Cathay ─ Ezra Pound's Orient

The English literati were fascinated by China at the turn of the century. London was a breeding ground for the avant-garde and modernist writers like Eliot, Yeats and Pound became infatuated with the essence of the Orient. But only Pound set out to re-invent, re-connect and eventually "rethink the nature of an English poem." Published in 1915, Pound’s translations were popular and highly controversial. His bold interpretations of Chinese form, wording and metric often bore little resemblance to the original.Cathay set the stage for a new approach to poetry and eventually for a newfound East in the West.

Ira Nadel is an American-Canadian biographer, literary critic and James Joyce scholar. Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography. He has also been awarded a Killam Research Prize, Mellon and Dorot Fellowships at the Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin, and a Beinecke Fellowship at Yale. For a number of years, he has been a book critic on CBC radio. Nadel is the author ofEzra Pound: A LIterary Life and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. He is a professor at University of British Columbia.