Variations on a Theme: Legge, Waley, and Pound Translate Ode VIII from

the Chinese Shi JingRobert E Kibler, Minot State University

I write about the Chinese Book of Songs, or Odes, the people who have translated them, and how we should respond to those translations.

The Chinese Shi Jing, or Book of

Odes is comprised of three hundred and

five odes assembled during the Chou

Dynasty (1122-255 BC) from songs

sung by the various peoples who lived in

the land of the Chou and in its several

tributary states. The songs are all very

old, and as Arthur Waley notes, together

comprise the ancient “folksongs, songs

of nobility, ritual hymns, and ballads on

significant events” of ancient China.i

Most of them concern life as lived

during the Chou dynasty. The oldest

ritual hymns, referred to as the ya, may

date from as early as the eleventh

century BC, while the anthology as a

whole, including the feng, or folksongs,

and sung, or odes sung at sacred rites,

probably reached its present

anthologized form sometime around 600

B.C.ii Interest in the odes has been

continual through time, both from those

who saw them as part of their own

cultural heritage, and those who would

translate that heritage into their own

words for their own people.

The Odes were purportedly first

anthologized around 600 BC by Chen,

the music master of the Chou court. In

the fifth century BC, Confucius was said

to have expurgated the anthology,

trimming the vast collection of 3000

songs down to its present number of

305.iii As such, the Odes form the

backbone of Confucian philosophical

and moral instruction, and have long

served as a part of Chinese attempts to

define human excellence by means of

past behaviors and traditions. Thus, in

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the Analects, Confucius expresses

elation because his son Tz’uiv has

recognized the value of happiness and

social propriety. Now, Confucius says,

he “can begin to talk about the Odes”v

with Tz’u, because such recognition

suggests that the Tz’u is in possession of

the intellectual and social maturity

requisite to studying the Odes—and “the

man who has not studied the Odes,”

Confucius notes elsewhere, “is like one

who stands with his face right against

the wall.”vi

Not surprisingly, a work so

closely associated with cultural

traditions and moral instruction

developed both antagonists and

defenders over time. The T’sin Dynasty

(255-206 BC), for example, sought to

erase the Odes, along with virtually all

of the other classical books of China, in

a bid to make China undergo a new

beginning.vii To do this they had a state-

mandated mass burning of all the old

books in 213 B.C.viii Yet, so beloved

were the Odes that many scholars had

memorized them.ix The only way for the

T’sin to eliminate the Odes was to

eliminate the scholars—something the

dynasty was perfectly willing to do for

many reasons. But as fate and the

Chinese people would have it, the

dynasty itself was snuffed out instead.

With the rise of the Han Dynasty (206-

25 AD) out of the ashes of the T’sin,

four complete versions of the Odes soon

surfaced. One of these, called the Text of

Maou, was presented at the Han court in

129 BC, and has served as the text

preferred by Chinese scholars unto this

day.x Maou’s text organizes the various

odes according to lessons learned from

the states, minor and major odes, odes of

the temple and altar, and the sacrificial

odes.xi

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The durability of the Maou text is

partly the result of scholars having

passed on their belief in it as the best

text, and partly because those same

scholars have painstakingly kept records

of their work with it from the time of its

presentation at the Han court unto this

day.xii Despite this line of scholarly

transmission, however, even Chinese

scholars have a difficult time

understanding and translating the Odes

as found in Maou—or in any text. Many

words have undergone radical

orthographic and usage changes, and no

one today precisely knows how the

ancient and classical Chinese

pronounced words. The Chinese four-

tone system, for example, was not

introduced until the fifth or sixth century

A.D. Earlier pronunciation depended on

either a three-tone system, for which

there is some evidence, or simply

resulted from phrasing modulations

ranging from slow to rapid, high to low,

repressed to expressive.xiii Further

difficulties arise because Maou’s text

was reconstructed as a result of memory

and recitation. Given the sound

similarity of so many Chinese

characters, it was perhaps inevitable

“that the same sounds, when taken down

by different writers, should in many

cases be represented by different

characters.”xiv

Be that as it may, beginning with

what many scholars refer to as the Jesuit

priest Lacharme’s “undigestible”

translation of the Odes into the latin

Liber Carminum in 1733,xv westerners

have diligently sought to increase their

understanding of ancient China by

means of translating the Odes. These

translators have often groped tenuously

and carefully towards the Chinese past,

drawing upon previous translations in

such a way as to create a textual line of

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transmission from China to 18th century

