Fenollosa's Vanishing Hand

19 The Ezra Pound Society Magazine __________________ Fenollosa’s Vanishing Hand _______________________ By Timothy Billings Roxana Preda asked me to provide a sneak peek of the forthcoming Fordham University Press critical edition of Cathay (which you’ll find in this issue) and to say a few things about it. She also gave me an advance copy of Harry Gilonis’s sharp and lively review (also in this edition) of two other recent editions of Cathay edited by Ira Nadel and Zhaoming Qian, and asked me if I might like to add anything. Gilonis is a keen reviewer, but the one thing he cannot assess is the accuracy of the transcripts of the Fenollosa notebooks in Qian’s edition. I’m actually one of a very few people in a position to do that, but it puts me an awkward position. I should explain. Over a year ago, Declan Spring, the senior editor at New Directions Publishing, asked me to delay publication of the Fordham Cathay so that Qian’s “Centennial Edition” with its unique foreword by Mary de Rachewiltz could have full play of the market for its appointed time. I readily consented. I (we) owe many debts of gratitude to New Directions, to Mary de Rachewiltz, and to Qian Zhaoming whose scholarly contributions to our understanding of Pound and China in the past two decades have been considerable, as I hardly need to tell readers of Make It New. Spring and I agreed that there was no direct competition between our two very different editions since the New Directions release was meant to be “gifty,” as he put it—something to be annotated lightedly, collected eagerly, read lovingly, gifted freely. But it still made sense for the editions to appear in turn instead of simultaneously. I was happy to stand aside for a year, and I was secretly pleased to have the extra time to double-check my work. Qian, however, was forced to work in haste. The most trenchant criticism that Gilonis makes in his review is that “Qian generally overestimates the extent of Pound’s mastery of the material, perhaps because, being Chinese, it is hard to envisage the situation of a monoglot reader.” Of course, it’s not that Qian is Chinese but rather that he is a reader of Chinese, but the point sticks. (I know a classicist who is utterly convinced that Shakespeare had a mastery of Latin vastly greater than anyone else has ever believed, not least Ben Jonson, but it’s not because he’s a Republican Roman.) Gilonis’s comment is truer than he could know because the same bias seems to inform Qian’s handling of the Fenollosa manuscripts—selective omissions, symptomatic mistranscriptions, mismatched Chinese texts—as if he were optimistically clearing the space between Pound and the Chinese originals Pound never saw. Qian is hardly alone: the same could be said of a great deal of commentary on Cathay over the last century. With the exception of the most recent work, it has tended not only to ignore the nuances of and differences among Fenollosa’s notebooks (when not ignoring the notebooks altogether), but also rather stubbornly to insist on Pound’s intuitive, even clairvoyant “faithfulness” to the meaning of those Chinese originals he never saw] and it has done so even when stressing the contrary point that Cathay must be evaluated as poetry in its own right, as Gilonis eloquently 20 Make It New 3.3 _______________________ reminds us. Gilonis is careful to muzzy up the East-West binary between Nadel and Qian, but then concludes “Nadel is more at home with what Pound did, and Qian more with what he did it from.” And so Gilonis steps on the same rake since “what Pound did it from” is not Chinese, but rather a set of cribs written almost entirely in English, as Gilonis knows better than most. Fenollosa’s hand keeps vanishing between Pound and China. To put it bluntly, Qian is not at home there either. Not because he is “Chinese,” mind you, but for the same reasons that nobody has felt at home in Fenollosa’s cribs, as I will explain. I’m wondering now whether the Fordham edition may be criticized for putting Fenollosa’s hand at its center instead of Pound’s, but I certainly hope not (and I don’t think it does) since a proper rendering of “what Pound did it from” is what we need to appreciate the full magnitude of his accomplishment in Cathay. And it is what we still lack. No transcription of any poem from the cribs has ever been complete or correct. As a result, they have been misunderstood and vastly underestimated. Hsieh Wen Tung called them “defective,” although he admitted he had never actually set eyes on them and was guessing that the “errors” he identified in Pound came from Fenollosa. (He was wrong.) Hugh Kenner quoted Hsieh at length, no doubt because Hsieh was Chinese, and also found the cribs in at least one place “incomprehensible.” (Kenner understood quite a lot about the cribs, but we tend to remember only his criticisms, some of which are faulty because they were based on mistranscriptions.) Wailim Yip famously called them “crippled.” (That has unfortunately been a favorite epithet to repeat.) Yip never