Ben welcomes and calls us to order, introducing Elijah Mosley. Undeterred by disobedient technology, Elijah’s presentation begins. In summary:

Cathay and Canto XIII together illustrate Pound’s different approaches to China throughout his career. In Cathay, the Chinese model is literary and aesthetic; in Canto XIII, China becomes the scene of Confucian order and a model of right governance. In the earlier period Pound’s thinking is preoccupied with Imagism and the ideogram, and his orientation towards Chinese translation is notoriously informed by Fenollosa’s imperfect theory of the language. Cathay and its Chinese are also elegiac reflecting the backdrop of the War. In comparison, Canto XIII is sourced from The Analects and concerned with “order,” repeated seven times. Elijah asks if Kung’s valorization of “standing in the middle” might not be a bit ironic considering Pound’s own political attitudes.

Ben opens up the responses by highlighting the overlapping but distinct categories of Pound’s China and Pound’s Confucianism, and raising the question of aestheticized treatments of China in subsequent Cantos (including 49, 52). Elijah draws a parallel to Pound’s concurrent and similarly dynamic treatments of Jefferson. Tyler suggests we might trace the similarities as well as differences across the texts, as well as edge cases such as the Rock-Drill Cantos. Leopold points out that there is a lot of growth between Cathay and the late Cantos.

Michael asserts that Pound would connect the ethical and political with the beautiful, as coheres with his polytheism and the nature of the gods. Jeff adds that the aesthetic is always ethical (as with Blake); relatedly, that the “aestheticized” China of Canto 49 might better be understood as utopian. Ben responds positing China as a utopia in crisis, devastated utopia. Jeff recognizes this as the elegiac element in Cathay and Chinese poetry more generally. Poetry itself is more central and significant in Chinese society, particularly as imagined by Pound (for him this is an important attraction). Tyler asks what we make of his inclusions and exclusions, for example why are the Odes not more prominent in The Cantos? Ian Probstein recalls his 2017 article in Make it New, I think this might be ‘“I Have Beaten Out My Exile”: The Perception of Ezra Pound’s Poetry in Russia’. Ian also notes that the orientalist fashion of the time was for Buddhism, not Confucianism.

Michael refers to the critique of Fenollosa and Pound, here represented by George A. Kennedy’s “Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character,” and asks if it necessarily matters. To the art, the literature? Consensus is that Pound was adapting, replicating, etc. But he knew NO CHINESE in writing Cathay, Jeff emphasizes, though he was (per Eliot) inventing Chinese poetry in English. And let’s not lose sight of how different his free verse English products are from actual, formal Classical Chinese. Judd Staley suggests Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger for points regarding Pound’s influence on Chinese modernist poetry. Tyler points out that Pound is a touchstone in translation studies as such, and that Pound learns more about actual Chinese as he matures—though significantly he never travels there. From the Pisan Cantos on, China is idealized, says Leopold. John and Tyler speculate as to how Pound would have related to China if not for Fenollosa. China is his “textual utopia” (in Jeff’s phrase).

Recalling earlier remarks from Elijah regarding the mediated, palimpsestic nature of Pound’s Chinese, Ezra mentions Charles Olson’s “The Kingfisher” and Mao’s appearance therein. Jeff wagers this was a deliberate counterpoint to Pound and compares it to Mao’s role in Louis Zukofsky’s "A". Walter brings up the sentimentality of “The River Merchant’s Wife.” Ezra connects this to W. S. Merwin and Pound’s sentimental legacy within the “cooked” branch of U. S. poetry. Elijah recalls that Yeats really liked Cathay, which reads as an evolution of Yeats’s early romantic poetry. Jeff reminds us it’s the most famous English translation of a Chinese poem of the century (or ever). Walter recalls an urban legend of Pound in Venice shouting “Disorder! Disorder!” Jeff points out that The Analects contain a different version of Kung’s lesson—Canto XIII fully revises Confucius. Later Pound would have been more faithful and attentive to governance. Leopold raises the question of whether or not Pound’s fascism could actually be Confucianism.

We learn from Walter that Pound preferred Sparta to Athens, and also that Hugh Kenner once recited Canto XIII by heart in Haley, Idaho. We should all memorize cantos. Pietra identifies the first appearance of China in the 1917 Ur-Cantos, where Pound contemplates a choice between Egypt and China. He went back to Egypt through Sheri Martinelli, John assists. He called his translations “traductions” and “translucences” say Pietro and John. Julius takes us back to Canto I and considers it also a “translations of translations” situation, then starts a conversation about the sequencing of topics across Cantos XII, XIII, and XIV.

Leopold hazards that Pound was “right about economics.” It’s a larger conversation. Julius suggests a session on The ABC of Economics. He also describes a kind of American nostalgia for a feudalism that never was, outside of maybe southern plantations. Conversation returns to the Romantics, with whom, as Elijah points out, Pound had an ambiguous relationship. Ben closes us out with a thought from Charles Wright’s homage to Ezra Pound, that he was quintessentially American in wanting to out-European the Europeans, and perhaps something similar could be said of him vis-à-vis China.

The next session will be a roundtable on Pound and Confucius!