Europe and from then unto the western

world of the present day. The names of

those who have in some fashion

succeeded in translating the Odes come

up time and again in discussions of

things Chinese: Lacharme (trans 1733,

published 1830) and Covreur (1896)—

both French, Karlgren the Swede (1950),

Legge (1861) and Waley (1937)--the

Brits, and the American, Pound

(1954).xvi There are of course several

i*Special thanks to Eileen Young, late of the Taiwanese Symphony Orchestra, and now a student of mine at Minot State University, for her help in tracking down and parsing all of the Chinese characters cited in this essay.? Lai Ming, A History of Chinese Literature (New York: John Day Co., 1964) p. 27. Lai Ming notes that there were three different categories of odes from ancient times: the feng, or folksongs or wind songs, which comprised 160 of the roughly 300 odes; ya, or verses sung at court, of which there are 105 odes; sung, or verses of songs sung at rituals. Further, according to L.S. Dembo, in his The Confucian Odes of Ezra Pound: A Critical Appraisal (Berkeley: University California Pr., 1963), p. 10-14, Confucius arranged the odes in keeping with the natural order of the universe, so began with the interrelationships of men and women, culminating in the family. The feng songs were of this type, and the earliest of these are referred to as Chou Nan, or songs of the Chou. They are often considered “genuine” or “pure” because they are simple lyrics or fu, that tell the story of people and work. In this sense, they embody a “moral purity” lost in other narrative types of odes, which use metaphorical (pi) or allusive (hsing) styles to convey complex meaning. ii Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1937) p. xiii. Waley notes that most of the odes probably reached their present anthologized form circa 600 B.C.iii James Legge. The She King (Taipei: SMC Pub, [1871] 1991) p. 3. This is probably not true—several literary and philosophical works produced before the time of Confucius quote so predominately from the 305 songs that it is difficult to think that 2800 rarely quoted odes existed alongside of these 305.iv Lai Ming, page 28. Lai Ming notes that Tz’u is the son of Confucius.v Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP. 1969) p. 22.vi James Legge, Confucius, from the “Analects” (New York: Dover Pr., [1893] 1971) p. 323.vii Wing-Tsit Chan, Sourcebook, p. 251. Wing-Tsit Chan notes that the Ch’in Dynasty (221-206 B.C.) promoted the Legalist School of Chinese philosophy, and while its violence and ruthlessness has guaranteed that there has never been another Legalist School in nearly two thousand years, the Legalists nevertheless had a positive side. They were the only Chinese philosophers who took charge of the state, and were “consistently and vigorously anti-ancient…. [The Legalists] looked to the present rather than the past, and to changing circumstances rather than to any prescribed condition.”viii James Legge, She King, p. 8.ix Dembo, p. 38. Dembo suggests “virtually any educated Chinese” could recite an ode “at a moment’s notice.” x Legge, She King, p. 11.xi Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia UP. 1962) p. 203. Watson notes that after the Ch’in’s famous burning of the books, three revived versions of the Odes eventually received official recognition of the early Han, but that all three of these, which only exist in fragments today, were replaced by the fourth so-called Mao text. The Mao text continues to be the standard version of the Odes.xii Legge, She King, p. 12.xiii Legge, She King, p. 101xiv Legge, She King, p. 12xv Legge, She King, p. v. Legge notes that M. Callery correctly characterized Lacharme’s translation as “la production la plus indigeste et la plus ennuyeuse dont la sinologie ait a rougir.”

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others, but of these whom I have

mentioned, three will serve as

particularly good points of comparison

and contrast in their rendering of the

Odes into English: James Legge, the

missionary, Arthur Waley, the scholar,

and Ezra Pound, the poet. Working with

the texts of their predecessors, all three

came to the Odes with different

intentions and abilities, and as we shall

see, those intentions and abilities have

very much controlled the character and

quality of their translations.