had access to them either. (He used Kenner’s and also Lawrence Chisholm’s which are even worse.) By general consensus the cribs are thought to be disorganized, error-ridden, and illegible. Some have even sniggered at the idea of relying on Japanese scholars to learn Chinese poetry—in the same breath that Herbert Giles and Arthur Waley are invoked as authorities for comparison. For the record, Fenollosa’s manuscripts—at least the two big notebooks of poetry by Li Bo (Rihaku) comprising the bulk of the material used for Cathay (not the early notebooks)— contain an impressive breadth and depth of accurate sinological material in a consistently organized format. Some of it Pound used] some of it he ignored. Fenollosa’s teacher for those two notebooks was Mori Kainan  (1863-1911), a specialist in Chinese poetry who not only edited an important edition of Tang poetry, but who was also highly celebrated in Japan for his own compositions of poetry in Classical Chinese. (That’s more than Giles or Waley could say, who could barely write poetry in English.) Mori was no slouch. By the time Pound had finished reading the notebooks, he was one of the best-informed people on Chinese poetry in Europe or North America, certainly among those who did not speak Chinese. It must be said that Fenollosa’s swift and cramped hand is occasionally difficult to decipher, and Pound complained about it more than once, but Fenollosa can hardly be faulted for bad handwriting when he was taking dictation as fast as possible during lectures, making notes intended for nobody but himself. In fact, most of the cribs are not difficult to read provided you have taken the time to learn Fenollosa’s hand. To be sure, it also helps to know which wizards are hiding behind which curtains. If no less a scholar than Ronald Bush transcribed “drum” as “dream” because he didn’t know that the Chinese word being glossed was gu < (drum), or no less a scholar than Hugh Kenner transcribed “red / (of beni)” as “red / (of berri)” because he didn’t know that 21 The Ezra Pound Society Magazine __________________ beni # means “rouge” in Japanese, is the fault truly Fenollosa’s for not having better handwriting? As it happens, close scrutiny of the minims in both of these words is enough to identify them without recourse to Chinese or Japanese. My point is that you have to approach the manuscripts like a paleographer, patient enough to learn the patterns of Fenollosa’s hand and to break down difficult words into their constituent letter-forms instead of relying on intuition. What most readers don’t realize is that Fenollosa’s cribs include a great deal of commentary from Mori’s lectures written on the verso pages of the cribs, which require some patience to transcribe. Qian silently omits all but slivers of one or two. It’s true that Pound rarely drew directly from these commentaries, but they make up the sum of what he knew about each poem, and we need to know what they say before we start speculating about how Pound adapted his material. Indeed, as the Fordham edition shows for the first time, Wai-lim Yip’s famous claim about Pound’s “clairvoyance” in correctly intuiting missing and erroneous facts in the cribs for “SouthFolk in Cold Country” turn out to be utterly irrelevant since he was looking at the wrong manuscript: Fenollosa studied the poem twice, once with Hirai Kinza during his first trip to Japan (in September 1986) and again with Mori during his second trip (in March of 1899), and everything that Yip imagined Pound to have mystically divined about the poem was right there in the crib— if only Yip had been looking at the right crib. The same is true for “Lament of the Frontier Guard.” Reviewing the whole of the cribs buries the idea that Pound was some clairvoyant shaman conjuring true and original Chinese meanings from Japanese hackwork (as if “true” and “original” meanings were ever his objective) and allows us to see how Pound creatively, ingeniously, sometimes very literally adapted richly complex texts into stunning free verse. Some of us have never imagined it any other way. It’s all there in Fenollosa’s hand. The cribs also include a number of Japanese terms, alternative pronunciations, and parallels with Japanese culture, which remind of us of the mediation between Pound and his Chinese poetry. Qian silently omits almost all of them. Moxa, mokusei, moengi, oshiroi, oshidori, kasu, ippai, kan on, go on, juban, isuka, naku, mage—these are all words in the cribs you will not find in Qian’s transcriptions.1 The cribs also contain many false starts, strike-throughs, insertions, and emendations, which remind us that they record the comments of a professor deciphering difficult medieval texts on the fly with an eager student by means of an interpreter. Qian silently omits all of these. The cribs are also not all in Fenollosa’s hand, nor all derived from Mori’s lectures, which matters as I suggest above because the sinological competence of Fenollosa’s teachers varied dramatically. Hirai’s classical Chinese was abominable, and he is guilty of some real howlers. Mori’s was superb. Nobody is infallible. The notebook from which Pound created “Song of the Bowman of the Shu,” moreover, was written entirely by Ariga Nagao, who translated for Mori. Kenner knew this. (The writing is obviously not in Fenollosa’s hand.) Qian identifies it as Fenollosa’s. Qian also often silently omits words, and occasionally drops phrases and whole sentences almost certainly because he wasn’t at home enough in the cribs to understand them.2 Omitting something silently makes a tidier and giftier text, but a dangerous one if you want to do anything else with it. 22 Make It New 3.3 _______________________ These are the omissions. There are also almost innumerable mistranscriptions. Most are of the small kind that anyone working intuitively might make: “foaming water” is changed to “form of water”] “wind” to “wood”] “control” to “confide”] “expression” to “emotion”] “autumn” to “northern.” In “To-em-mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud,’“ the birds in Qian’s edition come “to rest on the love tree in my yard.” One needs neither clairvoyance nor Chinese to see that it is a “lone tree.” In “The Exile’s Letter” the gloss on guan ! reads: “flute {pipe} / tube of the sho”] Qian gives it as “pipe / tribe of the sho,” as if it belonged to some indigenous clan, whereas Mori’s point is that the sheng (pan-flute) mentioned three lines earlier is composed of multiple guan ! (pipes) which are used synecdochically for the instrument and its music. (Qian also effaces the correction from “flute” to “pipe.”) A few lines earlier Qian turns “bent thread” into “bent towards,” whereas Mori appears to be offering an etymological gloss for ying $ (to wind, to twist) emphasizing the component mi " (a fine silk thread), which is depicted as a twisted thread in oracle bone script. In “The River Merchant’s Wife,” the fifteen year-old desires to be mingled with her beloved’s body after death, “even as dust, and even as ashes — partially together,” as Qian transcribes it (following Kodama Sanehide, in fact). But she desires nothing less than a complete mingling of the “particles” of their bodies together after death. That sounds a bit off, but the cribs contain unmistakable evidence that Fenollosa was taking down dictation so quickly that he often wrote exactly what Ariga said to him, thus reproducing some of his unidiomatic English. In half a dozen places he clearly also misheard Ariga’s accent, such as the funny moment in “The Exile’s Letter” where Fenollosa writes “ship / intestines” (not once but twice) as a gloss for yangchang %& “sheep intestines” before crossing out and correcting “ship” to “sheep.” Qian omits the correction and along with it the evidence that Fenollosa was sometimes writing so fast he didn’t fully understand what he was recording, at least in the moment. Strikingly, in the commentary to “The Beautiful Toilet,” Fenollosa writes “This is my idea,” then clarifies in parentheses that it is Mori’s idea, suggesting that sometimes Ariga was translating exactly what Mori said during the lesson. Of course, this realization muddies the eddies of authorship in the cribs: almost everything in Fenollosa’s two big Rihaku notebooks is more literally a collaboration among Mori, Ariga, and Fenollosa than most of us have ever imagined. What this means for readers of Fenollosa’s hand is that we must be on guard for the “correctly incorrect.” At the end of “The Exile’s Letter,” for example, the paraphrase reads, “So calling to one my son,” which Qian intuitively corrects to “So calling upon my son.” That’s better English, for sure, but “upon” is simply not what Fenollosa wrote (as is clear from the letter-forms), and the silent emendation erases what appears to be a tiny biographical observation of Mori’s that Li Bo was calling to one of his two sons. Qian avoids “dream” and “berri,” but elsewhere makes similar errors which a quick crosscheck of the Chinese text would have prevented. In “The Exile’s Letter,” Qian gives the gloss for jun + (military) as “bar” instead of “war.” Fenollosa’s initial w often has a riser, and in this case he looped the final stroke downward resembling a b. In “South-Folk in Cold Country,” the crib reads “Yesterday one has left the wild geese Fortress” (Yanmenguan 401) which Qian turns into “the wild geese Tartars.” Fenollosa’s capital F does resemble a T, but even the non-Chinese reader could cross-check the gloss here: “wild geese / gate / fort.” No Tartars. In fact, both of 23 The Ezra Pound Society Magazine __________________ these mistakes had already been made—Bush (48) and Kenner (220)—suggesting that Qian may sometimes have relied on previous transcriptions rather than on his own powers of observation. In the same poem, Qian transcribes “three” as “thru” for san  (three). But just the opposite also sometimes happens when Qian seems to be led astray by his knowledge of Chinese. In “The Exile’s Letter,” the gloss for qu  reads: “corner {(or)} / melody // {two meanings}.” The added comment emphasizes that there are “two