Pound and Western Civ, was Re: Orientalism Revis...

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Mon Jan 24 14:43:06 PST 2000



>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 01/24/00 12:57PM >>>

The beautiful lines Yoshie quotes from the *Cantos* may help us here. Those come from a Chinese history of China (from a Confucian standpoint) translated into French in the 18th century by a French Jesuit. In other words, a certain "China" was part of the definition of "Western Culture" from the period in which "Western Culture" was invented. They are written in a metric which Pound invented first for a translation of another piece of pre-western civilization incorporated into that civilization in the 19th century, the Anglo Saxon poem The Sea Farer, and then combined with a Latin metric (that of Ovid and Propertius) in his first major attempt at a definition of "Western Civilization": Homage to Sextus Propertius.

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CB: Well, what's the objective correlative ?

CB



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