Of the three, Legge is the

earliest to have translated the Odes and

the most learned one of the three to do

so. He is also the only one to have

visited or lived in China. Legge was a

Scotsman, born in Aberdeenshire in

1815. In youth he excelled at Latin, and

won the most prestigious First Bursary

scholarship to King’s College Oxford in

1831 and the Huttonian prize for the

University’s most brilliant student four

years later.xvii He was also, however, a

Presbyterian dissenter, who, like his

father, supported the Independent

Church, so while the Latin Chair at

King’s College seemed his sure destiny,

he instead joined the London Missionary

Society in 1836, married, and set sail

with his new wife for Malacca and then

on to Hong Kong.xviii Believing that

preaching was best left to the Chinese,

Legge and his fellow missionaries spent

their time teaching at the China Mission,

learning Chinese, and translating it for

publication.xix Through the many years,

he translated virtually all of the Chinese

Classics, and included original Chinese

texts and immensely learned notes with

those translations. By the time he died in

xvi Pere Lacharme, Liber Carminum, 1733 (published 1830). Couvreur’s Cheu King, 1896. Legge’s The She King or Book of Poetry, 1861. Bernard Karlgren, “Glosses on the Kuo Feng Odes, 1942. Arthur Waley’s Odes, 1937. Ezra Pound’s She-ching, 1954.

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1897, it was said of Legge by another

great Sinologist, Herbert A. Giles, that

he had made “the greatest contribution

ever…to the study of Chinese, and will

be remembered and studied ages after.”xx

His work is plain and straightforward,

and while somewhat dated in style, it

remains part of the canon of essential

texts for those with a serious interest in

Chinese.xxi

Waley and Pound were

contemporaries who knew and worked

with one another, though Waley was

clearly more the scholar and less the

poet, and Pound was just the opposite.

Each man was born in the 1880s, and

received an exemplary education. After

graduation in the Classics from

Cambridge, Waley took a job working

for Lawrence Binyon in the Oriental

Sub-department at the British Museum

in 1913.xxii Just prior to Waley’s arrival

there, Mary Fenollosa, widow of art

historian Ernest Fenollosa, had asked

Binyon, then Keeper of the museum’s

Eastern Art Collection, for help in

turning her late husband’s massive

collection of notes and manuscripts into

a finished product. While Waley had no

direct hand in this project—which was to

result in the 1912 publication of Epochs

of Chinese and Japanese Art-- he was

nevertheless working for Binyon in the

Oriental Sub-Department so as Jonathan

Spence suggests, Waley most assuredly

“breathed in a good deal” of the sinified

working air.”xxiii He immediately began

learning both Chinese and Japanese in

his spare time.xxiv

xvii James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Volume I, (Taipei: SMC Publishing, [1893] 1991) p. 3xviii Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 7.xix Legge, The Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean (Taipei, SMC Pub, 1893) p. 7. Legge was assigned to the Anglo-Chinese College located at Malacca in 1839, but in 1843, moved the mission to Hong Kong in order to be closer to the mainland.xx Legge, The Chinese Classics, p. 21xxi Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University Michigan Pr., 1997) p. 47.

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Pound was also living as a

dashing young American poet in London

about the same time as Waley, and had

likewise developed an interest in things

Chinese.xxv As fate would have it, Mary

Fenollosa read some of Pound’s poems

in the “Contemporania” section of the

April 1913 version of Poetry

Magazine,xxvi and impressed, sought out

the young poet as the one whom she

believed could best continue her late

husband’s translations from the Chinese

and Japanese. She was “distrustful of

academic experts” and wanted her

husband’s intellectual legacy to go to

someone unconventional.xxvii Those of

Fenollosa’s notes and manuscripts that

did not go to Binyon and his staff at the

Museum went to Pound in 1913.xxviii

At least in part then, Fenollosa

seems to have been the inspiration for

both Waley and Pound to undertake

translation projects from the Chinese,

and the fact that they were both

associates of Binyon’s caused them to

lunch together at the Vienna Café xxix and

consult one another regularly--although

it appears that Pound was primarily in

need of consulting Waley, and not the

other way round.xxx Nevertheless, Pound

produced the first volume based in their

joint interest in translation, publishing

Cathay in 1915 from his work with the

Fenollosa materials. A few weeks after

Cathay’s publication, Waley stopped by

Pound’s flat to have a look at

Fenollosa’s legacy to Pound,xxxi and both

Cathay and the Fenollosa material were xxii Jonathan Spence, Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture (New York: Norton Pub, 1992) p. 331.xxiii Spence, Roundabout, 331.xxiv Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: Duke UP. 1995) p. 131.xxv Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, pp. 9-14. Zhaoming Qian notes that Pound was “getting orient from all quarters” from roughly 1909 onwards, when he and his bride-to-be, Dorothy Shakespear, attended Lawrence Binyon’s March 1909 lecture on “Oriental and European Art,” at the British Museum. Binyon was Assistant Keeper in charge of the museum’s Far Eastern paintings and color prints.xxvi Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University California Pr., 1971) p. 197.xxvii Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Dell Pub.1990) p. 220.

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to have an identifiable influence on his

first work in Chinese translation, A

Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems,

appearing in 1917. To be sure, a rivalry

seems to have developed between the

two as time passed, but both remained

productive and durable translators all of

their working days,xxxii and both

eventually undertook translations of the

Odes in the later middle phase of their

long careers. Waley’s edition came out

in 1937, and Pound’s in 1954. Both

editions show the influence of Legge’s

earlier work.

Of Waley’s skills as a translator

of Chinese, Jonathan Spence wrote that

there are many Westerners whose

knowledge of Chinese is superior to

Waley’s, but they are not poets. At the

same time, there are many better poets

than Waley, but they do not know

Chinese so well.xxxiii The advertisement

for his first volume of Chinese

translations, A Hundred and Seventy

Chinese Poems (1919) in a 1919 edition

of the Dial further asserted that his work

“should be for our generation, at least,

the standard anthology.”xxxiv Of Pound’s

skills as a poet, his various poems will

attest. He was also the shaper of a new

poetic movement, a master of meter and

of sound in many languages, and in

some fashion, as T.S. Eliot noted in

1918, the “inventor of Chinese poetry in

our time.”xxxv As a translator of Chinese,

however, it must be said that he never

actually knew the language. Nor could

he so much as look up Chinese

xxviii Carpenter, p. 268.xxix Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.xxx Carpenter, p. 269. Carpenter notes that Waley’s linguistic skill far exceeded Pound’s, and in the introduction to his 1916 translations of Japanese Noh dramas, Pound thanked Waley for his orthographic help. Nevertheless, Waley too had taught himself Japanese and Chinese in his spare time while working for Binyon at the British Museum. xxxi Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 131.xxxii Carpenter, pp. 269-70. Carpenter notes that Waley was privately contemptuous of Pound’s understanding of the Chinese language, and for his part, when Daniel Corey mentioned Waley’s name to him, Pound let out a “fusillade of expletives.”

8

characters in a dictionary.xxxvi Yet he had

committed to memory many of the basic

Chinese radicals, and believed that he

had an intuitive and artistic

understanding of Chinese that allowed

him to actually see the meanings within

the scripted characters.xxxvii This belief in

an ability to intuitively read the

characters has some foundational merit

in the Chinese. At least in the old

Chinese scripts, for example, the radical

for a horse looks like a horse, the one

for a man like a man. The vast

majority of Chinese radicals, however,

long ago became abstract unrecognizable

versions of the things they signified, and

indeed, many more Chinese characters

developed as phonetic components of

signification rather than as ideographic

descriptions of things themselves.xxxviii

Of the three translators then, Pound was

the most dependent on the translation

work of others.

To compare the work of our three

translators, I have chosen a simple ode

from among the oldest in the anthology.

