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The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition
First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound's understanding-it is fair to say, his appropriation-of the text. Fenollosa's manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North Americaand East Asia.Pound's editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa's encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry.This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa's important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound's deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa's sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa's ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition.This masterfully edited book will be an essential resource for scholars and poets and a starting point for a renewed discussion of the multiple sources of American modernist poetry.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1919
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September 12, 2014
این کتاب در فارسی دیده نشد و حیف شد، سقط شد، معده شعر و ذوق فارسی آن را نفهمید. این کتاب در شعر مدرن آن طرف غوغایی به پا کرد و به جرات مینویسم اگر کسی به شعر نگاهی حرفهای و خلاقانه داشته باشد، این کتاب در فارسی ناب و بیمثال است. اینقد مهجور است که نه در کتابفروشیها پیداست، (نسخههای چاپ 1378 هنوز در انبار پخش کتابیها خاک میخورد) و نه حتی در گودریدز صفحهای داشت، نه چیزی برای آن نوشته شد، نه نقدی شد، نه توجهی را برگرداند.
کتاب مفصل و دقیق، توضیح میدهد آنچه که ارنست فنولوزا در ایدئوگرامهای زبان چینی میبیند ازرا پاوند (از ستونهای ادبیات خلاقانه ابتدای قرن بیستم) آن را کشف میکند و همت به انتشار آن میکند چیست و چطور است و چراست؟
اگر از ذهنیت و عینیت (به این شکل احمقانه)در شعر فارسی حرف میزنند، اگر از اشیا زبانیشده حرف میزنند، اگر از یکی کردن کنش و شی حرف میزنند، اگر از این حرف میزنند که باید از بازنمایی به سمت حادثه باید پیش رفت، بدون این کتاب شاید سخت بشود فهمید. یا بهتر است بگویم با این کتاب است که میشود دقیق فهمید قضیه چیست.
کتاب مفصل و دقیق، توضیح میدهد آنچه که ارنست فنولوزا در ایدئوگرامهای زبان چینی میبیند ازرا پاوند (از ستونهای ادبیات خلاقانه ابتدای قرن بیستم) آن را کشف میکند و همت به انتشار آن میکند چیست و چطور است و چراست؟
اگر از ذهنیت و عینیت (به این شکل احمقانه)در شعر فارسی حرف میزنند، اگر از اشیا زبانیشده حرف میزنند، اگر از یکی کردن کنش و شی حرف میزنند، اگر از این حرف میزنند که باید از بازنمایی به سمت حادثه باید پیش رفت، بدون این کتاب شاید سخت بشود فهمید. یا بهتر است بگویم با این کتاب است که میشود دقیق فهمید قضیه چیست.
August 18, 2008
I believe that we can all agree that Fenollosa's argument has less to do with Chinese etymology and much more to do with a theory of poetry. And that theory, though illustrated rather poorly in this case, is a brilliant one.
If one accepts that language is built out of metaphor, and that our present use of language represents centuries of metaphorical use and construction, Fenollosa's leap of faith-- that the Chinese character represents a sort of instant etymological study-- is rather easy to excuse. Fenollosa wants each word, in every language, to do such work in the mind of the poet, and, with luck, the mind of the reader. He thinks that concrete verbs, the wellspring of language in his theory, are the medium for such thought, and clearly expressed action is their container. Eschewing abstract verbs as the province of logic and degraded/lazy poetry, Fenollosa calls for a return of the transitive verb, of a multiplicity of verbs, to the English language. Indeed, his frequent asides about the English language should clue the reader in that his subject is not really Chinese language at all, but a kind of comparative study of (his vision of) the relative strengths of tradition in each, by which I mean how cognizant the poet and his/her readers are of the etymology and previous usage of each word utilized.
If one accepts that language is built out of metaphor, and that our present use of language represents centuries of metaphorical use and construction, Fenollosa's leap of faith-- that the Chinese character represents a sort of instant etymological study-- is rather easy to excuse. Fenollosa wants each word, in every language, to do such work in the mind of the poet, and, with luck, the mind of the reader. He thinks that concrete verbs, the wellspring of language in his theory, are the medium for such thought, and clearly expressed action is their container. Eschewing abstract verbs as the province of logic and degraded/lazy poetry, Fenollosa calls for a return of the transitive verb, of a multiplicity of verbs, to the English language. Indeed, his frequent asides about the English language should clue the reader in that his subject is not really Chinese language at all, but a kind of comparative study of (his vision of) the relative strengths of tradition in each, by which I mean how cognizant the poet and his/her readers are of the etymology and previous usage of each word utilized.
September 25, 2015
This essay was passed around like a dirty book amongst a few of us at Grinnell College, like something the grownups didn't want us to know but we were determined to understand. In the world of literary criticism and interpretation it was regarded in much the same way as Robert Graves' The White Goddess.
I read it on the recommendation of Robert Gehorsam, an aesthete for whom I had some considerable respect. He also recommended Graves' book, but Pound was much, much shorter. I understand now that its thesis, like Graves', is pretty thoroughly discredited, but in certain domains this hardly matters, litcrit being as much a weaving of tales as the literatures it studies. Besides, it gives one some insight into Pound--or Graves, for that matter.
I read it on the recommendation of Robert Gehorsam, an aesthete for whom I had some considerable respect. He also recommended Graves' book, but Pound was much, much shorter. I understand now that its thesis, like Graves', is pretty thoroughly discredited, but in certain domains this hardly matters, litcrit being as much a weaving of tales as the literatures it studies. Besides, it gives one some insight into Pound--or Graves, for that matter.
February 16, 2025
Although it's inaccurate when talking about the Chinese itself, it's an interesting way to look at language.
May 4, 2016
review of
Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
as edited by Ezra Pound
- by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 3, 2016
I have an ongoing fascination w/ language in multitudinous forms. I've made a braille piece (1980), 2 in American Sign Language (1986) ( http://youtu.be/l7H8DJ0CYJE ), etc.. The current manifestation of this interest is my 'opera': "Endangered Languages, Endangered Culture, Endangered Ideas". This led to my reading The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry - not b/c I consider Chinese to be endangered but b/c I want to work more w/ Chinese written language as a stimulus for Concrete & Visual Poetry to be animated w/in "Endangered"'s context.
The 2nd paragraph of the back cover blurb says this: "The old theory as to the nature of the Chinese written character (which Pound and Fenollosa followed) is that the written character is ideogrammic — a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents. The opposing theory (which prevails today among scholars) is that the character may have had pictorial origins in prehistoric times but that they have been obscured in all but a very few simple cases, and that in any case native writers don't have the original pictorial meaning in mind as they write."
I wasn't in the least bit convinced by Fenollosa's assertions but I did find them wonderful stimulus for the animation ideas that prompted my reading this bk in the 1st place.
"Man sees horse.
"It is clear that three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily denote these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters:" - p 8
At this point 3 Chinese characters are shown the 1st identified as meaning "Man", the 2nd as "Sees", & the 3rd as "Horse". I use this example in a short movie that I made called "Fenollosa's Chinese" that I posted on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/164504907 . In my simple animation, I show each of the Chinese characters preceded by Fenollosa's claim for their pictorial origins. The initial representational image is then cross-faded into the Chinese written character. I tried to be respectful of Fenollosa's claim but, IMO, the representational images are too far away from the written character to be believable as the origin.
