China and the West

Anne-Marie Grand : Victor Segalen confiera à Paul Claudel, qu'il sait 'toujours gré' au bouddhisme de lui avoir méthodiquement formulé ce qu'il avait confusément et timidement senti, le grand illusionnisme du monde, la prestidigitation des apparences sur lesquelles on souffle et qui s'en vont. Mais comme le bouddhisme était grevé de son mépris du monde, le taoïsme l'est aussi des conséquences qu'il impose. Le sage taoïste tend à son absorption dans le Grand Tout (le Dao), Segalen en refuse le principe, peut-être même le ressent-il comme une menace. En vérité, il élude les explications. A Claudel, il se contente de dire : "Quant au taoïsme, j'ai de grands scrupules à en parler, car les textes valables en sont à peine traduits, les autres galvaudés, - et ceci n'est pas affaire de texte et j'en néglige d’ailleurs la valeur pratique." Segalen s'intéressait aux théories scientifiques de la matière, et il n'est pas impossible de lire les taoïstes sous cet angle. On ne s'étonnera guère que Segalen, aux multiples acitivités ne souscrive pas à une philosophie du non-agir. D'un autre côté, le taoïsme offrait une vision du monde fondée sur l'illusoire comme le bouddhisme tout en insistant, contrairement à celui-ci, sur le bonheur, qui avait de quoi séduire. Avec le taoïsme, il trouve une autre formule, qu'il traduit par 'vision ivre', systématisant un comportement identique. Ou plus exactement pour le sage (comme pour l'artiste) qui la pratique, il s'agit d'une vision naïve, première, tout entière concentrée sur le spectacle et dont l'objectif est une identification. Si Segalen conserve le principe, il est loin d'en accepter les conséquences et d'abolir les distances entre sujet et objet. Pour lui, la 'vision ivre' ne va pas sans rappeler l'opium, permettant "d'une part, la pénétration à travers les choses lourdes, et la faculté d’en voir l'avers et le revers ; d'autre part, la dégustation ineffable de la beauté dans ces apparences fuyantes". Segalen a trouvé la formule d'une esthétique qui était sienne dès Tahiti, mais à laquelle le taoïsme prête l'élégance du dire et les supports d’une théorie. D'autant plus, sans doute, que cette philosophie a fortement imprégné la création des périodes chinoises les plus florissantes en matière artistique, celles des Tang ou des Song.

Brief von Victor Segalen an Andrée O'Neill.
Er schreibt : "La Chine, pour moi, est close, sucée. De plus en plus, en étreignant jalousement mon butin (qui n'est pas fait de porcelaines et de laques, seulement), je m'en sépare, je m'en retire, je m'en vais. Il y a d'autres rares pays du monde. Il y a surtout d'autres mondes."

Brief von Victor Segalen an Paul Claudel.
Er schreibt : "J'espère seulement ne pas mourir à tout sans avoir dit aux autres comment je concevais ce monde, illusoire et beau : - et ceci me ramène à cette vision taoïste, à cette vision 'ivre' de l'univers ; d'une part la pénétration à travers les choses lourdes, et la faculté d'en voir à la fois l'avers et le revers ; d'autre part la dégustation ineffable de la beauté dans les apparences fuyantes."

Segalen, Victor. Equipée [ID D9512].
Segalen schreibt : "J'ai toujours tenu pour suspects ou illusoires des récits de ce genre : récits d'aventures, feuilles de route, racontars – joufflus de mots sincères – d'actes qu'on affirmait avoir commis dans des lieux bien précisés, au long de jours catalogués... Ce livre ne veut donc être ni le poème d'un voyage, ni le journal de route d'un rêve vagabond."

In Chengdu schreibt er : "Imaginer, sur la foi des textes, que l'on va, dans ce lieu précis, découvrir une belle et archaïque statue de pierre de cette époque puissante et humaine des Han... et se trouver nez à nez avec un moignon informe de grès, est encore une déconvenue. Celle-ci, irrémédiable. Aucun espoir de découvrir un peu plus loin la statue qu'on ne trouve pas... Elle n'est pas perdue ; elle n'est pas égarée. Elle est là."

Er schreibt : "C'est donc à travers la Chine, grosse impératrice de l'Asie, pays du réel réalisée depuis quatre mille ans, que ce voyage se fera. Mais n'être dupe ni du voyage, ni du pays, ni du quotidien pittoresque, ni de soi! La mise en route et les gestes et les cris au départ, et l'avancée, les porteurs, les chevaux, les mules et les chars, les jonques pansues sur les fleuves, toute la sequelle déployée, auront moins pour but de me porter vers le but que de faire incessament éclater ce débat, doute fervent et pénétrant qui, pour la seconde fois, se propose: l'Imaginaire déchoit-il ou se renforce quand on le confronte au Réel ?"

"The entwined reciprocity of the two 'commas' forming the Tao, on white, the other black, equal, symmetrical neither ever victorious over the other. The symbol is a well-worn one. Its common translation is Yin and Yang, female and male ; this opposition and penetration which according to the classics of the tenth century, begat the world, are also capable of containing everything in the world we can image. My journey and the purpose of my journey are easily enclosed and uplifted in this symbol." [Französisches Original nicht gefunden].

Sekundärliteratur
1988 / 1996
Yvonne Y. Hsieh : Equipée narrate a sequence of episodes or describe in detail the characteristics of the various regions visited. It does not aim at being precise and informative. Instead, it explores the constant 'duel' between the real and the imaginary in different situations encountered during Segalen's second long journey across China, between what the traveler expects in his imagination and what he actually faces along the way. Equipée merely uses the travel experience as a catalyst for generating reflections on all sorts of subjects, from the usefulness of sandals and staff to the role of the imagination in restoring a badly eroded archaeological find to its original form ; from the mediocrity of catholic missionaries in China and the failure of their proselytizing efforts, to the mystery of lifesaving human instinct, 'supple as the caressing water, sensible as a peasant, sly as a cat coming out of some cellar or underground hide out'. Segalen often does not bother to tell us when or where certain events recounted in the text occurred, as this is not important for his purposes. Neither does he vouch for the authenticity of his accounts ; in fact, he deliberately chooses to give his readers the impression that he was traveling alone, except for the muleteers in his hire.
Segalen tries to invent another new genre with Equipée. For Segalen, China was 'le pays du réel', Tibet 'le pays de l’imaginaire'.
A few interesting observations may be made regarding Segalen’s modernization of T'ao Yüan-ming's story 'The Peach blossom source'. In the original version, the villagers had entered their secluded abode during the last days of the Ch'in dynasty, and the fisherman encountered them during the T'ai-yüan reign of the Chin emperor Hsiao-wu. In Equipée, the ancient villagers had taken refuge during the last days of the Ming dynasty and the traveler's accidental discovery of the community occurred almost three hundred years later, towards the end of the Ch'ing.

