The other day my wife asked me why Tang poetry mattered in America. Instead of an answer, I gave her a puzzled look despite myself. Frankly, she knew next to nothing about Chinese. So, how come she threw me this curveball question? Never mind. She had already landed in my lap, along with a copy of Cathay. Holy moly, it was good old Ezra Pound's Cathay, a slim volume containing 15 classical Chinese poems* rendered in English.** 

Virtually Chinese-illiterate, Pound nonetheless picked up the Tang spirit and ran with it. Published in 1915, his Cathay ended up as a game changer for American literature in the roaring '20s. Soaring from Cathay was a Tang soul for all American literati to look up to, and they did. Indeed, the celebrated American poet T.S. Eliot rightly regarded Tang poetry as a breath of fresh air.# Eliot went on to collect a Nobel prize. Ernest Hemingway, another Nobel laureate, also had a taste of Tang, perhaps unknowingly, thanks to Cathay which gave rise to American modernism in the Jazz Age. 

Jazz reinvented American music to which my wife and I couldn't help dancing. Tang revived American poetry with which we couldn't help rhyming. There's no daylight between Tang and Jazz. Both were in the moonlight. So were we.

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* Cathay is actually a collection of 17 poems, two of which ("The Seafarer" and "The Alchemist") have no roots in Chinese poetry. 

** To echo the ancient Chinese poems he was rewriting, Pound never shied away from archaic English. Let me cite two examples here: (1) Cathay refers to the Orient with China as its core. (2) In Cathay, toilet refers to dress-up and make-up. It comes from "toilette," a 16th Century French word. Don't mix it up with today's washroom.

# T.S. Eliot praised Pound as the“inventor of Chinese poetry for our time."

Recommended reference:

William Logan, Pound's China / Pound's"Cathay"

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/4/pounds-chinapounds-cathay

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In the attached audio/video is a reading of Ezra Pound's“translation” of Li Bai's quatrain (李白《五絕：玉階怨》：玉階生白露，夜久侵羅襪。卻下水晶簾，玲瓏望秋月。）Pound followed his Japanese consultants and called Li Bai “Rihaku” in his Cathay. I won't fault him, given the language barrier. But then, for the same reason, his works are not translations in the strict sense. This one is more like it, though.

The Jewel Stair’s Grievance  by Ezra Pound 

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

文/ 江靈颺