Book Review - Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, translation and commentary by Ezra Pound

 Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects Translation & Commentary by Ezra Pound, Stone Texts from rubbings supplied by William Hawley, a Note on the Stone Editions by Achilles Fang

New York: A New Directions Book, 1951                                 ISBN 0811201546

Ezra Pound remains an enigma - a fundamental figure of the Modernist movement, inspiration to many, balanced by the fact that he was an antisemite and supporter of fascism, his long life had many ups and downs and his work varied in quality if not in quantity. The Cantos remain his main contribution to Western Literature, and many academics have made a living trying to interpret his great work.

One thing that Ezra was fascinated with throughout his life was Chinese literature, and this book is a compilation of his translations of Confucius ranging from 1928-1950. There has been a lot of controversy around Pound's translations from the Chinese, revolving around several factors: Pound was not fluent in the language, and relied on other's notes and his own poetic sense to create his works. He saw his translations as a re-creation as much as a literal translation, and saw the philosophy of Confucius as a counter-balance to the Western thought on government which he saw as a failed project.

The first parts of this work - the translations of The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot - are in this edition juxtaposed with rubbings from the stone tablets from which the text was drawn - I don't read Chinese characters, but it's a great addition to this text. The Analects, which given the original publication date one can assume that Pound worked on when he was incarcerated after the War, are as a text much less developed than the first two works, and has many more textual explanations from Pound than the other two works (interestingly in this edition there were footnotes marked in the text, but no notes at the bottom of the page or at the end of the book).

I think that in many respects that Ezra has done a good job here - a reader gets a sense of what these texts are, of the difficulty in interpreting some of the verses, and he has provided some pithy language as translation: while the hokey Americanisms that he uses occasionally initially jarred, as I read through they seemed quite apt to present Confucius' character, which is by turns scholarly, pragmatic, realistic and prickly.

Honestly, this is not the work to go to for an accurate or up-to-date version of Confucius (I can recommend Simon Leys' translation of The Analects for that), but for any Poundian, they are worth the effort.

A final short rumination on New Directions Paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. I've always loved the design of these books, their understated covers and font, along with higher-quality paper and bindings, somehow give them an air of authority - they are a tactile and visual pleasure.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell