Fenollosa and Pound

Lin Wei examines the nagging question about the extent of Pound’s authorship regarding the posthumous publication of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Setting aside Pound’s separate preoccupation with Far Eastern culture and its influence on modernism, Wei observes how critical discussions of The Chinese Written Character can get confused, principally because Pound, not Fenollosa, is often assumed to be its author. When, after Fenollosa’s death in 1908, his widow asked Pound to edit for publication her husband’s translations and theoretical writings, Pound accepted the challenge and, through his life-long advocacy for Fenollosa’s disputed argument about the visual nature of the classical Chinese language, The Chinese Written Character has exerted an enormous influence on Western poets. Drawing on Haun Saussy’s 2008 edition of The Chinese Written Character, Wei’s essay compares that edition to earlier editions, as she analyses Pound’s method of editing, uncovers evidence of his shaping the text to fit his own poetic agenda, and deconstructs Pound’s theory as an author/editor. Adopting an approach from Walter Benjamin’s “The Ways of the Translator,” Wei raises important cross-cultural questions, not only about how Pound “edits” others’ texts, but about the art of translation itself.