BK. Ezra Pound

153. Johnson, Scott. ‘The Fenollosa-Hirata Manuscripts on Noh and How Ezra Pound  Edited Them’. Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan 23 (1978): 49-59.

Useful for presenting argumentation and information that had appeared earlier only in Japanese. Following Furukawa (see BL109 and D10d), Johnson argues that the draft translations of the Noh plays that ‘fired the enthusiasm’ of Pound and led to the writing of Yeats’s Four Plays for Dancers (BL17) were ‘fundamentally the work of Hirata Kiichi [Ap] and not Ernest Fenollosa’; the work goes on to suggest that Pound’s ‘finished’ versions of the plays ‘suffer’ from an ‘unresolved conflict’ between ‘his desire to be faithful to the manuscripts before him and his urge to shape them into moving, durable poetry’. Reproduces portions of Yano Hôjin’s translation of a 1938 essay by Hirata about Fenollosa and his study of the nô, and, from Furukawa, one of Fenollosa’s letters to Hirata.