Tim:
> What is "fancy" about a collection of glosses? One might infer from the
> tone that a translator who made use of glosses compiled by scholars
> somehow
> had an 'unfair' advantage over translators who had to rely only upon
> their
> wits and ignorance.

Once again my tone has gotten me in trouble.  So be it.  The glosses
that Pound used were "fancy" in that they were exceedingly rare.  Very
few Westerners had the tenacity and inclination to obtain such thorough
instruction in Chinese classics as did Fenollosa.  And, of course, for
a translator who doesn't know the source language of his texts, as
Pound did not in the case of Chinese, such a collection of powerful
glosses does offer a decided advantage over other translators.  Anyone
who investigates the English translations of Chinese poetry prior to
_Cathay_ will find that far too many made the attempt with nothing but
"their wits and ignorance", and almost none performed their
translations with anything other than earlier translations on their
writing desks.  Advantages like Fenollosa's notebooks are not "unfair",
no matter the aspersions one casts upon my tone: they were supremely
fortunate, and assisted later translators in finding more appropriate
forms in English to depict forms from Chinese.

> Don't you think Pound was making a good faith attempt to convey
> something
> of the "otherness" or "foreignness" of the originals by employing a
> terse,
> paratactic style over against the verbosity of the 14-line verse
> paragraphs?

Of course I do.  Pound was clearly depicting the otherness of Chinese
verse much better than his predecessors.  (Any unbiased glance at my
original post would notice that I was making a distinction between the
Cranmer-Byngs and the Pounds of the world, at least in this respect.)
We shouldn't forget however, in our haste to make Pound the hero of the
story, that Chinese poetry is not "imagiste" in at least this sense: it
carries strict, formal expectations about rhyme and other stanzaic
conventions, the English equivalents of which Pound et al. were doing
much to  unravel.  Vers libre was the most apt vehicle of the Pound Era
for re-presenting Chinese verse as "other", as well as for expressing
the concentrated brevity that Chinese verse exemplifies.  The fit
between vers libre and Chinese classic was not at all exact, in other
words, but it far surpassed the earlier competing models, as the
popularity of _Cathay_ attests.

Hope that answers your questions-
Jon

---------

Postscript:

"I'll be away for the weekend, and my responses to the list might take
some time," Weidler meagerly opined.  "Oh dear, I do hope that I can
get Tim Romano to like me again.  He's so dreamy..."  Weidler stared
out of his window, and felt concerned about his on-line popularity.  He
knew that nothing was more important than the unalloyed approval of
people he'd never met; he didn't sleep well knowing that someone out
there didn't like him.  "Oh dear, oh dear" he worriedly repeated.