Today’s Poem: The River-Merchant’s Wife
Ezra Pound’s Imagist homage to Li Bai
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The journey of Today’s Poem from the eighth-century Chinese of Li Bai (701–762) to the twentieth-century English of Ezra Pound is a convoluted one. This might be a more diplomatic way of saying, as some scholars do, that Pound wasn’t a particularly proficient translator from the Chinese. But it also happens to be the truth.
In 1913, while working in London as secretary to W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), who shared the younger poet’s interest in Asian art and literature, Pound became acquainted with Mary McNeil Fenellosa, widow of the art historian Ernest Fenellosa (1853–1908). The late Fenellosa, whose area of expertise had been Japanese art, left among his papers a number of notes and manuscripts, including Japanese Noh plays and poems by Japanese and Chinese poets. These his widow sent to Pound, to sort out, translate, and render publishable.
Pound’s limitations as a translator of Chinese poetry were compounded by the fact that Fenellosa, who had made some preliminary attempts, was fluent primarily in Japanese, not Chinese. So it’s perhaps inevitable that these poems, constituting Pound’s own 1915 collection, Cathay, would be more in the spirit of the dynamic equivalent than of fidelity to the original. This, perhaps, is a diplomatic way of saying that we learn more about Pound’s mind and interests from these poems than we learn about Li Bai’s.
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is a case in point. It’s telling that Pound’s epigraph, “after Li Po,” suggests that the poem is meant as a response to the original, rather than a faithful translation. While the setting is Chinese, and the plot concerns the cultural convention of an arranged marriage, the poem itself suggests a marriage of Japanese poetic conventions with Pound’s own artistic preoccupations. As Pound himself wrote, “Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.” The poem’s claim of being after Li Po both acknowledges the debt and establishes the poem in a hereditary line — but as a wholly separate entity with a life of its own.
In short, like his famous haiku-esque “In a Station of the Metro,” published in 1913, this supposed translation is really, at its core, an Imagist poem. The moves it makes, from one unadorned particular to the next, are on the one hand the moves of Japanese poetry, particularly haiku, which juxtaposes image with image and leaves the images to explain themselves through these juxtapositions. If the same moves are, on the other hand, also the moves of much contemporary American poetry, it’s because Ezra Pound, in poems like this, borrowing from the Asian forms he admired, made them part of the modern idiom.
All that aside, as a poem, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is simply beautiful. Its irregularly metered lines, undulant as the river itself, sketch a life story which is also a love story. Within the imposed form of the arranged marriage, love blooms and is realized most intensely through seasons of separation. All too swiftly its springtime has given way to autumn. In uncertainty and anxiety over her husband’s long absence, the young wife laments, “I grow older.” Still, she is certain of one thing: that when she hears from him — if she hears from him — she will come to meet him, “as far as Chō-fū-Sa.”
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound
After Li Po While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look out? At sixteen you departed You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
Our friend A.M. Juster points out that Pound's recasting of Chinese poetry stripped it of its original rhymed and metered forms. Here is another translation of the same poem by Aaron Poochigian, who has translated extensively from the Chinese, and who does seek to preserve these poems as formal poetry: https://www.literarymatters.org/15-2-a-song-of-chang-kan/
I think you can tell from Pound’s translation, that she is desperate for him to come back.