BE. Witter Bynner

5. ‘On Translating Chinese Poetry’. Asia 21 (December 1921): 993-97.

		Reprinted in The Selected Witter Bynner.

In part a discussion of Lowell and Ayscough’s Fir-Flower Tablets (BI10), though in his dismissal of the translation of component parts of the Sino-Japanese characters Bynner surely would have had in mind as well the Pound/Fenollosa conception of the ideogram (see especially BK32). To ‘drag out from an ideograph its radical metaphor lands you in a limbo-language’. Bynner also objects to ‘contemporary writers’ who ‘inflate’ translations of East Asian verse ‘with too much pomp and color’, and mentions Mathers (D25) specifically in this regard. See also 13; reprinted in 21.