Cathay: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Cathay, credited to Ezra Pound, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

Librivox recording of Cathay, translated by Ezra Pound. Read by Alan Davis-Drake. The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pound’s English translations/interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly created a new and somewhat complex style of translation, as he had done with words from several other languages. The Cathay poems are primarily written by the Chinese poet Li Po, refered to throughout these translations as Rihaku, the Japanese form of his name. These poems came to have a profound influence on 20th Century poetry, spawning, among other things, the Imagist movement, and helped in the generation of widespread interest in Asian literature and thought. Also included in this collection are two poems from Pound’s 1912 collection Ripostes. “The Seafarer” is another of Pound’s experiments in translation, this one from the Anglo-Saxon. (Summary by Alan Davis-Drake)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Cathay
• Author credits: Ezra Pound
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 17
• Listed recording duration: 45:58

Catalogue topics

• pound
• cathay
• poetry
• poem
• li po
• rihaku
• fenollosa
• chinese

Track guide

1. Song of the Bowmen of Shu — 2:28
2. The Beautiful Toilet — 1:08
3. The River Song — 3:19
4. The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter — 2:14
5. Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin — 2:30
6. The Jewel Stair's Grievance — 1:21
7. Lament of the Frontier Guard — 2:04
8. Exile's Letter — 5:54
9. Four Poems of Departure — 2:49
10. The City of Choan — 1:17
11. South-Folk In Cold Country — 1:27
12. Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku — 1:35
13. A Ballad of the Mulberry Tree — 1:34
14. Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu — 2:22
15. To Em-Mei's : The Unmoving Cloud — 2:33
16. The Seafarer — 7:07
17. The Alchemist — 5:00

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.