Cathay

At the turn of the twentieth century, London was a breeding ground for the avant-garde. Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound became infatuated with the Orient. Pound in particular was inspired by the clarity and precision of Eastern poetry to rethink the nature of an English poem. Published in 1915, Cathay, Pound's collection of fourteen experimental translations of classic Chinese poems, was a groundbreaking work that set the stage for a new-found East in the West.
'Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.' T.S. Eliot

Ira Nadel is a biographer and literary critic, and currently serves as Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, University of British Columbia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was awarded the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography. He has written biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard and Ezra Pound and published extensively on Joyce and the subject of biography.