ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a roughly chronological outline of Pound's major translations and highlights some of the most salient features of his general involvement with translation in relation to his fundamental concerns as a modern poet. It was largely Pound's growing interest in Confucianism before and after the Second World War that led him to translate all the 305 poems in the earliest anthology of Chinese poems, Shih Ching or The Classic of Poetry, which he entitled The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954). The example of The Women of Trachis is highly significant, for it shows that translation is for Pound sui generis interpretation and criticism, because translation reveals the fundamental structure of the original work. Yet the textual aspects of the original were often not important for Pound, even though he might have intended each of his translations to be a scholarly one. It is in the Cantos that people see Pound's engagement with translation at its most complex.