"If we knew what division of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much the same manner." - p 8
"as easily as drawing them as by speaking words": drawing is not usually as easy as speaking insofar as it involves external implements not always handy - a pencil & paper, eg. Even if one were to imagine drawing thru gesture there wd be problems of facing another person directly & reversing perspective from one's own left-right to the viewer's left-right. Sound is more omni-directional & doesn't depend on fixed perceiver position for comprehensibility.
"But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign : all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stand the man on his two legs."
Now, the actual Chinese symbol is like an inverted "y". This might be seen as a man in an unnaturally spread-legged position who has no arms & no head & whose torso is as thick as one of his legs but it cd more accurately be seen as many other things such as a wall that's falling over buttressed up by a board. In other words, Fenollosa's claim makes it seem like this symbol is obviously based on the depiction of a standing man when the actual visual connection is feeble, to say the least.
"Second, his eye moves through space : a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it." - p 8
Again, check out my very short movie in order to understand this better. I created an image of an eye over running legs in silhouette in an attempt to replicate Fenollosa's description accurately & then cross-faded it into the Chinese symbol so that the viewer can make the comparison for themselves. What Fenollosa refers to an an "eye" might be simply described as a not completely parallelogram box w/ 4 horizontal lines & 2 vertical ones. It looks more like shelves than an eye to me. The running legs I can see a little better.
"Third stands the horse on his four legs." - p 8
Ok, if the horse is standing on his 4 legs it also has an unnaturally long tail that it might be standing on AND a rider. Fenollosa omits the rider altogether even tho that seems extremely obvious. Again, see my movie.
"The thought-picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture." - pp 8-9
While I completely disagree w/ Fenollosa's assertion of the obviousness of the pictorial connection to the written symbol I do find his claim that Chinese is all verbs to be very interesting. He seems to be saying that the pictorial observations that the characters are allegedly based on aren't just NOUNS but VERBS. As he says: "they are alive". What the author claims as a drawing of running legs in the ideogram for "sees" does indeed have a line that cd be seen as a leg bent at the knee. Proportionally, it wd be too distorted for the claim to be very strong but, still, it's an interesting point. In an interview w/ Joel Biroco, of KAOS magazine, that I conducted in 1988, he stressed the art of Chinese Calligraphy as revolving around energy flow.
"But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes." - p 9
"A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one : things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them." - p 10
This theory of his especially interests me b/c of my own analysis of my high school yrbk & the self-descriptions that people wrote for it (see: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/W1969.Y... ). When looking at the yrbk shortly after it came out in 1970 I noticed that there were very few verbs used. Even as a 16 yr old this struck me as indicative of a cultural byproduct, a result of a society that stressed a passive robopathic relationship to citizenship. I felt like the teaching I'd rc'vd had a subtext stressing that I be more of a noun, a chesspiece for 'authorities'. This was at a time when the Vietnam War was still in progress & all males turning 18 yrs old were required to register for the draft. Resistance ACTIVISM was threatened w/ long federal prison sentences. W/ that analysis in mind, I find Fenollosa's contention of the "things in motion, motion in things" of Chinese to be significant far beyond its value for poetry.
"Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
"The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order of causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth." - p 12
Oh, well. While we're on the subject of the sentence why not quote Ron Silliman's essay, "The New Sentence", from his bk The New Sentence?:
"What Stein means about paragraphs being emotional and sentences not is precisely the point made by Emile Beneviste: that linguistic units integrate only up to the level of the sentence, but higher orders of meaning—such as emotion—integrate at higher levels than the sentence and occur only in the presence of either many sentences or, at least Stein's example suggests this, in the presence of certain complex sentences in which dependent clauses integrate with independent ones. The sentence is the horizon, the border between these two fundamentally distinct types of integration." - p 87, The New Sentence
I realize that I haven't used the proximity of Fenollosa & Silliman to exactly generate lightning but, still, if "The sentence is the horizon, the border between these two fundamentally distinct types of integration" might we at least have some fun calling a cloud one type of integration & the earth another? Back to Fenollosa:
"' Is ' comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. ' Be ' is from bhu, to grow.
"In Chinese the chief verb for ' is ' not only means actively ' to have ' but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely ' to snatch from the moon with the hand. '"
Here, he shows the relevant Chinese character. In my "Fenollosa's Chinese" movie it's the 4th Chinese character shown.
"Here the baldest symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry," - p 15
This bk, written by Fenollosa before his death in 1908, 1st published in 1920, & published in the minimally edited Pound edition in 1935, contains the 1st use of the expression "concrete poetry" that I've run across. Whether Fenollosa meant it in the sense of Concrete Poetry later elucidated is debatable. Take these quotes:
"Ideas to renew grammatical structures are bound to emerge if you make comparisons with foreign languages, with Chinese, for instance, with its classless words and meaning derived from word order"
[..]
"Having used the word concrete in these contexts, I have related it more to concrete music than to art concretism in its narrow meaning. In addition the concrete working poet is, of course, related to formalities and language-kneaders of all times, the Greeks, Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Schwitters, Artaud and many others. And he considers as venerated portal figures not only the Owl in Winnie the Pooh but also Carrol's Humpty Dumpty who considers every question a riddle and dictates impenetrable meanings to the words." - "Manifesto for Concrete Poetry" (1952-55) by Öyvind Fahlström (Sweden), translated by Karen Loevgren & Mary Ellen Solt - http://www.ubu.com/papers/fahlstrom01...
&/OR:
"concrete poetry: a manifesto
"- concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communiation, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history - tabu-tombs in which convention insist on burying the idea.
"- the concrete poet does not turn away from words, he does not glance at them obliquely: he goes directly to their center, in order to live and vivify their facticity."
[..]
"- mallarmé (un coup de dés - 1897), joyce (finnegans wake), pound (cantos, ideogram), cummings, and on a secondary plane, apollinaire (calligrammes) and the experimental attempts of the futurists-dadaists are at the root of the new poetic procedure which tends to impose itself on a conventional organization whose formal unity is the verse (even free-).
"- the concrete poem or ideogram becomes a relational field of funcions." - "Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto" (1956) by Augusto de Campos (Brazil), translated by John Tolman - http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampo...
Whether one believes that Fenollosa deserves credit for using the expression "concrete poetry" in a way that's predictive of the later "Concrete Poetry" or not, it's worth noting that Pound, who was influenced by Fenollosa, is listed as one of the roots "of the new poetic procedure" by de Campos & that, furthermore, de Campos conflates "concrete poem" & "ideogram" together.
That said, I find Fenollosa's explanation of the pictorial content of the Chinese character for "is" to be quite dubious.. but lovely nonetheless.
"Nature herself has no grammar. Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions!" - p 16
"The Chinese have one word, ming or mei. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally, ' the sun and moon of the cup ' for ' the cup's brightness. ' Placed as a verb, you write ' the cup sun-and-moons, ' actually ' cup sun-and-moon, ' or in a weakened thought, ' is like sun, ' i.e. shines. ' Sun-and-moon cup ' is naturally a bright cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid scholar may spend a week trying to decide what ' part of speech ' he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English." - p 18
Again, I find this interesting but since the sun is a generator of light & the moon is a reflector of it & since candles or fireflies, eg, cd also be sources of light if one were to be more exacting a "'Sun-and-moon cup'" wd only be a cup somehow interacting either w/ direct sunlight or indirect sunlight reflected from the moon. As such, in my reading of it, it's not necessarily a "bright cup".
