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In July 2001 I was invited to give a plenary address at the biennial international Ezra Pound Conference in Paris. It was a pleasure to reread Pound from the perspective of the seemingly so different Marcel Duchamp, with whose work I was then preoccupied. The essay that resulted profited from the comments of an audience of poets and artists at the lecture series curated by Sergio Bessa for the White Box Gallery in Chelsea. It was published in the inaugural issue (2003) of Paideuma. 3 The Search for “Prime Words” Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos but Wanjina is, shall we say, Ouan Jin or the man with an education and whose mouth was removed by his father because he made too many things whereby cluttered the bushman’s baggage. . . . Ouan Jim spoke and thereby created the named thereby making clutter Ezra Pound, Canto 74 In a pioneer study of Ezra Pound’s translations of the Chinese poems found in Japanese transcription in Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks, Sanehide Kodama discusses the speci¤c changes Pound made in the “Song of Ch’ang-kan” by Li Po (Rihaku in Japanese), translated as “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter .”1 The original, writes Kodama, has the rigid form of gogon zekku: “eight lines, with ¤ve characters in each line in a strict structural and rhyming pattern ” (220). And he goes on to describe the difference in tone as well as verse form between Li Po’s original and Pound’s dramatic monologue, commenting , as have Ronald Bush and others, on the greater subtlety and complexity of Pound’s portrait, in his version the wife becoming much less submissive, indeed somewhat rebellious.2 But the dif¤culty in assessing the speaker’s psychology—is she voicing her willingness to go to great lengths to meet her husband, or threatening, as Ronald Bush believes, to come “as far as Cho-fu-Sa but no farther”? (“Pound and Li Po” 42)—is surely compounded by a facet of Pound’s poetry rarely discussed, namely, his curious use of proper names. Consider the poem’s last four lines: If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa. In the Fenollosa transcription, which gives the Japanese sound equivalent for each Chinese character, followed by their literal English translation and then a syntactically normalized version, we read: So ban ka sam pa Sooner or later descend three whirls (name of spot on Yangtse Kiang where waters whirl) If you be coming down as far as the Three Narrows sooner or later Yo sho sho ho ka Beforehand with letter report family-home Please let me know by writing Sho gei fu do yen Mutually meeting not say far For I will go out to meet [you], not saying that the way be far Choku chi cho fu sa Directly arrive long wind sand (a port on the Yangtse) And will directly come to Chofusa. (Kodama 228–29) The poet and Sinologist Wai-Lim Yip translates the lines: When eventually you would come down from the Three Gorges, Please let me know ahead of time, I will meet you, no matter how far, Even all the way to Long Wind Sand. (194) And another translator, Arthur Cooper: 40 Chapter 3 Late or early coming from Sam-pa, Before you come, write me a letter: To welcome you, don’t talk of distance, I’ll go as far as the Long Wind Sands! (Kern 199) Both Cooper and Yip follow Fenollosa in rendering the Yangtse port Chofusa as “Long Wind Sand[s].”3 But Pound, here and frequently in Cathay, insists on retaining the Chinese name, even if he often has to make it up, as is the case in the poem “Separation on the River Kiang,” where the phrase ko jin (“old acquaintance”) is turned into a proper name, “Ko-jin” (“Ko jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro”).4 The “river Kiang” is a related example of what we might call Pound’s hyper-naming project. In colloquial Chinese, as Yunte Huang observes, Kiang (“river”) usually refers to a particular Kiang—the Yangtse—just as suburbanites in the New York area will talk of going “into the city” when they mean “New York City.”5 Thus, when Pound’s river merchant ’s wife suggests to her husband, “If you are coming down through the narrows...

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