meanings” for this character which are radically different, the latter of which is struck out as irrelevant in this context. In such manuscript traces, one sees the lesson unfolding: two teachers and an exceptional student working together at something they all love. (More on Mori’s pedagogy below.) Qian, however, silently omits the correction and the didactic aside by turning them into a simple “corner or meanderings”—which is, in fact, another meaning of qu , but just as certainly not what Fenollosa wrote there. Likewise, when Li Bo drunkenly pillows his head on the governor’s thigh, Qian glosses zhen  as “pillow / (rest),” whereas Fenollosa has written “pillow / (verb).” Mori’s point is that the noun functions as a verb here—just as it can very nicely do in English. (Now there’s an irony for readers of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which I’ll leave to that edition to explain.) Qian’s handling of the Chinese text in the transcripts also smacks of haste. Even in the four cases mentioned by Gilonis where the Chinese characters have been written in the notebooks either by Ariga or Fenollosa, Qian inexplicably imports an outside text instead of transcribing them from the actual page. The results are tragi-comical. For Ariga’s crib of “Song of the Bowmen of the Shu,” for example, this method effaces all traces of Japanese mediation from the text, once again as though Pound were closer to the “pure” original than he ever was. Wherever Ariga uses the typical Japanese noma or “ditto mark” (
) to represent duplicated characters, Qian silently inserts the Chinese. Where there is a slight Japanese variant for a character—
for yu ; (fish)— Qian silently inserts the Chinese form. Of course, these differences don’t change the meaning of the text, but if the point is to show us the manuscripts that Pound used, why show us something else? Since Qian never transcribed Ariga’s kanji, he also never noticed that Ariga circled the rhyme words. Pound might not have cared about the rhymes, but shouldn’t we? Finally, Qian took his texts from mainland Chinese editions with “simplified characters,” but failed to convert them to their traditional forms in a few places, as if Ariga had anticipated the Communist orthographic reforms of the 1950s. Once again, it doesn’t change the meaning, but the mishmash is unfortunate. This happens throughout. Those are the tragic bits. The comedy arises when Qian is forced to add footnotes to explain his Chinese text. In line 17, Ariga writes 8-
for kuikui 88 (strong and vigorous)—note the ma 7 (horse) radical at left. Qian dispenses with the ditto mark (fair enough), but imports a text containing the rarer variant character form —note the mu  “eye” radical at left—then adds the footnote “ = 88” when he could have just given 88 as in the manuscript. In other words, he substitutes the wrong characters, then adds a footnote telling readers what the correct ones should be. A different kind of difficulty arises in the crib for “To-em-mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud’“ which lacks Chinese characters (Fenollosa studied this poem early on with a “Mr. Shida,” 24 Make It New 3.3 _______________________ still unidentified). A gloss in line 18 reads “again,” clearly indicating that Shida’s text reads zai [sai]  (again), as it appears in one authoritative recension (the Siku quanshu Tao Yuanming ji  , 25), but the text Qian uses contains a textual variant zai [sai] , (just then] just starting), which requires him to add a footnote explaining that the character actually means, not “again,” but rather “Begin (to).” In other words, Qian assumes that the discrepancy between character and gloss is an error in Fenollosa’s crib instead of in the Chinese text he incorrectly matches with it. This instance is notable because Pound’s line “The trees in my east-looking garden / are bursting out with new twigs” comes closer to the character that Qian substitutes, which one might call a rare and splendid instance of intuitive reading on Pound’s part: the point of the buds sprouting “again” (in Shida’s text) is that they are (in Qian’s text) “just starting” to flourish, or “new.” (Textual variants often have similar meanings, so it’s not as surprising as it may sound, and it’s impossible to say which one is “correct,” but it is notable just the same. This is the sort of thing we want the cribs to show us.) It has never been observed before that the text Mori was using for their lessons on Li Bo is the Yu xuan Tang Song shi chun . */ (Distillation of Tang and Song Poetry, Selected by the Emperor, hereafter TSSC), compiled and annotated in 1750 by the Qing Emperor Qianlong 3 (1711–1799). Fenollosa notes at the start of Mori’s first formal lecture on Rihaku: “This {selection in} collection To So Shi jun [Tang Song shi chun */] was made by Emperor Kianlung [Qianlong] whose taste was good—and he made a selection from the originally [sic] collections. This selection follows the original order [of the “Ritaihaku Bunshu,” i.e. Li Taibo wenji  5]” (100-4235:1). Indeed, the