Confucius: The Great Digest, the Unwobbling Pivot, and the Analects

Ezra Pound

New Directions Publishing, 1969 - Philosophy - 288 pages

The study of Chinese culture was a dominant concern in Ezra Pound's life and work. His great Canto XIII is about Kung (Confucius), Cantos LII-LXI deal with Chinese history, and in the later Cantos key motifs are often given in Chinese quotations with the characters set into the English text. His introduction to Oriental literature was chiefly through Ernest Fenollosa whose translations and notes were given him by the scholars widow in London about 1913. From these notebooks came, in time, the superb poems entitled Cathay and Pound's edition of Fenollosa's Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. But it was Confucius' ethical and political teachings--that most influenced Pound. And now, for the first time, his versions, with commentary, of three basic texts that he translated have been assembled in one volume: The Great Digest (Ta Hsio), first published in 1928; The Unwobbling Pivot (Chung Yung), 1947; and The Analects (Lun-yü), 1950. For the first two, the Chinese characters from the ancient "Stone Classics" are printed en face in our edition, with a note by Achilles Fang. Pound never wanted to be a literal translator. What he could do, as no other could, is to identify the essence, pick out "what matters now," and phrase it so pungently, so beautifully, that it will stick in the head and start new thinking.

Contents

• Tsze Szes First Thesis: 99
• TszeLus Question: 111
• Tsze Szes Second Thesis: 115
• Duke Ngais Question: 147
• Tsze Szes First Thesis: 171
• Translators Note: 188
• Translators Note: 191
• Note to This New Version: 194
• Text: 195

About the author

New Directions has been the primary publisher ofEzra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal.... But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful."

Bibliographic information

• Title: Confucius: The Great Digest, the Unwobbling Pivot, and the Analects; Volume 285 of New Directions book; New Directions book, NDP 285
• Editor: Ezra Pound
• Translated by: Ezra Pound
• Compiled by: Ezra Pound
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing, 1969
• ISBN: 0811201546, 9780811201544
• Length: 288 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / Eastern; Philosophy / General; Religion / Confucianism; Science / General