Pound's Cathay: Invention and Error in Modernist Translation
How a Poet Who Knew No Chinese Rewrote English Verse

About this book:

In 1913, a poet who knew not a single Chinese character opened a crate of messy scholarly notebooks in a Kensington flat and, through a chain of misreadings spanning Tokyo to Tang Dynasty China, invented the voice of modern English verse. *Pound's Cathay* tells the electrifying story of how Ezra Pound transformed Ernest Fenollosa’s fragmented, error-ridden cribs into *Cathay* (1915)—the slim volume T. S. Eliot hailed as the invention of Chinese poetry for the West. This is literary history as high-stakes detective work: tracing how a Japanese pronunciation turned Li Bai into "Rihaku," how a sculptor’s eye for "primitive energy" in ideograms fueled Imagism, and how the Great War turned ancient frontier poems into the only language adequate for modern grief.

Moving from the smoke-filled salons of avant-garde London to the scholarly trenches of the British Museum—where rival translator Arthur Waley fought for philological rigor—this book reveals *Cathay* as a crucible where Orientalist fantasy, linguistic blindness, and avant-garde desperation forged a new poetics. It unpacks the "ideogrammic method" born of mistake, the free-verse cadences wrested from Victorian clutter, and the ethical fault lines of a masterpiece built on beautiful, generative errors. With a cast including Yeats, Gaudier-Brzeska, Hulme, and the ghost of Li Po himself, the narrative reads like a novel of ideas.

More than a study of one book, *Pound's Cathay* is a meditation on translation as original creation. It asks why the "wrong" words often carry the truest charge, how ignorance can become a method, and why a 1915 volume of supposed Chinese poems remains the template for how Anglophone poetry sees, fragments, and mourns. Rigorous, vivid, and startlingly relevant, this is the definitive account of the most influential mistranslation in literary history.