Cathay was published by Elkin Mathews in April 1915 and contains fourteen poems translated (or, more accurately, re-created) from the Chinese — primarily from the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa, the American scholar of Asian art who died in 1908 and whose literary papers were given to Pound by his widow in 1913. T.S. Eliot called these translations “the invention of Chinese poetry for our time,” and they remain — after more than a century and countless more scholarly translations — the most beautiful renderings of Chinese poetry into English.
The Poems
The collection includes:
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (by Li Po/Li Bai) — perhaps the most perfect poem Pound ever published: a young wife’s letter to her traveling husband, moving from childhood shyness through first love to present loneliness. “At fourteen I married My Lord you. / I never laughed, being bashful…” Every line is exactly right.
“Exile’s Letter” (by Li Po) — a longer poem of friendship, drinking, parting, and the passage of time. “And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going, / Over roads twisted like sheeps’ guts.”
“The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” (by Li Po) — Pound’s most compressed translation: five lines in which a court lady’s loneliness is expressed entirely through imagery (dew on jade stairs, the lateness of the hour) without a single explicit statement of emotion.
“Lament of the Frontier Guard” — war weariness expressed through landscape: “Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.”
“Song of the Bowmen of Shu” (from the Shih Ching) — soldiers longing for home: “We have been here since spring… / But we are tired and could cry.”
Method
Pound could not read Chinese. He worked from Fenollosa’s notes — which included character-by-character glosses, explanatory annotations, and Japanese pronunciation guides (Fenollosa had studied Chinese poetry through Japanese intermediaries). Sinologists have attacked the translations for inaccuracies: misidentified speakers, conflated poems, historical errors.
None of this matters. Pound was not producing scholarly cribs; he was writing English poems that captured something essential about the originals — their imagistic precision, their emotional restraint, their trust that concrete details carry feeling without explanation. The method is Imagist: “direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.”
The result proved that Pound’s Imagist principles were not arbitrary avant-garde prescriptions but descriptions of how the best poetry had always worked — across cultures, across centuries. Chinese poetry confirmed what Pound already believed: that poetry is not rhetoric but perception.
Significance
Cathay changed English-language poetry permanently. It demonstrated that translation could be a creative act of the highest order. It introduced Chinese poetry to English readers in a form they could actually experience as poetry (rather than as anthropological curiosity). And it provided working poets with new models: new tones, new structures, new ways of expressing emotion through image rather than statement.
Collecting Cathay
First edition (Elkin Mathews, London, 1915): Cream wrappers with Chinese-style design. Slim pamphlet format.
Identification points:
- Elkin Mathews imprint
- 1915 date on title page
- 32 pages
- Paper wrappers (no cloth binding)
Market values: Fine copies bring $3,000–$8,000. The pamphlet format means many copies were damaged or discarded; fine surviving copies are genuinely scarce.
Signed copies: $8,000–$15,000.
Cathay is one of the cornerstones of any serious collection of modern poetry. Its combination of supreme literary quality, historical importance, and attractive physical format (the slim pamphlet, the Chinese-influenced design) makes it permanently desirable.