BL. W. B. Yeats

116. Hubbell, Lindley Williams. ‘Yeats, Pound, and nô Drama’. East-West Review 1 (1964): 70-78.

A lively discussion by a poet who himself spent many years in Japan. Notes that the resemblance between Yeats’s plays for dancers and the nô is ‘superficial’, but nonetheless traces sympathetically Yeats’s interest in the form to a long-held ‘dream’ of a ‘theatre for the cultivated few’. The discussion of Pound focuses largely on the poetics derived from Fenollosa’s ‘Chinese Written Character’ (BK32), but in discussing his ‘translations’ from the nô finds that even if they are ‘fragmentary’ they are nonetheless of a ‘literary distinction which has never been equalled’ in nô translation in English, ‘not even by Waley . . . himself a literary artist of a high order’. Finds finally that the influence of Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character ‘was as important in the development of Pound as a poet as the Fenollosa translations of nô . . . were in the development of Yeats as a playwright’. In both cases the influence ‘was decisive and permanent’. Reprinted in Hubbell’s Miscellany (Tokyo: Nan’undo, 1972).