Pound, E. (2019). <i>Cathay. A critical edition</i>. Ed. by T. Billings. New York: Fordham U. P.

Abstract

The new edition of E. Pound's poetic collection Cathay, first published in 1915, shows the idea of world literature to be as real as it is problematic. Thanks to T. Billings, the editor behind the publication, the book offers the most exhaustive description of the process whereby the translations were created: it involved not only Pound and Fenollosa, but also K. Mori and N. Ariga, who represent the Japanese tradition of reading classical Chinese poetry. The volume contains almost all of Pound's Chinese translations produced in the 1910s, his essay ‘Chinese Poetry,' as well as an impressive scholarly corpus: articles on the significance of these translations in the era of close relations between China and the West, extracts from Fenollosa's notebooks deciphered by Billings, and the original Chinese poems, each supplied with comments. The reconstruction of the process by which word-for-word translations were created puts Pound's translation effort into a new perspective.