Ideograms: Pound/Michaux

Ideograms: Pound/Michaux Richard Sieburth I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN by evoking a translation that never saw the light. In his obituary memoir of Ezra Pound, Guy Davenport notes that during his final years in Venice il miglior fabbro, having abandoned his Cantos as a colossal botch, having edged further and fur­ ther into silence, was nevertheless contemplating a translation of Henri Michaux’s Idéogrammes en Chine. Pound’s health was failing, as was his confidence in the word, and apparently after a few false starts the project was set aside. It was left to a younger American poet, Gustaf Sobin, to complete the task—with the result that Michaux’s Ideograms in China was finally made available to English-speaking readers in 1984, pub­ lished, appropriately enough, under the Poundian imprint of New Direc­ tions as a latter day complement (so the blurb reads) to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium fo r Poetry.1 Literary history is of course filled with such failed encounters— dialogues abandoned en route, aborted conversations—but it seems to me that the juncture of Pound and Michaux, however tenuous, however mute it might have been, is especially resonant, for here was Pound at the dusk of his career circling back to beginnings, returning once again to the ideograms he had first learned to haruspicate in 1913 with the aid of Fenollosa’s manuscript on the Chinese character, and returning, more­ over, in the company of a French poet whose own graphic and literary work had since the late 20s been engaging the gist and gesture of Chinese ideogram with an intensity and an originality matched by few other artists of the 20th century. A translation of a French poet’s meditations on Chinese calligraphy —the configuration is typically Poundian (think of the first Canto, a translation into Anglo-Saxonized English of a Renaissance Latin version 1. Henri Michaux, Idéogrammes en Chine (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975); Ideograms in China, trans. Gustaf Sobin (New York: New Directions, 1984); Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium fo r Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Fran­ cisco: City Lights, n.d.). All subsequent page references to the Fenollosa will be included in the body of the text. Vo l . XXVI, No. 3 15 L ’E s pr it C réa te u r of Homer). And if Michaux’s French prose poetry acts as a mediator in this transaction between East and West, Chinese and English, this too is another memory of beginnings, a trace of the China Pound first dis­ covered in French guise—whether it be via Pauthier’s versions of Con­ fucius or via Judith Gautier’s Livre de jade whose delicate chinoiseries Pound would extend into the haiku-like condensations of the Imagist lyric or the poems of Cathay (1915). Pound’s China, a realm where Mencius speaks to Mussolini and Confucius converses with the Adams dynasty in an idiom that blends the civic apothegms of the Encyclo­ pedists with the hermetic evanescence of a Mallarmé, is an imaginary kingdom as quirky as any of those to be found in Michaux’s Voyage en Grande Garabagne. I take Pound’s late, silent dialogue with Michaux’s Idéogrammes en Chine as a final, failed gesture toward this imaginary China—a last visit to the Empire of Signs (to use Barthes’ term) or (if one prefers Genette) a belated Voyage en Cratylie. Blanchot observes in an essay on Michaux and Borges that one of the tasks of criticism is to render all comparison impossible.2 1 would there­ fore like to proceed by simply juxtaposing, rather than explicitly com­ paring, Pound’s and Michaux’s encounters with the Chinese character, in the hope that such a juxtaposition might tell us something about larger issues involving modernism, Cratylism, and the poetics of the sign. I use the term juxtaposition deliberately because it is fundamental to what Pound calls the “ ideogrammic method,” a method that underlies both the formal and didactic design of the Cantos. Pound called his poetics “ ideogrammic” because he followed the sinologist Fenollosa in believing (rightly or wrongly) that the sense...