Like
nature, the Chinese words are alive
and plastic,
because thing and action
are not formally separated.
(Fenollosa/Pound 1920)
Le
rêve: connaître une langue
étrangère (étrange)
et cependant
ne pas la comprendre... en un mot,
descendre dans l’intraduisible.
(Barthes 1973)
The first coherent descriptions of
the Chinese writing system appeared
in Europe in the second half of the
16th century and they agreed on underlining
the «universal» character
of the ideograms, seen as embedding
the «naturalness» of the
perfect language, the universal prebabelic
language.
In 1920 Ezra Pound, at the time one
of the most influential intellectuals
in Europe, published in London The
Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry, an essay of the American
philosopher Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908),
where the ideogram is seen as the
poetic medium par excellence.
Pound codified with that essay a poetic
revaluation of the ideogram which,
in different forms, was to be found
at the time in the works of several
other poets, variously connected to
the European avant-gardes. As many
sinologists have since demonstrated,
it was a case of creative misunderstanding
of Chinese characters, between exoticism
and cult of the foreigner as an aesthetic
possibility. Nonetheless it proved
quite a productive misunderstanding,
since it laid the foundations of a
true ars poetica, a poetics of the
ideogram.
The fascination for ideogrammatic
writing in poetry found its premises
in the Avant-garde desire to renovate
poetic language. Poets saw in the
ideograms the opportunity to resort
to primitive, concrete forms, to the
«words with a soul» anticipated
by Paul Claudel in his etymological
reveries: words-objects in which the
relationship with the thing was not
arbitrary, but graphically founded.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s teachings
on the arbitrary of the sign dated
from those same years, but Fenollosa
and Pound saw in the arbitrariness
of sign and in the generalising abstractness
of European languages the deep causes
for the anaemia of modern poetry.
Secondarily, what made Chinese characters
look particularly fit for poetry was
their combinatorial versatility. The
mechanisms of compound ideograms –
where two things or ideas are combined
and juxtaposed to conjure up new meanings
– bring a visual metaphor before
the eyes of the reader. Indeed, Claudel
speaks of a metaphorical logic for
ideogrammatic languages, and Fenollosa
remarked how such a language «bears
its metaphor on its face».
A further privilege of Chinese language
was perceived in its sheer prevalence
of verbs (as opposed to other grammatical
forms), and most notably of transitive
verbs. This was the most natural form
of poetry according to Fenollosa,
who was deeply critical of the «static»
quality acquired by alphabetic languages.
Ultimately, ideogrammatic writing
was seen as providing poetry with
the untranslatable virulence of a
language which carried in itself «a
verbal idea of action», and
proceeded by accumulation and juxtaposition,
«beyond» the abstract
logics of western languages.
The fascination and experimentation
with ideograms found multiple realizations
in the works of several early 20th
century poets. On the one hand, the
magic of the ideogram as a means of
pictorial writing led these poets
to include ideograms in their poems,
in dialogue with alphabetic writing
(e.g. Pound, Claudel, Victor Segalen
and Henri Michaux). Further along
this same line, the visual aspect
of ideograms opened the way towards
different forms of visual poetry,
that is poems conceived to be seen
as much as read (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire,
Pierre Albert-Birot, Corrado Govoni,
Pedro Raida, Juan Larrea, Christian
Morgenstern et Christian Dotremont).
If the quest of a form of artistic
writing (i.e. calligrammatic) was
an outcome of the «synthetic»
ambition of avant-garde poetry, visual
poetry showed a development from representative
to conceptual, from calligrammes
to analogia disegnata (Francesco
Meriano exhorted to represent «the
flight, not the aeroplane» in
1916).
On the other hand, and at a deeper
level of abstraction, ideograms (and
particularly the mechanisms of compound
ideograms) inspired a true principle
of poetics, which Pound named the
«ideogrammic method» and
applied to the syntactic construction
of his poems. This method consisted
in structuring a poem around a series
of juxtaposed observable images or
facts, thus inducing a poetic experience
built out of accumulation. «Free»
from the grammatical and logical constraints
of European thinking, poetical discourse
could reclaim the «natural order
of things», that is transitivity.
Interestingly enough, shortly after
Pound, Sergei Eisenstein celebrated
the ideogram as a principle of cinematographic
montage, in an essay he wrote in 1929.
This monographic issue of RiLUnE
wants to analyse the multifaceted
influence of a poetic of the ideogram
in early 20th century European poetry.
In an historical period characterised
by eclecticism and cosmopolitism,
it is not unusual to discover shared
tendencies and a manifest proximity
of experimentations throughout different
languages and countries. Apart from
Pound, one can think of Claudel’s
reflections on a «religion of
the sign» and «western
ideograms», Apollinaire’s
Calligrammes, the Italian
Futurists’ parole in libertà,
the experiments of the Spanish Ultraísmo
and Creacionismo, Segalen’s
steles, Michaux’s ideograms,
Christian Dotremont’s logograms
or the offshoots (of European origins)
of Jose Tablada’s ideographic
madrigals and the «concrete
poetry» of Eugen Gomringer and
Augusto de Campos. This issue sets
out to investigate the European roots
of such peculiar rediscovery of the
ideogram, gathering a series of contributions
which explore the implications of
this discovery across different authors
and countries.
Enrico
Monti
