Not New Poems but Translations: Ezra Pound’s Image-Centered Cathay from Chinese Tang Poetry

Abstract

This article reassesses Ezra Pound’s Cathay as translation from Chinese Tang poetry rather than autonomous modernist verse. Building on Pound’s own poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, we argue that Cathay maintains translational fidelity by preserving and sharpening images while accepting losses in prosodic form and thinning some culture-specific encyclopaedias. Methodologically, we conduct a qualitative, contrastive microanalysis of two Li Bai poems “送友人” (Taking Leave of a Friend) and “长干行” (The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter), aligning the Chinese text, a neutral interlinear gloss, and Pound’s English version. A coding scheme tracks image handling, cultural markers, prosody, and the balance of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia alongside domestication/foreignization choices. Findings show a stable hierarchy—image (phanopoeia)–stance (logopoeia)–sound/form (melopoeia)—that aligns with Chinese esthetic dynamics of yi/xiang (idea/form) and qing/jing (emotion/scene). Pound’s practice preserves correlative imagery (mountains/river/sunset; moss/leaves/butterflies) and voice, while paratextual titling, address terms, folklore allusions, toponyms, and a fifth-month calendar line reveal domestications, distortions, or omissions traceable to mediation via Fenollosa’s notes. We propose mechanism-sensitive criteria for evaluating distant-pair lyric translation: not formal replication, but reconstruction of the poem’s image–scene–emotion economy. On that basis, Cathay functions as translation—at justified costs. Rather than resolving the long-standing debate on Cathay, we offer a mechanism-sensitive account of how, in two central Li Bai poems, Pound’s image-centred poetics yields a limited but defensible form of translational fidelity within a relay-translation setting.

1. Introduction

Translation is a privileged site of intercultural communication: it circulates values, aesthetics, and worldviews across linguistic borders while inevitably reshaping them. Rather than a neutral transfer of meaning, translation is, as Lefevere argues, a form of “rewriting” that refracts the source text through the translator’s poetics and the target culture’s constraints (Lefevere 2017). Few modern cases crystallise this productive tension as sharply as Ezra Pound’s renderings of Chinese Tang poetry in Cathay (1915) (Kenner 1971; Yip 1969). Pound’s versions have long divided critics: are they innovative English poems loosely “after” Chinese sources, or are they still recognisably translations whose procedures and aims can be specified?

This article reassesses Cathay as translation by foregrounding Pound’s consistent, programmatic prioritisation of the image—his pursuit of “direct treatment of the thing,” economy of expression, and rhythm “in the sequence of the musical phrase” (Pound and Eliot 1968). Read through the lens of his triad—phanopoeia (image), melopoeia (sound), logopoeia (intellect/play)—Pound’s practice privileges what can cross languages with relative integrity (phanopoeia and aspects of logopoeia) while accepting losses where sound and prosodic patterning (melopoeia) are central. This imagist logic dovetails with key coordinates of classical Chinese poetics, especially the relation between yi/xiang (idea/form) and qing/jing (emotion/scene), in which thought is realised as concrete form and affect fuses with landscape. In other words, Pound translates toward images not despite Chinese aesthetics, but in ways that can be read as structurally compatible with them.

At the same time, Cathay was mediated by Ernest Fenollosa’s notes and Japanese intermediaries (Fenollosa and Pound 2008), and its Anglophone audience design is unmistakable. Scholarship has accordingly split. One strand underscores creative gain, intercultural transmission, and modernist renewal (e.g., Pei 2024; Mauro 2022; Fang 2021; An 2025), noting Pound’s meticulous selection of visual details, his ideogrammic juxtapositions, and the role of Cathay in catalysing imagist poetics in English. Another strand stresses cultural loss, misprision, and “Chinoiserie”—that is, a Western reimagining of “Chineseness” that attenuates historical and folkloric specificities (Tang 2011; Gao 2001; Witchard 2015; Wu 2021). These critiques often point to domestications of address terms (妾/郎/君), place-name distortions, seasonal symbolism flattened for non-Chinese readers, and the abandonment of regulated verse forms. Both readings capture something essential: Pound’s versions are at once enabling and distorting, inventive and constrained.

In practice, reception has never been limited to a simple binary. A substantial body of work already treats Cathay as a layered relay translation and as a “textual collaboration” across Chinese, Japanese, and Anglo-American mediators, instead of choosing between “pure translation” and “pure invention” (Hayot 1999; Qian 1995; Yao 2010; Saussy 2008; Billings 2019; Lin 2023). These studies emphasise the multi-step chain—from Li Bai through Mori and Ariga’s lessons, Fenollosa’s English notes, to Pound’s lyric rewriting—and analyse Cathay as both modernist experiment and mediated translation. Our aim is not to rediscover a “compromise position,” but to put this now familiar view on a finer analytic footing: we ask how, at line level, Pound’s decisions distribute gains and losses across images, sound, stance, and cultural encyclopaedias in two Li Bai poems, once the relay through Fenollosa’s notebooks is taken into account.

