A. C. Graham, translator
Poems of the Late T’ang.
NYRB Classics, 184 pages, $14.95

Ezra Pound knew no Chinese when he approached the poems of Li Po, translating solely from the notes of Ernest Fenellosa, a Sinologist whose knowledge of the language was questionable to say the least. Maybe the Chinese attention to the image, or that tradition’s strict fusion of form and function, beckoned to Pound’s militantly Modernist sensibilities, but something clearly clicked in this unlikely marriage. It is impossible to forget the undercurrent of longing, brushed with just the slightest hesitation, at the conclusion of “The River-Merchant Wife: A Letter” by Li Po:

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

The eminent translator Arthur Waley, who begrudged Pound’s forays into his territory, is much more faithful in his version of the same poem, but gone is the tension of a wife pining for her husband while mourning her own vanished youth. And just as Waley chafed against Pound’s appropriation of Chinese verse, later Sinologists frowned upon mid-century poets like Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder who filtered the poetry of ancient China through the sensibilities of northern California and the restless climate of postwar America. The twentieth century, in short, witnessed a rift between those who refused to use the poetry of China as a springboard for innovation in the English tongue and