An Ecocritical Study Of Kenneth Rexroth S Translation Of Classical Chinese Poems

The book is a close reading of English translations of over 400 classical Chinese poems by Kenneth Rexroth, an American eco-poet, translator, sinologist, and environmentalist. This study finds that the ecological dimension can provide a new description and explanation for Rexroth’s text selection, translation strategies, and translation character, giving a “green” interpretation of his translations. Due to various sources of Rexroth’s ecological worldview from East and West, Rexroth’s translation presents an ecological character, and the result of his interpretation is more of a cross-cultural ecopoetic rewriting and construction. This is related to several of his ideas: “ecopoetics of selfless imagism”, “aesthetics of relinquishment”, wilderness experience, “sense of place”, material eco-views, ideas of ecological utopia “the community of love” and others. It is also influenced by the historical context, cultural trends, and social reality: the eco-crisis and the rise of ecological movements at that time. Ecocriticism, an analysis approach which focuses on the human-nature relationship embodied in literary texts or other texts and cultural products, helps to delve into the ecopoetic dimension of Rexroth’s translation of classical Chinese poems, to explore his thoughts on the human-nature relationship represented and embodied in translation, to reread his translations from a “green” perspective, and to reveal the eco-value of his translations in contemporary times.

The lyrical world of Chinese poetry in faithful translations by Kenneth Rexroth. The lyric poetry of Tu Fu ranks with the greatest in all world literature. Across the centuries—Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty (731-770)—his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful. Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume. The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en, Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction, biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry.

Provides translations of more than two hundred-fifty poems by over forty poets, from early anonymous poetry through the T'ang and Sung dynasties.

This book focuses on the relations between the translation and appropriation of classical Chinese poetry by Ezra Pound and some of his contemporaries and the development of Anglo-American Imagist poetry and poetics. It is concerned as much with critical aspects of this correlative relationship as with the question of historical influence and ascription. The author places the early work of Ezra Pound in the context of works of Chinese translation by other contemporary poet-translators such as Arthur Waley and Amy Lowell, and examines the whole notion of an ideogrammic poetry as advocated by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound against an appropriately reconstructed historical and critical context of poetic theory and practice. Closely linked to this is a discussion of Pound's use of personae and modulation of the elegiac in relation to the immediately preceding context of late Victorian elegiac lyricism and Brownigesque dramatic monologue. Through a series of close readings of translations from the Chinese, especially those by Pound, the author shows how the critical problem of what is involved in translating a Chinese poem into a new English poem is closely linked to the particulars of early Modernist literary history. In particular, through tracing the trajectory of a number of central issues and notions, such as absolute, free-floating, metaphor, metaphor as epiphanic image and its relation to syntax, metaphor and parallelism, experiments with rhythm and cadence, the book explores some of the reasons for Fenollosa's and Pound's emphasis on the visual image, the notion of phanopoeia and ideogrammic verbal action as the active perceiving of relations, and closely examines the genesis and significance of Pound's ideogrammic method, as well as the question of cultural misreading and vicarious envisagement, and provides a critical overview of Pound's general engagement with translation.

Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.