![]() Would Pound’s free interpretations have been just as praised had he translated novels? Or if he published his works a century later? The translator’s version has become canonized. A classics professor recently told me that he feels the same way about Pound’s “re-creations” of the elegies by the Latin poet Sextus Propertius: “I don’t even the think of the changes as errors,” he said. The work is hardly considered a translation at all. And yet today, “Cathay” has become a deeply admired modernist classic “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” appears in many poetry anthologies. Not surprisingly, he made quite a few errors in the process. ![]() ![]() Instead, he worked from second-hand notes by another translator, boldly imposing his Imagist vision on classical Chinese poetry. Before publishing his famous Chinese poetry translation “Cathay” in 1915, Ezra Pound apparently had no knowledge of Chinese at all. ![]()
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