DIVExplores Ezra Pound's long fascination with Chinese literature and culture /div

First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound’s understanding—it is fair to say, his appropriation—of the text. Fenollosa’s manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North America and East Asia. Pound’s editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa’s encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry. This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa’s important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound’s deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa’s sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa’s ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition. This masterfully edited book will be an essential resource for scholars and poets and a starting point for a renewed discussion of the multiple sources of American modernist poetry.

Cathay is a compilation of traditional Chinese poems translated into English by poet Ezra Pound. These fifteen poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right.

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.

China’s profound influence on the avant-garde in the 20th century was nowhere more apparent than in the work of Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian literary journal Tel quel. Chinese Dreams explores the complex, intricate relationship between various “Chinas”—as texts—and the nation/culture known simply as “China”—their context—within the work of these writers. Eric Hayot calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West and ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming. The latest edition of this critically acclaimed book includes a new preface by the author. “Lucid and accessible . . . an important contribution to the field of East-West comparative studies, Asian studies, and modernism.” —Comparative Literature Studies “Instead of trying to decipher the indecipherable ‘China’ in Western literary texts and critical discourses, Hayot chose to show us why and how ‘China’ has remained, and will probably always be, an enchanting, ever-elusive dream. His approach is nuanced and refreshing, his analysis rigorous and illuminating.” —Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis