THE CLASSIC ANTHOLOGY DEFINED BY CONFUCIUS (224 pp.)—Translated by Ezra Pound—Harvard University ($5).
Some five centuries before Christ, the Chinese put together a kind of 3O5-poem treasury of their own verse. Around 484 B.C., Confucius, an inveterate lute player, edited the musical scores for the poems, and told his son: "A man who hasn't worked on the [Odes] is like one who stands with his face to a wall." In this volume. Poet Ezra Pound makes a free and brilliant translation, even to the use of jazz idioms and hillbilly dialect.
The poems are...