BK. Ezra Pound

84. To Homer Pound, January 1914. Quoted in Carpenter (181), 1988, p. 224.

Apparently Pound was enthralled enough by his work with Chinese and Japanese materials that he considered emigrating with his parents either to China or Japan (see also 59i, 82b2, 82e1, 176f). Carpenter suggests that Pound had met an official of the Chinese Mint in London ‘who seemed confident that he could provide a job for Homer Pound in Peking, and was confident of finding something for Ezra himself’, and then quotes from this letter: ‘We may yet be a united family [in China]’, Pound tells his father, adding, not quite correctly, as he no doubt knew, that if they moved to Japan the people would have difficulty knowing what to call him, for ‘the phonetic translation of my name into the Japanese tongue [means] “This picture of a phallus costs ten yen”’.