INTRODUCTION

Like the flapping kookaburra in Australia that sets off a tornado in Kansas, poetry operates under its own version of chaos theory: the unpredictable effects of remote, sometimes forgotten causes. A 4th-century poet from Gupta India, Kalidasa, becomes a founding father of German Romanticism; Buddhist Jataka tales turn up in Chaucer; a Finnish pseudo-folk epic sets the beat for the pseudo-folk epic called “Hiawatha”; an 11th-century Persian, Omar the Tentmaker (Khayyam) transfixes the Victorians. . . and, in the 20th century, American poetry is inextricable from classical Chinese poetry and the Chinese language itself.

In 1909, there had only been about a dozen English translations of Chinese poetry in 150 years, mainly obscure books done by diplomats and missionaries, and a poet like Li Po sounded like this (the translator is L. Cranmer-Byng):

And now Spring beckons with verdant hand, And Nature’s wealth of eloquence doth win Forth to the fragrant-bowered nectarine, Where my dear friends abide, a careless band. The received wisdom, as articulated by Lytton Strachey the year before, was that Chinese poems are like odours, for all their intangibility, the strange compelling powers of suggested reminiscence and romance. Whatever their subject, they remain ethereal . . . perhaps the Western writer whose manner they suggest most constantly is Verlaine. This was no surprise; in 1909, America’s most innovative poet, Ezra Pound, was writing like this:

Autumnal breaks the flame upon the sun-set herds. The sheep on Gilead as tawn hair gleam Neath Mithra’s dower and his slow departing, While in the sky a thousand fleece of gold Bear, each his tribute, to the waning god. Six years later, in 1915, here was Pound:

For a moment she rested against me Like a swallow half blown to the wall

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