Cathay: A Critical Edition

Review\nTimothy Billings has given us a stunning, masterful edition of a book that reinvented two worlds and made modern poetry possible.---William Logan, The New Criterion\nA miracle of poetic reincarnation, Ezra Pound's Cathay finally gets a comprehensive and thorough treatment in this critical edition. A marvel of scholarship that will be required reading for all students of poetry.---Yunte Huang, author of Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History\nA feat of archival scholarship and patient deciphering. Cathay emerges from this critical edition not as the work of a single man, but as a multiply authored enterprise, animated by the erudition of Japanese professors Mori Kainan and Ariga Nagao; the notes of Ernest Fenollosa; and the chutzpah of a young Ezra Pound. Pairing Pound’s compositions with the cribs he used and the Chinese originals he couldn’t read, Timothy Billings makes available, for the first time, the layer upon layer of mediation that went into this collective masterpiece, tracing a conversational arc that extends from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century.---Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University\nThis is an extraordinary book. Not just because of Pound’s poetry, whose verbal force still resonates with us today, but because, as an edition, it puts us face to face with the possibility of an interpretation that knows everything it needs to know. This is a book for teaching, for learning, and finally, for reading for pleasure―the pleasure of the poems, yes, and the pleasure of seeing in the poems the complex linguistic and conceptual histories, and accidents, that made them what they are today.---Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University\nAn astounding work of scholarship that lays to rest at long last the myths and muddles surrounding Ezra Pound’s ‘Chinese’ poems. Billings’s painstaking erudition brilliantly illuminates just how collective poetic creation can be. Of great relevance to students of modern poetry and to all those with interests in transmission, translation studies, and cultural appropriation. I cannot recommend this beautifully published book too highly.---David Bellos, Princeton University\nCathay has, in a word, become a part of world literature. . . . If Pound’s translations are in many respects mistaken, they are among the most generative mistakes in world literary history. . . . Historically the poems of Cathay were already links in a chain of translation (or ‘translation’) practices by the time Pound got to them. Rather than understanding this as one more degree of inauthenticity, we might think of Fenollosa and then Pound as additional links in the ‘Sinosphere,’ a world of letters in which important aspects of ‘the original’ are bracketed (so that the rest might travel more freely) and texts do not necessarily belong to their sites or moments of origin, but rather to that most exotic and indecipherable time and place in all of history: ‘our time.’---Christopher Bush, from the Introduction\nThis edition . . . supplements the Cathay long known to readers―an English-language collection with an invisible, remotely guessed-at Chinese background―with an archive of sequential conversations leading us back from the modernism of 1915 to the protest verse of the Bronze Age. . . . The Chinese ‘original,’ the mirror-image of Pound’s Cathay, has long occupied the space of an itch in the minds of poetry-readers. That original is a phantasm: Pound did not of course, translate directly from the Chinese, and what he did versify often corresponds to no Chinese original . . . . The double Cathay given here restores to history the composition process as it passed through a series of authors in a series of languages over some three thousand years; it creates, as a hron, what never was. Let it stand as ‘the invention of Cathay for our time.’---Haun Saussy, from the Foreword\nBeginning with the beautifully prepared book itself and the well-written scholarship, there is no end o