This chapter approaches genre both as a name for historically variable groupings of recurring patterns within poems and as an interpretive device that serves as a frame for engaging with individual poems. Examining Ezra Pound's translations of classical Chinese poetry, recent work by Marilyn Chin, and the anonymous body of verses in Chinese known collectively as “the Angel Island poems,” composed between 1910 and 1940 by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, the chapter explores how genres acquire new features or traits as they travel across and take root in different languages and literary traditions. In this way, the chapter demonstrates how genres generate expectations and other affective attachments among readers. At the same time, the chapter argues, individual poems may partake of, depart from, and otherwise play with the conventions of multiple genres simultaneously.

On the publication of the Chinese translation of the Pisan Cantos, the poet Yang Lian observed that now, in the Chinese language, The Cantos had achieved its full realization. For those of us who can read The Cantos only in English and a smattering of Western tongues, this is a somewhat disheartening proposition, yet the very suggestion resonates with a whole cluster of issues bound up with the central role that China came to play in Pound’s work. One might think the topic of China in Pound’s writings had been exhaustively covered, especially discussions of Cathay and Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on written Chinese as a medium for poetry, yet there is no abatement in the seemingly inexhaustible re-treading of old ground along with new approaches.