"I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. According to this European logic thought is a kind of brickyard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. Their use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and sticking them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula ' is, ' or of black mortar for the negative copula ' is not. ' In this way we produce such admirable propositions as ' A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly.'" - pp 25-26
Fenollosa is, of course, making fun here but I find his concluding mockery to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the bk so far - not for its mockery but for its imagery.
"In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language agree with science and not with logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy.
"Poetry agrees with science and not with logic.
"The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates." - p 28
"In English grammar, a copula is a verb that joins the subject of a sentence or clause to a subject complement. For example, the word is functions as a copula in the sentences "Jane is my friend" and "Jane is friendly." Adjective: copular. Also known as a copular verb or a linking verb. Contrast with lexical verb and dynamic verb." - http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/copul...
For many decades now I've called myself an "As Been". One of the reasons for this is that I prefer using "as" instead of "is" as a way of making a non-definitive statement such as "I as a human being." That statement is meant to say that I'm presenting myself as a human being but not restricting myself to being permanently identified as such. It seems that Fenollosa is expressing a similar idea. I was influenced in this direction by something I read by William S. Burroughs.
I also call myself an "As Been" b/c I knew that having once been identified as a 'Somebody" someone was bound to eventually try to tear me down into a 'Nobody', a "Has Been". This, indeed, started happening as early as 1995 if not earlier. I think my self-designation as As Been is much more accurate insofar as there've been times when I've been a 'Somebody" & others when I've been a "Nobody", times when I've been perceived as 'hip' & others when I've been 'uncool'. None of these latter designations have much to do w/ who I actually am.
HOWEVER, I don't find any of that as relevant to 'the evaporation [or not] of poetry'. I cd write:
Jane is friendly,
the bitch
(but from my POV Jack is a real moon-snatching ass).
& it wd still be poetry wdn't it?
"It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed alone as abstract sound without the concrete character." - p 30
I don't.
"Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony." - p 32
Or, at least, so poets say - but how wd it sound if we were to create a variation such as 'Politician-speak surpasses activist-speak in that the politician selects for juxtaposition those words whose meanings are closest to what the public wants to believe.' It sounds a but sillier then, doesn't it?
"How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighboring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor." - p 32
But I LIKE "mixed metaphor" as much as I like her cheeks being the roses of a hole-in-one.
On p 33, Fenollosa provides 3 more Chinese characters wch are the last 3 characters that I present in my movie mentioned above. These are sd to mean "Sun Rises (in the) East". The sign for "sun" is only one line away from being the sign for "eye" (if I understand correctly). That ties in to Malay name for the sun being "eye-in-the-sky" or "matahari" of "eye-of-the-day" or some such.
"The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb ' rise, ' we have further homology ; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading." - p 33
"Or turn to the Mi'kmaq language. A Harvard-trained law professor named Sake'j Youngblood Henderson — by origin, a member of the Chickasaw and Cheyenne people os Oklahoma — spent many years as constitutional advisor to the Mi'kmaq, an indigenous group found in Atlantic Canada and Maine. He came to know their language well. Its syntax, he once stated, futs a view of reality as existing in a perpetual state of oscillation, matter becoming energy becoming matter once again: "The use of verbs rather than nouny subjects and objects is important; it means that there are very few fixed and rigid objects in the Mi'kmaq worldview."" - p 51, Spoken Here - Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley
Hence, we come back to my 'opera': "Endangered Languages, Endangered Culture, Endangered Ideas": my hypothesis is that what's threatened are more fluid worldviews under attack by imperialism that attempts to turn the conquered peoples into objects dominated by the imposition of languages that defines them rather than flows w/ them.
Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
as edited by Ezra Pound
- by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 3, 2016
I have an ongoing fascination w/ language in multitudinous forms. I've made a braille piece (1980), 2 in American Sign Language (1986) ( http://youtu.be/l7H8DJ0CYJE ), etc.. The current manifestation of this interest is my 'opera': "Endangered Languages, Endangered Culture, Endangered Ideas". This led to my reading The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry - not b/c I consider Chinese to be endangered but b/c I want to work more w/ Chinese written language as a stimulus for Concrete & Visual Poetry to be animated w/in "Endangered"'s context.
The 2nd paragraph of the back cover blurb says this: "The old theory as to the nature of the Chinese written character (which Pound and Fenollosa followed) is that the written character is ideogrammic — a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents. The opposing theory (which prevails today among scholars) is that the character may have had pictorial origins in prehistoric times but that they have been obscured in all but a very few simple cases, and that in any case native writers don't have the original pictorial meaning in mind as they write."
I wasn't in the least bit convinced by Fenollosa's assertions but I did find them wonderful stimulus for the animation ideas that prompted my reading this bk in the 1st place.
"Man sees horse.
"It is clear that three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily denote these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters:" - p 8
At this point 3 Chinese characters are shown the 1st identified as meaning "Man", the 2nd as "Sees", & the 3rd as "Horse". I use this example in a short movie that I made called "Fenollosa's Chinese" that I posted on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/164504907 . In my simple animation, I show each of the Chinese characters preceded by Fenollosa's claim for their pictorial origins. The initial representational image is then cross-faded into the Chinese written character. I tried to be respectful of Fenollosa's claim but, IMO, the representational images are too far away from the written character to be believable as the origin.
"If we knew what division of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much the same manner." - p 8
"as easily as drawing them as by speaking words": drawing is not usually as easy as speaking insofar as it involves external implements not always handy - a pencil & paper, eg. Even if one were to imagine drawing thru gesture there wd be problems of facing another person directly & reversing perspective from one's own left-right to the viewer's left-right. Sound is more omni-directional & doesn't depend on fixed perceiver position for comprehensibility.
"But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign : all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stand the man on his two legs."
Now, the actual Chinese symbol is like an inverted "y". This might be seen as a man in an unnaturally spread-legged position who has no arms & no head & whose torso is as thick as one of his legs but it cd more accurately be seen as many other things such as a wall that's falling over buttressed up by a board. In other words, Fenollosa's claim makes it seem like this symbol is obviously based on the depiction of a standing man when the actual visual connection is feeble, to say the least.
"Second, his eye moves through space : a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it." - p 8
Again, check out my very short movie in order to understand this better. I created an image of an eye over running legs in silhouette in an attempt to replicate Fenollosa's description accurately & then cross-faded it into the Chinese symbol so that the viewer can make the comparison for themselves. What Fenollosa refers to an an "eye" might be simply described as a not completely parallelogram box w/ 4 horizontal lines & 2 vertical ones. It looks more like shelves than an eye to me. The running legs I can see a little better.
"Third stands the horse on his four legs." - p 8
Ok, if the horse is standing on his 4 legs it also has an unnaturally long tail that it might be standing on AND a rider. Fenollosa omits the rider altogether even tho that seems extremely obvious. Again, see my movie.
"The thought-picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture." - pp 8-9
While I completely disagree w/ Fenollosa's assertion of the obviousness of the pictorial connection to the written symbol I do find his claim that Chinese is all verbs to be very interesting. He seems to be saying that the pictorial observations that the characters are allegedly based on aren't just NOUNS but VERBS. As he says: "they are alive". What the author claims as a drawing of running legs in the ideogram for "sees" does indeed have a line that cd be seen as a leg bent at the knee. Proportionally, it wd be too distorted for the claim to be very strong but, still, it's an interesting point. In an interview w/ Joel Biroco, of KAOS magazine, that I conducted in 1988, he stressed the art of Chinese Calligraphy as revolving around energy flow.
