{"id":484,"date":"2016-02-03T17:57:06","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T22:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/?page_id=484"},"modified":"2016-02-11T13:47:52","modified_gmt":"2016-02-11T18:47:52","slug":"a-class-on-ezra-pound-as-noh-student","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/activities\/a-class-on-ezra-pound-as-noh-student\/","title":{"rendered":"A class on Ezra Pound as noh student"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following texts can be integrated into a seminar on Ezra Pound or a course on transnational modernism:<\/p>\n

I. Pound\u2019s translation of Hagoromo<\/em> based on a draft by Ernest Fenollosa published in the influential Certain Noble Plays of Japan<\/em> (1916) with an introduction by W. B. Yeats (I include this introduction in a syllabus for graduate seminars). The text is more accessible in the expanded volume The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan<\/em> of Japan, with Yeats\u2019s essay as an epilogue (1959).
\nII. Royall Tyler\u2019s more authoritative translation if Hagoromo<\/em>, by an unknown playwright, in Japanese N\u014d Dramas<\/em> (1992). They Pound\/Fenollosa and Tyler translations are both available online<\/a>, along with another version of Hagoromo<\/em> published by Arthur Waley.
\nIII. Pound\u2019s The Pisan Cantos<\/em> (1948).
\n
\nI. Pound\u2019s Hagoromo<\/em> as a Lesson on Imagism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hagoromo<\/em> is perhaps the most famous play in the repertory of the noh theater and a favorite of Pound and Yeats. Reading the play helps students understand how Pound used it to teach ideas about Imagism, particularly his developing notion of a long Imagist poem. Scholars of modernism have often been embarrassed by the errors in Pound\u2019s noh translations and considered them examples of modernist orientalism and cultural appropriation or else categorized them as creative contributions to English literature but not translations. I ask students to hold off on such judgments until we have a chance to produce together a close reading of Hagoromo<\/em> and consider Pound\u2019s pedagogical desires for the play, as well as the lessons it offers on cultural exchange.
\n\tA close reading of Hagoromo<\/em> might proceed along these lines: The play introduces a fisherman named Hakury\u014d who discovers the feathered mantle of a Tennin, a celestial moon maiden, hanging on a pine bough. Hakury\u014d and his companion Fisherman enter the stage singing of the beauties of spring, frequently expressed through typically modernist synesthesia or sensory mixing and linkage: \u201cthe breath-color of spring\u201d and \u201cIts colour-smell is mysterious\u201d (Pound, Noh 98, 99). The Fisherman claims of the well-ordered layers of waves, mist, and a moon \u201cdelaying above,\u201d \u201cHere is beauty to set the mind above itself\u201d (98). He appears to be correct that \u201cwe\u2019ve no skill to grasp it,\u201d for rather than \u201cbeauty,\u201d Hakury\u014d takes the feathered mantle of the Tennin, whose presence in the lower world is a manifestation of the \u201cdelaying\u201d moon (98). Hakury\u014d initially claims that he takes the mantle to his house to comfort \u201cthe aged,\u201d using modernist synesthesia again to describe its \u201ccolour-smell\u201d as \u201cmysterious\u201d (99). When he learns the true nature of the robe from the Tennin, he develops nationalist motivations to make it \u201ca treasure in the country\u201d (100). He relents after seeing her \u201csorrow\u201d and watching her begin to die the death of a celestial being but says he will only return the garment if she will perform \u201cthe dance of the Tennin\u201d (101). She will \u201cgladly\u201d help him \u201clearn\u201d the \u201cdance that can turn the palace of the moon,\u201d but she needs her mantle to perform (101). He refuses to return it, fearing that she might fly off before dancing, but she shames him, \u201cDoubt is of mortals; with us there is no deceit\u201d (102). <\/p>\n