It appears as Ode VIII in Legge and

Pound’s versions, and as Waley’s Ode

#99. Dembo and Lai Ming note that it is

one of the Kuo Feng folksongs are airs

of the 15 states.xxxix The ode appears in

the first Chou Nan section of the Shi

Jing, written in the earliest days of the

Chou dynasty. As such, it is a “genuine”

ode, illustrative of a “moral purity.”

Later odes sometimes allude to a corrupt

state, wherein those in possession of

moral purity often end in despair.xl And

indeed, this link to morality is consistent

with at least one longstanding story

associated with the Odes. It has been

written that the Kuo Feng were gathered

xxxiii Spence, Roundabout, p. 330.xxxiv Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism, p. 130.xxxv Carpenter, p. 270.xxxvii Dembo, page 2. Dembo notes that Pound believed in using intuition and a certain empathetic state of mind in order to create a cultural synthesis through translation.

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from the various 15 states for

presentation to the Chou emperor so that

he could check the mores and temper of

his subjects.xli They were also thought to

have the power whereby superiors

transformed their inferiors, and inferiors

in turn satirized their superiors.xlii While

such a dual role suggests the political

character of some of the Kuo Feng, Ode

VIII seems to be from that group of

simple lyrics referred to by Confucius as

fu, or narrative, composed of images

meaning nothing beyond their

appearance.xliii

Ode VIII is a fertility poem,

celebrating the gathering of wild

plantain--or ribgrass--from the meadows.

As Waley and Legge note, when women

were going to have babies, they ate

plantain because it was believed that

doing so would ease their delivery.

Likewise, the plant has a long and global

history as a curative and medicinal herb.

It was called the “plant of healing” by

the Highlanders of Scotland, and known

as one of the nine sacred herbs among

the Saxons. Pliny thought is a cure for

hydrophobia. xliv It is a dark green

slender plant that grows very tall, and

throws its angular and furrowed flower

stalks in long spikes high up in the air.

According to the ode, women gathered

plantain by filling their aprons with the

seeds and then tucking their full aprons

into their girdles.

Like so many odes of the kuo

feng type, Ode VIII expresses impersonal

sentiments and events common to all.

xxxvi Carpenter, p. 270.xxxviii Dembo, p. 24. Dembo notes that literally thousands of Chinese characters are constructed of phonological, not pictorial elements. Readers of Chinese through time would also have seen even the pictorial elements of the language in the abstract, and so would have not idea of what they were beholding. xxxix Dembo, p.7, Lai Ming, p. 27.xl Dembo, Odes, p. 62.xli Watson, p. 202.xlii Dembo, Odes, p. 10.xliii Dembo, Odes, p. 14.

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There is no attempt [in them] at any

individuality of expression.xlv

Structurally, the ode is written in three

stanzas of four lines each—the most

standard pattern for Chinese poetry until

the time of the seventh century A.D.

T’ang poets,xlvi and contains only a few

characters that repeat in chanting pattern.

Many of those characters also share

some of the same radicals.

Consequently, not only do sonic

repetitions dominate in the ode, so too

do eye-rhymes—words that look—at

least in part--the same. These repetitions

are evident in the following charts:

Legge’s Narrative Ode VIII

xliv Waley, p. 91. Legge, p. 15, further notes that the plant in question is probably the common English ribgrass, and that the Chinese still consider it to be helpful in “difficult labours.”xlv Dembo, Odes, p. 36.

Tsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // tsai zhiTsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // you zhiTsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // dou zhiTsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // liu zhiTsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // ji zhiTsai tsai // fou ee // pou yen // she zhi

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xlvi Legge, She King, p. 102.

claw, nail

wood, lumber tsai (to gather)

plantain fou ee (plantain)

lightly express pou yen (Oh!)

claw, nail

wood, lumber tsai (gather)

plantain fou ee (plantain)

lightly express pou yen (Oh!)

gather exist pluck rub in put in tuck in now now ears now now skirts girdles

now now

zhi=go, arrive, this or that…….

tsai zhi you zhi dou zhi liu zhi ji zhi she zhi

12

(1871)

Waley’s Marriage Ode #99Thick grows the plantain;Here we go plucking it.Thick grows the plantain;Here we go gathering it.

