Cathay

In 1915, as Europe tore itself apart in the First World War, Ezra Pound published a small book of Chinese poetry that would reshape English-language verse forever. Working from fragmentary notes left by the scholar Ernest Fenollosa and his own luminous intuition, Pound rendered the Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu into English with an immediacy that felt less like translation than resurrection. The poems here are ancient, but Pound's rendering makes them startlingly new: a river merchant's wife waits by the falling flowers for a husband who may never return; a frontier guard sings of the vast loneliness of the northern wastes; lovers part at dawn with the moon still bright above them. These are poems of profound stillness in the midst of impermanence, of beauty acknowledged precisely because it cannot last. Pound stripped away the fuss of Victorian poetry to find something spare and devastating. This is the book that taught modern poetry that less could be infinitely more, and that Chinese poets had been writing with that wisdom for a thousand years.