BK. Ezra Pound
Notes:
It is impossible to draw a strict line between Pound’s Chinese and Japanese interests. The listing here includes those ‘Chinese’ works that have clear sources in Japanese materials, and studies of them that focus on their Japanese origins, and strictly excludes all others. Thus, Cathay (15), Pound’s versions of Chinese poems filtered through Fenollosa and his Japanese teachers, is noted, while his Confucian translations, arrived at variously from earlier English translations from the Chinese, Judith Gautier’s French, and other non-Japanese sources, are not. Likewise, Cheadle’s study of the Confucian translations (205) is included for its attention to the relation between Pound’s Confucianism and the nô, while Kenner’s ‘The Invention of China’, the arguments of which might be applied to Pound’s Japanese interests but in the study itself are not, is not.
b. Page references and textual problems.
Pound’s versions of the nô and the cantos relevant to this study are listed according to date of first publication, but page references in annotations have been adjusted to the versions most readily available, the nô section of the enlarged edition of The Translations of Ezra Pound (60) and the enlarged thirteenth printing of the New Directions Cantos of Ezra Pound, 3rd ed. (see 57). The difficulties of establishing a definitive text of The Cantos are immense, and are only considered here when they are directly related to this study. Readers wishing fuller guidance are referred to Barbara Eastman’s Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’: The Story of the Text, 1948-1975 (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), Peter Makin’s ‘The State of the Text’, in Pound’s Cantos (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), and Richard Taylor’s ‘The History and State of the Texts’, in A Poem Containing History (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997). All interested in these matters await publication of Taylor’s Variorum Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound, many years in preparation, which will appear from Cambridge University Press.
All primary-list periodical publications through 1990 are reprinted in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals, 11 vols., edited by Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York: Garland, 1991).
