Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot / The Great Digest / The Analects by Confucius

Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot / The Great Digest / The Analects Reviews

• 
  Saettare

  The great misunderstood modernist poet leads us through the Stone Classics (The Great Digest, The Analects, The Unwobbling Pivot). He beautifully breaks down some of the key ideograms in the manner of an imagist poet. Though I suspect that Pound's presence can be felt – as is the case with everything this mad genius passed through his often less than diaphanous filter. It is, nevertheless, social and civic thought that meets the familial and spiritual. Many words of wisdom to contemplate, to live a life by both privately and in the public eye.
  
  "Virtue, i.e., this self-knowledge [looking straight into the heart and acting thence] is the root; wealth is the byproduct."
  
  "The man in whom speaks the voice of his forebears cuts no log that he does not make fit to be roof-tree [does nothing that he does not bring to a maximum, that he does not carry through to a finish]."
  
  "The man of real breeding who carries the cultural and moral heritage must look the heart in the eye when alone."
  
  "You improve the old homestead by material riches and irrigation; you enrich and irrigate the character by the process of looking straight into the heart and then acting on the results. Thus the mind becomes your palace and the body can be at ease; it is for this reason that the great gentleman must find the precise verbal expression [the sun's lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally] for inarticulate thoughts [tones given off by the heart]."
  
  "Know the point of rest and then have an orderly mode of procedure; having this orderly mode of procedure one can 'grasp the azure,' that is, take hold of a clear concept; holding a clear concept one can be at peace [internally], being thus calm one can keep one's head in moments of danger; he who can keep his head in the presence of a tiger is qualified to come to his deed in due hour."
  
  "If a man does not discipline himself he cannot bring order into the home."
  
  "What is meant by saying, 'To govern a state one must first bring order into one's family,' is this: the man who, being incapable of educating his own family, is able to educate other men doesn't exist. On which account, the real man perfects the nation's culture without leaving his fireside."
  
  "Put order in the home in order to govern the country."
  
  
• 
  Steve

  I have many translations. Pound is idiosyncratic, for sure, but he's the one I keep coming back to. I trust his ear.
• 
  Eric

  湯之盤銘曰：「茍日新，日日新，又日新。」《康誥》曰：「作新民。」《詩》曰：「周雖舊邦，其命惟新。」是故君子無所不用其極。
  
  Every process of adaptation has two stages. At the start, an inflamed consciousness processes sense-experience from first principles; action is slow and halting; energy is expended and effort applied in great quantity. As experience accumulates, however, the unconscious marshals sense-experience into pattern, first principle passes the baton to habit and heuristic, and the organism learns to expend its energy sparingly and efficiently to attain the same goal. New becomes old.
  
  Reading these translations is like being thrown backwards from the second stage into the first. Pound, having only fragmentary access to scholarship on Chinese philology, engaged with the Confucian classics with unmatched earnestness. Where a Chinese scholar-bureaucrat or even the great Legge might have seen a venerable philosophical classic, one can only imagine Pound experiencing the wild and delirious confusion of a toddler or a lobotomized patient as he gazes over a semantically fractalized wall of vortical ideograms (not yet “characters”).
  
  Pound’s beginner’s-mind reaches even to the task of dissecting the characters themselves, hallucinating etymologies unheard of in the Shuowen Jiezi. The result is at times laughable and embarrassingly hormonal, but also perhaps the most energetic, affirmative, alive translation of these texts ever to be produced.
  
  For contemporary readers more familiar with the philosophy of the Eastern Zhou, these translations are an invitation to engage in a sort of meta-orientalism — to examine the transformative idea of the modern as such, and to consider what it really means to “make it new.”
• 
  Jacob Hurley

  These seem more like a passion project on Pound's part, a sort of game of interpreting the ideograms and comparing them to pre-existing translations; as is, especially for his (often grammatically nonsensical) version of the Analects, basically just a moderate renovation of the existing translations of his time - though it appears his predecessors here were primarily in French, so I suppose he's done English readers something of a service. The inclusion of the two lesser known of the Four Classics (The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, as they're traditionally called) help greatly, especially since they seem to-this-day mostly neglected by English readers ...
  
  I think his translations are generally adequate compared to other translations although they would appear (to my otherwise totally ignorant eye) to manipulate the text in slightly exaggerated ways to hammer onto favorite motifs Pound felt he saw in them, such as a lot of the aphorisms entailing "definitions of words, not generic quips" or Confucius' maxims representing a purely common-sense humanism. I do think this may be a decent primer for Confucianism in general, since the three works each appear to distinct aspects which, read in isolation, each one might not fully illuminate; eg as The Doctrine of the Mean hints at a Plato-like metaphyics not evident from the Great Learning's political theory or the Analects' sumatory wisdom.
  
  Still, I would have to think that more informed editions of more recent years would be better, whereas this volume will (despite its author's hopes) represent solely a bastion for interpreting the pseudo-Confucian themes in Pound's Cantos. Interesting also to note that while the other two were comfortably composed during his government-bankrolled 15 year tenure at a mental hospital, Pound inexplicably managed to smuggle in a chinese dictionary and The Great Learning into his arrest at the end of WW2 and translated it onto toilet paper while imprisoned in that same cage where he wrote The Pisan Cantos. When he managed to get a notebook after a while there, he wrote the Pisan poems starting from the first page, the Chinese translations starting from the back page
• 
  Alec Sieber

  Probably only really valuable for people who are really into Pound. If you want to actually read Confucius, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of these translations (especially the sketchy, unfinished translation of the Analects).
• 
  Jordan

  The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot are excellent, Pound’s masterful touch makes much of the source material. The Analects feels either incomplete or simply more inaccesible, perhaps both.
  
  Confucius lives up to his reputation.
• 
  Alison Rice-Murphy

  Definitely gets carried away in the second (the unwobbling pivot) which is claimed to be a metaphysics of Confucius - much extrapolation. As in, lines and lines from a few characters. The analects were a great translation though (I think). I enjoyed these
• 
  Harry

  Still studying... Confucius told me to not stop reading it even after I'm finished.
• 
  Mikael

  any pound is great but i think confucius was the hitler to taos gandhi. this cd be what pushed him over to il duce love. i alternately have digestive problem or feel a bit wobbly after reading this one.
• 
  Al Maki

  When I first read it I thought it was a profound into Chinese thought but since then I have learned that Pound's interpretation of Confucius contains a great deal more of Pound than it does of Confucius. I think it's probably best to regard this in the same light as Robert Lowell's imitations.
• 
  Eric

  Laconic Pound--cachectic wisdom. Better this than the "China cantos." Though this makes of those a richer experience!
  
  [Pound is fair here--making sure to note at the foot of certain of the more bonepickish characters the interpretations alternately of Legge and Pauthier, sometimes both.]
• 
  Mitch

  Slow going. Important, though, if you're reading thru the Cantos
• 
  Sam

  Indeed.
• 
  Kevin

  2.5 repetitive... strange translations at times. but interesting! mostly...