Shortly after the release of my critical edition of Ezra Pound's Cathay in late 2019, there appeared the oddest review of it in Make It New which I thought not worth the bother of responding to at the time on the grounds that the edition...
moreShortly after the release of my critical edition of Ezra Pound's Cathay in late 2019, there appeared the oddest review of it in Make It New which I thought not worth the bother of responding to at the time on the grounds that the edition speaks for itself, the truth will out, and all that. But in recent months I have been nagged by the thought that since the points in that review all relate to questions of East Asian language and culture which many of the otherwise learned readers of this journal might not have the background to adjudicate on their own, I should probably step forward to correct the record. It also seemed like an occasion to explore further a few ideas that could not easily be accommodated in the footnotes of an edition, as well as to take a moment to reflect on what we are really doing when we review each other's work. I suspect that most readers have seen book reviews that seem to be more about the reviewer than the book under review, though they may be hard to recognize as such unless one already knows something about both. Although the reviewer in this case, Andrew Houwen, seems almost begrudgingly to concede that the new edition is "indispensable," he says almost nothing about why that should be the case-indeed, he says very little about the contents of the book at all-in favor of making a number of complaints that are not only misrepresentations of the edition, but also mostly mistaken in and of themselves, all related to Japan in some way. The reviewer does at least acknowledge the importance of the edition's shift of critical perspective away from the typical comparison of Pound's versions with Chinese originals he never saw, onto Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks which Pound plundered so gleefully and gloriously. But the aim of the review was apparently not to explain the contributions of the edition along with an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, or even to give readers an idea of what it covers and how, but rather to stake a territorial claim of expertise in "Ezra Pound's Japan" in anticipation of the reviewer's own book on that topic, which has just been released. My edition of Cathay, like everything else in this vale of tears, is not flawless, I will not hesitate to admit, despite my slavish labors to make it so. Since publication, I have discovered a
