ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the earliest Chinese versions by Pound as part of the beginning of Imagism, not as influenced by the theory and practice which Pound subsequently discovered had been advanced by Fenollosa. Pound apparently employs the passive form "You are also laid aside" to intensify the lady's sense of being abandoned and forsaken by an implied but unnamed owner. This highly condensed image has all the swiftness of perception and sharpness of presentation that Pound was to claim as characteristic of Chinese poetic composition. Yet none of these features can be readily found in English versions of the same poem by those with direct knowledge of Chinese language and poetry such as Giles. The chapter explores the Western reception of Chinese poetry, conventionally metonymie images in Chinese, shorn of their cultural and historical contexts, may appear to uninformed Western readers as startlingly fresh metaphors and hence may risk being sentimentalized as exoticism.
