ABSTRACT
In Cathay Pound frequently invokes the vocalized speakers, whether the personae themselves or the projected voices of the personae, whereas these voices are mostly absent or only latent in their Chinese originals. The individualized perspective in Cathay is for the most part retrospective and is almost always tinged with an elegiac coloring. Yet this elegiac coloring is not a general, all-pervasive mood or atmosphere enveloping or devouring the individual speakers in the poems. It also often tends to leave the emotional stance of the translating poet somewhat uncommitted, in a kind of sympathetic neutrality, not by any implicit collusion expressing his own personal elegiac feeling. Thus the expression of this elegiac mood or feeling exists on three levels: that of the original Chinese poet being translated, that of Pound the translator, following Fenollosa's often neutral and uncommitted cribs, and finally the implied voice or stance of the resulting poem in English.
