에즈라 파운드의 『중국』에 나타난 번역의 시학

Poetics of Translation in Ezra Pound’s Cathay

This essay argues that Pound’s poetics of translation is an attempt to foreground the otherness of the original text yet to further the potential of English poetry through the appropriation of such otherness. Focusing on the pictorial aspect of poetry (phanopoeia), this study first examines the way that Pound the translator underscores the foreignness of Chinese poetry. He invents English idioms and violates English syntax, both of which provide him with linguistic devices to suggest the equilibrium between nature and human beings, one of the most prevalent imagery in Chinese poetry. Then, the next chapter analyzes how the otherness is, in turn, channelled into Pound’s own creative work when he incorporates some of the characteristics of the original text in order to invigorate his own poetry and poetics. Pound the poet maximizes the Imagist principle by amplifying Chinese syntax and juxtapositions so as to create a new English stranger than the original Chinese. His translated language never gets domesticated conventionally. Rather, it must be identified as somewhere between the source language and the target language. As such, Cathay provides a major stimulus to the Chinese translation, as well as a new model of Anglo-American high modernist poetry.