"But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes." - p 9
"A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one : things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them." - p 10
This theory of his especially interests me b/c of my own analysis of my high school yrbk & the self-descriptions that people wrote for it (see: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/W1969.Y... ). When looking at the yrbk shortly after it came out in 1970 I noticed that there were very few verbs used. Even as a 16 yr old this struck me as indicative of a cultural byproduct, a result of a society that stressed a passive robopathic relationship to citizenship. I felt like the teaching I'd rc'vd had a subtext stressing that I be more of a noun, a chesspiece for 'authorities'. This was at a time when the Vietnam War was still in progress & all males turning 18 yrs old were required to register for the draft. Resistance ACTIVISM was threatened w/ long federal prison sentences. W/ that analysis in mind, I find Fenollosa's contention of the "things in motion, motion in things" of Chinese to be significant far beyond its value for poetry.
"Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
"The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order of causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth." - p 12
Oh, well. While we're on the subject of the sentence why not quote Ron Silliman's essay, "The New Sentence", from his bk The New Sentence?:
"What Stein means about paragraphs being emotional and sentences not is precisely the point made by Emile Beneviste: that linguistic units integrate only up to the level of the sentence, but higher orders of meaning—such as emotion—integrate at higher levels than the sentence and occur only in the presence of either many sentences or, at least Stein's example suggests this, in the presence of certain complex sentences in which dependent clauses integrate with independent ones. The sentence is the horizon, the border between these two fundamentally distinct types of integration." - p 87, The New Sentence
I realize that I haven't used the proximity of Fenollosa & Silliman to exactly generate lightning but, still, if "The sentence is the horizon, the border between these two fundamentally distinct types of integration" might we at least have some fun calling a cloud one type of integration & the earth another? Back to Fenollosa:
"' Is ' comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. ' Be ' is from bhu, to grow.
"In Chinese the chief verb for ' is ' not only means actively ' to have ' but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely ' to snatch from the moon with the hand. '"
Here, he shows the relevant Chinese character. In my "Fenollosa's Chinese" movie it's the 4th Chinese character shown.
"Here the baldest symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry," - p 15
This bk, written by Fenollosa before his death in 1908, 1st published in 1920, & published in the minimally edited Pound edition in 1935, contains the 1st use of the expression "concrete poetry" that I've run across. Whether Fenollosa meant it in the sense of Concrete Poetry later elucidated is debatable. Take these quotes:
"Ideas to renew grammatical structures are bound to emerge if you make comparisons with foreign languages, with Chinese, for instance, with its classless words and meaning derived from word order"
[..]
"Having used the word concrete in these contexts, I have related it more to concrete music than to art concretism in its narrow meaning. In addition the concrete working poet is, of course, related to formalities and language-kneaders of all times, the Greeks, Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Schwitters, Artaud and many others. And he considers as venerated portal figures not only the Owl in Winnie the Pooh but also Carrol's Humpty Dumpty who considers every question a riddle and dictates impenetrable meanings to the words." - "Manifesto for Concrete Poetry" (1952-55) by Öyvind Fahlström (Sweden), translated by Karen Loevgren & Mary Ellen Solt - http://www.ubu.com/papers/fahlstrom01...
&/OR:
"concrete poetry: a manifesto
"- concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communiation, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history - tabu-tombs in which convention insist on burying the idea.
"- the concrete poet does not turn away from words, he does not glance at them obliquely: he goes directly to their center, in order to live and vivify their facticity."
[..]
"- mallarmé (un coup de dés - 1897), joyce (finnegans wake), pound (cantos, ideogram), cummings, and on a secondary plane, apollinaire (calligrammes) and the experimental attempts of the futurists-dadaists are at the root of the new poetic procedure which tends to impose itself on a conventional organization whose formal unity is the verse (even free-).
"- the concrete poem or ideogram becomes a relational field of funcions." - "Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto" (1956) by Augusto de Campos (Brazil), translated by John Tolman - http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampo...
Whether one believes that Fenollosa deserves credit for using the expression "concrete poetry" in a way that's predictive of the later "Concrete Poetry" or not, it's worth noting that Pound, who was influenced by Fenollosa, is listed as one of the roots "of the new poetic procedure" by de Campos & that, furthermore, de Campos conflates "concrete poem" & "ideogram" together.
That said, I find Fenollosa's explanation of the pictorial content of the Chinese character for "is" to be quite dubious.. but lovely nonetheless.
"Nature herself has no grammar. Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions!" - p 16
"The Chinese have one word, ming or mei. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally, ' the sun and moon of the cup ' for ' the cup's brightness. ' Placed as a verb, you write ' the cup sun-and-moons, ' actually ' cup sun-and-moon, ' or in a weakened thought, ' is like sun, ' i.e. shines. ' Sun-and-moon cup ' is naturally a bright cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid scholar may spend a week trying to decide what ' part of speech ' he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English." - p 18
Again, I find this interesting but since the sun is a generator of light & the moon is a reflector of it & since candles or fireflies, eg, cd also be sources of light if one were to be more exacting a "'Sun-and-moon cup'" wd only be a cup somehow interacting either w/ direct sunlight or indirect sunlight reflected from the moon. As such, in my reading of it, it's not necessarily a "bright cup".
"I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. According to this European logic thought is a kind of brickyard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. Their use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and sticking them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula ' is, ' or of black mortar for the negative copula ' is not. ' In this way we produce such admirable propositions as ' A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly.'" - pp 25-26
Fenollosa is, of course, making fun here but I find his concluding mockery to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the bk so far - not for its mockery but for its imagery.
"In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language agree with science and not with logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy.
"Poetry agrees with science and not with logic.
"The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates." - p 28
"In English grammar, a copula is a verb that joins the subject of a sentence or clause to a subject complement. For example, the word is functions as a copula in the sentences "Jane is my friend" and "Jane is friendly." Adjective: copular. Also known as a copular verb or a linking verb. Contrast with lexical verb and dynamic verb." - http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/copul...
For many decades now I've called myself an "As Been". One of the reasons for this is that I prefer using "as" instead of "is" as a way of making a non-definitive statement such as "I as a human being." That statement is meant to say that I'm presenting myself as a human being but not restricting myself to being permanently identified as such. It seems that Fenollosa is expressing a similar idea. I was influenced in this direction by something I read by William S. Burroughs.
I also call myself an "As Been" b/c I knew that having once been identified as a 'Somebody" someone was bound to eventually try to tear me down into a 'Nobody', a "Has Been". This, indeed, started happening as early as 1995 if not earlier. I think my self-designation as As Been is much more accurate insofar as there've been times when I've been a 'Somebody" & others when I've been a "Nobody", times when I've been perceived as 'hip' & others when I've been 'uncool'. None of these latter designations have much to do w/ who I actually am.
HOWEVER, I don't find any of that as relevant to 'the evaporation [or not] of poetry'. I cd write:
Jane is friendly,
the bitch
(but from my POV Jack is a real moon-snatching ass).
& it wd still be poetry wdn't it?
"It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed alone as abstract sound without the concrete character." - p 30
I don't.
"Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony." - p 32
Or, at least, so poets say - but how wd it sound if we were to create a variation such as 'Politician-speak surpasses activist-speak in that the politician selects for juxtaposition those words whose meanings are closest to what the public wants to believe.' It sounds a but sillier then, doesn't it?
"How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighboring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor." - p 32
But I LIKE "mixed metaphor" as much as I like her cheeks being the roses of a hole-in-one.
