The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

"The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is a poem loosely translated by Ezra Pound from a poem by Chinese poet Li Bai. It first appeared in Pound's 1915 collection Cathay. It is the most widely anthologized poem of the collection.[1] In addition to "The Jewell Stairs' Grievance" and "The Exile's Letter", also included in the collection, Zhaoming Qian has referred to "The River Merchant's Wife" as an "imagist and vorticist [masterpiece]".[2]

The poem is written from the perspective of a girl married to a river merchant, and describes her gradually increasing affection for him and the pain she feels when he is away.[3]

References
  1. Zhang, Yu (Fall 1998). "Ezra Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter": On Mistranslation Of The Two Allusions". Paideuma. 27 (2/3): 185-194.
  2. Qian, Zhaoming (2010). The Orient. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8.
  3. Hunter, J. Paul (1986). The Norton Introduction to Poetry. Norton.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.