Pound\u2019s Tennin teaches sympathy, trust, and a dance, but also Imagist aesthetics. Pound offered noh as the answer to a question he had been asked, \u201cCould one do a long Imagiste poem, or even a long poem in vers libre?\u201d (27). Yes, if the long poem adheres to noh\u2019s \u201cUnity of Image\u201d; \u201cthe better plays are all built into the intensification of a single Image: \u2026 the mantle of feathers in the play of that name, Hagoromo<\/em>\u201d (27). Pound never directly stated how this \u201cUnity\u201d was to be achieved, but his translation of Hagoromo<\/em> used the feathered mantle throughout his version of the play to establish related clusters of images. Pound\u2019s Tennin appears as a vernal spirit whose flowers begin \u201cdrooping and fading\u201d after Hakury\u014d steals her mantle (100). Images of her celebratory dance unite her flowing robe with the season\u2019s blossoms and storms: \u201cThe sleeves of flowers are being wet with the rain\u201d (102). \u201cThe rustling of the flowers, the putting on of the feathery sleeve; they bend in the air with the dancing\u201d (104). The chorus sings of the \u201cplumage of heaven,\u201d \u201cfeathery skirt of the stars,\u201d and \u201crobe of mist\u201d (103-104). As these related images create a structural unity for the play, Hakury\u014d realizes that nature, humanity, and the spirit world \u201care doing one step,\u201d and he learns to dance in \u201cunity\u201d as well (102). <\/p>\n

The \u201cUnity of Image\u201d Pound celebrated in noh matches Hagoromo<\/em>\u2019s theme of connecting heaven and earth or the divine being and the fisherman. Hakury\u014d learns to be in \u201cstep\u201d with the ephemeral spirit of nature without the desire to possess her or take her magical garment for his country. Pound learned how to organize an Imagist long poem or play by related images or trope.
\n
\nII. Tyler\u2019s Hagoromo<\/em>: Reconsidering Translation and Cultural Exchange<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hakury\u014d\u2019s theft of the feathered robe as a treasure for his nation mirrors one of the major complaints launched against both Pound and Yeats for their work on noh, they were engaged in cultural theft and orientalist mystification. This is a complaint my students readily embrace, particularly those attuned to the values of cultural difference and political correctness. I ask students to read Royall Tyler\u2019s celebrated translation of Hagoromo<\/em> alongside Pound\u2019s version, and they enthusiastically pick out discrepancies in the translations, noticing, for example, that Pound excised most of the references to Buddhism, the philosophical center of noh. Comparing translations also helps them see how Pound\u2019s desires to make the play into a lesson on Imagism encouraged him to mistranslate or creatively translate passages into examples of his \u201cUnity of Image\u201d and thereby turn Hagoromo<\/em> into a template for a long Imagist poem or play. For a graduate seminar including translation theory, Pound\u2019s Hagoromo<\/em> provides a useful example of what Lawrence Venuti described as a \u201cforeignizing\u201d rather than \u201cdomesticating\u201d translation (17). Pound made the English sound more foreign with unusual syntax, unfamiliar names, and stereotypical images of Japan: \u201cWindy road of the waves by Miwo, \/ Swift with ships, loud over steersmen\u2019s voices. \/ Hakury\u014d taker of fish, head of his house, dwells upon the barren pine-waste of Miwo\u201d (Noh 98). The relation between subjects and adjectives is ambiguous: Is the road \u201cwindy,\u201d or are the waves following a metaphorical \u201cwindy road\u201d? Are the ships \u201cswift,\u201d or do the waves or road seem swift because of the ships sailing there? Hakury\u014d seems more foreign when described as a \u201ctaker of fish\u201d rather than a fisherman. <\/p>\n

My students tend to like comparing translations and discovering that Pound took strategic liberties with the source text, but I find it important to disrupt their pieties and complicate some of their more ready-made assumptions about cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. Hagoromo<\/em> itself prompts one possible approach as the play turns the theft of a beautiful thing into a dance lesson that shares an art form with future generations. We can hardly imagine that the fisherman Hakury\u014d will learn to perform \u201cthe dance of the rainbow-feathered garment\u201d with as much grace as the Tennin. But, given the origin myths the play invokes about noh\u2019s roots in a divine dance lesson, Hakury\u014d was able to learn and pass on the Tennin\u2019s dance to future noh performers. <\/p>\n