1996
Andreas Michel : Equipée represents an exploration of the clash of the two fundamental tendencies in which aisthesis has been thought in the West: as sensory encounter with the physical world, ('experience'), on the one hand, and as imaginative, poetic construction of the world ('imagination') on the other. In Equipée, Segalen, the poet, undertakes a journey into the land of the real ('un voyage au pays du réel') in order to find out if the power of the imagination can hold its own when confronted with brute reality or if, on the contrary, the knowledge furnished by the imagination has to be discarded.
Segalen is well aware of the name for his attraction to faraway lands-exoticism-as well as the negative connotations that this term holds. For apart from its geographical and cultural application, the idea of distance, in which he sees the essence of exoticism, also expresses the philosophical relation between subject and object. And it is at this point that his exoticism takes on theoretical dimensions.
This dimension of exoticism, then, is directly linked to an always renewed experience of difference and alterity. In his encounters with different cultures, Segalen is intent on reviving the level of aesthetic experience that had been devalued in aestheticism: direct sensory experience through physical contact. In this perspective, Segalen's own contribution to intellectual history comes into view: it consists in his desire to reintegrate sensory experience into his poetic writings. While Segalen the aestheticist believes in the evocative power of the imagination, Segalen the traveler explores the sensible nature of experience. Equipée, this trip in the land of the real, stages the debate between these two versions of aesthetic experience. During the expedition, Segalen opposes the imaginative practice of the poet and his tools, words, to the physical experience of the traveler.
Equipée is structured in such a way that the reader witnesses the imaginative anticipation (l'imaginaire) of an experience followed by a narrative of its actual occurrence (le réel). More often than not, the imaginative projection is proven to have been false, the actual experience taking place in a manner quite different from what the narrator had expected. The different chapters thus show the traveler being shaken to and from between the « two worlds » of imagination and reality.

1993
Qin Haiying : La confrontation textuelle de la Source aux fleurs de pêcher de Tao Yuanming et Equipée permet de voir que les deux récits sont construits selon un même schéma structurel. Mais on ne tarde pas à remarquer que, sur fond de cette structure profonde commune, le texte de Segalen présente bien des éléments visiblement différents. On peut dire que le texte de Segalen respecta la syntaxe du récit de Tao Yuanming en y permutant de nouveaux syntagmes et en la prenant souvent à contre-pied.
Pour tirer toutes les conséquences de la récriture du mythe chinois par Segalen, il faut encore tenir compte du fait que l'épisode n'est pas un récit indépendant comme le texte de Tao Yuanming, mais fait partie d'un journal de route à caractère autobiographique. Par les transformations de divers ordres, Segalen donne du mythe de la Source aux fleurs de pèchers une version originale et moderne, celle d'un poète occidental du XXe siècle qui se préoccupe avant tout du problème esthétique et philosophique de la Différence, du conflit et de l'alternance entre le même et l'autre.
Segalen a-t-il lu Tao Yuanming ? Si l'hypothèse de l'emprunt peut être prouvée biographiquement, notre étude sera non seulement justifiée par le rapport intertextuel, mais aussi légitimée par le rapport de fait. Aucune note manuscrite d'Equipée n'a mentionné cet emprunt et Segalen n’a nulle part parlé de Tao Yuanming. En consultant à la Bibliothèque nationale les manuscrits de Segalen, nous avons découvert une page manuscrite de Peintures au verso de laquelle Segalen avait copié au crayon et en caractères chinois de petits fragments du Récit de la source aux fleurs de pècher. C'est une preuve, que Segalen avait réellement connu dans le texte original le récit et que le rapprochement entre les deux textes est positivement fondé.

Chen, Duxiu. Xian dai Ouzhou wen yi shi tan [ID D22973].
Er schreibt : "Le naturalisme fit-il réellement faillite ? S'il ne laissait rien de durable, encore aurait-il bien mérité de la littérature en la ramenant à l'observation, à l'étude sincère de la réalité ? Mais pour ne parler ici que du roman, nous lui devons Gustave Flaubert, Jules et Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ferdinand Fabre ; et peut-être aucune autre époque de notre histoire littéraire ne fournirait dans un seul genre, plus de noms justement illustrés".
Chen Duxiu erwähnt zum ersten Mal in China Gustave Flaubert : geboren in Rouen 1821, gest. 1880.

Li Jieren ist Reporter, Herausgeber und Direktor der Zeitung Si chuan qun bao und der Chuan bao.

Chen, Duxiu. Xian dai Ouzhou wen yi shi tan [ID D23499].
Zhou Xiaoshan : Emile Zola est considéré par les Chinois comme le représentant de l'école naturaliste. Chen Duxiu exprime son admiration pour Zola. Er schreibt : « Il consacre toute sa vie à la littérature, se battant contre le romantisme. Il est le Napoléon du naturalisme ».

Eintrag von "Shakespeare" in einer chinesischen Enzyklopädie.
Es steht : "English playwright, world's greatest literary figure ; born in Stratford on Avon. Son of a wool merchant, he had not received a good education. In 1586 he went to London and there he served as an actor and worked hard writing his plays with number 35 in all, and all of these plays are treasures in world literature."

Aufführung von Chun meng = Othello von William Shakespeare durch die Chun liu she (Spring Willow Society) im Spring Willow Theatre in der Adaptation von Lu Jingruo nach Kawakami Otojirô in Shanghai.

Gu, Hongming. The spirit of the Chinese people [ID D10756].
Gu schreibt : "In fact this 'gentleness' of the real Chinaman, in the Chinese woman, becomes sweet 'meekness'. The meekness, the submissiveness of the woman in China is like that of Milton's in the Paradise lost, who says to her husband : 'God is thy law, thou, mine ; to know no more. Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise'.

Conrad, Joseph. Victory [ID D27532].
Pt. 1, chap. 4
His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and wizened—which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows in prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature. To serve a Chinese firm is not so bad. Once they become convinced you deal straight by them, their confidence becomes unlimited.
Pt. 3, chap. 1
It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own side.
Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get materials for making a high and very close fence round his patch, as if the growing of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his race.
Chap. 11
It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman has run off with your money. A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil himself—"

Heliéna M. Krenn : The narrator speaks of a 'wonderful intuition' with which the Chinese are gifted. Frequently their detachment affects Westerner as being an expression of sadness and consequently 'sad-eyed' is an often-used modifier.
Wang proves his share in the qualities of detachment and ghostlikeness by his ability to 'vanish' and 'materialize' and by his withdrawal into safety when elements enter the scene that present a challenge to action.
The positive presentation of despotism is obvious. Its splendor asserts itself in the 'unlimited confidence' that superiors in Chinese firms demonstrate toward subordinates from the West once they have become convinced of the latter's trustworthiness.

Chen, Duxiu. Xian dai Ouzhou wen yi shi tan [ID D27627].
Zhou Xiaoyi : Chen says that Wilde was one of the 'four greatest modern writers' in European literature. The others are Ibsen, Turgenev, and Maeterlinck. Chen's praise is an example of the prevalent perception among Chinese writers of Wilde as a leading artist in world literature. Wilde's aesthetic practice – his way of dressing and other non-conformist behavior – further reinforces this image of Wilde as a unique artist. He was seen as the representative aesthete in England, whose reputation and achievements in art and aesthetic theory surpassed even Walter Pater and other aesthetes, although translations of Pater's works were also available in China at that time.

[Wilde, Oscar]. Li xiang zhang fu [ID D27628].
Hu Shi criticized the Chinese translation of An ideal husband by Oscar Wilde for its lack of artistry and its irrelevance to the Chinese situation.

Gründung des American Returned Students' Club in Nanjing und der American Returned Students' Association of East China in Shanghai.

International Education Conference in Panama.
Cai Yuanpei submitted a report and he recommended John Dewey and his educational philosophy.

Irving Babbitt acquired a dedicated disciple, Mei Guangdi at Harvard University. In addition to teaching Chinese at Harvard, Mei returned to China to lead a Chinese crusade based on Babbitt's concept of humanism, a movement closely linked with the attempt of the Chinese people to work out a political future during the transition from monarchy to democracy.
Mei Guangdi : "[Babbitt] regularly stayed away from the commencement exercises at the University, and when his duty as a father required his presence at his son's graduation, he laughingly announced: 'This is the first commencement I have attended in many years.' Babbitt was a solitary figure in a crowded metropolis of learning."
"Confucius was perhaps the teacher with whom Babbitt had the closest temperamental kinship."
Ong Chang Woei : Mei Guangdi, besides praising Babbitt as a 'teacher of men' following the Chinese tradition, claimed that if Babbitt had been born in China not later than the seventeenth century, he would merit the extraordinary honor of being elevated to membership in the most exclusive of Chinese national institutions, the Temple of Confucius : an honor conferred on only a limited number of great men throughout Chinese history who were believed to have truly transmitted the Confucian way.

Mercier, J.A. Mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Unis.
Mercier indicated that Babbitt was steeped in Buddhism, but practiced Confucianism, that his work was known in China, that he had many Orientals among his students, and that he was one of the race of Occidental critics, if not the only one, equipped to compare Europe and America with the Orient.

Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (1)
Rihaku flourished in the eight century of our era. The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer is of about this period. The other poems from the Chinese are earlier.
Song of the Bowmen of Shu
By Bunno (um 1000 B.C.)
Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots
And saying : When shall we get back to our country ?
Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen,
We have no comfort because of these Mongols.
We grub the soft fern-shoots,
When anyone says "Return", the others are full of sorrow.
Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.
Our defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return.
We grub the old fern-stalks.
We say : Will we be let to go back in October ?
There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.
Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.
What flower has come into blossom ?
Whose chariot ? The General's.
Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.
We have no rest, three battles a month.
By heaven, his horses are tired.
The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.
The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fish-skin.
The enemy is swift, we must be careful.
When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring.
We come back in the snow,
We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,
Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief ?

The beautiful Toilet
By Mei Sheng, 140 B.C.
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand,
And she was a courtesan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who know goes drunkenly out
And leaves her to much alone.

The River Song
By Rihaku, 8th century A.D. [Li Bo]
The boat is of shato-wood, and its gunwales are cut magnolia,
Musicians with jeweled flutes and with pipes of gold
Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine
Is rich for a thousand cups.
We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water,
Yet Sennin needs
A yellow stork for a charger, and all our seamen
Would follow the white gulls or ride them.
Kutsu's prose song
Hangs with the sun and moon.
King So's terraced palace is now but barren hill,
But I draw pen on this barge
Causing the five peaks to tremble,
And I have joy in these words like the joy of blue islands.
(If glory could last for ever
Then the waters of Han would flow northward).
And I have moped in the Emperor's garden,
Awaiting an order-to-write !
I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water
Just reflecting the sky's tinge,
And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing.
The eastern wind brings the green colour into the island grasses at Yei-shu,
The purple house and the crimson are full of spring softness.
South of the pond the willow-tips are half-blue and bluer,
Their cords tangle in mist, against the brocade-like palace.
Vine-strings a hundred feet long hang down from carved railings,
And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other, and listen,
Crying - "Kwan, Kuan", for the early wind, and the feel of it.
The wind bundles itself into a bluish cloud and wanders off.
Over a thousand gates, over a thousand doors are the sounds of spring singing.
And the Emperor is at Ko.
Five clouds hang aloft, bright on the purple sky,
The imperial guards come forth from the golden house with their armour a-gleaming.
The Emperor in his jeweled car goes out to inspect his flowers,
He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks,
He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales,
For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales,
Their sound is mixed in this flute,
Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.

The River-Merchant's Wife : a letter
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan :
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out ?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

The Jewel Stairs' Grievance
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
Note :
Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, there-fore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poems is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
March has come to the bridge-head,
Peach boughs and apricot boughs hang over a thousand gates,
At morning there are flowers to cut the heart,
And evening drives them on the eastward-flowing waters.
Petals are on the gone waters and on the going.
And on the back-swirling eddies,
But to-day's men are not the men of the old days,
Though they hang in the same way over the bridge-rail.
The sea's colour moves at the dawn
And the princes still stand in rows, about the throne,
And the moon falls over the portals of Sei-go-yo,
And clings to the walls and the gate-top.
With head gear glittering against the cloud and sun,
The lords go forth from the court, and into far borders.
They ride upon dragon-like horses,
Upon horses with head-trappings of yellow metal,
And the streets make way for their passage.
Haughty their passing,
Haughty their steps as they go in to great banquets,
To high halls and curious food,
To the perfumed air and girls dancing,
To clear flutes and clear singing ;
To the dance of the seventy couples ;
To the mad chase through the gardens.
Night and day are given over to pleasure
And they think it will last a thousand autumns,
Unwearying autumns.
For them the yellow dogs howl portents in vain,
And what are they compared to the lady Riokushu,
That was cause of hate !
Who among them is a man like Han-rei
Who departed alone with his mistress,
With her hair unbound, and he his own skiffsman !

Lament of the Frontier Guard
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now !
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land :
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass ;
Who brought this to pass ?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger ?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums ?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

Exile's letter
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
To So-Kin of Rakuyo, ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen.
Now I remember that you built me a special tavern
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels, we paid for songs and laughter
And we were drunk for month on month, forgetting the kings and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially,
There was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship,
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei, smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
Till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common.
And then, when separation had come to its worst,
We met, and travelled into Sen-jo,
Through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters,
Into a valley of the thousand bright flowers,
That was the first valley ;
And into ten thousand valleys full of voices and pine-winds.
And with silver harness and reins of gold,
Out came the East of Kan foreman and his company.
And there came also the "True man" of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-ko they gave us more Sennin music,
Many instruments, like the sound of young phoenix broods.
The foreman of Kan-chu, drunk, danced because his long sleeves wouldn't keep still
With that music playing
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens,
And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or rain.
I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,
You back to your river-bridge.
And your father, who was brave as a leopard,
Was governor in Hei Shu, and put down the barbarian rabble,
And one May he had you send for me, despite the long distance.
And what with broken wheels and so on, I won't say it wasn't hard going.
Over roads twisted like sheep's guts.
And I was still going, late in the year, in the cutting wind from the North,
And thinking how little you cared for the cost, and you caring enough to pay it.
And what a reception :
Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jewelled table,
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning.
And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,
To the dynastic temple, with water about it clear as blue jade,
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,
With ripples like dragon-scales, going grass-green on the water,
Pleasure lasting, with courtesans, going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow flakes falling like snow,
And the vermillioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
And the water, a hundred feet deep, reflecting green eyebrows
Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,
Gracefully painted
And the girls singing back at each other,
Dancing in transparent brocade,
And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.
And all this comes to an end.
And is not again to be met with.
I went up to the court for examination,
Tried Layu's luck, offered the Choyo song,
And got no promotion,
and went back to the East Mountains
White-headed.
And once again, later, we met at the South bridge-head.
And then the crowd broke up, you went north to San palace,
And if you ask how I regret that parting :
It is like the flowers falling at Spring's end
Confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.
I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees here
To seal this,
And send it a thousand miles, thinking.

Four poems of Departure
By Rihaku [Li Bo] or Omakitsu [Yip Wai-lim : By Wang Wei].
Light rain is on the light dust.
The willows of the inn-yard
Will be going greener and greener,
But you, Sir, had better take wine ere your departure,
For you will have no friends about you
When you come to the gates of Go.

Separation on the River Kiang
By Rihaku
Ko-jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro,
The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.
His lone sail blots the far sky.
And now I see only the river,
The long Kiang, reaching heaven.

Taking Leave of a Friend
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing.

Leave-Taking Near Shoku
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
"Sanso, King of Shoku, built roads"
They say the roads of Sanso are steep.
Sheer as the mountains.
The walls rise in a man's face,
Clouds grow out of the hill at his horse's bridle.
Sweet trees are on the paved way of the Shin,
Their trunks burst through the paving,
And freshets are bursting their ice
In the mids of Shoku, a proud city.
Men's fates are already set,
There is no need of asking diviners.
[Der Staat Shoku = Shu. Die Stadt Shin = Chengdu. Rishogu = Li Guang].

The City of Choan
By Rihaku [Li Bo]
The phoenix are at play on their terrace.
The phoenix are gone, the river flows on alone.
Flowers and grass
Cover over the dark path where lay the dynastic house of the Go.
The bright cloths and bright caps of Shin
Are now the base of old hills.
The Three Mountains fall through the far heaven,
The isle of White Heron splits the two streams apart.
Now the high clouds cover the sun
And I cannot see Choan afar
And I am sad.

South-Folk in Cold Country
[Yip Wai-lim : By Li Bo]
The Dai horse neighs against the bleak wind of Etsu,
The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the North,
Emotion is born out of habit.
Yesterday we went out of the Wild-Goose gate,
To-day from the dragon-Pen. (1)
Surprised. Desert turmoil. Sea sun.
Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven.
Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements.
Mind and spirit drive on the feathery banners.
Hard fight gets no reward.
Loyalty is hard to explain.
Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift moving,
Whose white head is lost for this province ?
(1) I.e., we have been warring from one end of the empire to the other, now east, now west, on each border.

Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku
[Yip Wai-lim : By Guo Pu].
The red and green kingfishers flash between the orchids and clover,
One bird casts its gleam on another.
Green vines hang through the high forest,
They weave a whole roof to the mountain,
The lone man sits with shut speech,
He purrs and pats the clear strings.
He throws his heart up through the sky,
He bites through the flower pistil and brings up a fine fountain.
The red-pine-tree god looks at him and wonders.
He rides through the purple smoke to visit the sennin,
He takes "Floaring Hill" (1) by the sleeve,
He claps his hand on the back of the great water sennin.
But you, you dam'd crowd of gnats,
Can you even tell the age of a turtle ?
(1) Name of a sennin.

Ballad of the Mulberry Road
Fenollosa MSS., very early)
[Yip Wai-lim : anonymous]
The sun rises in south-east corner of things
To look on the tall house of the Shin
For they have a daughter named Rafu (pretty girl),
She made the name for herself : "Gauze Veil",
For she feeds mulberries to silkworms,
She gets them by the south wall of the town.
With green strings she makes the warp of her basket,
She makes the shoulder-straps of her basket from the boughs of Katsura,
And she piles her hair up on the left side of her head-piece.
Her earrings are made of pearl,
Her underskirt is of green pattern-silk,
Her overskirt is the same silk dyed in purple,
And when men going by look on Rafu
They set down their burdens,
They sand and twirl their moustaches.

Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu
[Yip Wai-lim : By Lu Zhaolin].
Yip Wai-lim : The original poem is 68 lines. Pound translated only the first sixteen lines.
I
The narrow streets cut into the wide highway at Choan,
Dark oxen, white horses, drag on the seven coaches with outriders
The coaches are perfumed wood,
The jeweled chair is held up at the crossway,
Before the royal lodge :
A glitter of golden saddles, awaiting the princess ;
They eddy before the gate of the barons.
The canopy embroidered with dragons drinks in and casts back the sun.
Evening comes.
The trappings are bordered with mist.
The hundred cords of mist are spread through and double the trees,
Night birds, and night women,
Spread out their sounds through the gardens.
II
Birds with flowery wing, hovering butterflies crowd over the thousand gates.
Trees that glitter like jade, terraces tinged with silver,
The seed of a myriad hues,
A network of arbours and passages and covered ways,
Double towers, winged roofs, border the network of ways :
A place of felicitous meeting.
Riu's house stands out on the sky, with glitter of colour
As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus to gather his dews,
Before it another house which I do not know :
How shall we know all the friends whom we meet on strange roadways ?

To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud"
By Tao Yuan Ming, 365-427 A.D. [Tao Yuanming = Tao Qian]
"Wet Springtime", says To-Em-Mei, "Wet Spring in the Garden".
I
The clouds have gathered, and gathered, and the rain falls and falls,
The eight ply of the heavens are all folded into one darkness,
And the wide, flat road stretches out.
I stop in my room toward the East, quiet, quiet,
I pat my new cask of wine.
My friends are estranged, or far distant,
I bow my head and stand still.
II
Rain, rain, and the clouds have gathered,
The eight ply of the heavens are darkness,
The flat land is turned into river.
"Wine, wine, here is wine" !
I drink by my eastern window.
I think of talking and man,
And no boat, no carriage, approaches.
III
The trees in my east-looking garden are bursting out with new twigs,
They try to stir new affection,
And men say the sun and moon keep on moving
Because they can't find a soft seat.
The birds flutter to rest in my tree, and I think I have heard them saying,
"It is not that there are no other men
But we like this fellow the best,
But however we long to speak
He cannot know of our sorrow".

"I have not come to the end of Ernest Fenollosa's notes by a long way, nor is it entirely perplexity that causes me to cease from translation. True, I can find little to add to one line out of a certain Poem :
'You know ell where it was that I walked
When you had left me.'
In another I find a perfect speech in a literality which will be to many most unacceptable. The couplet is at follows :
'Drawing sword, cut into water, water again flow :
Raise cup, quench sorrow, sorrow again sorrow'.

[Final page]
There are also other poems, notably the 'Five colour Screen', in which Professor Fenollosa was, as an art critic, especially interested, and Rihaku's sort of Ars Poetica, which might be given with diffidence to an audience of good will. But if I give them, with the necessary breaks for explanation, and a tedium of notes, it is quite certain that the personal hatred in which I am held by many, and the invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists, will be brought to bear first on the flaws of such translation, and will then be merged into depreciation of the whole book of translations. Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems."
E.P.

Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound from London ; 22 Sept. 1915.
"I wonder if there is a decent translation of Confucius. I've Pauthier's French version. NOT the odes, but the 'Four Books'." Allen Upward introduced Pound to Guillaume Pauthier's Les quatre lives de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine.

Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. (2)
Sekundärliteratur
1915
Arthur Clutton-Brock : "We do not know from the title of this little book whether Mr Pound has translated these poems direct from the Chinese or has only used other translations. But for those who, like ourselves, know no Chinese, it does not matter much. The result, however produced, is well worth having, and it seems to us very Chinese. There is a strong superstition among us that a translation should always seem quite English. But when it is made from a literature very alien in method and thought, it is not a translation at all if it seems quite English. Besides, a literal translation from something strange and good may surprise our language into new beauties. If we invite a foreigner of genius among us, we don't want to make him behave just like ourselves ; we shall enjoy him best and learn most from him if he remains himself. So we think Mr Pound has chosen the right method in these translations, and we do not mind that they often are 'not English'. The words are English and give us the sense ; and after all it is the business of a writer to mould language to new purposes, not to say something new just as his forefathers said something old. So it is the business of the reader not to be angry or surprised at a strange use of language, if it is a use proper to the sense. Mr. Pound has kept to the reality of the original because he keeps his language simple and sharp and precise. We hope he will give us some more versions of Chinese poetry."

1916
Arthur Clutton-Brock : "… His verse is not ordinary speech, but he aims in it at the illusion of ordinary speech ; and, thought this illusion gives an air of liveliness to the poems, it seems to us to be bought at too high a price. Certainly the original poems as well as the translations show that he has talent – one can read them all with some interest – but why should he use it to express so much indifference and impatience ? Why should he so constantly be ironical about nothing in particular ? He seems to have private jokes of his own which he does not succeed in making public. He seems to be always reacting against something ; and the very form of his verse is a reaction against exhausted forms. But nothing can be made of mere reaction or a habit of irony. The world may not be serious, but the universe is. One suspects a hidden timidity in this air of indifference, as if Mr Pound feared above all things to give himself away. A poet must be ready to give himself away ; he must forget even the ironies of his most intimate friends when he writes, no less than tha possible misunderstandings of fools…"

1918
Arthur Waley read a paper on 'The poet Li Bo, A.D. 701-762, before the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London, in which he gives his translation of Pomes no 3, 4, 8, and 14 of Cathay. "But I venture to surmise that if a dozen representative English poets could read Chinese poetry in the original, they would none of them give either the first or second place to Li Bo".

1938
Achilles Fang : Es wimmelt von orthographischen Fehlern, falschen Ämterbezeichnungen, verstellten Zeilen oder fehlenden Strophen. Öfter wird kein Dichter genannt oder ein falscher angegeben, noch dazu stets in japanischer Transkription.

1951
Hugh Kenner : "Cathay is notable, considered as an English product rather than Chinese product." These poems serve "to extend, inform, and articulate the preoccupations of the present by bringing the past abreast of it".

1965
A.C. Graham : "The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pounds Cathay".

1970
Akiko Miyake : The vividness and freshness of Cathay as poetry depends more than anything else on Pound's effort to create his own Imagist poetry out of the unfamiliar materials. Fenollosa was a man with strong opinions on everything, and his individuality is shown in the notebooks. Even with his very limited knowledge of Chinese, he tried to reach the depth of the meaning by learning each word, each allusion. He aimed at more than scholarly accuracy, and Pound responded to such depth. He must have been fascinated by the task of groping for poetry underneath the unfamiliar surface. The greatest reward Pound got through writing Cathay comes probably from the fact that he could invent his own poetry even out of so remote a country as China, and of poetry in so ancient a period, for after writing Cathay, China became one of his indispensable themes. In writing Cathay, Pound by no means exhausted the rich resources of Fenollosa's essay. He did not even try the possibility of intellectual search with images in this little book.

1976
Monika Motsch : Im Gegensatz zu Chinese written character as a medium for poetry von Ernest Fenollosa [ID D22141], wird Cathay nicht angegriffen und abgelehnt, sondern anerkannt ; wenn nicht als wortgetreue Übersetzung, so doch als selbständige Dichtung. Die Anerkennung ist erstaunlich, da Pound in der Zeit, als er Cathay schrieb, kein einziges Wort Chinesisch konnte und auf Fenollosa's Notizen zurückgreifen musste, die fehlerhaft waren oder Lücken aufwiesen. Auch wenn Pounds Übersetzung voller Fehler ist, so hat er doch grundlegende Züge der chinesischen Sprache und Lyrik erfasst und im Englischen wiedergegeben : ihre syntaktische Einfachheit, die kommentarlos aufeinanderfolgenden, dynamischen Bilder, eindringliche Naturbeschreibungen und die emotionelle Verhaltenheit. Fenollosa hat Pounds Gesichtskreis ungeheuer erweitert. Er weckte sein Interesse an der Übersetzung alter Literaturen und regte ihn an zur Beschäftigung mit der chinesischen Lyrik und mit Konfuzius.
The River Merchant's Wife : Das Gedicht ist eine ziemlich genaue Übersetzung des chinesischen Originals. Pound hat nur einige Namen ausgelassen, die Europäer nur mit Hilfe eines längeren Kommentars verständlich wären. Der Stil kennt, wie die chinesische Sprache, kaum grammatische Über- oder Unt4erordnung, und logisch ordnende Partikel fehlen fast vollständig.
Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin : Das Gedicht setzt ein mit einfachen, klaren Hauptsätzen, die je eine Zeile einnehmen und dem Rhythmus eine getragene Ruhe verleihen. Die Verben sind teilweise weggelassen und der Rhythmus wird zunehmend dynamischer.
Leave-Taking Near Shoku : Dass es sich um ein Abschiedsgedicht handelt, geht nur aus dem Titel hervor. Die Trauer bleibt unausgesprochen. In drei kurz skizzierten, gegensätzlichen Naturbildern wird die Unsicherheit der Trennung um so deutlicher.
To-Em-Mei's "The Unmoving Cloud" : Die dritte Strophe ist bei Pound völlig anders als im Original und seine Version ist eher ein selbständiges Gedicht als eine Übersetzung.

1967
Yip Wai-lim : Cathay consists of only nineteen poems. Many people have translated at least five times as many from the Chinese ; but none among these has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry and in the history of modern English poetry. Considered as translation, Cathay ought to be viewed as a kind of re-creation. The poems are bound to differ from the originals in the sense that certain literal details are either eliminated or violated ; local tase is modified or even altered to suit the English audience and certain allusions are suppressed in order to relieve the readers from the burden of footnotes.
The criticism of Cathay fall into two obvious patterns : defense and condemnation. Most of Pound's defenders could not discuss the way in which some of the poems are said to be close to the original in the 'sequence of images', 'rhythm', 'effects', and 'tone'. Those who condemn Pound tend to concentrate on the scar and overlook everything els. To understand Pound is to widen the possibility of communication, and a clear measurement of Pound' achievement :
1. To look at the problems of translation from Chinese into English, and in particular, to discuss the difficulty of approximating in English the peculiar mode of representation constituted by Chinese syntax.
2. To look into Pound's mind as a poet, to know the obsessive concepts and techniques he cherished at the time he translated these Chinese poems and to see haw these conditioned his translation.
3. Since Fenollosa annotated these poems under Japanese instructors ('Rihaku', for instance, is the Japanese name for Li Bo), it is necessary for us to examine the triple relation, from the original Chinese to Fenollosa's notes and to the end products, in order to find out how the intermediary has obstructed Pound and how his creative spirit sometimes breaks through the crippled text to resurrect what was in the original.
4. No translator can claim to have actually translated the poetry. This is also true of Pound. How close, then, are the 'equivalents' he gets out of the Fenollosa notes to the original, the 'cuts and turns' of the Chinese poems ? In other words, we need to compare carefully the original and the derivative 'form of consciousness' to see what has actually happened in between.
In his dealing with Cathay Pound is able to get into the central consciousness of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance. Pound has indeed made many philological mistakes as a consequence of his ignorance of Chinese. But it is important to remind readers that not all of them are due to ignorance ; many are done deliberately to heighten artistic intensity, and some, for a less defensible reason, are conditioned by his own obsessions as a practicing poet.
The first poem Song of the bowmen of Shu is a reworking from Ariga Nagao's English version. It has followed the curves of the original's internal thought-form and the undercurrent of sadness. Pound has to admit that he has changed partially the character of the semi-monologue he has all the way dominated.

1967
D.B. Graham : While some of the Cathay poems have drawn wide praise and much analytical attention, Separation on the river Kiang has been faulted for its errors or else ignored. The criticism of this poem raises certain important questions about the critical perspective of the early Chinese translations. The usual charges against Cathay, and Separation on the river Kiang in particular, have to do with Pound's 'failure' to render literally the Chinese of Li Bo. They are chastising Pound for mistranslating and praising him for not translating. In Cathay Pound was not concerned with the quality of verse that he described as 'melopoeia', the 'musical property' of poetry. The 'melopoeia' Separation is achieved through several techniques. The first is the duplication of the monosyllabic pattern that constitutes the basic rhythmic unit of Chinese poetry. Metrically, the monosyllabic base helps Pound achieve a central aim, the breaking up of the dominant measure of English verse, the iambic. In addition to the 'melopoeia' of the monosyllabic structure of the poem, some 'melopoetic' effects are also accomplished by syntactical reduction. Of the prime characteristics of Chinese verse, none is more apparent or important than conciseness, terseness, economy. The key to Pound's succinctness lies in the syntactical order of subject / verb / complement, a formula that Fenollosa saw as central to Chinese verse. The ideogram attracted Fenollosa and Pound precisely because they viewed it as a direct expression of action. The music of Pound's poem is not confined to imitating the 'melopoetic' qualities of Chinese verse. Pound combines specifically Chinese traditions and English techniques to produce something both ancient and new. Like Fenollosa before him, Pound was attracted to the Chinese ideogram as a natural medium for poetry. Both saw the ideogram as bearing a direct, inherent relationship with the thing it names. Linguistically wrong, Pound and Fenollosa were pragmatically astute, for Chinese verse did depend heavily on concrete images, a reliance that made it a perfect medium of imitation for the imagists.

1971
Hugh Kenner : The 14 poems in the original Cathay were selected from some 150 in the notebooks, were the first 'vers-libre' translations not derived from other translations but from detailed notes on the Chinese texts. the Cathay poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry. Perfectly vital after 50 years, they are among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I.

1978
Antony Tatlow : In making his Cathay translations Pound had employed a method which took as its starting point the Chinese line and phrase. In those poems which stress the context of speech, the Chinese line of often broken up to meet the requirements of his own rhythmus. The form of speech is often stylized but the element of gesture is fundamental and is inseparable from Pound's sense of the present relevance of the poem.

1979
John Kwan-Terry : Pound's contemporaries spoke of the Cathay poems as adding 'a new breath' to the literary atmosphere and as 'like a door in a wall, opening upon a landscape made real by the intensity of human emotions'. I believe that the poems, besides being a stage in the technical development of Pound's poetry, also constitute an important chapter in the development of Pound's poetic sensibility. From the beginning, Pound's poetry sought to relate two seemingly disparate worlds – one, a world of irritating contemporary realities confronted by a vibrant vitality anxious to do battle ; the other, a world of aesthetic and mystic visions that seemed to transcend time and its wars altogether.
In the raw material provided by Fenollosa, Pound saw the possibility, or the possibility presented itself for him, to create or recreate a poetry that can integrate the high and the low, the ordinary and the transcendent.
Like the early poems, the Cathay poems are infused with a sense of loss, of desolation and loneliness, but on a wider scale. Reading these poems, one has the impression of vast distances and the partings and exiles that distances entail ; an empire so huge that its defenders and functionaries cannot know its purposes, and perhaps these purposes are absurd anyway ; distances also in time and history, so great that human glory cannot hope to outlast them. The social scope covered is equally impressive : war and peace, the high-born and the low-born, the intellectual and the domestic, the soldier and the poet, wife, husband, lover, friend. What sets these poems apart, is an achieved sense of harmony, of unity sought and found – the unity that integrates the contemporary reality with the self, the quotidian with the eternal moment. A quality of Chinese poetry that appeals to Pound strongly is the absence of 'moralizing', 'comment', and 'abstraction'. Cathay poems involve the subjective, but they do not convey the sense of being 'abandoned' which seems to be the prevailing ethos in modern literature and is so strong an element in Pound's poetry. There is less sense of the 'anguish' of being without God. There is resignation, but not despair.
The poetry conveys a sense of gratitude, a creative delight in experience, in the small moments of life. One of the greatest values in Cathay is that it can express the human need for relationship, and the ways in which the sense of identity is bound up with love.
For Pound, Fenollosa's theory seemed to come as a powerful criticism of the principles of Imagism. The implications in Fenollosa's essay, as Pound saw them, were that Imagism took too static a view of what poetry could perform. It conceived of the world as so many inert 'things', to be brought into juxtaposition, whereas the world is made up of 'energies', and a poems should be a sort of vortex, concentrating these energies. The Cathay poems mark a unique stage in Pound's career, a stage in which Pound's sensibility, interacting with the Chinese tradition, discovered a creative theme, a sense of the integrated man.

