"E has sent me the Chinese poems," wrote a young French-born sculptor named Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was serving as an officer on the Western Front, to his London patron Olivia Shakespear on April 11, 1915. "I keep the book in my pocket, indeed I use them to put courage in my fellows. I speak now of the 'Bowmen' and the 'North Gate,' which are so appropriate to our case."
For many months now, I've felt the need for a war poem—one appropriate to our case. One that might answer Yeats's injunction of 1916: "I think it better that in times like these / A poet's mouth be silent." Not a poem about our current situation, in some literal sense, but one that speaks to it in an authentic, irrefutable, even universal way.
Then sometime last August, with battles raging in Iraq, something triggered a memory of Gaudier-Brzeska at the front and the little book he kept in his pocket.
That book, Cathay, published in London in April 1915, was a curious pamphlet containing eleven "Chinese" poems by Ezra Pound. It came in a drab tan wrapper—a reference, perhaps, to the uniforms then being worn, and shredded, in Belgium and France.
At the front of the volume appeared this puzzling inscription:
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.
Some explanation, some deciphering, is required. Rihaku is the Japanese form of Li Po, the great T'ang Dynasty poet who lived from 701 to 762. Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) was an American scholar of Far Eastern literature whose voluminous notes on classical Chinese poetry—compiled in Tokyo in 1896-99 and containing the Chinese characters accompanied by rough English translations of the poems—had been entrusted to Pound by Fenollosa's widow in 1912. The professors Mori and Ariga were the Japanese scholars who served as Fenollosa's translators and interpreters of the Chinese texts. Fenollosa, you see, couldn't read Chinese. Neither could Pound.