Instigations

Ezra Pound opens with a rebuke: America’s intellectual life can no longer afford to be monolingual. Why, he asks, should a New Zealand newspaper be more alert to French poetry than any American periodical?

In the early twentieth century, Pound looks across the Atlantic to ask what American readers are missing. His sharp, personal essays weigh the work of French poets from Gautier to Laforgue, Corbière, and Rimbaud, arguing that an outsider’s eye can sometimes cut through a nation’s literary fashions and find the art that lasts. Alongside these reflections comes “An Essay on the Chinese Written Character,” extending the book’s inquiry into language and how meaning takes shape. Which qualities of a poem survive the journey from one language—and one culture—to another?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.