On p 33, Fenollosa provides 3 more Chinese characters wch are the last 3 characters that I present in my movie mentioned above. These are sd to mean "Sun Rises (in the) East". The sign for "sun" is only one line away from being the sign for "eye" (if I understand correctly). That ties in to Malay name for the sun being "eye-in-the-sky" or "matahari" of "eye-of-the-day" or some such.
"The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb ' rise, ' we have further homology ; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading." - p 33
"Or turn to the Mi'kmaq language. A Harvard-trained law professor named Sake'j Youngblood Henderson — by origin, a member of the Chickasaw and Cheyenne people os Oklahoma — spent many years as constitutional advisor to the Mi'kmaq, an indigenous group found in Atlantic Canada and Maine. He came to know their language well. Its syntax, he once stated, futs a view of reality as existing in a perpetual state of oscillation, matter becoming energy becoming matter once again: "The use of verbs rather than nouny subjects and objects is important; it means that there are very few fixed and rigid objects in the Mi'kmaq worldview."" - p 51, Spoken Here - Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley
Hence, we come back to my 'opera': "Endangered Languages, Endangered Culture, Endangered Ideas": my hypothesis is that what's threatened are more fluid worldviews under attack by imperialism that attempts to turn the conquered peoples into objects dominated by the imposition of languages that defines them rather than flows w/ them.
October 13, 2022
I am unqualified to comment on the controversy that swirls around this book because I am not a Chinese language scholar . The author posits that the picto-graphic origin of written Chinese informs it's use in classical Chinese poetry. For example: We might say "he is a human" in a Western language, but the author suggests that the format of the Chinese characters has them built up of other simpler pictograms, so that in China that similar concept comes out more verb-like "he humans". And that a human is a complex collection of activities (verbs) as one drills down into what a human does. This, to me, is rather like saying that Chinese characters are a product of a more connected psychology in Asia. A psychology I interpret as very unlike the Western idea of individualism that makes it all too easy to ignore that fact that everything depends on everything else. For example: we need oxygen, so we should protect the plants that make it, another example: we want roads to drive on, but see the taxation necessary to build them as theft of "my money". So, finally, in the eyes of the author (and editor the poet Ezra Pound), translations of classical Chinese poems should take into account that psychology of connected-ness.
January 9, 2023
Nebyla to ztráta času, má to něco do sebe pro ty, co se zajímají především o poezii. Jen pasáže o fungování čínštiny a jazyka obecně se musí brát s rezervou si myslím.
July 4, 2025
This is a busy essay, and because Fenollosa did not himself complete it, it is an interesting and impossible thing to review in its partial form. That said, we can grasp where he was headed and take the ideas much as they are presented by himself and Pound. There are many distinctly positive things in this book, in some of the Large Ideas and in some contributing details. However, these things do not always complement one another, and some good details fail to support some larger idea, while some Large Ideas are piled upon unsound details.
For one, Fenollosa was trying to justify the beauty and power of Chinese poetry for a Western audience that, up to that point, had looked at it mostly as a curiosity. So, this is the first success of the book: that it helped to habituate us to Eastern poetry. Simultaneously, in recognizing the substance of Eastern poetry, it also helps to humanize those thought to be foreign to us. Fenollosa's is ultimately a very humane view: "The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own . . . We need their best ideals to supplement our own—ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives." If this were the main goal of the piece, I think it would've been a rousing success. However, his academic arguments fail where his moral one did not.
To his credit, Fenollosa issues a small (yet very large, it turns out) caveat on the third page: He is an enthusiast, amateur, and layman in the fields of Sinology and Eastern culture. So, he puts this essay to us from a "sheer enthusiasm of generosity." This is largely my starting place as concerns Chinese poetry. I can understand where he's coming from, in terms of this sheer enthusiasm—though I too am no expert. Caveats aside, what is this work about?
In short, its argument centers on the ideogrammic nature of the Chinese language—"It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature." This means that Chinese one ups merely phonetic scripts, as it carries meaning on multiple levels. It both communicates meaning with sound, but also with image. "[Chinese poetry] speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate." This is what I would consider the woo-woo school of Chinese linguistics, and there are scads of primers, websites, and apps these days that purport to teach Chinese pictorially. Of course, these methods are childish and often dumb, and they only draw on the Chinese that fits their narrative, all while ignoring the fact that most characters bear no relation to what they represent. For instance, these books will show you how 人 looks like a human walking, or 森林 looks like a bunch of trees, but they neglect to mention that 青蛙 does not resemble a frog or 蜜蜂 a bee. You see my point. This line of inquiry only gets you so far, and Fenollosa knows this, as he chooses for his examples the few words that might actually bear out his thesis. Just to prove the point, guess what this means: 人見馬. Can you read nature from the symbols? Well, I've told you that the first is a person. Would you believe me if I told you the second was an eye on legs that meant "to see," and that the last was a horse? You see how hopeless this quickly becomes. Of course, almost no one thinks this way any longer; scholars are pretty much of one mind that, while perhaps many basic Chinese symbols once represented nature more obviously, most characters are now too far removed from nature to show their meanings explicitly. And, anyway, no one writing in Chinese has these deeper meanings in mind. Even poets. We can discuss radicals and the evolution of characters for more nuance, but, at the end of the day, Fenollosa is a bit off his rocker here.
This is unfortunate, because some of his tangential, supporting details are spot-on. Chinese does have a fluidity to it wherein characters lack the strict classification of noun, verb, adjective, tense, etc. They are more conceptual, more universal, and more flexible. This is whence springs the nuance (and frustration) of translating Chinese poetry. This fact leads quite beautifully to some reflections on nature that ring true in a Heraclitus sort of way: "A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots." That is a wondrous insight picked up from ancient Greece and elsewhere. In Fenollosa's mind, because Chinese characters have this fluid state, they are that much closer to reality. So, while he writes things like "the cup sun-and-moons" to say "the cup is bright," it is important to remember that he also says sensible, true, and marvelous things. One must separate wheat from chaff.
In terms of translation, I largely agree with his assessment. Though I do not hold with the ideogrammic nonsense, he is right that the nuanced vagueness of Chinese should be celebrated and make its way into the translation: "In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and individual verbs." However, F. believes too much in every Chinese word being some flavor of verb—they're not. Some are, indeed, nouns or adjectives at the end of the day. Again, defects in details (all characters are verbs but barely separated from natural processes and resembling them), but salient larger point: maintain flexibility and richness of the uncategorizable when translating. This is a rule of thumb broken by many early translators of Chinese, who fluffed up austere and beautifully simplistic poems with unnecessary subjects, prepositions, and the like. Keep it simple, keep it "pure."
Overall, I think this essay is still mandatory reading not for its central argument (here the linguists can play) but for its insights into nature, the creative process, and the joys of translation and poetry. There is much here to be not just analyzed but enjoyed. It is truly an important text, and hey: no one thinks Chinese poetry a mere curiosity anymore, and that's something.
For one, Fenollosa was trying to justify the beauty and power of Chinese poetry for a Western audience that, up to that point, had looked at it mostly as a curiosity. So, this is the first success of the book: that it helped to habituate us to Eastern poetry. Simultaneously, in recognizing the substance of Eastern poetry, it also helps to humanize those thought to be foreign to us. Fenollosa's is ultimately a very humane view: "The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own . . . We need their best ideals to supplement our own—ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives." If this were the main goal of the piece, I think it would've been a rousing success. However, his academic arguments fail where his moral one did not.