This article advances the debate by reframing the question. Rather than ask whether Pound produced “new poems” or “translations,” we ask how his translational choices operate and what kind of fidelity they establish. Our thesis is that Cathay functions as translation because its systematic preservation and sharpening of images—underwritten by Pound’s declared poetics—maintains the core aesthetic dynamics of the Chinese poems (yi/xiang; qing/jing), even as melopoeic features and some culture-specific markers are reduced, adapted, or misread. At the same time, Cathay is inseparable from Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks and their Japanese sources. Recent work has shown that these cribs are not simply “defective,” but on the whole a remarkably reliable transmission of Mori Kainan’s sinological learning, structured in two passes: word-for-word glosses and more accurate paraphrases. Apparent “errors” arise from the relay configuration itself—Mori & Ariga’s glossing strategies, Fenollosa’s note-taking, and Pound’s own selective re-use and misreadings—rather than from a single “faulty” level. Our analysis therefore treats mediation not as noise to be dismissed, but as a constitutive feature of how Cathay works. To make this case, we integrate three complementary frameworks. First, we treat Pound’s phanopoeia/logopoeia/melopoeia as an operative model of what is translatable in lyric. Second, we draw selectively on Chinese poetics to articulate what “counts” as aesthetic fidelity in the Tang poems: the coupling of emotion and scene (qing/jing) and the realisation of idea in concrete form (yi/xiang). Third, we position Pound’s procedures within translation studies debates on domestication and foreignization, as well as Lefevere’s rewriting: Cathay negotiates visibility of the foreign while calibrating accessibility for Anglophone readers, yielding a hybrid profile at the boundary of the two strategies (Miyake 2009; Pinheiro 2015; Williams 2009).

Strictly speaking, Pound’s labour here is a mixed case of interlingual and intralingual translation: he rewrites English glosses and paraphrases into an English lyric idiom, while those glosses themselves crystallise Chinese and Japanese readings. Following Billings (2019) and Saussy (2023), we use “translation” in this article to refer to this entire relay rather than to a non-existent direct Chinese–English operation

Methodologically, the article employs a qualitative, contrastive microanalysis of two Li Bai poems that anchor Cathay: “送友人” (“Taking Leave of a Friend”) and “长干行” (“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”). For each poem we align (i) the Chinese text, (ii) a neutral interlinear gloss, and (iii) Pound’s English version. We then code line by line for (a) image handling (preserved, intensified, reconfigured), (b) cultural markers (retained/omitted/domesticated), (c) sound/form features (rhyme, regulated parallelism, tonal patterning), and (d) stance/attitude (logopoeic effects). Particular attention is paid to items often cited in the secondary literature—colour terms (青), address forms, toponyms (瞿塘/滟滪堆), seasonal and animal imagery (butterflies, monkeys), and closure formulae—so that our reading directly tests contested points. Our focus is deliberately restricted to these two Li Bai poems. We do not offer a comprehensive account of Cathay as a whole, and we acknowledge that other pieces in the volume—including problematic cases such as “The River Song,” where Pound appears to fuse two distinct source texts—may follow different translational logics.

Our analysis of “送友人” shows a consistent sharpening of visual contrasts (mountains/water; sunset/farewell), a deliberate acceptance of melopoeic loss (regulated verse, antithetical couplets), and an effective fusion of scene and emotion compatible with qing/jing. “长干行” reveals both Pound’s fine-grained retention of everyday detail (hair, gate, plums, “seat” rather than “bed”) and his domestication of address terms and folklore allusions; yet the imagistic and affective throughline remains intact, culminating in an ethos of waiting and fidelity that maps onto yi/xiang dynamics. Across cases, we find a systematic translational logic: image fidelity over prosodic fidelity, selective domestication to stabilise intelligibility, and an ideogrammic habit of juxtaposition that scaffolds meaning without heavy exposition.

The contribution is twofold and modest in scope. Substantively, we provide a disciplined account of how, in these two Li Bai poems, Pound’s versions meet defensible criteria of translational fidelity within a cross-cultural poetics framework, clarifying why they can still function as translations in spite of their well-known shortcomings. Conceptually, we model an analysis that aligns a modernist poetics (Pound’s triad) with Chinese aesthetic categories (yi/xiang; qing/jing) and translation theory (domestication/foreignization; rewriting), moving the discussion beyond binary judgments toward a mechanism-sensitive evaluation of how these translations work.

1.1. Pound and Imagism: Programme, Sources, and the Place of Cathay

Ezra Pound’s early poetics consolidated in three often-cited imagist maxims: (1) direct treatment of the thing (whether subjective or objective), (2) no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and (3) rhythm in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome (Pound and Eliot 1968). As critical commonplaces, these principles risk sounding merely programmatic; in practice they define a hierarchy of values that privileges image and intonation over inherited stanzaic patterning and ornamental diction. Pound’s 1915 collection Cathay is frequently read as the laboratory where these principles are stress-tested against distant poetic material. The volume presents English poems “for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Bai], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the deciphering of the professors Mori and Ariga” (Pound 1915). That prefatory disclosure matters: Pound is translating through a scholarly apparatus (Fenollosa’s drafts, glosses, and occasional paraphrases mediated via Japanese), not from direct control of Classical Chinese.

