Cathay: Ezra Pound's Orient

The English literati were fascinated by China at the turn of the century. London was a breeding ground for the avant-garde and modernist writers like Eliot, Yeats and Pound became infatuated—but only Pound set out to re-invent, re-connect and eventually "rethink the nature of an English poem." Published in 1915, Pound’s translations were popular and highly controversial. His bold interpretations of Chinese form, wording and metric often bore little resemblance to the original. Cathay set the stage for a new approach to poetry and eventually for a newfound East in the West.

Ira Nadel is an American-Canadian biographer and literary critic. Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography. He has also been awarded a Killam Research Prize, Mellon and Dorot Fellowships at the Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale. Nadel is the author of Ezra Pound: A LIterary Life and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. He is a book critic on CBC radio and a professor at University of British Columbia.