Editing Ezra Pound (section)

===Meeting Eliot, ''Cathay'', translation{{anchor|Translations from Japanese and Chinese}}===
{{further|United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany (1914)|Lost Generation}}
[[File:T.S. Eliot, 1923.JPG|thumb|upright=0.9|alt=photograph|[[T. S. Eliot]], 1923]]
When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for writers were immediately reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic.<ref>Aldington (1941), 165</ref> Pound's income from October 1914 to October 1915 was £42.10.0,<ref name="TPR">{{cite magazine |last1=Hall |first1=Donald |title=Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5 |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound |website=The Paris Review |year=1962 |volume=Summer-Fall 1962 |issue=28 |access-date=7 October 2022}}</ref> apparently five times less than the year before.<ref>Tytell (1987), 120–121.</ref>

On 22 September 1914 [[T. S. Eliot]] traveled from [[Merton College, Oxford]], with an introduction from [[Conrad Aiken]], to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "[[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]]".<ref>Moody (2007), 319; Carpenter (1988), 258</ref> Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of ''Poetry'', on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was at Oxford on a fellowship from [[Harvard University|Harvard]]—had "sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American&nbsp;... He has actually trained himself ''and'' modernized himself ''on his own''."<ref>Carpenter (1988), 258</ref> Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to [[Humphrey Carpenter]], but she published it anyway, in June 1915.<ref>Carpenter (1988), 260, 262; [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=44212 Eliot (1915)], 130–135</ref>

{{Quote box
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 | title= The River Merchant's Wife:<br />A Letter
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 | quote=<poem>At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.<br />
At fifteen, I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?</poem>
 |source= —&nbsp;"[[The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter]]" by [[Li Bai]], translated in ''[[Cathay (poetry collection)|Cathay]]'' (1915)<ref>Pound (1915), 11–12; Pound (2003a), 251–252</ref>}}

The 1915 poem ''[[Cathay (poetry collection)|Cathay]]'' contains 25 examples of [[Classical Chinese poetry]] that Pound translated into English based on the notes of the [[Oriental studies|Orientalist]] [[Ernest Fenollosa]]. Fenollosa's widow, [[Sidney McCall|Mary McNeill Fenollosa]], had given Pound her husband's notes in 1913,<ref>Moody (2007), 239</ref> after Laurence Binyon introduced them.<ref>Qian (2000), 105</ref> [[Michael J. Alexander|Michael Alexander]] saw ''Cathay'' as the most attractive of Pound's work.<ref name=Alexander95>Alexander (1979), 95</ref> There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions to Imagism and the modernization of English poetry.<ref>Twitchell-Waas (2020), 157–158</ref> English professor Steven Yao argued that ''Cathay'' shows that translation does not need a thorough knowledge of the source language.{{efn|Steven Yao does not view Pound's lack of Chinese as an obstacle, and states that the poet's trawl through centuries of scholarly interpretations resulted in a genuine understanding of the original poem.<ref>Yao (2010), 36–39</ref> Chinese poet [[An Qi (poet)|An Qi]] acknowledged a debt to Pound in her poem "Pound or the Rib of Poetry".<ref>Ying (2010), 5</ref>}}

Pound's translations from Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge.<ref name=Alexander1979p62>Alexander (1979), 62</ref> [[Robert Graves]] wrote in 1955: "[Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated ''The Seafarer''. I once asked [[Arthur Waley]] how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently."<ref>Graves (1955), 138</ref>

Pound was devastated when [[Henri Gaudier-Brzeska]], from whom he had commissioned [[Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound|a sculpture of himself]] two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published ''Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir'' (1916), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist has gone."<ref>Pound (1916), 3; Redman (1991), 27</ref> Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had written to Pound to say that he kept ''Cathay'' in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows".<ref>Pound (1916), 76; Tytell (1987), 123</ref>