Two corollaries follow for our analysis. First, the “ideogrammic method” (Fenollosa and Pound 2008) often invoked as Pound’s discovery, is better treated as a poetic strategy of juxtaposition and imagistic concatenation than as a philological doctrine about Chinese writing. For Pound the method licenses the assembly of concrete particulars to suggest abstract relations, a technique that coincides with his first two imagist maxims and with Cathay ’s pressure toward vivid equivalences (Cao and Zhai 2023; Öztürk 2012). Second, because Pound’s access to Chinese metrics and tonal patterning is indirect, Cathay routinely sacrifices melopoeic features (rhyme class, regulated parallelism, tonal antithesis) while intensifying visual contrasts, scene-setting, and emotional stance—moves consistent with imagist priorities. Our question, then, is not whether Cathay is “faithful” in a narrow formalist sense, but whether its image-first translational logic maps onto defensible criteria of fidelity for the Tang poems it adapts.

Two compact coordinates from classical Chinese poetics guide our readings. The first is 意/象 (yi/xiang), typically glossed as idea/thought (yi) and image/form (xiang). In lyric composition, the thought is realised as a concrete image; conversely, the image is meaningful precisely because it crystallises a value or attitude (Guo 2017; Zhao 2015). This is not a crude sign–referent mapping; it is an aesthetic economy where abstraction is earned by specificity (Owen 1985; Cai 2008). For translators, the practical implication is clear: if the xiang is preserved convincingly, much of the poem’s yi can survive cross-linguistic transfer, even when etymological puns or tonal play are lost.

The second is 情/景 (qing/jing), the fusion of emotion (qing) and scene (jing). Classical criticism often treats the highest lyric achievement as a harmonious interpenetration whereby feelings are refracted through landscape and landscape is saturated with affect. This does not entail explicit statement of emotion; rather, it relies on correlative imagery—seasonal cues, animal cries, colours, weather, and distances—to cue a culturally legible emotive field (Su 2024; Wan 2022; Owen 1985; Cai 2008). In regulated verse (律诗) such relations are frequently intensified by parallel couplets and rhyme; yet the principle of qing/jing precedes its metrical instantiations.

These two coordinates are not esoteric addenda. They are the very places where Pound’s imagist programme can interlock with Chinese poetics: a focus on tangible particulars (xiang) and on scenes that carry emotion without discursive statement (jing). When Pound sharpens contrasts (“blue mountains/white river,” sunset at parting), he is not merely “modernizing” but often activating the same compositional economy that makes the Tang originals legible. Conversely, when Pound truncates or domesticates culturally charged images (e.g., address terms; folklore allusions; toponyms), we can specify not only that something is lost but which dimension—yi, xiang, qing, or jing—is attenuated and how that affects the poem’s functioning.

1.2. Translation Frameworks Employed

Pound’s triad offers an operational model of what may or may not cross languages (Pound 1960). Phanopoeia—words throwing a visual image on the imagination—is “most” translatable; melopoeia—meaning charged by sound—is least portable across unrelated prosodic systems; and logopoeia—intellectual play and tonal stance—can travel when the target language affords comparable pragmatic resources. In Cathay, Pound predictably emphasises phanopoeia, accepts melopoeic loss, and pursues logopoeic effects through stance, address, and pragmatic register rather than through inherited Chinese forms. Our analyses code line by line for those three channels, asking how Pound re-weights them to keep poems functionally alive in English.

A useful cross-check—with economy of exposition—is Hasan’s distinction between first-order semiosis (lexico-grammar, phonology) and second-order semiosis (verbal art: symbolic articulation, theme) (Hasan 1985). Phanopoeia aligns with first-order resources that can be re-instantiated in the target language; logopoeia overlaps with second-order patterning (stance, thematic articulation). Melopoeia straddles both but is the most system-bound, hence the most fragile in transfer. We use this alignment only heuristically to justify why preserving images and stance can plausibly sustain literary value despite losses of tonal regulation and rhyme class.

We situate Pound’s solutions along the domestication–foreignization spectrum, treating outcomes as poem-specific mixtures rather than a binary; the detailed trade-offs are analysed in the Discussion (Miyake 2009; Pinheiro 2015; Williams 2009).

Finally, following Lefevere’s notion of translation as rewriting conditioned by poetics, ideology, and patronage (Lefevere 2017), we locate Cathay within its material and institutional constraints: Pound’s modernist agenda, Anglophone readerships, wartime publishing, and crucially, Fenollosa’s intermediary notes. On this view, the recurrent “errors” (e.g., place-name distortions; misread seasonal markers) are not merely lapses but system effects of the rewriting situation: third-hand access to the source, an English lyric idiom optimised for image and cadence, and a paratext (the Cathay preface) that frames the enterprise as translational yet boldly interpretive. The value of the rewriting frame is diagnostic: it keeps us from retrofitting an impossible criterion of form-identical fidelity and instead asks whether Pound’s version reconstructs the poem’s operating aesthetics (image/scene/emotion economy) for its new system.

Taken together, these anchors yield a concise evaluative metric. Pound’s imagist maxims predict image-forward solutions; Chinese poetics tells us which images matter and how they carry emotion; the triad (with Hasan as cross-check) specifies what kinds of effects can plausibly transfer; domestication/foreignization and rewriting explain why certain cultural markers are muted while imagistic contrasts are intensified. Our case studies operationalize this metric: we track where xiang is preserved or reconfigured, where qing/jing is sustained or flattened, how phanopoeia/logopoeia/melopoeia are re-weighted, and how domestication/foreignization choices mediate accessibility and alterity. This allows us to argue, with evidence, that Cathay functions as translation not by replicating Tang forms but by re-creating the poems’ imagistic and affective economy under modernist constraints.

