Cathay

Widely recognized as a masterpiece of modernism and world literature, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) had a substantial influence on the evolution of American poetics and created 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.” And yet Pound achieved this feat without knowing any Chinese, by relying on the word-for-word “cribs” in the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa.

This fully annotated critical edition makes it possible for the first time to appreciate the magnitude and the nuances of Pound’s poetic art by providing the first accurate and unabridged transcriptions of Fenollosa’s notebooks together with Pound’s translations, along with carefully edited Chinese texts in a format designed for ease of comparison, all accompanied by exhaustive critical notes for the use of readers with no knowledge of Chinese. It focuses on Pound without forgetting that the original Chinese poems are masterpieces of world literature in their own right.

Fordham’s 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 the Anglo-Saxon text for comparison. Also included are thirteen more Chinese translations from the same period printed in Lustra (1916) and The Little Review (1918), as well as Pound’s essay on “Chinese Poetry” (1919), 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 by Timothy Billings will forever change how readers view Pound’s “Chinese” poems. In addition to the discoveries that permanently alter the scholarly record, his critical apparatus lays open the field for readers to make many more discoveries of their own.