I’ll go as far as the Long Wind Sands! (Kern 199)ĦBoth Cooper and Yip follow Fenollosa in rendering the Yangtse port Chofusa as “Long Wind Sand.” ‑ 3 But Pound, here and frequently in Cathay, insists on retaining the Chinese name, even if he often has to make it up, as is the case in the poem “Separation on the River Kiang,” where the phrase ko jin (“old acquaintance”) is turned into a proper name, “Ko-jin” (“Ko jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro”) ( 140). When eventually you would come down from the Three Gorges,Įven all the way to Long Wind Sand. (Kodama 228 - 29 )ĤThe poet and Sinologist Wai-Lim Yip translates the lines:
If you be coming down as far as the Three Narrows sooner or laterīeforehand with letter report family-homeįor I will go out to meet, not saying that the way be farĭirectly arrive long wind sand (a port on the Yangtse)Īnd will directly come to Chofusa. Sooner or later descend three whirls (name of spot on Yangtse Kian, where waters whirl) If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,ģIn the Fenollosa transcription, which gives the Japanese sound equivalent for each Chinese character, followed by their literal English translation and then a syntactically normalized version, we read: 2ĢBut the difficulty in assessing the speaker’s psychology-is she voicing her willingness to go to great lengths to meet her husband or threatening, as Ronald Bush believes, to come “as far as Cho-fu-Sa but no farther” ( 42)?-is surely compounded by a facet of Pound’s poetry rarely discussed-namely his curious use of proper names. And he goes on to describe the difference in tone as well as verse form between Li Po’s original and Pound’s dramatic monologue, commenting, as have Ronald Bush and others, on the greater subtlety and complexity of Pound’s portrait, the wife becoming, in his version, much less submissive, indeed somewhat rebellious. Ouan Jin spoke and thereby created the namedġIn a pioneer study of Ezra Pound’s translations of the Chinese poems found in Japanese transcription in Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks, Sanehide Kodama discusses the specific changes Pound made in the “Song of Ch’ang-kan” by Li Po (Rihaku in Japanese), translated as “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” ‑ 1 The original, writes Kodama, has the rigid form of gogon zekku: “eight lines, with five characters in each line in a strict structural and rhyming pattern” ( 220).
And whose mouth was removed by his father