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Rating: 
Summary: Not for the novice
Review: If you have never read the Analects in a more contemporary translation, then stay away from the Ezra Pound version, because you will most likely not understand the text (for example, compare verse 2.4 versus any other translation out there). The Pound version is much more interesting after you have read the Analects at least once and have a view of what the verses mean.
Rating: 
Summary: more griping, I'm afraid, but this is rubbish
Review: Let's put things in perspective:
you wouldn't ask a fellow how to explain Saint Thomas Aquinas, if he:
a)knew no Latin,
b)wasn't a Catholic,
c)knew no Catholics, and
d)had a long history of spouting rubbish about languages, belief systems, and peoples he knew nothing about.
Now, if getting the right dope on Aquinas might be a bit difficult under these circumstances, how much more difficult would it be to get the truth on a far more foreign culture speaking a far more foreign language from a lot longer ago?
If you've read Ezra Pound's silly and ill-tempered diatribes on literary matters (e.g. ABC of Reading, or the Guide to Kulchur) you'll recognize the rhetorical style.
If you like Pound's literary style, fine, then read his own discombobulated verse or perhaps his "Cathay", which is a purely imaginative work derived from Earnest Fenellosa's notes (who didn't know Chinese either, by the way, just Japanese) which purports to render Li Po's great poems into English. It's about as Chinese as a tearoom in Las Vegas but that's allright.
This man does NOT know anything about China or Confucious. You cannot just wing it when you translate an ancient text. Even if you're blindly convinced that the text is a transcendent work of genius which would cure all the evils of the world, which is more or less the tenor of Pound's dementia when he ground out this screed.
Use Arthur Waley's readable translation with its excellent introduction, or, for that matter, just about anything else. You'll reach a better conclusion about Confucious. Was he the sanest and most humane of all the philosophical system builders, or was he just a sententious reactionary, a lunatic to rank with all the others who thought they knew how society should be governed?
Rating: 
Summary: Those who know aren't up to those who love...
Review: One of the worst problems in our world is that it is infested with 'experts,' 'experts' of every variety from the diploma-wavers through to the self-appointed. The main aim of these 'experts' seems to have been to convince the world that only 'experts' have a right to say anything about anything. In this they have been extremely successful, and the mature, intelligent, and well-informed adult who may have a lot to contribute, but who is not an 'expert,' has been pretty well reduced to silence. His mouth has been shut. He has been convinced that his own God-given brain is worthless. Even if there's something he'd like to say, he or she is afraid of being shouted down by the 'experts' and their groupies. A reading of the great Chinese thinkers would soon convince anyone of how dangerous and damaging to society 'experts' can be, but most of us don't read the Chinese. We have been conditioned to think of them as alien and to forget that they were human like us. Ezra Pound may have been a bit crazy in some ways (who isn't?), and his Chinese readings have come in for a lot of flak, but anyone who, like Pound, loved Asian thought and set out to bring it to a West that is desperately in need of it, certainly deserves our gratitude whether they be 'expert' or non-expert. Nobody knows how much Chinese Pound knew anyway. He certainly knew some. And anyone who knows anything at all about the complexities of Classical Chinese realizes that all readings or translations from that language, whether by professional linguists or enthusiasts such as Pound, must always be personal. There are just too many ways of validly interpreting a given line. And as Burton Watson, who is one of the USA's foremost scholars of Ancient Chinese has pointed out in his 'Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,' since there can be no definitive interpretation neither can there be any such thing as a definitive translation. Watson, incidentally, was perfectly happy to approve Thomas Merton's readings of another great Chinese thinker, Chuang Tzu, even though Merton knew no Chinese at all. He feels that the more translations, whether expert or non- expert (when done with sincerity and love), the better. But experts such as Burton Watson, sadly, are rare, perhaps because they are the only true experts. My own copy of Pound's 'Confucius' was purchased many years ago. It's very well-thumbed and heavily annotated, and I often return to it. I've also studied Arthur Waley's more exact translation carefully, and a few others. But the Confucian lines that stick in my mind always seem to be those of Pound, lines such as: "If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed" (page 33). The "root" today is certainly "in confusion." And those who dismiss Pound on the basis of a few howlers are simply adding to the confusion. To let you in on a secret, there are many howlers - up to and including the omission of whole lines - in the translations of even reputable and well-known scholars of Chinese (though I've never found any in Burton Watson). My advice would be to ignore the gripers, most of whom don't have direct access to the Chinese text anyway, and to read Pound's version of Confucius. He was a literary genius and got it right most of the time, and you'd learn a great deal from it. Pound's 'Confucius' has always found and will continue to find readers. I think it's because, as Confucius says: "Those who know aren't up to those who love..." (page 216).
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