1985
Ronald Bush : Pound, maintaining the beautiful indirection of the poem The river-merchant's wife, transformed its subject. The implied emotional drama of the poem is one of love maturing before our eyes. The wife remembers herself as a little girl, recalls a time when she entered into an arranged marriage without much feeling, and then, spurred by the pain her husband's departure has provoked, slowly realizes how much she cares for him. At the end of the poem she dreams of his returning and achieves a poignant reunion by traveling a considerable distance in her imagination to meet him halfway. In Pound's hands, this poem becomes a dark reflection of its Chinese self and a recognizable cousin to the poems of blocked expression in the suite around it. In Pound's poem, to affirm her love for her husband, the wife must overcome not only the miles between them but also her own fugitive feelings of betrayal.
Comparing the Exile's letter to the notes on which it is based, Pound exaggerated Li Po's nostalgia for a past when poets were joined in true fellowship. Something extraordinary is created in his poem, not by a single friendship but by a poetic community that disdains gold and has forgotten kings and princes. It is this unique fellowship that allows the poets for once to speak out their 'hearts and minds without regret'.

1990
Qian Zhaoming : Cathay is a beautiful translation of classical Chinese poetry. It is considered as such because it has translated the charm and simplicity of the classical Chinese poems. To this one may add that it takes a great poet plus a great critic to translate great poetry. Though Pound is handicapped by his own ignorance of the Chinese language and Fenollosa's numerous misrepresentations, with his poetic sensibility and critical experience he is able to penetrate the shell and catch the quintessence. It is true that there are many deviations in his translation. But compared with what he has preserved, the presentation, the mood, and the whole image, his flaws are negligible and his triumph is great. It is through Pound that the English readers first get the original of such great Chinese poets as Li Bo. But Pound himself has also benefited from translating Chinese classical poetry. He is exposed to new sensibilities and new techniques, which in turn exert an important impact on him in his literary career, and through him also exert an important impact on modern English poetry.

1996
Robert Kern : Cathay is very much a production of creative reading, where 'creative' means not only inventive or fictionalizing but insightful and penetrating, both psychologically and philologically. Pound is nonetheless able to recover the movement of consciousness in his texts, even to the point of occasionally capturing elusive realities of voice and tone, an achievement which virtually demands that he go beyond strict dictionary meanings. Therefore, if he is also guilty of errors because of his ignorance of Chinese, or because he is misled by the uncertainties of Fenollosa's notes, sometimes his inaccuracies are conscious and deliberate, committed for the sake of greater artistic intensity and even on behalf of 'his own obsessions as a practicing poet'. The poems in Cathay are not only sometimes acutely 'accurate', despite their deviations from dictionary sense, but are continuous, thematically and in other respects, with the rest of Pound's work. What need to be stressed is the extent to which he as deliberately pursued this continuity, and it is under the category of his 'obsessions as a practicing poet', that Pound's acts of Orientalizing or creative reading should be placed. Cathay appropriates Chinese poetry for purposes other than those of Chinese poetry itself. Pound is using the Chinese texts as a drawing board for the creation of a modernist style or technique, he is also already practicing it, in the sense that modernism in general may be defined as an activity of appropriation, a series of strategies, such as allusion, collage, and what Pound would later call 'the ideogrammic method', for incorporating other texts, other voices, other perspectives within one's own, and for shoring up, the ruins of the modern world, amassing the cultural valuables of the past and increasingly of other, non-Western cultures in order to restore coherence and stability to modern experience, or to create them anew. At the same time, he seems to be moving beyond imagism, and in many of the Cathay poems, which reflect Pound's reading of Fenollosa's essay, we find less of an emphasis on the image as 'itself the speech', less reliance on the technique of superpositioning as a structural resource, and less of an appeal in general to strict imagist orthodoxy as a means of producing the Chinese poem. Pound invents Chinese for his English reader by defamiliarizing his English. This process takes several forms in Cathay, one of the most important of which is both Fenollosan and imagist. Writing for Pound, during this period, is a process of stripping words of their associations in order to arrive at their exact meanings and this process is itself a form of defamiliarization, of discovering and presenting arrangements of language that emphasize their own strangeness with respect to more conventional, or historically and culturally conditioned, modes of expression.

1998
Grace Fang : Pound found Chinese poetry and ideograms to be the perfect means of expression for his creative resources and convictions. His translations provided him with a new opportunity to recreate the source text and to activate dynamic responses in the reader, which reflect a vivid Chinese picture through Western eyes.
Not every character is a picture, and even when most Chinese people use a character originally created as an imitation of the shape of a object, they will not be aware of its etymology. Chinese language derives much of its poetic power from its three-thousand-year development of these phonetic and semantic devices. It also functions as a normal communicative language in which the form of the character does not stand for its original visual form but for the meaning it conveys. There is an arbitrary relationship between sign and meaning, and the character represents not the original natural image but the conventional signification. A Chinese character can stand by itself as 'a word' or can be combined with one or two or three other characters to from 'a word', which would lead the character to lose its own original meaning and to gain a new significance in the combination as a compound word. Therefore, the ideogrammic method either risks over-emphasizing the etymological meaning of the separated part of the character or mistaking the individual signified for the significance of a whole compound word. Fenollosa and Pound show great concern for the language they deal with, but to over-emphazise the philological sense at the expense of other considerations, such as the total textual structure, rhyme, and 'original meaning' refined by the original poet, is dangerous, particularly when the translator has not established his expertise in the source language. Misinterpretations and mistakes are bound to happen.
Pound's Cathay is a poetic performance across three culture, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, English), to be synchronized in his own poetic voice. Although Pound may sometimes have conveyed certain wrong meanings, most of the time he has conveyed the right feeling. Although he does not understand all the words, he has remained as faithful as possible to the original poet's sequence of tone, voice, rhythms and images.

1999
Eric Hayot : The differences between Arthur Waley and Pound notwithstanding, it is vital to notices how far they both are from Herbert A. Giles' attempts to turn the Chinese poem into an English one. Relative to Giles's, Pound's translations allowed the poems to stay strange, English enough to read but Chinese enough to represent their own difference. He was essentially 'rebuking' Giles for not making his translations Chinese enough, for bringing them too far into English. Waley's rebuke of Pound criticizes Pound for doing exactly what Pound didn't like about Giles, namely for making the poems too English, and for not adequately respecting their originals. Pound's translations impress more than Waley's precisely because they have something poetic about them. Pound was, at times, wrong both about the specifics of his language and the general tone of the poem.
Despite the vast differences in their literary reception, it can be helpful to consider differences between Giles, Pound, Waley and Yip matters of degree rather than king. Each translator attempts to bring across more or less of the Chinese difference by putting it in a literary or cultural language more or less comprehensible to English readers, most of whom know little about China. Inevitably, the translation will carry with it aspects of English language and culture not justified by any mood or motive of the original text.