numbering of Mori’s selections corresponds to those in TSSC, whose annotations are furthermore reflected in some of Mori’s commentaries. Qian, however, imports his Chinese text for the lion’s share of Cathay from the Quan Tangshi  * (Complete Tang Poetry). To be honest, the differences amount to little more than variant forms of a number of characters (plus the smattering of simplified forms), but if we are going to reconstruct the Chinese text behind Fenollosa’s cribs, we might as well use the one that Mori had open in front of them, not least because it allows us to glance sideways at Qianlong’s commentaries from time to time. Qian also mistranscribes many of the Sino-Japanese (on’yomi) romanizations, showing that he didn’t cross-check those either, but I suspect that few readers will care about that, however annoying it may be to those few] and yet those pronunciations do sometimes preserve Tang rhymes that modern Mandarin does not. (Cantonese is a better dialect for that, which Pound also knew from Fenollosa’s notes). Moreover, since a squiggled finger in an iPhone app will identify any character for you these days, I’m not convinced that the extra layer of modern pinyin is worth the clutter, especially when there is no interlineation of Pound’s verse to facilitate doing what I think we all want to do with the cribs—but that’s merely an editorial preference. Fenollosa’s hand played a crucial role in the most important revelation to come from my work on the cribs about how the two big Li Bo notebooks are structured and how Pound used them. I’ll save the finer details for the introduction to the Fordham edition, but the gist of it is that 25 The Ezra Pound Society Magazine __________________ Mori apparently derived his pedagogical method from a traditional Japanese reading practice for Chinese texts called kundoku (“gloss reading”) which involves a two-stage process: 1) identify the meanings of the characters, then 2) rearrange the kanji into intelligible Japanese sentences. Mori’s practice was likewise to supply “glosses” for all the characters in a poem all at once without necessarily reading the lines very carefully to determine precisely which meanings were relevant] and then only after having glossed the whole poem would Mori return to the beginning for a second pass during which he supplied the “paraphrases” for each line, which Fenollosa wrote underneath the glosses. The smoking gun is a conspicuous change of Fenollosa’s pencil in the middle of one of the paraphrases in “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” which continues through the rest of the paraphrases—but none of the glosses—indicating that all of the glosses had already been completed. This explanation accounts for the many otherwise puzzling contradictions—which I believe nobody has observed before—between the glosses and the paraphrases: they were generated through different processes for different purposes. The purpose of the glosses was simply to lay down a rough sense of the individual characters, which would be properly “deciphered” in the second stage, during which Mori examined each line more closely, proposed very literal paraphrases, and sometimes suggested revisions to the glosses, as can be seen in Fenollosa’s many strike-throughs and insertions. During that second stage, Mori also provided comments on history, structure, and style. In short, the paraphrases are Mori’s “decipherings,” the glosses but his preparatory notes. Pound, however, had a penchant for hewing as closely to the language of the original as possible for what we would now call a “foreignizing” translation effect (in Lawrence Venuti’s popular term), as we see very clearly in the “literal” homophonic renderings of “The Seafarer.” He therefore repeatedly preferred trying to parse the provisional glosses on his own rather than relying on the ready-made explanations in the paraphrases. This revelation explains many of the “errors” (real and imaginary) that do stem from the cribs. They stem not from ignorance on Mori’s part, but from Pound’s failure to understand how Mori’s kundoku-inspired pedagogy structured Fenollosa’s manuscripts. Ever since Kenner, a popular technique for scholars has been to extract several lines from the paraphrases in the cribs without the glosses (the vanishing hand) and to reassemble them into a stanza as if they were “Fenollosa’s translations” to be compared with Pound’s translations. Of course, there’s no comparison, but they’re also not really “Fenollosa’s translations” since they’re Mori & Ariga’s decipherings as more or less taken down in dictation by Fenollosa to be translated properly at some later date. (Thank the gods they fell to Pound because Fenollosa was a dreadful poet, as a couple of his unfinished drafts demonstrate.) These paraphrases are also simply not what Pound was primarily using for his poesis, and so they give an imperfect and misleading picture of Pound’s craft. As scholars and admirers of Pound, we need to stop doing this once and for all. Among my editorial goals for the Fordham