By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Pound translates the Chinese line “desolate-castle-empty-vast-desert”, where the middle character “empty” is ambiguous enough to serve both as a verb reinforcing “vast desert” and as a verb to look back to “desolate castle”. 
 Pound’s version of translation captures this pivotal image in its complexity as well as its simplicity. ( Elegy and Personae in Ezra Pound’s Cathay ,  Ming Xie ) 
 The fragmented line suggests a sense of break, an empty chasm that cannot be connected.