EZRA POUND, MARCO POLO, AND CATHAY

Studies of Ezra Pound and the Orient frequently focus on various aspects of his work with the papers of Ernest Fenollosa and on the numerous texts which helped shape Pound\u27s understanding of Asia. One background text which is rarely discussed, however, is Marco Polo\u27s Description of the World, usually known as the Travels. This book, perhaps the most influential travel book ever written, describes Marco Polo\u27s thirteenth-century journey from Venice along the Silk Road to China, his adventures in Asia as an emissary of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, and his return by sea to Europe. When Pound titled his collection of Chinese translations "Cathay," he silently acknowledged a debt to Polo. It was Polo\u27s Travels which brought the term "Cathay" into popular use in the West and fired the Western imagination with its first vision of the Orient. This paper clarifies the nature of Pound\u27s Orient by examining the connections between Marco Polo and Ezra Pound, between the Travels and the Cantos. The purpose is twofold: first, to explore an alternative to the usual approach to the study of Pound and the Orient-to follow Pound from Europe east along the Silk Road to China instead of west through Japan-and second, to examine how the fabulous image of Asia found in the Travels is used by Pound to advance his own ideas and create his own Orient. The heart of the paper is an examination of three texts: Chapter XXIV in Book II of the Travels, Pound\u27s brief essay, "Kublai Khan and his Currency," and the beginning of Canto XVIII consisting of twenty-three lines Pound adapted from Polo. These texts all deal in different ways with Kublai Khan\u27s making and control of paper currency in China. In the essay and in Canto XVIII, Pound draws from Polo\u27s Travels to promote his own economic theories. The recent controversy, spearheaded by Frances Wood, over whether or not Polo actually visited China links the Travels and the Cantos even more closely. Ultimately they are both fictional works grounded in experience but describing imaginary worlds