The Wall of Emotion: Imagery Transmission from East to West in Ezra Pound's Translations

Abstract

When poetry travels across cultures, misunderstanding and mistranslation are almost inevitable due to differences in language, historical context, and cultural traditions. Yet, literary translation simultaneously facilitates the circulation, development, and renewal of culture. Ezra Pound, as both a distinguished poet and translator, assimilated elements from Japanese haiku and classical Chinese poetry to create unprecedented poetic imagery within modernist literature. On the one hand, he rendered a wide range of Chinese texts, including The Book of Songs and poems by Li Bai and Wang Wei. In traditional Chinese discourse, writing emphasizes the expression of “implication”, whereas translation must not only capture textual meaning but also anticipate the reception of unseen readers. On the other hand, Pound transformed poetic images into forms familiar to his cultural environment, thereby reshaping their resonance in English. Focusing on Pound’s translation of terms such as “city”, “wall” and “corner” in Li Bai’s poetry, this paper examines how imagery is transformed and reinterpreted in the process of cross-cultural communication.