Thick grows the plantain;Here we hold it between the fingers.Thick grows the plantain;Here we are with handfuls of it.

Thick grows the plantain;Here we have our aprons full of it.Thick grows the plantain;Now our apronfuls are tucked in at our belts (1937)Pound’s Folksong #VIII Waley’s Marriage Song #99Pluck, pluck, pluck, the thick plantain; Pluck, pick, pluck, then pluck again.

Oh pick, pluck the thick plantain,Here be seeds for sturdy men.

Pluck the leaf and fill the flap,Skirts were made to hide the lap (1954)

On The left-hand side of the

chart, reading from top to bottom,

Legge, Waley, and Pound’s versions of

Ode 8 appear. Legge’s version also

contains the Chinese characters of the

ode, to be read right to left, top to

bottom. The three stanzas are marked at

their beginning points with the Chinese

13

numbers for 1 , 2 , and 3 ,

positioned above a small-sized version

of the character for “stanza.” In the ode,

save for the character tsai “to gather,”

two complete characters make up each

Chinese word, so that stanzas 2 and 3 on

the chart, which for the most part have

four characters running top to bottom,

nevertheless present two words arranged

vertically in each column, two Chinese

characters to the word. Scanning the

Chinese characters from right to left

then, reading two characters to the word,

top to bottom, the number of repeating

eye-rhymes becomes obvious. Indeed,

every stanza contains two lines whose

first, second, and third words repeat.

Even the fourth word of each line

repeats the bottom character. Only the

top character of every fourth line varies.

On the top of the right hand side

of the chart is a pronunciation guide for

the Chinese characters, rendered left to

right instead of in the Chinese right to

left pattern, and broken down to the level

of each word. Seen in its sonic form, the

ode clearly substantiates to the ear the

heavy emphasis on repetition asserted by

its visual form before the eye. Indeed, in

sound as in form, only the first half of

the fourth word in every line contains a

variation. Below this pronunciation

guide and on the same side of the chart

is a horizontal breakdown of each

repeating word contained in Ode 8,

along with its definition and a

confirmation of its pronunciation. While

a closer look at the radicals composing

these words will figure later in our

analysis of the three translations, the

singular Chinese character tsai, meaning

“to gather,” is broken down in the chart

to its two radicals, illustrating the way in

which some Chinese characters signify

visually. The upper radical of tsai, for

example, typically represents an animal

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claw or nail, and combines with the

lower radical for wood or lumber to

suggest the act of gathering. The “claw”

figuratively gathers “the wood” in a way

suggestive of a wild or uncultivated sort

of action. And indeed, plantain grew

wild in the meadows and wastelands, so

the gatherers were not working next to

their huts or houses. Other visual cues

to meaning appear in the ode, and as we

shall see, are especially dramatic in the

varying fourth characters, which are set

horizontally at the bottom of the word

chart along with their own definitions

and pronunciations.

Seen collectively, then, the

assembly of charts suggests some

fundamental qualities of Ode 8 that serve

as pivotal challenges to our three

translator’s various interpretations. Each

translator is roughly able to deliver the

information contained in the ode, but at

the same time, each in their own way

perforce contends with its rhythmic

character, and with the key words and

phrases that essentially deliver that

rhythm to our understanding. Each, for

example, must account in some sensible

way for the waves of repeating eye-

rhymes, compounded by the repeating

waves of sound occurring in each stanza.

