Finalist, Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism Ezra Pound's Cathay
(1915) is a masterpiece both of modernism and of world literature.
The muscular precision of images that mark Pound's translations
helped establish a modern style for American literature, at the
same time creating a thirst for classical Chinese poetry in
English. Pound's dynamic free-verse translations in a modern idiom
formed the basis for T.S. Eliot's famous claim that Pound was the
"inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Yet Pound achieved this
feat without knowing any Chinese, relying instead on word-for-word
"cribs" left by the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, whose notebooks
reveal a remarkable story of sustained cultural exchange. This
fully annotated critical edition focuses on Pound's astonishing
translations without forgetting that the original Chinese poems are
masterpieces in their own right. On the one hand, the presentation
of all that went into the final Cathay makes it possible for the
first time to appreciate the magnitude and the nuances of Pound's
poetic art. At the same time, by bringing the final text together
with the Chinese and Old English poems it claims to translate, as
well as the manuscript traces of Pound's Japanese and American
interlocutors, the volume also recovers practices of poetic
circulation, resituating a Modernist classic as a work of world
literature. The Pound text and its intertexts are presented with
care, clarity, and visual elegance. By providing the first accurate
and unabridged transcriptions of Fenollosa's notebooks, along with
carefully edited Chinese texts, the volume makes it possible to
trace the movements of poetic ideas and poetic expression as they
veer toward and away from Pound's creations. In supplying the full
Fenollosa texts, the volume overturns decades of scholarship that
has mystified Pound's translation process as a kind of
"clairvoyance," displaying instead the impressive amount of
sinological learning preserved in Fenollosa's hard-to-read
notebooks and by detailing every deviation from the probable sense
of the originals. The edition also supplies exhaustive historical,
critical, and textual notes, clarifying points that have sometimes
lent obscurity to Pound's poems and making the process of
translation visible even for readers with no knowledge of Chinese.
Cathay: A Critical Edition includes the original fourteen Chinese
translations as well as Pound's unique version of "The Seafarer,"
which is fully annotated alongside its Anglo-Saxon source. Also
included are Pound's fifteen additional Chinese translations from
Lustra and other contemporary publications, his essay "Chinese
Poetry" (1919), a substantial textual Introduction, and original
essays by Christopher Bush and Haun Saussy on international
modernism, the mediation of Japan, and translation. The meticulous
treatment and analysis of the texts for this landmark edition will
forever change how readers view Pound's "Chinese" poems. In
addition to discoveries that permanently alter the scholarly record
and force us to revise a number of critical commonplaces, the
critical apparatus allows readers to make fresh discoveries by
making available the specific networks through which poetic
expression moved among hands, languages, and media. Ultimately,
this edition not only enables us more fully to appreciate a
canonical work of Modernism but also resituates the art of Pound's
translations by recovering the historical circulations that went
into the making of a multiply authored and intrinsically hybrid
masterpiece.
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