BK. Ezra Pound

98. Kenner, Hugh. Introduction to The Translations of Ezra Pound (60), 1953.

Kenner writes that if Pound’s work with the nô ‘is somehow less successful’ than the poems of Cathay (15), it is because ‘there is less of Pound in them’. We may be ‘teased from time to time by traces of Yeats’ in the nô translations, but ‘we have only to put [a passage from them] beside something from Cathay . . . to sense a remoteness, a sense on Pound’s part that he is doing something exotic, thin, appreciated rather than lived, that just prevents the Noh sequence from standing, as Cathay does, with his finest original work’. Regarding the ‘traces of Yeats’, see especially 154 and 175.