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Review of Literatures of the European Union

Issue n. 8 - December 2008

The Reception of Ideograms in Early 20th Century European Poetry
Edited by Enrico Monti

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

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Bibliography

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