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Before he published his translations of Chinese poems, Cathay, Ezra Pound had adapted three pieces of Chinese poems from H. A. Giles' History of Chinese Literature: 'After Ch'u Yuan,' 'Liu Ch'e,' and 'Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord.' Though he was ignorant of Chinese language at that time and later, he was quite ready to accept Chinese classics: Allen Upward's books on China were eye-openers to him: he read them and turned Confucian. Cathay comprises eighteen translaitons of nineteen Chinese poems out of some 150 Chinese poems annotated and transcribed by Ernest Fenollosa in his notebooks which were handed over to Pound by his widow in 1913. They were mainly from Li Po, eleven to be exact, or twelve, and the rest were from various sources: Shi Ching, old poem, and five poets, one anonymous among them, one from each. There are many errors in the translations. Some of them are so called howlers. They are mistakes and mistranslations which could have been easily avoided by a minimum of primary knowledge of the language. With the translations, Pound achieved what he could in English: clear-cut visual images, hard, dry, and precise. and lost what he should: a vision of human fate realized in the vastness of Chinese geography and history, which is the final beauty of the original poems. Pound believed an understanding of Confucianism, a few beginning lines of Ta Hsio could prevent the impendng World War. He translated three of Four Books: Th Hsio twice (as Ta Hio: The Great Learning in 1928 and as Ta Hsio: The Great Digest in 1947), Chung Yung: The Unwobbling Pivot in 1947, and The Analects in 1950; he did not rendered Mencius which is by far longer than the other three put together. The three books were published in one volume, titled Confucius in 1951. His 'ideogrammic method', begun earlier and destined to culminate in his renderings of ShiChing, was vigorously employed in the book. It is the method of juxtapositions without copula, characterized by 'the constant use of extreme ellipsis.' It is 'almost a shorthand.' Achilles Fang called it 'etymosinology.'