Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters

ISBN-13: 9780199238606 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 268 str.

Qian, Zhaoming

Opis

No literary figure of the past century - in America or perhaps in any other Western country - is comparable to Ezra Pound in the scope and depth of his exchange with China. To this day, scholars and students still find it puzzling that this influential poet spent a lifetime incorporating Chinese language, literature, history, and philosophy into Anglo-American modernism. How well did Pound know Chinese? Was he guided exclusively by eighteenth to nineteenth-century orientalists in his various Chinese projects? Did he seek guidance from Chinese peers? Those who have written about Pound and China have failed to address this fundamental question. No one could do so just a few years ago when the letters Pound wrote to his Chinese friends were sealed or had not been found. This book brings together 162 revealing letters between Pound and nine Chinese intellectuals, eighty-five of them newly opened up and none previously printed. Accompanied by editorial introductions and notes, these selected letters make available for the first time the forgotten stories of Pound and his Chinese friends. They illuminate a dimension in Pound's career that has been neglected: his dynamic interaction with people from China over a span of forty-five years from 1914 until 1959. This selection will also be a documentary record of a leading modernist's unparalleled efforts to pursue what he saw as the best of China, including both his stumbles and his triumphs.

Recenzje

Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends fills out our understanding of Pound's fascination with China and Japan through original documents. It reveals glimpses of this opinionated, questing man in dialogue with people he respected (not a frequent situation in Pound's correspondence). Chiefly it shows one of the major Modernists in his time of isolation, trying to 'make it new' by engagement with an unfamiliar language and culture.

O autorze

As University Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, Zhaoming Qian's teaching and research areas focus on East/West comparative poetics, Orientalism, transpacific interculturality, and interdisciplinary Modernism. Qian's books include Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (1995), The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (2003), and Ezra Pound and China (2003). His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and Yale University.