CB. Archives

1. †Ernest Fenollosa Papers.

a. Houghton Library, Harvard. Most of Fenollosa’s manuscripts archived here, including voluminous material about Japanese art, religion, philosophy, and literature, have been edited by Akiko Murakata and published in The Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, The Houghton Library, Harvard University /Harvard daigaku Houghton Library, Ernest Fenollosa shiryô, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Museum, 1984, 1987), which include as well Murakata’s introductions and notes to the material, mainly in Japanese, translation of much of the material into Japanese, and, in volume 3, ‘Ernest F. Fenollosa’s “Notes for a History of the Influence of China upon the Western World”: A Link Between the Houghton and Beinecke Library Manuscripts’, reprinted from Review of English Literature 47 (1982), which examines the relation between the two largest collections of Fenollosa materials.

b. Beinecke Library, Yale. Many of the Fenollosa papers from which Pound worked (see especially BK15, 24, and 32) are held in the Pound archive here (see BK90). A ‘Tentative Catalogue’ of the Fenollosa materials appears as an appendix to Murakata’s Ernest F. Fenollosa Papers, vol. 3 (see a); of Fenollosa’s papers relating to the nô, most of those from which Pound worked are transcribed and copiously noted in Miyake, Kodama, and Teele’s A Guide to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (BK201). These papers were not available to scholars until after 1975, and so before that year critical treatments of the ways Pound edited and adapted the material are either guesswork or, in the case of studies and transcriptions by Taylor (BK132 and 144), based on Dorothy Pound’s transcriptions of several of the nô translations (see c). Japanese scholarship, particularly that of Furukawa and Yamaguchi (see BL109 and D10d), has shown that the translations of the nô in these manuscripts are in fact more the work of Hirata Kiichi (Ap) than of Fenollosa himself.

c. Albemarle Library, University of Virginia. Holdings include Dorothy Pound’s transcriptions of manuscripts of the Fenollosa/Hirata nô translations that are now at Yale (see b). Until sometime after 1975 the Yale manuscripts were not available for consultation, and so these transcriptions were the only source for scholars wishing to describe and evaluate the ways Pound handled the material. Johnson (BK153) suggests that the originals of ‘a few’ of the manuscripts in this collection are not held at Yale, and indeed if Murakata’s ‘Tentative Catalogue’ of Fenollosa papers in the Pound Archive at the Beinecke Library is correct, the original from which Dorothy Pound transcribed the version of YÔRÔ in this archive is not among the papers at Yale.

See also BK90b.