The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter -- Ezra Pound

In conformance with my own literary tastes, this poem is decidedly
romantic, but not, please note, Romantic...

(Poem #70) The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the lookout? At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fo-Sa. -- Ezra Pound

[Biography]

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Variant Name(s): Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (full name); William Atheling
(pseudonym); The Poet of Titchfield Street (pseudonym); Alfred Venison
(pseudonym)

Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, and raised in Philadelphia,
the son of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston Pound. He made his first
visits to Europe with his family in 1898 and 1902. He attended the
Cheltenham Military Academy when he was twelve and soon after attended
the Cheltenham Township High School. Just before his sixteenth birthday
Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1903 he transferred
to Hamilton College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1905. He taught
Romance languages at Wabash College in Indiana for a short time in 1907,
but was dismissed after a scandal involving a stranded actress that he
allowed to stay overnight with him in his room. After this and a failed
courtship with Mary S. Moore, Pound decided to leave for Europe, where
he privately published his first volume of poetry, 'A lume spento', in
Venice in 1908. He then moved to London and by 1911 was immersed in the
literary and intellectual milieu and was a respected critic and poet.
Around this time Pound founded a poetic movement called Imagism, which
linked techniques derived from the Symbolist movement and Oriental
poetry, such as haiku.

Pound spent much of his time concerned with promoting the careers of
many of the great writers of the time and was a key figure in the
publication of many influential works, including Ernest Hemingway's 'In
Our Time', and T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. In 1921 Pound moved to
Paris and from there to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. In Italy Pound endorsed
the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini and declared his political
and anti-semitic beliefs in a series of radio broadcasts during World
War II. After the war Pound was arrested by American allies and charged
with treason. He was found mentally incapable to stand trial and was
committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. in 1946. Upon
his release in 1958 he returned to Italy. He died in Venice in 1972 and
is buried in San Michele Cemetery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

[Overview of the poem]

'The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter' was published in 1915 in Ezra
Pound's third collection of poetry, Cathay: Translations, which contains
versions of Chinese poems composed from the sixteen notebooks of Ernest
Fenollosa, a scholar of Chinese literature. Pound called the poems in
English which resulted from the Fenollosa manuscripts "translations,"
but as such they are held in contempt by most scholars of Chinese
language and literature. However, they have been acclaimed as "poetry"
for their clarity and elegance. They are variously referred to as
"translations," "interpretations," "paraphrases," and "adaptations."
Pound's study of the Fenollosa manuscripts led to his preoccupation with
the Chinese ideogram (a written symbol for an idea or object) as a
medium for poetry. In fact, he realized that Chinese poets had long been
aware of the image as the fundamental principle for poetic composition
that he himself was beginning to formulate. Pound further maintained
that the poetic image did not lose anything in translation between
languages nor was it bound by time, but effectively communicated through
time and across cultures, accruing meaning in the process. 'The
River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter', for example, communicates with depth
and poignance the human experience of sorrow at separation, the human
experience of love. Working with the literary traditions of other
cultures was typical not only of Pound, but of most of his
contemporaries, who were not convinced that the only culture of value
was European. However, Pound's work has significance not only for its
cross- cultural innovations, but for the "cross-chronological"
breakthrough notion that the human response to the world links us all,
so that an American in the twentieth century can share and learn from
the human experience of an eighth century Chinese river-merchant's wife.

[Construction]

