Cathay at 100: A Conversation

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Invitation:In April 1915 a slim volume of verse was published by Elkin Mathews in London, Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. Ezra Pound's Cathay is just 100 years old, and we all know what it did to transform English--- language poetry (especially American). It has also generated some fine scholarship over the years- and lots of interesting disagreement. With a century of changing perspectives now behind us, wouldn't it be a good moment (however adventitious) to sit down and talk about the differences that Cathay made, and the differences between its earliest readers' responses and ours today, and other related topics?Here's what I would like to invite you to, if you like the idea: a conversation over email about Cathay, to be pursued in odd moments over the next few weeks or possibly months, following the turns of real conversation. At some point I would then edit it down and send it to each of you for final approval and revisions. What do you think? A little hundredth---birthday party for the slim khaki---colored volume.The Conversation:Haun Saussy: Everyone acknowledges that the appearance in 1915 of Cathay did to change the style and manner of American poetry- and over the years, English poetry too. Just what that something was we might want to spend some time trying to pin down; also how it happened, how the Imagist idea of what a poem is took root and found partisans. It is astonishing that these changes should have begun with a translation from a language, Chinese, that had done very little to affect English writing up to then. A language, too, that the translator (a two---headed prodigy, Fenollosa---Pound) did not quite know (Pound knowing less than Fenollosa at this point, Fenollosa largely dependent on his Japanese intermediaries). Now reorientations in literary style and sensibility often come as a result of translations. As Pound himself observed, most innovations in English verse have come about as a result of steals from the French. But usually the precondition of such an effect is hundreds of years of close contact between the languages involved (at literary and everyday levels). The literatures of England have been mediating Latin since the time of Caedmon, French since 1066, Italian since Chaucer, and so forth. Chinese poetry was an unknown in 1915, and it is astonishing to see it taking in short order the role of a model for what modern poetry ought to be. How could we account for this irruption, made through one slender volume of short poems in the second year of a terrible war?Marjorie Perloff: I think the prodigious irruption took place in response to the maudlin verses of the Georgian poets who were Pound's contemporaries in the England of 1915. Here's an average one by Frank Prewett:To My Mother in Canada, from Sick---Bed in ItalyDear mother, from the sure sun and warm seasOf Italy, I, sick, remember nowWhat sometimes is forgot in times of ease,Our love, the always felt but unspoken vow.So send I beckoning hands from here to there,And kiss your black once, now white thin---grown hairAnd your stooped small shoulder and pinched brow.Here, mother, there is sunshine every day;It warms the bones and breathes upon the heart;But you I see out---plod a little way,Bitten with cold; your cheeks and fingers smart.Would you were here, we might in temples lie,And look from azure into azure sky,And paradise achieve, slipping death''s part.But now 'tis time for sleep: I think no speechThere needs to pass between us what we mean,For we soul---venturing mingle each with each.So, mother, pass across the world unseenAnd share in me some wished---for dream in you;For so brings destiny her pledges true,The mother withered, in the son grown green. …

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