2. Results

2.1. Case Study 1: “送友人”—“Taking Leave of a Friend”

2.1.1. Image Handling and Qing/Jing

Pound opens with a sharpened chromatic and spatial contrast—“Blue mountains…/White River…”—that intensifies the scene’s visual legibility while fusing landscape with the emotion of parting. The eastward city is omitted and “walls” are pluralized; both moves tighten focus on separation rather than urban topography. This paratactic sequencing (“mountains/river/separation/dead grass”) exemplifies ideogrammic juxtaposition: concrete particulars accumulate to suggest the abstract tenor (inevitability of parting) without discursive explanation. Throughout the first stanza, qing/jing is maintained: feelings are refracted through the scene (cold north, winding water, “dead grass”), not stated.

The modal necessity in “Here we must make separation” heightens the affect. It also revises a more literal “once make separation” toward a pragmatic stance of ineluctability—an interpretive intensification rather than a mere paraphrase. Similarly, “Mind like a floating wide cloud” both preserves and amplifies the source image: the added “wide” broadens affective scope, and the simile brings the “wanderer” into the mind’s figuration, even as lexical ties to the traveller are loosened.

In the second movement, sunset is recast as “the parting of old acquaintances,” turning implicit correlation into explicit simile. The farewell gesture is domesticated (“bow over their clasped hands at a distance”), supplying a culturally legible posture for Anglophone readers while keeping the visual at centre. The closing image—horses neighing to each other “as we are departing”—extends qing/jing by letting the natural world index human feeling, a strategy fully consonant with Tang poetics and Pound’s phanopoeic priorities.

2.1.2. Cultural Markers and Domestication/Foreignization

“East city” is dropped; the river/city relation is generalised to “river winding about them.” This domesticates local specificity but foreignizes syntax and pacing via parataxis and lexemic economy.

“Clasped hands” supplies a clear, respectful leave-taking gesture that Anglophones can picture—domestication in service of image legibility.

Colour term “青” is rendered “blue,” a defensible but selective choice (green/blue range). It pushes the scene toward coolness and distance, reinforcing mood.

2.1.3. Prosody and Melopoeia

All regulated-verse features (rhyme class; tonal antithesis; parallel couplets) are abandoned. Pound substitutes cadential phrasing and line-length variation; the gain is discursivity and breath; the loss is Chinese melopoeia and syntactic parallelism as meaning. His wager is that phanopoeia (mountains/river/sunset/horses) and logopoeia (stance of necessity; ceremonious leave-taking) will carry the lyric experience without the original’s prosodic lattice.

Judging from the analysis of each line as represented in

Table 1. “送友人”—“Taking Leave of a Friend”.

Chinese (CN)	Neutral Gloss	Pound (1915)	Image/Culture Note
青山横北郭	green/blue mountains lie across the north wall	Blue mountains to the north of the walls,	Chooses “blue” for 青; plural “walls”; chromatic/spatial contrast.
白水绕东城	white waters encircle the east city	White river winding about them	Drops “east/city”; keeps river image; parataxis.
此地一为别	here once/now make separation	Here we must make separation	Modal “must” heightens inevitability.
孤蓬万里征	solitary tumbleweed; ten-thousand-li journey	And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass	Reconfigures “孤蓬” to landscape; departure mood.
浮云游子意	floating clouds = traveller’s mind	Mind like a floating wide cloud.	Adds “wide”; phanopoeia
落日故人情	setting sun = old friend’s feeling	Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances	Correlation made explicit via simile.
挥手自兹去	wave hands; from here, go	Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.	Gesture domesticated for clarity.
萧萧班马鸣	soughing; parting horses neigh	Our horses neigh to each other/as we are departing.	Keeps sound image; slight amplification.

, we might draw several concluding remarks, (1) consistent image sharpening with minimal exposition sustains yi/xiang and qing/jing. (2) Cultural compression (east city omitted) and gesture domestication co-exist with syntactic foreignization (parataxis). (3) Melopoeic and form-level features are traded for imagistic cadence; the poem still functions as a translation by preserving the imagistic-affective economy.

2.2. Case Study 2: “长干行” (Changgan Xing) → “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

Pound retitles the poem to foreground genre (“A Letter”) and social roles (“The River-Merchant’s Wife”) rather than the locale “Changgan.” This is a decisive domestication at the paratextual level: it primes readers for epistolary intimacy and clarifies perspective. While it erases a culturally saturated toponym, it strengthens logopoeia—the voice and stance of the speaker—by making situation and address explicit from the threshold.

The opening vignette (“hair cut straight across my forehead,” “pulling flowers,” “bamboo stilts,” “blue plums,” “seat” not “bed”) shows high-fidelity phanopoeia. As detailed in

Table 2. “长干行” (Changgan xing) → “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”.