To his credit, Fenollosa issues a small (yet very large, it turns out) caveat on the third page: He is an enthusiast, amateur, and layman in the fields of Sinology and Eastern culture. So, he puts this essay to us from a "sheer enthusiasm of generosity." This is largely my starting place as concerns Chinese poetry. I can understand where he's coming from, in terms of this sheer enthusiasm—though I too am no expert. Caveats aside, what is this work about?
In short, its argument centers on the ideogrammic nature of the Chinese language—"It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature." This means that Chinese one ups merely phonetic scripts, as it carries meaning on multiple levels. It both communicates meaning with sound, but also with image. "[Chinese poetry] speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate." This is what I would consider the woo-woo school of Chinese linguistics, and there are scads of primers, websites, and apps these days that purport to teach Chinese pictorially. Of course, these methods are childish and often dumb, and they only draw on the Chinese that fits their narrative, all while ignoring the fact that most characters bear no relation to what they represent. For instance, these books will show you how 人 looks like a human walking, or 森林 looks like a bunch of trees, but they neglect to mention that 青蛙 does not resemble a frog or 蜜蜂 a bee. You see my point. This line of inquiry only gets you so far, and Fenollosa knows this, as he chooses for his examples the few words that might actually bear out his thesis. Just to prove the point, guess what this means: 人見馬. Can you read nature from the symbols? Well, I've told you that the first is a person. Would you believe me if I told you the second was an eye on legs that meant "to see," and that the last was a horse? You see how hopeless this quickly becomes. Of course, almost no one thinks this way any longer; scholars are pretty much of one mind that, while perhaps many basic Chinese symbols once represented nature more obviously, most characters are now too far removed from nature to show their meanings explicitly. And, anyway, no one writing in Chinese has these deeper meanings in mind. Even poets. We can discuss radicals and the evolution of characters for more nuance, but, at the end of the day, Fenollosa is a bit off his rocker here.
This is unfortunate, because some of his tangential, supporting details are spot-on. Chinese does have a fluidity to it wherein characters lack the strict classification of noun, verb, adjective, tense, etc. They are more conceptual, more universal, and more flexible. This is whence springs the nuance (and frustration) of translating Chinese poetry. This fact leads quite beautifully to some reflections on nature that ring true in a Heraclitus sort of way: "A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots." That is a wondrous insight picked up from ancient Greece and elsewhere. In Fenollosa's mind, because Chinese characters have this fluid state, they are that much closer to reality. So, while he writes things like "the cup sun-and-moons" to say "the cup is bright," it is important to remember that he also says sensible, true, and marvelous things. One must separate wheat from chaff.
In terms of translation, I largely agree with his assessment. Though I do not hold with the ideogrammic nonsense, he is right that the nuanced vagueness of Chinese should be celebrated and make its way into the translation: "In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and individual verbs." However, F. believes too much in every Chinese word being some flavor of verb—they're not. Some are, indeed, nouns or adjectives at the end of the day. Again, defects in details (all characters are verbs but barely separated from natural processes and resembling them), but salient larger point: maintain flexibility and richness of the uncategorizable when translating. This is a rule of thumb broken by many early translators of Chinese, who fluffed up austere and beautifully simplistic poems with unnecessary subjects, prepositions, and the like. Keep it simple, keep it "pure."
Overall, I think this essay is still mandatory reading not for its central argument (here the linguists can play) but for its insights into nature, the creative process, and the joys of translation and poetry. There is much here to be not just analyzed but enjoyed. It is truly an important text, and hey: no one thinks Chinese poetry a mere curiosity anymore, and that's something.
August 15, 2012
I suddenly remembered this little treatise on Chinese ideograms and imagist poetry tonight as I was reading a passage from The Savage Detectives where Joaquin Vazquez Amaral recalls discussing Ezra Pound with Belano and Lima: "What did we talk about? About the maestro, of course, and his time at Saint Elizabeth's, about that strange man Fenollosa, about the poetry of the Han dynasty [and on and on with the Chinese names and dynasties]...in other words, about Pound things that none of us knew anything about, not even the maestro, really, because the literature he knew best was European literature, but what a show of strength, what magnificent curiosity Pound had, to root around in that enigmatic language, am I right?"
I'm not sure where the book came from, maybe from Jeff Logan because he appreciated Pound a lot more than me, but it was in great shape for being passed around in Nepal so maybe Kate Klaus mailed it to me, I dunno, but it was a strange little book to be reading and thinking about in Nepal while I was wrapping my head around another language and alphabet.
And as for the ideas, well, Fenollosa is discredited these days but it probably doesn't matter. It's all true enough even if it isn't true. And Amaral is right; Pound does have a magnificent curiosity, but I have yet to make my own pact with him; I guess I 'm still not old enough to make friends and let there be commerce between us.
I'm not sure where the book came from, maybe from Jeff Logan because he appreciated Pound a lot more than me, but it was in great shape for being passed around in Nepal so maybe Kate Klaus mailed it to me, I dunno, but it was a strange little book to be reading and thinking about in Nepal while I was wrapping my head around another language and alphabet.
And as for the ideas, well, Fenollosa is discredited these days but it probably doesn't matter. It's all true enough even if it isn't true. And Amaral is right; Pound does have a magnificent curiosity, but I have yet to make my own pact with him; I guess I 'm still not old enough to make friends and let there be commerce between us.
January 10, 2017
I had to read this book for a literature class I had (was forced) to take, so I was seriously dreading this book. I was pleasantly surprised when I learned about the Chinese written language and now want to study it (when has a book you dreaded made you want to delve deeper into the subject matter?). The book is short and doesn't really have that much poetry in it, but it has many profound statements and insights.
Perhaps my favorite gem, "Science fought till she got at the things." That may not seem profound, but it is explained later and its such a funny sentence, I love it.
Some insight on Shakespeare: "I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare's English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find 'is' in his sentences." I too never understood why people viewed Shakespeare as so good (likely a strange view) until I figured out it was satirical (but even then I was questioning Shakespeare) and now I see this insight by Fenollosa and I am interested to go back and study some Shakespeare.
Overall, this was a book that made me think about the English language, Chinese written character, and many other things I never thought I would need to think about. I was pleasantly surprised by this book.
Perhaps my favorite gem, "Science fought till she got at the things." That may not seem profound, but it is explained later and its such a funny sentence, I love it.
Some insight on Shakespeare: "I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare's English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find 'is' in his sentences." I too never understood why people viewed Shakespeare as so good (likely a strange view) until I figured out it was satirical (but even then I was questioning Shakespeare) and now I see this insight by Fenollosa and I am interested to go back and study some Shakespeare.
Overall, this was a book that made me think about the English language, Chinese written character, and many other things I never thought I would need to think about. I was pleasantly surprised by this book.
June 30, 2022
This book argues that poets might exploit the analogies between the Chinese language, which is ideogrammatic, and poetry, which employs images. While this is a useful notion for poets in whose work images are dominant, in fact poetry is about music and wordplay as well. Thus, while the book’s argument resonates with the work of poets like Ezra Pound or H. D., it is more limited with respect to the work of poets like Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Christian Bok or Henry Rollins.
