Jon:
Very interesting notes on Easternizing the Westernesse (or is it the
reverse?). In the end Pound does not rise or fall, I suspect, on any single
trend he initiated or any (mis)treatment of another culture's artifacts, but
on the simple fact that his poems early on reawakend something in
Anglo-American Kulchur that was dead asleep. His language is alive and stays
alive as this list demonstrates. The rest is a matter of interest of course,
and great grist for the scholarly mill, but inevitably of secondary
importance. Tom White

> From: Jon & Anne Weidler <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 11:26:32 -0600
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: The image & orientalism(e)
>
> Robert Kern wrote a wonderful book called _Orientalism, Modernism & the
> American Poem_.  In it, he goes into some detail about the "deeper
> roots" of Pound and Fenollossa's ideogrammatic convictions, saying that
> they can be found "not only in American literary history (particularly
> the work of Emerson) but in intellectual and linguistic traditions that
> go back at least as far as the Renaissance" (ix).  He argues that EP
> and EF's interests and accomplishments vis a vis Chinese poetry are
> grounded in a long history of western thinkers pursuing "Adamic
> language", that is, an ideal immediacy between sign and referent (as
> when Adam named the animals.)
>
> The debate about Adam's language goes back quite a ways.  I won't bore
> anyone with the details, but I will mention that 17th century English
> and French thinkers became enamored for a while of ideogrammatic
> language, even considering a variation of Chinese script for use in
> official state discourse.  Their notion was that ideograms conveyed a
> complicated statement in a small written package, and were not so
> susceptible to rhetorical over-elaboration as was analytic, phonetic
> English.  Back in the real world, they were clearly wrong, and Swift
> parodied the notion by describing a society where everyone has to carry
> bags full of objects in order to communicate with one another,
> displaying the different objects at appropriate times.
>
> (Chinese thinking and writing continued to animate the philosophes of
> the Enlightenment.  Francois de Quesnay, the classical economist who
> most influenced Adam Smith, was a so-called "physiocrat", believing
> that economies worked because of the land's natural production, and
> that Europeans should practice the Chinese imperial habit of "wu wei",
> meaning "no effort"; the land, he believed, and the commerce flowing
> off of its bounty, required no special state control and should be let
> alone to make or do the things it makes and does.  He translated "wu
> wei" as "laissez faire".  Adam Smith kept the French term as it was,
> and now every American junior high social studies text quotes Confucian
> principles without realizing they are doing so, blithely believing they
> are talking about what they call "capitalism".)
>
> Europeans searching for more immediate, revivified ways of writing
> would return periodically to the ideogram.  Interestingly, during the
> nineteenth century, while German philologists did everything they could
> to denigrate Chinese as a fossilized, stunted, only-half-finished
> language (far inferior to their beloved Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and, oh
> hey, German as well,) Egyptian hieroglyphics were decoded by M.
> Champollion, and European thinkers had a different kind of ancient
> pictographic language to idealize and reify as something that it was
> not.  And they did so to great effect: the Scarlet Letter (the letter,
> not the narrative) is called a hieroglyph, Moby Dick (the whale, not
> the narrative) is called a hieroglyph, the Purloined Letter (ditto) is
> called a hieroglyph, and Walt Whitman's first edition of _Leaves of
> Grass_ came out without the author's name on the title page, replaced
> instead by his engraved portrait, as if the image were enough to
> signify _Leaves_ as Walt's textual double.
>
> By the time Fenollossa wrote his famous notebooks, and by the time EP
> got his hands on them, Chinese poetry had been what they call
> "translated" a number of times into English.  Usually, the translators
> knew no Chinese, and had no fancy collection of glosses from Japanese
> literature professors to assist them.  Instead, most translators of
> Chinese verse did everything they could to excise the impression that
> the poems had ever been Chinese at all, and were for the most part
> content to "translate" other already-English translations into updated
> verse forms.  Lancelot Cranmer-Byng, for instance, "translated" Herbert
> Giles' already published work by substituting Pre-Raphaelite
> conventions for Tennysonian ones.  In neither case does the Chinese
> poem escape being domesticated into English: four-line poems with four
> syllables per line suddenly explode into verse paragraphs of fourteen
> lines or more.
>
> With these two governing conditions in place ( 1 - Euro-American
> authors have a tradition of becoming dissatisfied with phonetic,
> analytic English as a vehicle for linguistic immediacy, and 2 - the
> translation of Chinese poetry into English almost never treated it as
> appropriately "other" to indigenous English verse), we have to notice
> that Pound (along with Fenollosa) fulfilled two different tasks by
> talking about the ideogram as a medium for poetry: they signalled that
> the ancient desire for Adamic language had been reignited, and
> demonstrated that "imagism" (variously and ably defined for us by Rick
> and Dirk) as a short-line verse form concentrating on brevity and
> juxtaposition was a way for English to pose as Chinese, a way for
> phonetics to substitute for 'real', pictographic ideograms.  This
> facility of imagism to represent "otherness" might have contributed to
> its being so romantically available to writers of varying skill.  (I
> think it's important to remember, therefore, that Pound gave "amygism"
> its name because of a strong dislike for its products and producers,
> and not because he had some sober rationale for distinguishing between
> them on the basis of simple criteria.)
>
> Along with the discussion of images, vortices, and ideograms, we should
> periodically recall that "the East" is "given" a special sort of
> modernist-derived image of its own.  It's easy to forget that _Cathay_
> is not really Cathay, and that Chinese poetry (even by L'iu Che) is not
> modernist or "imagist" or vers libre at all.  It has been cast into
> this form by Euro-American tendencies to spot themselves in others'
> images.  I don't mean to imply too Saidian of a rant here, but it's
> clear to me that Pound only "invented" China for "our" time, our
> script, our grammar, and our own patterned energy of narcissism.  And
> for that, he gets both praise and hesitation.
>
> Regards to all,
> Jon