Opening with a theft and misunderstanding and ending in a dance lesson, Hagoromo<\/em> inspires a shift in focus from cultural appropriation to collaborative pedagogical transmission. In fact, Pound\u2019s Hagoromo<\/em> and other noh translations were the product of a series of transnational lessons and partnerships. I am actually imprecise to reference \u201cPound\u2019s Hagoromo<\/em>\u201d given the complicated textual transmission of the manuscripts. Pound received Ernest Fenollosa\u2019s draft translation of noh plays, along with some classical Chinese poetry and an unpublished essay \u201cThe Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry\u201d from Fenollosa\u2019s widow, Mary, in 1913. These drafts were the result of a pedagogical scenario and international collaboration. Hirata Kiichi (1873-1943), Fenollosa\u2019s colleague, accompanied Fenollosa to lessons and produced literal translations before they attended, for example, the production of Hagoromo on 15 January 1899. Hirata is mentioned twice without explanation in the publication of what should be called the Fenollosa-Hirata-Pound translations (Pound, Noh 27, 115). <\/p>\n

III. The Pisan Hagoromo<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hagoromo makes a dramatic reappearance in The Cantos<\/em>, and I use the play help students find a foothold in the infamously difficult, allusive, and transnational work. A fisherman associated with Hagoromo<\/em> is the first poetic persona in Pound\u2019s initial drafts of The Cantos<\/em> published in Poetry<\/em> in 1917, just after his most intense work on noh: \u201cSay that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery \/ As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?\u201d (\u201cThree Cantos\u201d 113). This Hakury\u014d has stolen and donned the mantle of artistic inspiration, but doesn\u2019t know what to do with it: \u201cWhom shall I hang my shimmering garment on; \/ Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo; \/ Whom set to dazzle the serious future ages?\u201d (117). Pound was searching for a new form and speaker for the massive poem he would write for the rest of his life, and he turned to the \u201cUnity\u201d he discovered and invented in noh. <\/p>\n

Pound composed The Pisan Cantos<\/em> (1948) in 1945 after being imprisoned by the U.S. military for treason near Pisa. There, in a six-by-six-foot open cage visited by the angel of Hagoromo<\/em> and other noh characters, Pound wrote a book that was controversially awarded the Bollingen Prize. The Pisan Cantos<\/em> presents anti-Semitic and pro-fascist ideas along with allusions to Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Roman literature. The poem is both difficult and disturbing to students, and I help them see that they can follow a strand to analyze some elements of the text while reserving others for another reading. Tracking noh and Hagoromo<\/em> through The Pisan Cantos<\/em> reveals the \u201cunity\u201d of the repeated moon images as an organizing poetic trope. In the first explicit reference to noh in the initial poem of The Pisan Cantos<\/em>; the speaker is visited by the \u201cnymph of Hagoromo\u2026 as a corona of angels\u201d (74.180). Pound echoes the question he posed in 1917 just as he was beginning his cantos: \u201cWhom shall I hang my shimmering garment on; \/ Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo.\u201d If that earlier Hakury\u014d was searching for a new poetic form, this fisherman has lost the magic robe of inspiration and needs the moon maiden\u2019s return along with a coterie of angels including Artemus\/Diana, the Greek and Roman moon-goddesses (74.226), the Sino-Japanese spirit of mercy, Kuannon (74.131), and the love goddesses, Aphrodite\/Venus\/\u201cCythera, in the moon\u2019s barge\u201d (74.190, 80.596). Pound links the Hakury\u014d of The Pisan Cantos<\/em> to Odysseus, renders the greek hero\u2019s Cyclops-evading name as \u201cO\u00dd \u03a4\u0399\u03a3\u201d or \u201cnoman,\u201d and lists it as the caption for the Chinese character mo \u83ab (no or not) in the Hagoromo<\/em> allusion. Pound\u2019s ideogrammic reading of mo \u83abfound the character for person \u4eba (see the two \u201clegs\u201d of the character) below the radical for sun\u65e5, and read the character as \u201ca man on whom the sun has gone down\u201d (74.178). Moon images unify the speaking subject as Pound-Hakury\u014d-Odysseus-O\u00dd \u03a4\u0399\u03a3- \u83ab and illuminate his dream of redemptive goddesses. If the sun has gone down on him, this composite, even ideogrammic, speaker looks to the moon.<\/p>\n