Chinese (CN)	Neutral Gloss	Pound (1915)	Image/Culture Note
妾发初覆额	my hair first covered forehead	While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead	High-fidelity domestic detail.
折花门前剧	pluck flowers; play at the gate	I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.	Preserved image.
郎骑竹马来	lad rides bamboo horse, comes	You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,	“Stilts” for bamboo horse; play preserved.
绕床弄青梅	circle seat/bed; play green plums	…about my seat, playing with blue plums.	“Seat” avoids sexualizing; 青 → “blue”.
同居长干里	together dwell in Changgan	…living in the village of Chokan:	Nonstandard romanization retained.
两小无嫌猜	two small ones, no dislike/suspect	Two small people, without dislike or suspicion	Ethical clarity preserved.
十四为君妇	at fourteen became your wife	At fourteen I married/My Lord you.	Address terms domesticated; deference hint.
羞颜未尝开	shy face not yet opened	I never laughed, being bashful.	Idiom → affect paraphrase.
十五始展眉	at fifteen began to unfurl brows	At fifteen I stopped scowling,	Vehicle shift; value kept.
常存抱柱信	keep the “embracing-the-pillar” pledge	—	Folklore allusion flattened/omitted.
岂上望夫台	why climb the husband-watching terrace	Why should I climb the look out?	Literalized; texture reduced.
瞿塘滟滪堆	Qutang, Yanyu Dui	…into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies	Toponyms distorted; hazard image added.
五月不可触	fifth lunar month perilous	And you have been gone five months.	Calendar → duration misread.
猿声天上哀	monkeys’ cries above plaintive	The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.	Pathos foregrounded.
门前迟行迹	slow-going traces by gate	You dragged your feet when you went out.	Hesitation preserved and sharpened as embodied reluctance
一一生绿苔	one-by-one green moss grows	By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses.	Slight amplification.
苔深不能扫	moss deep, cannot be swept	Too deep to clear them away!	Depth of moss marks long absence; grief as something no longer “sweepable”
落叶秋风早	leaves fall; autumn wind early	The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.	Preserved seasonal correlate; early autumn as melancholy marker
八月蝴蝶来	in eighth month butterflies come	The paired butterflies are already yellow with August	Conjugal pairing retained.
双飞西园草	in pairs they fly over West-garden grass	Over the grass in the West garden	Adds precise locus (West garden); correlative scene of conjugal pairing.
感此伤妾心	feeling this, it wounds my heart	They hurt me.	Explicit comment on affect; Pound condenses the emotional impact of the butterflies into a brief statement.
坐愁红颜老	sitting in sorrow that my red cheeks grow old	I grow older.	Chinese idiom of feminine beauty ageing flattened to a simple temporal statement; logopoeia > image.
早晚下三巴	sooner or later you will come down through Sanba	If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,	Geographic marker “三巴” generalised as “the narrows of the river Kiang”; journey peril retained; exact toponym blurred.
预将书报家	send a letter home in advance	Please let me know beforehand,	High-fidelity rendering of the pragmatic request; little imagery.
相迎不道远	to meet you, not calling it far	And I will come out to meet you	Core intention preserved; explicit “not far” nuance implied rather than stated.
直至长风沙	straight to Changfengsha	As far as Cho-fu-Sa.	Distorted romanization; endpoint kept.

, Pound retains the everyday objects that anchor the couple’s childhood, avoiding sensational misreading (e.g., “bed” would have sexualized “床”). “Blue plums” again fixes on one end of 青’s spectrum; the choice paints a cool, childlike palette and preserves the cultural gesture (playing with unripe plums). The line “Two small people, without dislike or suspicion” keeps the ethical clarity of the original in clean, idiomatic English.

Address terms are domesticated: “妾/郎/君” become “I/you/My Lord you.” The last preserves some deference but collapses finer gradations of social deixis. This streamlines readability at the cost of pragmatic nuance.

Pound’s “At fourteen I married/My Lord you./I never laughed, being bashful” compresses and clarifies developmental transitions. The crucial idiom “展眉” is rendered as “stopped scowling,” which reconfigures an idiomatic “unfurling of brows” (blossoming into maturity) into an Anglophone affect term. The core trajectory (from shyness to openness) survives, but the metaphoric vehicle shifts from Chinese physiognomic idiom to English emotional lexicon.

Two culture-loaded allusions—抱柱 (the faithful lover grasping the pillar) and 望夫台 (the “husband-watching terrace”)—are flattened: Pound supplies the general idea (“I desired my dust to be mingled with yours… Why should I climb the look out?”) while omitting narrative provenance. The value (fidelity, constancy) remains, but cultural texture (story-worlds that carry that value) is reduced.

The journey sequence amplifies a cluster of contested points. (1) Toponyms. As Billings’s reconstruction of Fenollosa’s notebooks shows, Mori and Ariga’s crib clearly distinguishes the dangerous rock Yanyudui 灩澦堆 (“Yenyo tai”) from the gorge at Qu Tang 瞿塘 (“Kuto”), glossing Yanyudui as a towering stone in the Yangzi that generated “whirling eddies” hazardous to boats (Billings 2019, pp. 121–2). Pound’s “Ku-to-Yen” compresses these into a single, hybridised form that matches neither modern Pinyin nor the Japanese-derived spellings, obscuring precise geography while preserving the idea of a narrow, turbulent reach of river. Similarly, “Cho-fu-Sa” corresponds to 長風沙 (Changfengsha) via a Japanese-style romanization; the sense of a remote meeting point survives, but geographic anchoring is blurred. (2) Calendar line. Fenollosa’s notes gloss 五月不可触 as “not to be touched in the fifth month; the ship must be careful of them in May,” preserving the traditional view of the fifth lunar month as a season of hydrological danger. Pound’s “And you have been gone five months” is therefore his own reorientation of the line from seasonal peril to elapsed time. Billings notes that Pound’s “five months” follows only the gloss (“5/month”), not the paraphrase or commentary (Billings 2019, p. 129, n. 24). This misinterpretation reorients the line from environmental risk to temporal absence: the affect (danger/sorrow) is preserved, but the mechanism (calendar lore and river conditions) is replaced by a purely chronological reading. (3) Monkeys. “The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead” reads the cry as pathos rather than a mark of wilderness/rapids and travel peril. This is another re-interpretation that channels the image toward subjective tone.

From “You dragged your feet when you went out” through the double moss image (“the moss is grown… too deep to clear them away”), “early leaves,” and “paired butterflies,” Pound closely preserves the visual sequence. The moss that has grown so thick it cannot be swept away marks both the duration of absence and the weight of grief; he lets this correlative scene stand without gloss. Yet their cultural valences shift subtly: Moss indexes long absence—fully compatible; Early falling leaves remain a melancholy sign but are not tied to mid-autumn festival resonances; Butterflies appear “already yellow with August… over the grass in the West Garden.” The symbol of conjugal pairing and seasonal mortality is present, but the coded cultural density (southern species, life cycle, conjugal emblem) is muted. Still, the imagistic throughline—time passing, pair-bonding, grief—is clear. Analysing the poem’s closing sequence (蝴蝶黄/双飞西园草/感此伤妾心/坐愁红颜老/早晚下三巴/预将书报家/相迎不道远/直至长风沙), it becomes clear that Li Bai briefly tilts away from pure correlative imagery toward explicit reflection and projected action. The Chinese text names the wound to the speaker’s heart and her fear of ageing (“伤妾心… 红颜老”) and then moves into pragmatic planning: the husband will eventually “come down through Sanba,” he should write ahead, and she will go out to meet him without complaining of the distance. Pound compresses the explicitly discursive parts into the short statement “They hurt me. I grow older.” and redistributes the forward-looking content into the travel plan (“If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,/Please let me know beforehand… As far as Cho-fu-Sa.”). Even in this less imagistic stretch of the source, he lets one visual node—the paired butterflies over the West-garden grass—carry both the emotional shock and the implied future, while rendering the rest with minimal, almost prosaic phrasing. This is precisely where the limits of an image-first translational logic show: it can absorb overt statement into a single strong image and a few bare declaratives, but the result is a leaner, more linear closure than Li Bai’s mixture of image, lament, and logistics. “Please let me know beforehand… I will come out to meet you,/As far as Cho-fu-Sa.” The request formula (“please… beforehand”) is strikingly formal in English for a spousal letter; it may be Pound’s late compensation for having domesticated 妾 earlier, reasserting deference at closure. The terminal toponym again uses a nonstandard romanization. Nonetheless the ethos of fidelity is intact: the speaker will traverse distance to meet the beloved.

2.3. Cross-Case Synthesis: Systematic Tendencies

Read across the two case studies, Pound’s procedure emerges as an image-first translational logic. He consistently preserves or intensifies the poem’s visual spine—chromatic landscapes, journey markers, domestic particulars, seasonal correlates—while accepting losses in regulated form (rhyme class, tonal parallelism, antithetical couplets). This is not merely a modernist preference but remains operationally compatible with compact coordinates of Chinese lyric theory. Whenever a concrete vehicle bears the thought, yi/xiang remains intact, and qing/jing persists through correlative scenes—mountain/river/sunset; moss/leaves/butterflies—so that feeling is shown rather than declared. Even where local construal shift (e.g., monkey cries read as pathos rather than a wilderness omen), the mechanism of signification remains imagistic rather than expository.

Across both poems, a hybrid domestication–foreignization profile emerges; for examples and implications, see the Discussion. Where meaning does shift, the pattern is mechanism-sensitive. Images heavily burdened with cultural encyclopaedias tend to retain their axiological vector (fidelity, constancy) while losing textualized story-frames; natural correlates preserve both vehicle and tenor; polysemous lexemes anchored in colour systems or calendrics (青; the fifth lunar month) are resolved toward stable Anglophone readings, sustaining affect at the expense of cultural precision. Taken together, these tendencies support the article’s thesis: Cathay functions as translation not by replicating Tang prosody or its encyclopaedic scaffolds, but by reconstructing in English the poems’ imagistic and affective economy in line with Pound’s priorities and with core dynamics of Chinese lyric (yi/xiang; qing/jing). Where specificity thins, the losses are systematic and locally intelligible—traceable to audience design and mediation—rather than amounting to a wholesale abdication of translational responsibility.

3. Discussion

This study set out to move beyond the binary “original poem vs. translation” verdict that has long structured reception of Cathay. Read through the dual lenses of Pound’s declared poetics and compact coordinates from Chinese lyric theory, the two case studies support a mechanism-sensitive account: Pound translates by making im-ages carry the poem, even when this entails attenuating prosodic form and thinning parts of the cultural encyclopaedia. We therefore synthesise what this means for Pound as translator, for domestication/foreignization trade-offs, for the alignment between Pound’s triad and Hasan’s two-order semiosis, and for the limits imposed by mediation and system differences.

Across both poems—“送友人” and “长干行”—Pound consistently preserves or intensifies the lyric’s visual spine: chromatic landscapes, domestic objects, and season-al/animal correlates. Where direct transfer of regulated form is impracticable, he relies on phanopoeia and a calibrated logopoeic stance (necessity, deference, constancy) to keep the poem’s affective and conceptual economy intelligible. The fidelity at stake is not formal replication of tonal parallelism or rhyme class but the maintenance of the poem’s imagistic-affective operations—the very locus where Chinese poetics situates lyric value through yi/xiang (idea realised in image) and qing/jing (emotion fused with scene). The line-level record bears this out: “blue mountains/white river/dead grass” in “送友人”; “hair/flowers/bamboo/blue plums” and “moss/leaves/butterflies” in “长干行.” These are not incidental ornaments but the vehicles through which the poems think and feel. On this basis, the well-known “losses” (parallel couplets, tonal antitheses, exact toponyms) read less as abdications of translation and more as principled re-weightings that privilege what can survive cross-system transfer without expository overburden—an image-first hierarchy in which stance follows and sound/form yields.

Our micro-analysis shows a consistent division of labour. Pound domesticates social pragmatics and paratext to stabilise Anglophone uptake—flattening fine-grained ad-dress terms (妾/郎/君 → “I/you,” with the occasional courtly “My Lord you”), supplying a clear leave-taking gesture (“bow over their clasped hands”), and retitling “长干行” as “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” Culture-laden allusions are often reduced to their axiological vector: 抱柱 and 望夫台 survive as fidelity and constancy without the narrative scaffolds that make those values legible in Chinese reception. Mediation effects further complicate the profile. Hybridised toponyms (“Ku-to-Yen,” “Cho-fu-Sa”) emerge from Pound’s handling of Mori and Ariga’s glosses as transmitted in Fenollosa’s notebooks, combined with early-twentieth-century romanization practices, so that hydrological and geographic information is partially preserved but locally blurred. By contrast, the fifth-month line 五月不可触 is accurately glossed in the notebooks as a warning about seasonal river danger; Pound’s “you have been gone five months” is thus his own reorientation of the line from calendrical peril to elapsed time (Billings 2019, p. 122, n. 17.). In both kinds of case, the emotive trajectory (danger, distance, sorrow) remains legible, but the mechanisms that carry it (calendar lore, precise place-name networks) are altered or thinned. These choices increase readability yet thin the encyclopaedic layer that, for some readers, enriches resonance (Miyake 2009; Tang 2011; Williams 2009).

Set against this, foreignness is preserved in scene construction and reader task. Pound resists explanatory glossing, relying on parataxis and unglossed correlates—moss accruing at the threshold, early leaves, paired butterflies, monkey calls—so that relations are intuited rather than narrated. The effect is to keep the poem working through placed particulars, sustaining yi/xiang and qing/jing without importing ethno-graphic ballast (Pinheiro 2015). The result is not a binary posture but a calibrated hybrid: domestication where social deixis or paratext would otherwise block uptake; foreignization in imagistic economy and syntactic compression, where alterity can remain visible without impairing lyric performance.

Pound’s phanopoeia/melopoeia/logopoeia triad offers an internal gauge of what he tries to move across. Our findings align with a minimal mapping to Hasan’s two orders of semiosis. Phanopoeia exploits first-order resources (lexico-grammar) in the target language to reinstantiate images; it is robust in both case studies. Melopoeia is the most system-bound—regulated tone classes and antithetical parallelism in Chinese cannot simply be replayed in English; Pound substitutes cadence and selective syntactic par-allelism. Logopoeia—stance, deference, pragmatic shading—sits between first- and second-order effects; Pound often recovers it through register (“must make separation,” “Please let me know beforehand,” “My Lord you”), even while losing the source language’s social-deixis granularity (Hasan 1985).

Three families of limitations temper these claims. (1) Mediation. Toponymic distortions are mixed products of the relay configuration (Japanese-inflected romanization, note-taking conventions) and Pound’s own recombination of notebook material, while the fifth-month misreading is attributable to Pound, given the accuracy of the underlying glosses. Both types reduce referential precision and sometimes nudge interpretation (danger—duration), even if affective direction is maintained. (2) Melopoeic and form-level losses. Rhyme-class regularity, tonal parallelism, and antithetical couplets are not replicated; Pound’s compensations (cadence, anaphora, syntactic balancing) are functional substitutes rather than equivalents. (3) Cultural encyclopaedias. Where an image is densely coded (the lovers’ pillar; the “husband-watching terrace”), Pound’s choice to keep the poem light yields value without story—acceptable to some readers, flattening to others.

These constraints mark the boundary of the approach. An image-forward strategy is powerful where the source texts “think in images”; it is less adequate where form is constitutive of meaning or where allusive density is the meaning. In such cases, the translation may remain legible and moving but thinner. “The River Song,” where Pound appears to fuse two distinct Li Bai poems into a single English text, is a well-known example of such limits: it foregrounds the risks of the relay configuration rather than the kind of controlled image-first fidelity we observe in “送友人” and “长干行.” Our claims are therefore intentionally restricted to these two Li Bai poems and do not generalise to Cathay as a whole.

