Cathay By Unknown

The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pounds English translations/ interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly created a new and somewhat complex style of translation, as he had done with words from several other languages. The Cathay poems are primarily written by the Chinese poet Li Po, refered to throughout these translations as Rihaku, the Japanese form of his name. These poems came to have a profound influence on 20th Century poetry, spawning, among other things, the Imagist movement, and helped in the generation of widespread interest in Asian literature and thought. Also included in this collection are two poems from Pounds 1912 collection Ripostes. The Seafarer is another of Pounds experiments in translation, this one from the Anglo-Saxon.