If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific
Contents
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Modernism’s Abstraction: Equivalence as Capital Modernism’s Abstraction: Equivalence as Capital
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The Ideograph and the Ideologue The Ideograph and the Ideologue
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“Can you ideograph it” “Can you ideograph it”
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The Exceptions of “Poeticempiricism” in Hu’s “Dream and Poetry” The Exceptions of “Poeticempiricism” in Hu’s “Dream and Poetry”
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Fenollosa’s Nature and the Exceptionalism of Metaphor Fenollosa’s Nature and the Exceptionalism of Metaphor
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The Unity of Speech with Writing in Hu’s “Modest Proposals” The Unity of Speech with Writing in Hu’s “Modest Proposals”
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Like Forms in Fenollosa’s “Exceptionally Easy” Translations Like Forms in Fenollosa’s “Exceptionally Easy” Translations
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Translating Hu’s “Hope” Translating Hu’s “Hope”
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The Future of Reading The Future of Reading
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Cite
Abstract
The chapter assembles a comparative archive for the book’s framing account of abstraction: a theory and technology of translation at the turn of the century exemplified by two writers who aligned Chinese writing with modernist poetics. Their work formalized the means by which the abstractions of literary equivalence acquired the semblance of cultural capital. The first is Ernest Fenollosa, an American art historian, ambassador, and sinologist who authored The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1906), an important influence for Ezra Pound. The chapter’s second subject is Hu Shi, a reformist advocate of the Chinese baihua vernacular movement in the May Fourth movement—and one of few Chinese thinkers directly interested in the reformatory possibilities represented by the free verse of Anglo-American modernist poetry, recorded in his US diaries as a student in the 1910s. In close readings comparing their theories of linguistic and cultural confrontation, the chapter argues that their translations mediate speech with writing, and sound with image, to authorize the ideological formations shaping a Sino-US transpacific politics of translation. Other texts considered include Hu’s “Dream and Poetry,” “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature,” and a translated poem “Hope.”
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