Prismatic Foreignness: Engaging with Herbert Giles’ Translations of Chinese Poetry

This article examines one phase of the historical reception of the sinologist Herbert Giles’ translations of classical Chinese poetry, focusing on a group of early twentieth-century writers and poets who, without sufficient knowledge of Chinese, read Chinese poetry indirectly through Giles’ mediation. Contrary to modern-day criticisms that Giles’ translations are misleadingly ‘domesticating’ and obscure the foreignness of Chinese poetry, this group of readers, the best known being Ezra Pound, derived from them an appealing experience of aesthetic difference. They engaged with them as writers and translators too; some wrote reviews, some composed adaptations and imitations, and some retranslated Giles’ works. This article unpacks how Giles’ texts act as generative nexuses and how various prisms of interpretation and intertexts of transcultural representation are brought into play in these engagements, which pluralize the meaning of Chinese poetry and enable multiple cultural work.