The Beautiful Toilet: Translation as a poetic practice
T. S. Eliot in his literary essay “The Music of Poetry” (1942) writes “I believe that
any language, so long as it is the same language, imposes its laws and restrictions and permits its own license, dictates its own speech rhythms and sound patterns.” erary works. Especially, when translating poetry, a genre with heavy usage of rhythm and sounds, translation almost seems like a futile maneuver that fails to do neither the source language nor the receiver language justice.
Here is one of the better known poems from Cathay, Pound’s anthology of Chinese poems:
The Beautiful Toilet Blue, blue is the grass about the river And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
For a long time, the purpose, method and ethics of literary translation have been much disputed. Translated literary works were often considered not as “literature” of its own sovereign literary value but rather as a murky informative window to different cultures. Translating literature seemed forever an incomplete and imperfect practice. However, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) solved this quandary by applying a different function to translating literature: Donald Hall in Remembering Poets (1979) declares that “Ezra Pound is a poet, who a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry possible in English.” Ezra Pound is said to have “revitalized” literature in the 20th Century. As T. S. Eliot proposes that “forms have to be broken and remade” and one must “revolt against dead form” in “ preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old”. It was in this quest for a new style that Pound found the purpose in translating poetry, especially in translating Oriental poetry.
And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunkenly out
The strikingly simple image is created by the word “blue.” The choice of the word the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.” Blue is a “common speech” in that everyone can understand and associate with the term “blue”. At the same time, “blue” is also an “exact word” because even though each reader may be thinking of blue of differground in which the readers can sympathize with each other and the poet, while the reader’s personal and unique experiences.
English conventions, Pound valued the form and structure of oriental language and believed that it was also possible to translate these intricacies: characteristic features of Chinese and Japanese regarding word order, repetition, rhyme etc. In other words, Pound considered translation as another process of creation and believed that it possessed a sovereign artistic value that was intrinsic to the translation itself. In fact, it must be noted that he did not know Chinese or Japanese languages himself. So his translation was done by referring to the notes of a Japanese scholar, Ernest Fenollosa. These circumstances may have facilitated his method of translating poetry with an emphasis on the exploring and experimenting with the oriental ‘form’ rather than its ‘meaning.’ It was while translating the Asian poetry he gave birth to a movement “Imagism”. Imagism favored clarity and sharpness of imagery and succinct and economical use of language. Asian poetry forms such as Japanese Haiku inspired Pound to break free from rhetorics, discursiveness and abstractions that prevailed in Romanticism prior to his time. Pound published extensive collections of translated oriental poetry in his anthologies Cathay(1915) and Lustra(1916).
42
In Pound’s opinion, images in poetry were not to deliver the poet’s ideas directly to the readers but rather ‘to resonate’ with them. They were triggers that conjured up the reader’s personal and unique responses. However, the images had to be created through ‘common’ and ‘exact’ words in order to provide an effective stimulus for the readers. Therefore an image for Pound was of paradoxical nature: it was born out of the common human sentiments and thought processes shared by the humanity, but it resulted in one’s employment of and insight into one’s individuality. Pound, perhaps understood translation in the same way. Translation was the ‘poem’ between two languages, rather than two individuals: No matter how different the languages and the cultures that set it’s bases were, there was also a set common rules, structures and expressions shared by two languages, which is brought to the surface through translation. For Pound, translation itself was a poetic action, which gave birth to another unique art that responded to the original literature in its own cultural sense, whilst not failing to resonate within the shared strings of sentiments across the whole humanity. Here Between The Lines presents a poem translated from Korean to English: