Year

1928

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (2)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (2)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1917	Letter from Ezra Pound to Kate Buss ; 4 January (1917). "Dear Miss Buss : Thanks for sending me the copy of your review. The only error seems to be in supposing that 'Albâtre' was in any way influenced by Chinese stuff which I did not see until a year of two later. The error is natural as Cathay appeared before Lustra, but the separate poems in Lustra had mostly been written before the Chinese translations were begun and had mostly been printed in periodicals either here or in America… The subject is Chinese, the language of the translations is mine – I think. At least if you compare the 'Song of the Bowemen' with the English version of the same poem in Jennings' 'Shi King' Part II, 1-7 called 'Song of the Troops', or the 'Beautiful Toilet' with the same poem in Giles' Chinese literature, you will be able to gauge the amount of effect the celestial Chinese has on the osseous head of an imbecile or a philologist. Omahitsu is the real modern – even Parisian – of VIII cent. China."	Person: Pound, Ezra
2	1928	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…"	Person: Eliot, T.S. Person: Pound, Ezra

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2007-	Worldcat/OCLC	Web / WC