fenollosa's work but also of Chinese as a whole: either you can have poetry, or you can have accuracy. That line of thinking appears still in discussions of translating poetry: either it looks and sounds pretty, or it's accurate—pick one. The more distance between the substrate and superstrate, the more difficult incorporating both into a translation becomes.
If you're going to read Fenollosa's essay, this is the version to get. My rating is of the essay as it stands; the review is of this particular edition.
The editors have done their best to replicate Fenollosa's writing as properly as possible, freed from Pound's ministrations. The influence Fenollosa has had on the anglosphere is perhaps the most interesting facet of the whole situation (despite the fact that no wholly ideogrammatic languages presently exist beyond the theoretical, you will still encounter people who genuinely believe that every Chinese character is an ideogram). The essay proper "separates its readers into two groups," writes Saussy, i.e., "those who care about poetry and those who care about the Chinese written character." (He further notes that "[Achilles] Fang’s knowledgeable and patient survey 'Fenollosa and Pound' is one of the earliest studies to show concern for both subjects.") This is also the issue with Pound's interpretation not only of Fenollosa's work but also of Chinese as a whole: either you can have poetry, or you can have accuracy. That line of thinking appears still in discussions of translating poetry: either it looks and sounds pretty, or it's accurate—pick one. The more distance between the substrate and superstrate, the more difficult incorporating both into a translation becomes.
If you're going to read Fenollosa's essay, this is the version to get. My rating is of the essay as it stands; the review is of this particular edition.
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