Judith Gautier, Vers Libre, and the Faux East.

Judith Gautier (1845-1917) is best known as muse to Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner. More recently, critics have started crediting her for bringing Asian culture to Parnassian-era Paris in her 1867 translations of Chinese poetry, Le Livre de jade. In most of her translations, Gautier adapted Chinese texts to suit personal and contemporary French poetic ideals, which were in turn appropriated by readers as models of Chinese ideals. Her poetic creations reveal an early modernist style, which is at once disorienting and familiarizing. This article reconsiders Gautier's translations to show how and why these adaptations replaced original Chinese sources for subsequent generations of modernist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth. Orientalist tendencies in these eminent poets are products of Gautier's subjective, gendered, and inventive interpretation of the East, shaped not only by the translations themselves but also by Gautier's ways of understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]