Twenty-Nine Goodbyes: An Introduction to Chinese Poetry

In 1915, Ezra Pound published a volume of translations from the Chinese work Cathay. That volume included the poem “Taking Leave of a Friend,” also translated as “Seeing Off a Friend,” by eighth-century poet Li Bae, one of China’s most beloved writers. Pound’s translation shows the beauty and poignancy of Li Bae’s Chinese sonnet, dressed in the imagism found in many of Pound’s other work. In this book, Billings (English and comparative literature, Middlebury Coll.; translator, Stèles) looks at Pound’s version of “Seeing Off a Friend,” as well as 28 other translations by Chinese, American, British, French, and German writers, along with a Jesuit scholar who translated it into Latin. He uses this one poem to introduce readers to classic Chinese poetry fundamentals. Believing that every translation of a poem reinvents it, Billings analyzes each translation in great depth by looking at word choice, tonal balance, vowel sounds, meter, and parallelism.