ABSTRACT
George Steiner has pointed out that the China of Pound's poems, of Waley's, is one people have come fully to expect and believe in. It is worthwhile to consider briefly some general aspects of the problem of translation and its possible definition as regards the complex variety of translations from the Chinese made by Pound, Waley, and Lowell. Pound himself commented on his Cathay versions in 1917: The implicit distinction between the Chinese subject and his own language of translation intimates the tentativeness of Pound's claim about his versions. Waley himself offered some perceptive comments, when rereading Lytton Strachey's remarks on Chinese poetry in a 1908 review of Giles's anthology of Chinese translations. By contrast, the language of Pound's Cathay versions was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian idioms in English as was Pound's usual practice.