These incessant waves of repetitions

suggest an absorbing—even hypnotic—

communal action. So too, each translator

has to contend with the other action

words that provide the alteration of sight

and sound patterns occurring at the end

of each stanza--words that modify the

overall sight and sound of the ode in

much the same way that the gathering,

plucking, rubbing, and tucking that takes

place in its imagined fields and fens

shifts the character of the work done

Turning to Legge’s handling of

the ode, it becomes immediately clear

that he seeks to capture some sense of its

15

communal rhythm. His translation

contains a collective “we” in each line,

and continues to gather and gather,

pluck, rub, and tuck from beginning to

end, often setting these action words in

stock phrases appearing in the same

location of each stanza, thereby creating

an English version of the eye-rhymes

evident in the original. His use of an

adverbial “now” also conveys some

sense of immediacy and life as expressed

in the original through its varying fourth

line spirit-of-action word zhi meaning

“to go or arrive.” Moreover, Legge

chooses his verbs well, suggestive of the

way in which some Chinese characters

visualize the action they symbolize. He

uses the phrase “pluck the ears” for

example, as the English equivalent of a

Chinese character that shows just that

action: shows an abstract radical form

of a person whose hand is stretched out

towards and plucking at what visually

appears to be a field of corn , or at

least four sheafy bundles. Likewise, the

same character used for plucking shows

up again in the Chinese ideogram

meaning “to rub” or “stroke” .

Yet overall, Legge’s work lacks

vim, and the ode very much to wants it.

His “now” tells us that we are to imagine

a present action, for example, but does

so by telling us of the present rather than

by showing it. He also neglects the fun

that is pervasive in the ode. Indeed, in

his footnotes to the ode, Legge suggests

that the ideogram for pou yen, is

essentially untranslatable gobbledygook

and so unjustly writes off the third

character of every stanza, or 25% of the

ode. (LeggeXX). Yet pou yen is

composed of a variety of elements that

collectively suggest that it means

something like “to lightly express,” or to

express with a sort of effervescence.

The lower character of the ideogram

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shows a mouth with words coming out

of it-- --and is the Chinese radical

meaning “to speak” or “to express.”

Above it is a wonderful assemblage of

radicals that together convey a sense of

mirth. Taken as the sum of its parts,

water, plus small, plus ”barely,”

plus “grass” expresses a mood as

light, fluent, and subtle as is the

whispering wind over water and grass.

Perhaps the disciplined Presbyterian

minister just could not bring himself to

accept the idea of a light mood

associated with work.

Waley also seeks to convey the

communal and rhythmic nature of the

ode’s action through repetition of word

and phrase. “Thick grows the plantain,”

for example, is followed by another

stock phrase,“Here we go” or “hold” or

“have.” In these ways not only is the

communal nature of the ode’s action

conveyed, that action is confirmed by a

nod to the eye rhymes of the original

because each stock phrase appears in the

same place within each stanza, creating a

mass decking of visual similarity. Such

stock phrases also capture the sense of

immediacy of action relayed in the

original through such phrases as

“gather and gather” and both tsai zhi ,

“gathering now” and you zhi , “here

we are now.” Yet at the same time, if

Legge’s version appears to be a fairly

literal one, albeit bereft of the all-

important and spirited pou yen ,

Waley’s appears to be a fairly literal

version of the ode that turns spirit into

the rote phrasing of the pedant.

Waley repeats Legge’s attempts

to recreate the communal rhythm of the

original by translating line by line, in

keeping with the ancient Chinese pattern

of three stanzas of four lines each. He

also follows Legge’s attempt to keep the

eye and sound rhymes found in the

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original alive in his translation. In these

ways, Waley is apparently a good

student of the ode. Nevertheless, he

makes small changes to the ode in what

must be a poetic attempt to awaken it in

some fashion. It is in these attempts to

awaken the ode, however, that Waley’s

pedantry shows, for he instead depletes

the verbal life and spirit of the ode

through his emphasis on adverbs, static

intransitive verbs, and superfluous detail.

“Thick grows the plaintain,” for

example, empties the energy from the

original through its substitution of the

still image of thick standing plants for

the votive act of gathering birthing seeds

from those plants. His replacement of

action verbs such as Legge’s “pluck”

and “rub” and “place” with “here we

hold,” and “here we are,” and “here we

have” further depletes the ode’s energy

by again making intransitive what was

clearly meant in the original to be full of

rhythmic movement. What is more,

additions such as when his gatherers

have seeds “between the fingers,” or

elsewhere, “handfuls” of seeds, again

curtail movement in the ode because a

focus on what is small and specific

misses the essentially large and general

sweep of a work intent on expressing

communal rather than individual action.