Two broader implications follow. First, evaluation of distant-pair lyric translation (Chinese–English) benefits from mechanism-sensitive criteria: not “is the rhyme re-produced?” but “does the translation rebuild the poem’s image–scene–emotion economy?” By that metric, at least the two analysed poems by this study, Pound’s versions function as translations in a relay sense, even where they depart from sinological exactitude. Second, teaching and reception improve when Pound’s practice is framed as a coherent strategy with linked trade-offs: imagistic fidelity and readability purchased at the expense of prosodic and encyclopaedic density.

In sum, for the two Li Bai poems examined here, Pound’s Chinese versions can still be read as translations because they keep faith—within the limits of a multi-step relay—with what most fundamentally animates the Tang originals: thought made palpable in image and feeling refracted through scene. Recognising both strengths and limits shifts the question from “are they translations?” to the more productive “how do these translations work—and at what justified costs?” Read through Pound’s poetics and compact Chinese coordinates, these Cathay versions function translationally by reconstructing the poems’ imagistic–affective operations in English; a mechanism-sensitive evaluation makes those trade-offs explicit. Future work should extend the coding to additional Cathay texts and compare against sinologist translations to test the generality and boundaries of this image-first logic.

4. Materials and Methods

This study focuses on two Li Bai poems that anchor Pound’s Cathay and concentrate key controversies: “送友人” “Taking Leave of a Friend” and “长干行” (Changgan xing) “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”. They were chosen because (i) both are central to Pound’s Chinese dossier, (ii) they exhibit distinct lyric economies—farewell scene vs. epistolary narrative—and (iii) they contain culturally dense markers (address terms, toponyms, seasonal/animal imagery) that stress-test claims about domestication, foreignization, and imagist “ideogrammic” juxtaposition.

The Chinese base texts for Li Bai’s “送友人” and “长干行” are taken from Gushiwen and cross-checked against standard annotated editions. To account for the fact that Pound did not work from Chinese but from Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks, we also consult Timothy Billings’s Cathay: A Critical Edition which reproduces the cribs line by line. When we encounter a shift, we first check in the notebooks whether the relevant feature is already reconfigured or clearly explained there. For example, Billings shows that 五月不可觸 is glossed “5 month not must touch” but paraphrased as a warning about May navigation hazards, even though Pound renders it as “five months” (Billings 2019, p. 122). We attribute a shift to “mediation” only when ambiguity or error is demonstrably present at this intermediate tier; where the notebook layer is accurate, we treat divergences as Pound’s decisions. Our micro-analysis thus focuses on the relation between Li Bai’s poems and Pound’s English versions, with the Fenollosa tier functioning as a control layer rather than being ignored.

4.1. Coding Scheme

We code each aligned unit with the following variables. Categories are mutually intelligible and allow multiple tags when warranted.

1.

Image handling

• Preserved (core visual scene retained);
• Intensified (contrast sharpened; added qualifier that heightens visibility);
• Reconfigured (different vehicle for same tenor; image type shifted);
• Omitted (salient image dropped);
• Introduced (new image with no source trigger).

2.

Cultural markers (lexico-pragmatic and symbolic)

• Terms of address and social deixis (e.g., 妾/郎/君): retained/domesticated/erased.
• Toponyms and historical allusions (e.g., 瞿塘, 滟滪堆): accurate/approximated/distorted/omitted.
• Seasonal and folklore cues (e.g., butterflies, falling leaves, monkey calls): preserved with source connotation/preserved but reinterpreted/flattened/replaced.

3.

Prosody and form

• Regulated verse features in the source (rhyme class; tonal parallelism; antithetical couplets): maintained/approximated/abandoned in Pound.
• Compensatory devices in English (cadential phrasing, parallel syntactic frames, anaphora).

4.

Pound’s triad: channel salience

• Phanopoeia (image): high/medium/low.
• Melopoeia (sound/prosody): high/medium/low.
• Logopoeia (stance/attitude, intellectual play, register): high/medium/low.
• Raters note how each channel is achieved (e.g., phanopoeia via colour contrast; logopoeia via politeness formulae).

5.

Domestication–Foreignization decision (micro-level)

• Domestication (choice increases immediate Anglophone readability or aligns to English politeness norms),
• Foreignization (choice preserves strangeness: parataxis, unglossed cultural item),
• Hybrid (co-presence in the same unit).

6.

Ideogrammic juxtaposition (IJ) presence

• Present (paratactic piling/juxtaposition yields abstract relation),
• Absent,
• Amplified (Pound increases parataxis beyond source).

4.2. Limitations

The coding categories are derived from the theoretical anchors articulated in the Background. This ensures that what we count is what we argue about. The gloss is deliberately non-interpretive and avoids “pre-translating” idioms; interpretation appears only in the code notes. We do not attempt quantitative generalisation to all of Cathay; melopoeic loss is described qualitatively (no tonal analytics); and our domestication/foreignization labels are micro-contextual (unit-level), not sweeping verdicts on the entire poem.