Cathay

In 1915, a poet who could not read Chinese published a book of translations that would reshape English-language poetry forever. Ezra Pound worked from the fragmented notes of the deceased scholar Ernest Fenollosa, reconstructing classical Chinese poems attributed primarily to the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (Rihaku). The result is neither faithful translation nor outright invention, but something stranger and more vital: fifteen poems that pulse with Pound's modernist urgency while preserving the haunted elegance of the original imagistic tradition. Cathay includes the famous 'The River Song' and 'The City of Choan,' works that move from quiet devastations ('The buds of spring/What do they mean?') to the great exiles' laments. Pound's method was heretical, his Chinese was nonexistent, and yet these versions possess an authority that strict scholars have never quite managed to replicate. The book launched imagism, influenced generations of poets, and remains a demonstration that poetry lives in the spaces between languages as much as within them.