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Anonymous06/23/25, 14:21No.24489868
why did Ezra Pound write a translation of Chinese poetry without knowing Chinese?
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Anon06/23/25, 14:24No.24489877
the understanding of essence transcends the barrier of language
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Anon06/23/25, 14:29No.24489887
It's not difficult to translate Chinese but simultaneously it is nearly impossibleVery good exercise for poetry
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Anon06/23/25, 14:30No.24489890
he just made it up
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Anon06/23/25, 14:37No.24489909
it's not very good
https://archive.org/details/cathay_librivox/cathay_01_song_bowman_shu_pound.mp3
I think everyone just hypes him up as our guy because he was stylish and mentally ill.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:05No.24490229
It's very goodIt's not a super accurate translation, but the truth is a super accurate translation of poetry is impossible. One definition of "poetry" is: that which cannot be translated. So for a translation to be good it has to be a whole new poem by a real poetThe model is FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, which while he knew Persian is not accurate--in a sense it's a completely different poem, but it's one of the greatest poems in English
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Anon06/23/25, 17:08No.24490235
He was 'vibe translating', not really being accurate but that's not the point.
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Anon06/23/25, 17:20No.24490264
Chinese poetry isn't made up of text but of characters meaning particular things. So if you get somebody to translate the individual characters making up the poem for you, your guess as to how "moon, look, sad, home" should be translated into a western language is as good as anyone else's because your knowledge of chinese does not help with the actual process of translation, only with knowing what the characters mean.