Ezra Pound’s Japan

Description

The first book to deal with the subject of Ezra Pound’s relationships with Japanese literature as a whole, this book provides a wealth of new scholarship on this subject, including on the 19th-century Japanese contexts that led to Pound’s interest in ‘hokku’ and Fenollosa’s No translations on which Pound based his own; significant original research on Pound’s Japanese friendships that enriched his understanding of Japanese literature; and an examination of all the explicit references to No in The Cantos in unprecedented depth. It demonstrates that the works for which Ezra Pound is most famous, such as 'In a Station of the Metro' and his epic poem, The Cantos, were shaped by his lifelong interest in Japanese literature. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Note on the text Abbreviations Published Works Archives Chapter 1: Ezra Pound’s Japan Part 1: Pound and hokku Chapter 2: Herbert Spencer’s ‘minor image’, Masaoka Shiki and the Meiji reinvention of haiku Chapter 3: Symphonies in white: Basil Hall Chamberlain and the introduction of ‘hokku’ into English Chapter 4: Pound’s ‘“Metro” hokku’ Part 2: Pound and nō Chapter 5: ‘Nobody thought nō would rise again’: Umewaka Minoru and the Meiji revival of nō Chapter 6: Ernest Fenollosa’s ‘single image’ and the introduction of nō into English Chapter 7: ‘One of the great arts of the world’: Pound’s first nō translations Chapter 8: ‘Growing together’: Pound’s Japanese friends, nō and the genesis of The Cantos Chapter 9: ‘The closest parallel to my thought’: Pound’s nō plays and accomplishments Part 3: Nō and The Cantos Chapter 10: ‘Grow with the pines of Ise’: Pound’s early cantos and nō Chapter 11: ‘A treasure like nothing we have in the Occident’: Pound’s wartime cantos and nō Chapter 12: ‘The light sings eternal’: Nō’s place in the Paradiso of Pound’s later cantos Bibliography Works and translations by Pound Co-authored Works Secondary Sources Index of Published Works by Pound Index of Names