This translation, 'The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter', is structured
into 5 stanzas: the first of 6 lines, and the second, third, and fourth
of 4 lines each. Each of the first four stanzas is image-centered,
focusing an emotional point in the history of the relationship between
the river-merchant's wife and her husband. The final stanza of 10 lines
and a dropped half-line begins with the presentation of a similar
central image that collects an enhancing detail in each line until line
25 shifts into direct emotional statement. The last four lines mix this
direct letter-writing style with the final image closing the physical
and emotional distance between the river-merchant and his wife.It was
Pound's belief that the pictorial quality of the Chinese ideogram, in
its "closeness to the thing itself," had the capacity for raising the
mundane to the poetic. Likewise, Pound's ear for the music of
conversational speech raised natural speech rhythms to the level of
poetry. In this poem he expertly combines these to create a sense of the
conversational naturalness of letter-writing with the focused, direct,
and simple presentation of image inspired by the Chinese ideograms in
which the poem was originally written. Pound's insistence on the
centrality of image to poetry is in great part responsible for the
varied line lengths of this poem written in unrhymed free verse. While
each of the first four stanzas concentrates on one image, the individual
lines themselves are as long as Pound needs them to be to focus each
component of the central image of the stanza in the mind of the reader.
This technique is termed end-stopped lines, meaning that a complete idea
is expressed in a line, with no spillover into the next line. However,
the use of capital letters at the beginnings of each line is a signal
that it is the lines of poetry , rather than the sentence constructions,
that are the basic units of meaning.The poet employs direct address
throughout the poem, taking on the persona of the wife as the "I" who is
writing the letter and thus entering her experience. This use of the
first-person "I" also makes it possible for the reader of the poem to
enter her experience. In addition, the direct address to the
second-person "you" allows the poem also to be experienced as if it is a
letter to the reader.

[Criticism]

American critic and poet T. S. Eliot has called Pound "the inventor of
Chinese poetry" for the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he sees Cathay:
Translations, containing the much anthologized poem 'The
River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter', as more than intelligent literary
archaeology of poems from eighth century China. It establishes Pound's
particular literary genius "for expressing himself through historical
masks" that would become the hallmark of his later major work, the
Cantos. It is Eliot's critical assessment, furthermore, that the value
of Pound's work in this collection is the clarity with which he presents
his perception that "the present is no more than the present
significance of the past." In fact, Eliot maintains that Pound's
translations of ancient Chinese poetry are decidedly Modernist because
they affirm the universality of human experience through time and across
cultures.Eliot grants that while Pound's style in these translations
might not reflect that of the Chinese originals, his poetic concern for
image provides an effective means for "transporting the content" of the
original picture-making Chinese ideograms. Thus the value of these poems
is not as Chinese translations, but as a stage in the development of
Pound's poetic concerns from his original concepts of "luminous detail"
and "Imagism," through "vortex" and "haiku" and "metaphor," and
ultimately to the "ideogrammatic composition" of his Cantos. Pound is
not generally viewed as especially gifted in composing his own original
poems, but the accusation of Chinese language scholars that he
mistranslates the poems of this volume is brushed aside by such critics
of poetry as Hugh Kenner, who is perfectly willing to read them as
"Pound's interpretative paraphrases that are informed by his own
concerns and background." It is Michael Alexander's estimation that
these poems have been "underrated" as mere translations, rather than
appreciated for their highly disciplined free verse. Indeed, as William
Pratt has noted, "the relatively pure images of Cathay ... seem less and
less like translations and more and more like original poems." William
Van O'Connor suggests that Pound's "translations" have a song-like
quality, which he notes especially in 'The River-Merchant's Wife: A
Letter'. In this poem Pound's belief that poetry always had and always
should reflect the conversational speech of its day combines with his
intensive study of musical forms to achieve the composition of lyrical
natural lines toward the development of the convincing voice of the
poem's persona. M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall acknowledge the
"rhythmic successes" of such poems as 'The River-Merchant's Wife: A
Letter' as responsible for a move away from dramatic presentation of
character and monologue toward "what the poem before us is creating." It
is their contention that these poems go beyond "Imagism" and
"phanopoeia" ("the casting of images upon the visual imagination"),
engendering a progression of centered images in a sequence, or pattern,
of human thought and emotion.Accordingly, David E. Ward postulates that
the guiding principle of Pound's theory is a belief in a shared poetic
tradition that allows full expression of the emotional patterns of human
experience and response. 'The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter' is an
eloquent manifestation of this principle.

My own two bits? Heartbreakingly beautiful and poignant; there's nothing
more I can say.

thomas.