Starting from China: A New Translation of The Cantos

Translating Ezra Pound’s Cantos, “a poem including history”, involves much homework. Pound, a poet-scholar, makes use of numberless out-of-the-way sources. Given his early interest in China and Japan, I consider his presentation of Confucius (“Kung”) in canto 13, published 1925. Kung provides a moral bedrock among the confusion of Western ideologies and religions, which Pound indicts immediately after in “Hell” cantos 14-16. To present the noble, tolerant, and secular Kung, he paraphrases passages from Guillaume Pauthier’s Doctrine de Confucius (1841). By comparing the source and the poem wee see how Pound proceeds, rearranging statements and rhythms to create an Olympian feeling of calm and contentment, and we gain a better understanding of his intentions and methods. Kung was to remain Pound’s chief guide and persona, whose pithy views on morals, history, society, and the arts are recast in the verse of the Cantos, particularly in the dramatic and moving Pisan Cantos of 1945.