Re-read Sept. 3-9, 2015
Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
Re-read Sept. 3-9, 2015
Acquired 1995
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
December 8, 2024
هجدهمِ آذرماهِ هزاروچهارصدوسه | ساعتِ یازدهوپنجاهوهفتدقیقهیصبح
نسخهی فیزیکیش که نیست و پیدیاف مختصری هم بهضربوزور از خرابهای وسطِ اینترنت پیدا کردم و نشستم بهخواندن. دروغ است اگر بگویم دقیق خواندم چون ضعیفیِ چشم امانم نمیدهد که پیدیاف بخوانم آنهم صدوشصت صفحه با فونت ریز. اما سرسری هم نبود آنچنان. دریافتیام از این کتاب چیزی بود که ندیده بودم جای دیگری یا در کتاب و متن و جستار دیگری. انگار یکی آمده بود که حرف جدیدی بزند. فنولوزا توی آن مقالهی کوچک همزمان که زبان چینی را ستایش میکند، دیدنِ دقیق را هم میستاید. اینکه شاعر -و شاید همهی ما- باید به طبیعت بازگردد. دقیقتر نگاه کند و دقیقتر حس کند. اینکه تمام حقیقت عبارتست از انتقالِ نیرو.
اما چیزی که شگفتزدهام کرد نگاهِ دقیقِ فنولوزا به زبانِ چینی و سیر تکاملیاش بود؛ همچنین مثالهایی که انتهای کتاب آمده بود از سیر تکاملی واژههایی مثل باران، بال، انسان، قلب و...
در کل اگر نسخهی فیزیکی گیرتان آمد دقیق بخوانید و لذت ببرید. اگر هم نسخهی پیدیافش را خواستید توی سایتِ «کتابناک» موجود است.
نسخهی فیزیکیش که نیست و پیدیاف مختصری هم بهضربوزور از خرابهای وسطِ اینترنت پیدا کردم و نشستم بهخواندن. دروغ است اگر بگویم دقیق خواندم چون ضعیفیِ چشم امانم نمیدهد که پیدیاف بخوانم آنهم صدوشصت صفحه با فونت ریز. اما سرسری هم نبود آنچنان. دریافتیام از این کتاب چیزی بود که ندیده بودم جای دیگری یا در کتاب و متن و جستار دیگری. انگار یکی آمده بود که حرف جدیدی بزند. فنولوزا توی آن مقالهی کوچک همزمان که زبان چینی را ستایش میکند، دیدنِ دقیق را هم میستاید. اینکه شاعر -و شاید همهی ما- باید به طبیعت بازگردد. دقیقتر نگاه کند و دقیقتر حس کند. اینکه تمام حقیقت عبارتست از انتقالِ نیرو.
اما چیزی که شگفتزدهام کرد نگاهِ دقیقِ فنولوزا به زبانِ چینی و سیر تکاملیاش بود؛ همچنین مثالهایی که انتهای کتاب آمده بود از سیر تکاملی واژههایی مثل باران، بال، انسان، قلب و...
در کل اگر نسخهی فیزیکی گیرتان آمد دقیق بخوانید و لذت ببرید. اگر هم نسخهی پیدیافش را خواستید توی سایتِ «کتابناک» موجود است.
March 31, 2009
If this essay was Pound's second-most-important editing job after The Waste Land, then this edition should be nearly as important as the Valerie Eliot edition of the original version of the latter with Pound's notations was in the '70s. In any case, Haun Saussy's intro is very helpful, and one gets a much broader picture of Fenellosa.
July 28, 2017
The 2008 Saussy, Stalling, and Klein Critical Edition of CWC is essential to further study of the subject. Includes full text of Fenollosa's 'original', Ezra Pound's more famous emendation, Haun Saussy's now indispensable introduction, copious notes, and related texts.
May 15, 2018
the main concept of this essay is that chinese characters have more depth and meaning then english’s sort of watered-down verbs like ‘is’. i thought it was interesting and i understood what was being said but i really had to focus to truly understand.
July 27, 2007
Great book. Turns out later that scholars disagree with Fenollosa, but hey, fuck'em. Great imagining of language.
September 19, 2025
"...The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature, they sang out her processes in their hymns. And this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has condensed into a more tangible substance. Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminious envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light bands." (Fenollosa, pg. 32)
Thus ends the brief (and quite interesting) book by Ernest Fenollosa on the concept of the Chinese Ideogram as a physical representation of what it signifies linguistically. Published with help by eminent poet Ezra Pound, and imprinted by City Lights Publishing, this effort is, as mentioned earlier, stimulating to read in the extreme, despite its lack of factual basis in linguistics. For, as critics have suggested since the first writing of this piece, Chinese characters are not truly representations of their meaning, but rather they are like other, more ordinary linguistic systems, a mishmash of abstractions and some, albeit only a few, true ideograms of the type described (and lauded) by Mr. Pound. But, as several other sources have suggested to me, this book is actually more essential for what it reveals, and prompted, in Pounds' own poetry: a reliance on things rather than ideas as a means for creating meaning in the poetic line. Similar to William Carlos Williams' injunction "No ideas but in things," Pound's ideas inform his poetry, especially his Cantos, and are found in his 'Usura' segment of that poetic sequence, fruitfully on display. So, one can conclude, Pound may have 'missed the mark' here on the Chinese character, but he transmuted this idea into his own poetry (especially "Imagism" and "Vorticist" schools' examples), to a great end. This makes this volume, over far too soon, both a historical oddity and a profound example of poetic inspiration at work It is also has a good sample of poetry from the original Chinese (found in the rear of the book) on display.
I recommend this work for all deep appreciators of poetry, and of Ezra Pound in particular, for its stimulating ideas concerning the poetic line, its importance (the line), and its influence on modern poetry. This is a good book!
Thus ends the brief (and quite interesting) book by Ernest Fenollosa on the concept of the Chinese Ideogram as a physical representation of what it signifies linguistically. Published with help by eminent poet Ezra Pound, and imprinted by City Lights Publishing, this effort is, as mentioned earlier, stimulating to read in the extreme, despite its lack of factual basis in linguistics. For, as critics have suggested since the first writing of this piece, Chinese characters are not truly representations of their meaning, but rather they are like other, more ordinary linguistic systems, a mishmash of abstractions and some, albeit only a few, true ideograms of the type described (and lauded) by Mr. Pound. But, as several other sources have suggested to me, this book is actually more essential for what it reveals, and prompted, in Pounds' own poetry: a reliance on things rather than ideas as a means for creating meaning in the poetic line. Similar to William Carlos Williams' injunction "No ideas but in things," Pound's ideas inform his poetry, especially his Cantos, and are found in his 'Usura' segment of that poetic sequence, fruitfully on display. So, one can conclude, Pound may have 'missed the mark' here on the Chinese character, but he transmuted this idea into his own poetry (especially "Imagism" and "Vorticist" schools' examples), to a great end. This makes this volume, over far too soon, both a historical oddity and a profound example of poetic inspiration at work It is also has a good sample of poetry from the original Chinese (found in the rear of the book) on display.
I recommend this work for all deep appreciators of poetry, and of Ezra Pound in particular, for its stimulating ideas concerning the poetic line, its importance (the line), and its influence on modern poetry. This is a good book!
March 3, 2025
Café para muy cafeteros, me veo estos días revisando los Cantos de Pound y este librillo sobre la escritura china es muy ilustrador de la visión que tiene Pound (que solamente corrige el texto de Fenollosa) sobre la escritura china en su propia obra. Está muy bien que en el prólogo expliquen que la mayoría de sinologos contemporáneos aceptan que la visión del libro simplifica al extremo la escritura china, pero sirve mucho para entender cómo Pound ve y aplica los carácteres chinos en su obra, como la importancia del elemento pictórico es mayor que el lingüístico y su uso en la obra de Pound parece responder más al aparato visual que al significante (cosa que en mi edición de los cantos viene explicada, no hace falta 'entender' chino para disfrutar de su aparición en los Cantos).
