By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them, No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Riboku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers. --Written by Li Po, translated into English by Ezra
This is the closing poem of Cathay (London:
Elkin Mathews, 1915), the slim volume of Chinese poems translated by Ezra Pound from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa.
The book's widely-applauded publication prompted T.
S. Eliot to remark, famously, that Pound had "reinvented Chinese poetry for our time." The first (1915 ) publication of Cathay was comprised of 14 translations: two early Chinese poems, eleven poems by T'ang Dynasty poet Li Po ("Rihaku"), and the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer," which Pound included for timeline comparison of 8th-century English poetry with 8th-century Chinese poetry.
Cathay (a small book with a small print run) ranks among the most pivotal publications in the entire history of translation.