Students are more likely to appreciate the Chinese characters in The Pisan Cantos<\/em> once I suggest that they can enjoy the same associative reading pleasures Pound created. The Pound-Hakury\u014d-Odysseus-O\u00dd \u03a4\u0399\u03a3-\u83abspeaker takes on a material, visual presence in the text and can quickly add another facet or persona to the list. The speaker becomes the soldier and art patron Sigismundo Malatesta (1417-68) in a moonlit visionary encounter. While standing at a crossing of three paths or triedro, Sigismundo sees the ghosts of three women, including the compassionate lover of troubadour Sordello, Cunizza da Romano (1198-1270) and \u201cla scalza,\u201d a barefoot country woman fleeing the war\u2019s bombs. The latter is linked to Hagoromo\u2019s moon nymph as she speaks one of The Pisan Cantos<\/em>\u2019s prominent lyrical refrains: \u201cIo la luna\u201d (I am the moon). Just as the Hakury\u014d-speaker claims, \u201cthe nymph of Hagoromo came to me,\u201d the Sigismundo-speaker insists, \u201cthey suddenly stand in my room here\u201d (74.180, 76.11). \u201cLa scalza\u201d and \u201cthe corona of angels\u201d return with each repetition of the phrase, \u201cIo la luna.\u201d Such refrains take on the quality of a choral song, and Pound\u2019s Hakury\u014d-Odysseus-O\u00dd \u03a4\u0399\u03a3-\u83ab-speaker wears many masks.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s second reference to Hagoromo<\/em> contrasts Pound\u2019s Japanese and Greek literary sources, distinguishing Hakury\u014d\u2019s return of the feathered mantle from the \u201cGreek rascality\u201d of Odysseus\u2019s opportunistic attack on Ismarus as he was leaving Troy. This didactic stance persists in his third reference to the moon maiden of Hagoromo<\/em>. Her return is prompted by the darkest of the lunar references, when the barefoot woman, la scalza, recounts an image left out of the previous visions: Her dead son nailed to the ground with arms stretched in the shape of a cross. \u201cIo son\u2019 la luna\u201d (80.247-50). This leads to a parody of pretty, romantic moon imagery in an overblown personification: \u201cthe moon\u2019s arse been chewed off by this time\u201d (80.258). Hagoromo<\/em> returns with the line that shamed Hakury\u014d: \u201cWith us there is no deceit\u201d \/ said the moon nymph immacolata \/ Give back my cloak, hagoromo\u201d (80.258-62).<\/p>\n

Did Pound learn Hakury\u014d\u2019s lesson? Did he echo the response, \u201cI am ashamed. I give you your mantle\u201d? The question over whether or not Pound felt shame and apologized for his pro-fascist propaganda have been put to The Pisan Cantos<\/em> since the book\u2019s early readers argued whether or not the controversial author, having been determined mentally unfit for trial and imprisoned in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane, should have received the Bollingen Prize. Much of the debate about the sequence hinges on whether or not Pound is the speaker of the famous \u201cPull down thy vanity\u201d chant (81.521-522). Pound\u2019s \u201cideogrammic\u201d Noman subjectivity renders this question one of the least answerable of the many invoked by The Pisan Cantos<\/em>. The speaker of the poem is the humbled Hakury\u014d who has stolen the magical mantle and must return it, and Odysseus who will attack yet another village on his way home from Troy, and the one on whom the sun has gone down, and Pound himself, turning his incarceration into a gripping story.<\/p>\n

***
\nIn spite of Pound\u2019s own bleak position on education (\u201cTeach? at Harvard? \/ Teach? It cannot be done\u201d (74.302-3)), I find that teaching Pound\u2019s noh translations with The Pisan Cantos<\/em> provides a challenging and rewarding lesson. Hagoromo<\/em> creates one track through Pound\u2019s collage of Chinese characters, literary allusions, and personal anecdotes while helping students confront one of the most difficult and important lessons of the twentieth-century, the atrocities produced by fascist political movements and militarization in Europe and Asia. As for the common complaint that Pound is guilty of orientalism and misrepresentation of cultures, I agree. But I believe that is all the more reason to study his work. To discard it for its inaccuracy is to imagine that accurate cultural transmission is possible and to vainly presume we might accomplish it in our teaching. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following texts can be integrated into a seminar on Ezra Pound or a course on transnational modernism: I. Pound\u2019s translation of Hagoromo based on a draft by Ernest Fenollosa published in the influential Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) with an introduction by W. B. Yeats (I include this introduction in a syllabus for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4338,"featured_media":0,"parent":176,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4338"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484\/revisions\/517"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/learningtokneel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}