Cathay: Centennial Edition [Paperback]

First published in 1915, Cathay, Ezra Pounds early monumental work, originally contained fourteen translations from the Chinese and a translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer. Over time, these poems have been widely read and loved as both translations and original poetry. In 1916, Cathay was reprinted in the book Lustra without The Seafarer and with four more Chinese poems. Cathay is greatly indebted to the notes of a Harvard-trained scholar Ernest Fenollosa. In Fenollosas Chinese poetry materials, Pound scholar Zhaoming Qian writes, Pound discovered a new model that at once mirrored and challenged his developing poetics. Edited by Qian, this centennial edition reproduces for the first time the text of the original publication plus the poems from Lustra and transcripts of all the relevant Fenollosa notes and Chinese texts. Also included is a new foreword by Ezra Pounds daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, providing an appreciation and fascinating background material on this pivotal work of Pounds oeuvre. Pound, transcreating Chinese poetry in English, seems to have anticipated that making it new in our endless, inescapable present would increasingly mean returning to the old.  With the vers libre of?The centennial edition of Ezra Pound's early poetic masterpiecein a handsome facsimile edition.