Ernest Fenollosa
In 1913, Pound was contacted by the widow of the recently deceased Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, who while in Japan had collected word-by-word translations and notes for 150 classical Chinese poems that fit in closely with this program. Chinese grammar offers different expressive possibilities from English grammar, a point that Pound subsequently made much of. For example, in Chinese, the first line of Li Po's (called "Rihaku" by Fenollosa's Japanese informants) poem is a spare, direct juxtaposition of 5 characters that appear in Fenollosa's notes as mistress       hair       first       cover       browIn his resulting 1915 "Cathay", Pound rendered this in simple English as While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead