Canto XLIX and the Fourth Dimension

NB: For access to the source album as well as permission both to quote from unpublished letters and reproduce the published poem, I should like to thank Mary de Rachewiltz, Achilles Fang, Faber & Faber Limited, and New Directions Publishing Company.

More commonly referred to as ‘The Seven Lakes’, Canto XLIX contains only eight lines out of forty-seven which are neither translations nor transcriptions from the Chinese, and three of those are presumed to be paraphrased from historical texts. The exact sources for the ten disparate poems have long been known, and the acceptability of Pound’s versions acknowledged. What remains, however, is to pursue the question of his achievement in reshaping and juxtaposing them; that is, the creation of an original and coherent unity whose meaning is more a function of experimental form than of its immediate subject matter and sources.

The greater part of the canto, some thirty lines in all, derives from a sequence of poems, ‘The Eight Scenes of Hsiao-Hsiang’ (Shō-Shō Hakkei, in Romanjied Japanese), which were read out to him as a running translation by a Chinese visitor from a picture album, perhaps seventeenth century in origin, owned by his parents. | 1 | The provenance of the album is documented by an unpublished note of 1949 : My gt/ aunt Frank]'s third husband  received in ms/ from a friend. | 2 | Pound wrote to his mother on 1 March 1928:

Dorothy is up a mountain with a returned missionary. Yes, Chinese book arrived, verry interestin’, returned missionary promises us a descendant of Confucius in a month or so, who will prob. be able to decipher it. | 3 |

On 17 May 1928 Pound wrote to Glenn Hughes:

Conferred with descendant of Kung and Thseng-Tsu just before leaving Rapallo.

Two weeks later, on 30 May 1928, he wrote to his father from Vienna:

Translation of Chinese poems in picture book is at Rapallo. They are poems on a set of scenes in Miss Thseng’s part of the country = sort of habit of people to make pictures & poems on that set of scenes.

Pao-sun Tseng (b. 1894) was founder and president of I Fang Woman’s College, Changsha, Hunan (1918) and later, Chinese Christian University of Tung-hai, Tai-chung, Taiwan (1949). | 4 | That album was a Japanese recreation of the classic, ‘Eight Scenes’ first painted by Sung Ti (1011-1072). Miss Tseng was, indeed, directly descended from Tsen Hsi (sixth century B.C.) not Confucius, but one of his most famous disciples, and came from Hunan Province, long famed for the spectacular scenery of the lake region along the river Hsiao-Hsiang. On 22 July, Pound offered to copy out the translations for his father, but wrote again on 1 August with reservations and seems not to have sent the typescript.

1 |  M.C. Ferrero de Luca, Ezra Pound e il Canto dei Sette Laghi (Reggio Emilia Italia, Edizioni Diabasis, 2004), p. 12. Accompanying the book is a scaled-down reproduction of the actual album. See also Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 328.

2 |  I Cantos, ed. & trans. Mary de Rachewiltz (Firenze; Mandadori, 1985), p. 1,536.

3 |  All letters quoted from originals, Beinecke Library: Pound, II. See also Angela Jung Polandri, "the Seven Lakes Canto Revisited", Paideuma, 3, 1 (Spring 1974), pp. 52-53.

4 |  See again Paideuma, 3, 1 (Spring 1974), p. 53.

I copied out the Chinese poems two days ago, but don’t know whether I can trust you to return copy, you have horrible habit of taking copies etc. IF I print up a printable version later I DONT want rough draft left lying about. When enlightened on this pt. will consider remitting the draft! copy[.]

Pound’s last comment on the matter is found in a further letter to his father, dated 1 September [1928]:

Given infinite time I Might be able to read a Chinese poem thass to say I know how the ideograph works, and can find ’em in the dictionary or vocabulary,... For your book Miss Thseng, descendant of Kung read out the stuff to me. Am perfectly able to look up an ideograph and see what shade it can be given etc. but it iz a matter of time. wd. be no point in it

Deletions on the surviving typescript suggest that Pound was already adapting Miss Tseng’s rough translation into a larger scheme, but the order of the Chinese poems and pictures is exactly that of the first thirty-six lines of Canto XLIX as ultimately published. Hugh Kenner’s transcription (March 1965) of the three pages transposes the last two of the draft. | 5 | Pound certainly followed the running translation, and Tseng obviously read the poems in the order determined by the physical nature of the book. The poet did not re-order the poems for his own creative purposes.

In 1969 Daniel Pearlman published a valiant attempt to reconstruct the source from an incomplete set of reproductions by matching the mildew-stains on some of the facing pages, but he had never seen the album. Relying on Sanehide Kodama’s assurance that there is a conventional order for the scenes/poems, he arranged existing ‘pairs’ accordingly. | 6 | Kodama’s excellent translations of the Chinese and Japanese poems also follow this ideal sequence, but the source book is actually arranged rather differently.

