Customer Reviews

Confucius

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One of the worst problems in our world is that it is infested with 'experts,' 'experts' of every variety from the diploma-wavers through to the self-appointed. The main aim of these 'experts' seems to have been to convince the world that only 'experts' have a right to say anything about anything. In this they have been extremely successful, and the mature, intelligent, and well-informed adult who may have a lot to contribute, but who is not an 'expert,' has been pretty well reduced to silence.

His mouth has been shut. He has been convinced that his own God-given brain is worthless. Even if there's something he'd like to say, he or she is afraid of being shouted down by the 'experts' and their groupies. A reading of the great Chinese thinkers would soon convince anyone of how dangerous and damaging to society 'experts' can be, but most of us don't read the Chinese. We have been conditioned to think of them as alien and to forget that they were human like us.

Ezra Pound may have been a bit crazy in some ways (who isn't?), and his Chinese readings have come in for a lot of flak, but anyone who, like Pound, loved Asian thought and set out to bring it to a West that is desperately in need of it, certainly deserves our gratitude whether they be 'expert' or non-expert.

Nobody knows how much Chinese Pound knew anyway. He certainly knew some. And anyone who knows anything at all about the complexities of Classical Chinese realizes that all readings or translations from that language, whether by professional linguists or enthusiasts such as Pound, must always be personal. There are just too many ways of validly interpreting a given line.

And as Burton Watson, who is one of the USA's foremost scholars of Ancient Chinese has pointed out in his 'Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,' since there can be no definitive interpretation neither can there be any such thing as a definitive translation. Watson, incidentally, was perfectly happy to approve Thomas Merton's readings of another great Chinese thinker, Chuang Tzu, even though Merton knew no Chinese at all. He feels that the more translations, whether expert or non- expert (when done with sincerity and love), the better. But experts such as Burton Watson, sadly, are rare, perhaps because they are the only true experts.

My own copy of Pound's 'Confucius' was purchased many years ago. It's very well-thumbed and heavily annotated, and I often return to it. I've also studied Arthur Waley's more exact translation carefully, and a few others. But the Confucian lines that stick in my mind always seem to be those of Pound, lines such as: "If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed" (page 33).

The "root" today is certainly "in confusion." And those who dismiss Pound on the basis of a few howlers are simply adding to the confusion. To let you in on a secret, there are many howlers - up to and including the omission of whole lines - in the translations of even reputable and well-known scholars of Chinese (though I've never found any in Burton Watson).

My advice would be to ignore the gripers, most of whom don't have direct access to the Chinese text anyway, and to read Pound's version of Confucius. He was a literary genius and got it right most of the time, and you'd learn a great deal from it.

Pound's 'Confucius' has always found and will continue to find readers. I think it's because, as Confucius says: "Those who know aren't up to those who love..." (page 216).

A bizarre, glorious train wreck of a translation. It's not a word-for-word translation of the works of Confucius, and it doesn't try to be. Instead, it's like one of those movie "adaptations" that turn out to have only the most tenuous connections with the books on which they're based. Pound, living up to the stereotypical eccentricity of poets, interprets any character he's not familiar with based on the literal meanings of its radicals, mashing them together into clumsy yet somehow apropos metaphorical images. However, for all the liberties Pound takes in translating individual characters -- and in getting Confucius and all his disciples to talk in his own curmudgeonly voice -- he's strangely obstinate about preserving word order. Plus, the whole thing is contaminated with Pound's skewed point of view. For all its inadequacies as a translation, it's a surprisingly intriguing read, but it's better as a study of Ezra Pound than as a study of Confucius. Highly inconsistent Wade-Giles romanization.

I bought this book because I had heard some people say it was more poetic than other translations. I did not find this to be true. If you are a beginner in Confucianism, "The Unwobbling Pivot" is usually referred to as the "Doctrine of the Mean." "The Great Digest" is usually referred to as "The Great Learning". I read Pound's translation of the Analects and I was disappointed. I think Waley's translation is closer to being poetic than Pound's translation. I have studied many translations of the Analects and I found Pound's translation to seem off-mark. The language was usually clumsy rather than poetic. I eventually put it aside.

