Pound's Translations from the Chinese: "The Beautiful Toilet"
I have a collection of Pound's earlier poems, including the translations, and so I downloaded the whole of Cathay ($0.99) to reacquaint myself with the poems. (I don't believe all of the poems were in the volume I read so many years ago.) Are they as monumental as Eliot makes them out to be? Well, he's the expert, not me. * The Beautiful Toilet Blue, blue is the grass about the river And the willows have overfilled the close garden. And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth. White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door. Slender, she puts forth a slender hand, And she was a courtesan in the old days, And she has married a sot, Who now goes drunken- ly out And leaves her too much alone. ...