Pound the poet makes some

interesting changes to the ode. Unlike

Legge the missionary and Waley the

scholar, Pound strays from the

traditional four-line pattern for each of

the three stanzas of the original, and

instead delivers two per stanza. This

seems a good strategy for generating a

more upbeat tempo than either Legge or

Waley achieve in their translations, and

Pound clearly seeks to embed a sense of

effervescent life into his version. Indeed,

even his attempt to convey the

communal rhythms of the original is

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imbued with musical effervescence.

Instead of the freighted repetitions of

Legge and Waley’s stock phrases,

Pound’s “pluck, pluck, pluck” followed

by “pluck, pick, pluck, then pluck again”

serves as a swift variation on an insistent

rhythm. The immediate result is a

lightening of mood, while at the same

time Pound’s nod to the sonic and eye-

rhymes of the original convey the

necessary sense of communal action. A

lightened mood is further established

through the use of the interjection “Oh”

to presumably deliver some of what in

the Chinese comes across through pou

yen and through all of the spirit of

immediacy embodied in every fourth

line of the original through the various

compounds including zhi .

What is more, Pound shows a

sensibility to the ode that is less in

evidence in either Legge or Waley’s

versions. Whether it comes from his

poetic intuition at work or from his

reading of Legge and Waley’s footnotes,

only Pound’s “Here be seeds for sturdy

men” conveys any sense of the purpose

behind the women gathering plantain.

Yet this information is essential to the

modern, post-industrial reader, and it is

not altogether an intrusion on the poem

to have inserted it. In sum then, Pound’s

version brings the communal rhythm, the

effervescent spirit, and the essential

purpose of the original to life through his

translation in a way superior to what

Legge and Waley produce. His ode lives

in a way that theirs do not, and from

what we have seen of the ode through

charting and explication, it very much

wants to live.

Yet that said, Pound’s version

has its problems. It is perhaps a little too

irreverent. The heavy rhythms of the

original produce in sound, text, and

sense an essential majesty of motion that

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is lost in all of Pound’s end rhymes and

assorted pickings and pluckings. In his

bid for more spirit and fun, Pound may

have gone too far towards turning an ode

embodying the ritualized communal

activity of women gathering medicinal

birthing seeds into very little more than a

ditty, complete with what amounts to a

cryptic cornpone maxim in the final

stanza: “Pluck the leaf and fill the

flap/Skirts were made to hide the lap.”

This final line fails to deliver the

original’s basic information, while being

foolish. At least Legge and Waley retain

the dignity of the ode in translation, and

no matter what their translation crimes,

clearly transfer the ode’s narrative sense

to us.

All of which is to perhaps

confirm on one level what Burton

Watson suggests is the problem of

variety in translations encountered by

every reader,xlvii and what Achilles Fang

asserts is the necessity for all translators

of the Odes “to take courage in their

hands,” because “translators are

interpreters among other things.”xlviii In

short, this brief comparison and contrast

of Legge the minister, Waley the

scholar, and Pound the poet’s

interpretations of Ode VII suggests both

the ways in which each translator

succeeds and the ways in which each

falls short. As such, it seems that there is

really only one solution to the translation

problem faced by Legge, Waley, Pound,

and countless others through time. One

must grab the bull by the horns, hunker

down in a chair with a series of other

translations, pray to the various muses

perhaps, and offer yet another version.

Here is mine:

Gathering gathering plantainOh yes, we gather it right nowGathering, gathering, yes nowSo that we have it for birthing time

We gather and we gather yes!Plucking and picking from the stemsOh we gather and we gather!Rubbing out seeds with nimble touch

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Gathering and gathering plantainPlacing the seeds in magic skirtsYes we do gather and gatherTucking our skirts in magic belts (2003)

I thus offer in conclusion a

solution to several of the problems that

Legge, Waley, and Pound failed to

overcome in their translation of Ode

VIII, and at the same time, have

suggested what needs to be done by

those who disagree, who see here not so

much a conclusion as a call for yet

another interpretive beginning. To that

intrepid group, I say good luck!

Notes

xlvii Watson, p. 205.xlviii Dembo, p. x

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