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, can be found at the time
in several other poets’ work,
more or less connected to the European
avant-gardes. As many sinologists
have since demonstrated, it is a
case of creative misunderstanding
of Chinese characters, but nonetheless
a productive one, 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 possibility to resort
to primitive, concrete forms, to
the «words with a soul»
dreamt by Paul Claudel: words-objects
in which the relationship with the
thing was not arbitrary, but graphically
founded. 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, thanks to mechanisms
of juxtaposition which may turn
every compound ideogram into a visual
metaphor before the eyes of the
reader. 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
and combine them with alphabetic
writings (e.g. Pound, Victor Segalen,
Henri Michaux and Paul Claudel).
Further on 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, Corrado Govoni
and Christian Dotremont). On the
other hand, and at a deeper level
of exploration, ideograms (and particularly
the mechanics 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.
This
monographic issue of RiLUnE
will 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, we 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 further away, the offshoots (of
European origins) of Jose Tablada’s
ideographic madrigals and the «concrete
poetry» of Eugen Gomringer
and Augusto de Campos. This issue
aims to investigate the European
roots of this peculiar rediscovery
of the ideogram, gathering contributions
which may explore the implications
of this discovery across different
authors and countries.
Some
possible lines of analysis within
the reception of the ideogram are:
-
The effects of the «re-discovery»
of the ideogram in poetic language.
The need for a concrete and primal
relationship with things and the
rediscovery of the «fossil
poetry» in language.
- The creative misunderstanding
of the ideogrammatic basis of the
Chinese characters and its developments:
whether and how the Indo-European
linguistic perspective may interfere
with and isolate/emphasize/distort
particular features of the language,
between exoticism and cult of the
foreigner as an aesthetic possibility.
- The influence of the ideogram
on the spatiality of poetic writing:
directionality and dynamism («internal»
in the signs of the ideogram and
«external» in alphabetical
languages); horizontal signs versus
vertical signs, a new form of energy
within the language.
- The syntactic implications of
an «ideogrammic method»
applied to poetry: a form of writing
by juxtaposition and accumulation,
«free» from syntactical
constraints and linked to the «natural
order of things», i.e. transitivity.
Incidentally, the method is paralleled
in cinema by Sergei Eisenstein who,
in a 1929 essay, celebrated the
ideogram as a principle of cinematographic
montage.
- Visual poetics: from Imagism to
visual poetry, the search for a
language of overtones «vibrating
against the eye» (Fenollosa).
The ideogram as a means of visual
synthesis between painting and writing,
and its integration in the poetic
text, in dialogue with alphabetical
writing. The search for a form of
artistic writing (i.e. calligrammatic)
as an expression of the «synthetic»
ideal of avant-garde poetry.
- The ideogrammatic roots of visual
poetry. From Mallarmé’s
«Coup de dès»
to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes,
from Italian futurism (Marinetti
and Govoni) to the Spanish Vanguardia
(Vicente Huidobro): the ideogram
as a tool to dissolve the free verse
into the plastic forms of visual
poetry. Note also the evolution
of visual poetry from representative
to conceptual, from calligrammes
to analogia disegnata (Francesco
Meriano exhorted to represent «the
flight, not the aeroplane»
in 1916).
- The metaphorical quality of the
ideogram, especially in compound
ideograms, where two things or ideas
are combined and juxtaposed to conjure
up new meanings. Claudel speaks
of a metaphorical logic for ideogrammatic
languages and Fenollosa remarked
how such a language «bears
its metaphor on its face».
- The fascination for etymology
as a prerogative of poetry and the
license of poetic etymologies possibly
encouraged by the «etymorhetoric»
(Jin 2002) tradition of classical
Chinese poetry (see, among others,
Claudel, Fenollosa and Michaux).
- The reception of the ideogram
as a realization of Roland Barthes’
dream of «knowing a language
without understanding it»:
the descent to the «untranslatable»
as a poetic experience, leading
to the dissolution of meaning in
Michaux’s and Dotremont’s
picto-poetic experimentations.
SUBMISSIONS
Deadline
for abstracts (400 words) plus a
brief cv: July 10, 2008
Deadline
for completed articles: November
30, 2008
Articles
may be written in one of the following
languages: English, French, Spanish,
Italian and German. Two abstracts
in English and French (200 words
each) should accompany each submission.
Address your inquiries and submissions
to:
Enrico
Monti
identifying
“Rilune” in the subject
line.