I do applaud Ezra Pound's love of Confucianism and his intention to promote Confucianism for Westerners. In this vein, I recommend "Achieve Lasting Happiness" by Robert Canright, which is a version of the Analects updated for modernity. Canright's book also presents a vision of how Americans can embrace Confucianism as a system of universal ethics.

One of the other reviews said "no one knows how much Chinese Ezra Pound knew". I recommend "Ezra Pound and Confucianism" by Feng Lan. The author discusses Pound's translation in a way that is accessible and interesting. Dr. Feng Lan goes beyond the issues of translation. He also discusses Ezra Pound's "political polemic" in chap. 3 and Pound's spiritual beliefs in chapter 4.

Whether or not you buy this book by Pound, I encourage you to buy Robert Canright's book and Feng Lan's book.

This book was an epiphany when I encountered it years ago (glad it's still in print so I can give a copy here and there to special people). Dunno how much Confucius there is behind Pound's translation, but what he writes here is haiku about purpose, vision, honor, decency and integrity.

Oh yes, Pound was a lunatic on more than a few counts (most notably, his affiliation with Fascism and and Nazism), but he's still one of the finest English authors of the 20th century.

I originally pinned the following quote from this book on Nixon...though it's just as applicable to the current crop of amoral politicians and CEOs:

"When the head of state of family thinks first of gouging out an income, he must perforce do it through small men; and even if they are clever at their job, if one employ such inferior characters in state and family business the tilled fields will go rack swamp and ruin and edged calamities will mount up to the full.... This is the meaning of: A state does not profit by profits"

This book was my first introduction to Confucius and I was very pleased. Other reviewers have made critical reference to the translation. While not a Chinese scholar, I am aquainted with the literature and this volume has been the most useful in introducing me to Confucius.
Ezra Pound seems to have captured the essense of these writings, as this translation confirms many ideas contained in other more scholarly works. Highly recommended!

If you have never read the Analects in a more contemporary translation, then stay away from the Ezra Pound version, because you will most likely not understand the text (for example, compare verse 2.4 versus any other translation out there). The Pound version is much more interesting after you have read the Analects at least once and have a view of what the verses mean.

Pound 'translated' that he 'felt' was the authors intent so expect Pound more than Confuicius ... but this is great reading.

Let's put things in perspective:
you wouldn't ask a fellow how to explain Saint Thomas Aquinas, if he:
a)knew no Latin,
b)wasn't a Catholic,
c)knew no Catholics, and
d)had a long history of spouting rubbish about languages, belief systems, and peoples he knew nothing about.
Now, if getting the right dope on Aquinas might be a bit difficult under these circumstances, how much more difficult would it be to get the truth on a far more foreign culture speaking a far more foreign language from a lot longer ago?
If you've read Ezra Pound's silly and ill-tempered diatribes on literary matters (e.g. ABC of Reading, or the Guide to Kulchur) you'll recognize the rhetorical style.
If you like Pound's literary style, fine, then read his own discombobulated verse or perhaps his "Cathay", which is a purely imaginative work derived from Earnest Fenellosa's notes (who didn't know Chinese either, by the way, just Japanese) which purports to render Li Po's great poems into English. It's about as Chinese as a tearoom in Las Vegas but that's allright.
This man does NOT know anything about China or Confucious. You cannot just wing it when you translate an ancient text. Even if you're blindly convinced that the text is a transcendent work of genius which would cure all the evils of the world, which is more or less the tenor of Pound's dementia when he ground out this screed.
Use Arthur Waley's readable translation with its excellent introduction, or, for that matter, just about anything else. You'll reach a better conclusion about Confucious. Was he the sanest and most humane of all the philosophical system builders, or was he just a sententious reactionary, a lunatic to rank with all the others who thought they knew how society should be governed?