July 12, 2025
ارنست فنولوزا توی این رسالهی کوتاه توضیح میده چطور خط تصویری چینی و به تبع اون، زبان چینی با شعر هماهنگتره و ماهیتا شاعرانهتره نسبت به زبانهای دیگه. در واقع این رساله که بیشتر معرفی قابلیتهای شعر چینی به غربه، یکجور مانیفسته برای خود شعر؛ اینکه شعر اصلا خاصیتش چیه و زبان شعر چه شکلی باید باشه. یکجور تحلیل درست حسابی بر مبنای زبانشناسی از شعر. اینش من رو به وجد میاره. احمد اخوت چنتایی متن هم اضافه کرده برای فهم بهتر
February 3, 2018
Most of what is said is provably nonsense, but it poses some interesting ideas for experimentation with translation and poetics.
August 29, 2023
3 1/2 stars
December 19, 2023
"I nostri antenati costruirono strutture linguistiche e sistemi di pensiero da cumuli di metafore. Le lingue oggi sono scarne e algide perché infondiamo in loro sempre meno pensiero".
July 7, 2020
"it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is"
-Bill Clinton
-Bill Clinton
September 16, 2016
The blurb on the back of this book gives a critique of it as "a small mass of confusion" and I think that sums it up pretty well. Fenollosa obviously had little knowledge of Chinese, and Pound had even less so, and from my understanding of his work, would not have been shy of editing the work to fit his own ideas. I read this book because in college I took a class on "modern" (early 20th century) poetry, and so when I saw this come through as a hold, I remembered encountering it in that course and thought it might be worth a read. Sadly, not so much the case. I knew that it was written from an incorrect understanding of Chinese characters as purely ideogrammatic in character, and I hoped it would provide an interesting analysis of that idea of characters as abstracted pictures. But really, most of the work reads as a screed against contemporary English education rather than a decent analysis of Chinese characters. Add to it that even as the author was attempting to say that -- contrary to apparent dismissal by contemporary Western experts -- Chinese had artistic merit, he still comes off as incredibly racist and dismissive of actual Chinese expertise on their own language, which was well aware that most radicals exist for their phonetic value, rather than as metaphoric associations to indicate complex concepts, and it feels like there is little of real merit in this book.
In the process of looking up information on this, I found that there is apparently an edition out there that has Fenollosa's original essay, unedited by Pound. Sadly, not available through my library, since it could be interesting to read it, especially as it apparently goes more into Japanese usage, and in the essay I have, Fenollosa notes that he comes to Chinese through Japanese experts, but then says little more of it. And as that is closer to my own knowledge base (I have studied Japanese, but know next to nothing of Chinese), it could be interesting to read.
In the process of looking up information on this, I found that there is apparently an edition out there that has Fenollosa's original essay, unedited by Pound. Sadly, not available through my library, since it could be interesting to read it, especially as it apparently goes more into Japanese usage, and in the essay I have, Fenollosa notes that he comes to Chinese through Japanese experts, but then says little more of it. And as that is closer to my own knowledge base (I have studied Japanese, but know next to nothing of Chinese), it could be interesting to read.
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November 17, 2010brilliant. foundational text for all modern poetry. elucidates so much of pound, williams, and their successors. and in all of 36 pages!
key points:
- nouns are the most dead approximations, abstracted from the thingness of a thing, which is defined by what it does
- harmony of pairings, not to create a third object but to suggest fundamental relationships
- visual characters are etymologies preserved
- avoid "is" as much as possible; this made Shakespeare great
- greatest poetry of all languages came before grammar solidified; science (the truth of a thing) should win out over logic (the organization of a thing)
- action/motion = key. "Reading promotes writing" is poor; more specific is "If one reads it teaches him how to write" or "One who reads becomes one who writes." succinctly, in Chinese: "Read promote write." all aggressively active words
- in a truer, nuanced language, vocabulary ought to be more expansive and expressive; generalizations deaden
key points:
- nouns are the most dead approximations, abstracted from the thingness of a thing, which is defined by what it does
- harmony of pairings, not to create a third object but to suggest fundamental relationships
- visual characters are etymologies preserved
- avoid "is" as much as possible; this made Shakespeare great
- greatest poetry of all languages came before grammar solidified; science (the truth of a thing) should win out over logic (the organization of a thing)
- action/motion = key. "Reading promotes writing" is poor; more specific is "If one reads it teaches him how to write" or "One who reads becomes one who writes." succinctly, in Chinese: "Read promote write." all aggressively active words
- in a truer, nuanced language, vocabulary ought to be more expansive and expressive; generalizations deaden
February 7, 2024
Woa, this shit rocked my face off. I have my misgivings about how accurate the "translations" of Chinese ideograms are, but the real point here is connecting something which we consider to be so abstract and highfalutin and human, i.e. "language," back to its roots in observable nature. Dude breaks down sentences like they were ruled by physics instead of grammar. He takes you to the moment of cavemen creating language, and paints it as a process of imaginative metaphor in which electric, pulsing verbs were used to describe objects, and eventually became nouns. It's nice to be made aware of how language masks the full energy of reality because of how it's gotten more abstract and weaker through time. But you can get it back. It's still all there.
Also, if you happen to write poetry and experience shame as a result...it helps to think about cavemen doing it. Cavemen are macho.
Also, if you happen to write poetry and experience shame as a result...it helps to think about cavemen doing it. Cavemen are macho.
August 30, 2014
We used this for the first time to teach UCOR 101. As an experiment, I think the text does lend itself to the topic of writing and critical thinking about reading and writing. However, I would put in much more critical thinking of my own before using this text for freshman, as it is heavily theoretical. My co-teacher did an excellent job with the discussion of semiotics and the concrete use of language emphasized in this book. Overall, I really liked reading it, but personally found it hard to teach, perhaps because I'm not as comfortable with the linguistic theories presented within as I would like to be.
January 15, 2013
I suspect Fenollosa's argument breaks down if one looks too closely at his chosen examples (in Chinese), but the heart of this brilliant essay is what he has to say about poetic diction and metaphor as the foundation of language.
I find it interesting that seemingly unrelated things I've read have made similar points--for example, much of what the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield) or Esperanto writers (eg. Piron's essay Esperanto from the Viewpoint of a Writer) have to say on poetics.
I find it interesting that seemingly unrelated things I've read have made similar points--for example, much of what the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield) or Esperanto writers (eg. Piron's essay Esperanto from the Viewpoint of a Writer) have to say on poetics.
March 9, 2008
Ezra Pound's edited version helps focus on the experience of poetry and the act of writing - from a different perspective as the relationship with thought and language is different with ideograms vs English and related languages. A rainbow of "metaphoric overtones" is explained . . . and other connections can be found. (Pounds periodic editor comments that flog our western egoism are fun too - and probably well deserved.)
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June 3, 2016In this essay by Fenollosa you can find a brief explanation about the main characteristics of the chinese character, and chinese poetry and how this function as an image-word, that shows multiplicity of meanings, and avoid the vicious of the latin languages that have complicated the languages with connectors, tenses, and more extra words that we use to comunicate properly. Very useful for my thesis.
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