How to Read Chinese Poetry (If You Can’t Read Chinese): The Case of Ezra Pound

In 1915, Ezra Pound published a collection of early “translations” of Chinese poetry that took the poetic world by storm. However, Pound didn’t know a word of Chinese. Middlebury professor Timothy Billings (Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College) was the first scholar to decipher the manuscripts that Pound used as “cheat sheets” to compose adaptations of Tang Dynasty poetry. Here he shares his discoveries.

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