The album consists of hardboard sections with texts and images on both sides of the inner leaves. The screen-like volume is enclosed by end-papers decorated with brightly colored and highly stylized landscapes of Japanese design [recto], while the outer end leaves are covered with brocade for protection [verso]. The hinged leaves make it possible to lay the book out fiat, showing four scenes and eight poems [recto] and a similar sequence [verso]. It is properly read from right to left, and Sung Ti’s ‘Eight Scenes’ show delicate land- water- and mountain-scapes as seen from a distanced and idealized point of view. Their tone is elegantly elegiac and represents the sublimity of nature as well as predicating mankind’s harmonious co-existence with nature.

5 |  See Hugh Kenner, "More on the Seven Lakes Canto", Paideuma, 2, 1(Spring 1973), pp. 43-44. The original is found as a letter to Homer Pound (1 August 1928), Beinecke Library, Ezra Pound Papers, Series II.

6 |  See Daniel D. Pearlman, The Barb of Time (New York; Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 305 and Sadehide Kodama, , "the Eight Scenes of Shoi-Sho", Paideuma, 6, 2 (Fall 1977), p. 133.

The family volume is still very much intact and only two of the paper hinges are damaged, one between the eighth and ninth leaves from the right and the other between the thirteenth and fourteenth. When taking the folded album in hand, brocade cover uppermost, and reading from right to left, one encounters the following sequence. [Reproductions of the actual paintings can be seen on-screen using the buttons to the right of each poem in the Appendix. The dark circles and dots, as well as the redish stains which disfigure them, attest to the passage of time and the presence of mildew/mold.]

Without turning the book over, but continuing to turn successive leaves from right to left, one finds the verso sequence and a similar pattern:

Pound followed the translation without question, but the way in which he transformed that material is another matter. There was no need for radical revision, but the poems were subtly altered. Most of them are set in Autumn/Winter or the twilight of dusk or dawn, and the dominant colours are grey, silver, milky jade, sky green, or the reflection of sun or moon on water. Clouds, smoke, mist, snow, and ice prevail, as do stillness, melancholic music, a temple bell, the solace of wine, and moods of loneliness, sadness, or nostalgia. In only two cases, ‘Mist over Mountain Town’ and ‘Sunset over Fishing Village’, is there anything like movement and gaiety in the original poems, but such images have either been suppressed or rendered ambiguous in the final version. [See Appendix.] The effect of omitting such lines as "A few country people enjoying their evening drink / In time of peace, every day is like spring." and

Fisherman calls his boy, and takes up his wine bottle, They drink, they lie on the sand and point to the marsh-grass, talking

is to disembody the scene and stress an idealised distance or abstraction which is characteristic of the entire sequence. The same can be said of other major omissions, such as the lines which complete ‘Evening-Misty Temple’: "One can not tell whether to the summit, is near or far, / Sure only that one is in hollow of mountains". In the same case the reference to Spring also disappears, whereas in ‘Autumn Moon on Lake’ the seasonal reference of the title is incorporated into the finished canto. Similarly the title, ‘Wild Geese,’ is used as an opening line which reverses itself later into "geese line out with the autumn" and replaces "A few lines of autumn geese on the marsh."

With the exception of the eighth poem, which has been re-worked to provide a meaningful transition to the next section of the canto. The images tend to reinforce one another and emphasise an unspoken depth of meaning, which lies beyond the created universe, through the elegiac yearning and restrained elegance of the verse. The point of both the originals and Pound’s re-workings, is the presence of a mysterious and ineffable power which inspires harmony between man and nature. The subject of the poems, as is so often the case in classical Chinese and Japanese art, is the unseen, the unknown; that which is not actually stated.

In line 31, however, Pound introduces an element extraneous to the original. "In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes." Tsing is an alternative transcription of Ch’ing, the Manchu dynasty (1616-1912), in the person of its Fourth Emperor, K’ang hsi who visited the lake region in 1699. | 7 | The point is not simply that the person of the Emperor graced the region, but that the personification of just and harmonious (i.e., Confucian) government shone forth, like the dawn; light spreading. Pound uses only two lines from the rough translation of ‘Sunset over Fishing Village’: "Dawn begins with light to the south and north / Noise of children hawking their fish and crawfish". The spreading of light in Pound’s version, however, is particularised as "a light" and frames the contrasting images of boys fishing and the Emperor’s journey. Even the original sound image, "Noise of children hawking their fish and crawfish" becomes a visual sign, "young boys prod stones for shrimp".

7 |  See Terrell, Companion to the Cantos (Berkely and Los Angeles; University of California Press, 1980), p. 191. The reign of the Emperor K’ang hsi is the subject of LVIII-LXI and his Sacred Edict is covered in XCVIII-XCIX.