China and the West

Pound, Ezra. Selected poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. with an introd. by T.S. Eliot. [ID D29133].
Introduction.
"As for Cathay, it must be pointed out that Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. I suspect that every age has had, and will have, the same illusion concerning translation, an illusion which is not altogether an illusion either. When a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been 'translated' ; we believe that through this translation we really at last get the original… His [Pound's] translations seem to be – and that is the text of excellence – translucencies ; we think we are closer to the Chinese than when we read, for instance. Legge. I doubt this : I predict that in three hundred years Pound's Cathay will be a 'Windsor Translation', as Chapman and North are now 'Tudor translations' : it will be called (and justly) a 'magnificent specimen of XXth Century poetry' rather than 'a translation'. Each generation must translate for itself. This is as much to say that Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound. It is not to say that there is a Chinese poetry-in-itslef, waiting for some ideal translator who shall be only translator…"