edition in transcribing, annotating, and interlineating the cribs with Pound’s verse has always been the desire to illuminate Pound’s poetic alchemy. It came as a surprise to learn that the cribs he transmuted into gold were not leaden, as 26 Make It New 3.3 _______________________ earlier transcriptions had led me to believe, but already a kind of unrefined silver. I have also wanted never to flinch from the blood on the sausage-making floor. Cathay too often seems to range the Ezraphiles on one side of a great chasm and the osseous headed philologists (as Pound put it) on the other. My position has always been to walk the planks of the rope bridge swaying above the abyss, knowing full well I will annoy both sides at one point or another. That’s as it should be. But above all perhaps it has been my aim to keep ringing the reminder that the poems from which Pound indirectly made Cathay are themselves magnificent works. They are worth learning to love on their own terms (as well as we can understand those terms), instead of invoking them only as nightsticks wherewith to pummel Pound for his creative deviations from what we think they must mean. Indeed, like all great literature, these Chinese poems contain uncertainties and ambiguities even specialists must squabble over. And in the same spirit that we approach Pound’s translucencies—or better yet opacities, as Gilonis perfectly puts it—without insisting that they be something other than what they are, we must also be willing to approach the Chinese poems on their own terms as masterworks in another poetic idiom whose brilliancies warrant closer scrutiny than any single translation could render. The framing spirit of the Fordham edition is unapologetically Ezracentric, but it also aims to transcend simple notions of “translation” in order to manifest each “poem” as a complex epiphenomenon of originary texts, paratextual commentaries, and translinguistic transformations—a puff of spores and a ripple of echoes floating outwards and sometimes reverberating back again. Pound’s versions are but one (extraordinary) piece of an ever expanding whole, Fenollosa’s cribs another. We would not have the one without the other. But the one and the other go both ways. Indeed, if it weren’t for Pound, a great many admirers of Li Bo’s poetry would never have heard of him even now, by that or any other name. ________ NOTES 1. Take the last of these. In “A Ballad of the Mulberry Road” one gloss reads “hair arrangement (mage).” The point of the parenthetical note is that the Chinese character in the poem ji [kei] : (topknot) is used in Japanese for the masculine topknot of a samurai, whereas mage is the modern Japanese reading (kun’yomi) of another word qu [kei] 9 (topknot) which was traditionally used in Japan for a woman’s hairstyle. Qian, however, reads it as “hair arrangement (maze),” making Fenollosa and his teachers vanish in puff of misrecognition that brings the English and Chinese closer together. That particular loosely-bound hairstyle also has nothing maze-like about it. 2. Take, for example, the line in “The Exile’s Letter” which Pound renders as “And the water a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows.” The paraphrase under the glosses for this 27 The Ezra Pound Society Magazine __________________ line (46) in the crib reads: “Where the hundred feet deep clear waters are reflected / their green eyebrows (the girls) // (Their eyebrows are shaved, and green painted afterward / Jap court ladies’ were done so too.) // {Chinese girls in long form of a bow, “like a distant mt.”}” (italics added throughout for ease of comparison). Qian gives: “Where the hundred feet deep clear water are reflected their green eyebrows (the girls.) (Chinese girls in long form of a brow……their eyebrows are shady, and green penciled afterword) eyes of court ladies were done so too.” Qian fails to recognize that Mori is comparing Chinese and Japanese cosmetic traditions, and so erases everything Japanese from the notes, closing the gap between Pound and China once again. The dropped phrase “like a distant mountain” (at least marked with an elipsis in this case) refers to a description of the beautiful wife of Sima Xiangru 7 (179–117 bce) in the 4th-century Xijing zaji (6) (Miscellany of the Western Capital): “The color of her brows was like that of a distant mountain seen from afar” (' -). Later the term yuanshanmei - (distant-mountain eyebrows) was used for the shape, not the color, of beautiful eyebrows in the course of ever-changing fashion trends. Mori knew what he was talking about. ______________ WORKS CITED Chisholm, Lawrence W. Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. A Critical Edition. Eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Gilonis, Harry. “The Inventor of Cathays,” Make It New. Vol. 3.3 (Dec. 2016). Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1971. Pound, Ezra. Cathay. Ed. Qian Zhaoming. New York: New Directions, 2016. Yip, Wai-Lim. Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton, N.J. Princeton UP, 1967.