1999
Ming Xie : The connection between Pound's haiku images and his earlier epigrams might be viewed as the logical precedent for what Pound set out to do in Cathay. Pound's apparent ignorance of Chinese and Chinese literary forms has perhaps enabled him to modulate and transpose freely the original Chinese poems in terms adapted to his own generic experiments and expressive consideration. He was perhaps fortunate enough not to be in a position to render literally from the original Chinese ; he evidently derived a stimulus to innovate forms of a more immediate expressiveness from this ostensibly unpromising activity, that of translating from a language not fully understood. The Cathay poems display the importance of a certain kind of provincialism of feeling, feeling deeply rooted in details of the actual circumscribed world of the protagonists. Pound and Thomas Hardy are often concerned with the reality of memory and retrospection, regret and melancholy, time and isolation.
The use of natural imagery in the poems is often of primary importance. There is a natural relation of the natural setting to the speaking and observing persona in the Cathay poems, as well as a sense of distance that separates the observer or speaker from the natural world that he or she observes. But the resulting tension is precisely what is most important in any good poems.
The individual perspective in Cathay is for the most part retrospective and is almost always tinged with an elegiac coloring. This elegiac coloring is not a general, all-pervasive mood or atmosphere enveloping or devouring the individual speakers in the poems. It also often tends to leave the emotional stance of the translating poet in a kind of sympathetic neutrality, not by any implicit collusion expressing his own personal elegiac feeling.
The Cathay poems as a whole do not provide some extraordinary moral perspective in which the reader would be invited to judge morally ; rather, they almost invariably invite the reader to participate and sympathize in an ordinary highly individualized emotional or psychological perspective, except that the exotic and unfamiliar context makes this for the Western reader 'ordinary' only by an act of consciously maintained vicarious projection.
The river-merchant's wife : In Pound's version the emotion of the woman speaker is presented within her confined perspective through particular stages of emotional development and psychological retrospection, out of which emerge different shades of meaning and significance. Pound divides the poem into different stanzas or strophes, in order to delineate more sharply and contrastively the successive stages of retrospection and revelation. In the Chinese poem, due to lack of specified relations of tense or number, the narrative sequence is not explicitly established by syntactical markers.
Pound has largely ignored Fenollosa's theory of the transitive verb. His Cathay displays a surprisingly wide variety of poetic techniques and rhetorical structures neglected in Fenollosa's treatise, especially in the use of paratactic and anaphoric constructions. These devices do not in fact originate with Cathay ; rather they are a continuation of Pound's earlier practices and experiments. But it is nevertheless evident that Pound's extensive use of these structures is based upon his intuitive sense of their importance and significance in the original Chinese poems, as confirmed in large part by Fenollosa's often detailed notes and literal versions.
The language of Cathay was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary ; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian English, as was often Pound's practice. Cathay is an example of a strong tendency in Pound to regard translation as not historical but contemporary or timeless. Pound's versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry, because he has largely stripped away most of the supposed or fictitious qualities that late-Victorian poetic treatment (by James Legge, Herbert Giles) had imposed upon classical Chinese poetry. The success of Cathay is also largely due to Pound's tacit and skillful reliance upon a stylized evocation of China. The use of Chinese landscape seems to provide a powerful confirmation of the kind of 'otherness' which Western readers tacitly identified with an emotional coding linked to understood conventions of feeling in Chinese art and poetry.

2000
Sylvia Ieong Sao Leng : Ezra Pound's Cathay had gone through two rearrangements before it was brought out by Elkin Mathews in April 1915. Originally, the sequence was made up of eleven poems. The Cathay typescript at the Beinecke Library shows that Pound had added four poems to the original eleven when he submitted the sequence to Mathews. In the last minute, pound ‘suppressed the four appended poems and added 'Lament of the frontier guard' and 'South – folk in cold country'. In 1916 when Pound incorporated Cathay into Lustra, he restored the four suppressed poems.

2003
Barry Ahearn : Pound leads his readers to believe that the original Chinese verses are of such high quality that even inexpert translators cannot greatly harm them. In Chinese poetry he cites two poems as examples of how Chinese and Western poetic practices share common ground. In respect of The jewel stairs' grievance he illustrates how the Western reader should approcach the poem : "I have never found any occidental who could 'make much' of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, no merely by 'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poems. You can play Conan Doyle if you like."
Pound first shares the burden with Fenollosa, Mori Kainan and Ariga Nagao (though on closer inspection, he calls their abilities into question and transfer credit to the poems themselves. Second, he contends that the poems have qualities (some of which he specifies and some of which he does not) that make them amenable to translation. There is also a third strategy Pound employs to divert the readers' attention from his role as translator. This third strategy is to include images in the poems that will strike the reader as recognizably Chinese because these images already seem Chinese, thanks to existing Western preconceptions about China. He adopted various strategies to suggest the virtual identity of Chinese poetry and Western literary forms. But he also 'foreignized' the translations to remind his readers that there were unavoidable differences. Pound uses complicated means to make his translations seem authentically 'foreign' – complicated because they depend upon delicate adjustments of diction.
In his attempt to make the language of Cathay on occasionally bizarre form of English, Pound does not limit himself to nouns and verbs. He well knew that some of the most perplexing problems for a novice translator arise from some of the simplest words. The effect of verbal perplexities is to produce a strange impression, the impression that this translation has been produced not by Ezra Pound, but by a native speaker of Chinese whose command of English is less than fluent. Pound inserts a sufficient number of odd expressions in the poems, with the intention of leaving the reader with the impression that even though these English versions may be imperfect, there must lie behind them a superior Chinese original.
Pound's treatment of the poems in the Fenollosa papers adopts a divided stance : the Chinese poems are like Western ones ; the Chinese poems are in many respect alien.

2007
Choi Hongsun : Pound departs from his Anglocentric conversion and takes a centrifugal attitude toward otherness of the other. He attempts to foreground the cultural and linguistic otherness of Chinese poetry and to revive its own poetic qualities in his translated poems. Pound the poet searches for 'dynamic equivalence' in consideration of the receptor language and culture. This target language oriented approach has a centripetal focus on a new poetic English that is filtered through translation. Thus, such otherness is incorporated into the Pound's own creative work. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry maintains the precarious tension between two different translating strategies : formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Cathay demonstrates Pound's attempts to foreground the otherness of the Chinese original to further the potential of English poetry through the appropriation of such otherness. In regards to formal equivalence, Pound the translator pursues a text to be equivalent, rather than equal, to the distinctive aspects of Chinese poetry. He thus foreignizes English in an attempt to reflect the poetic otherness of the original. At the same time, while his translation is oriented toward dynamic equivalence, such otherness is incorporated into his whole poetic arsenal of English, so that Pound the poet invents a new English stranger than the original Chinese. Even concerning dynamic equivalence, his translated language never gets domesticated conventionally, but rather it must be identified as somewhere between the source language and the target language. In this way, Cathay marks an important turning point in the history of Chinese translation as well as in Pound's own literary career.

2012
A. Serdar Öztürk : The image, the ideogram itself, if it is to be effective, depends greatly on the beauty and the force of the image, the ideogrammic component. That Pound was successful in translating the Chinese image is everywhere attested in Cathay. Which ties the poem together is not so much the narrative as the succession of images. The Imagists concern for concentrated expression and Pound's definition of the image as 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' would lead one to believe, that most of the poetry in Cathay would tend toward brevity. Although there are a representative number of short poems, the greater number is rather long. To account for the ability to sustain an image in a poem of more than a few lines, or even a few stanzas, one must turn again to the effectiveness of ideogrammic juxtaposition.