Poet Ezra Pound, following the lead of scholar Ernest Fenollosa, once said that Chinese was the ideal medium for poetry, as its characters, or ideograms, actually mime the very processes of nature itself. These signs, he said, form a language that visibly patterns the "primal energies of the elements."
The ideogram bears "its metaphor on its face." The sign for sun "glows" like the sun, the sign for tree "grows" like a tree, and when you combine the two ("entangling the sun radical in the branches of the tree") you have represented the concept "east."
From these observations the poet cobbled together his "ideogrammatic method," which depended upon the (incorrect) belief that the sense of Chinese characters was visibly and invariably generated by the juxtaposition of their component elements. In fact, almost all Chinese characters are phonetic compounds and thus do not speak entirely to the eye. Nonetheless this "ideogrammatic" theory has had many proponents over the years and is still used as an aide-memoire in some teaching methods.
Needing all the adherents he could find, Pound was delighted to discover that the French poet-painter Henri Michaux was, he thought, of the same persuasion as himself, and when the latter's "Ideogrammes en Chine" was first published in 1971, Pound announced that he himself would translate it.
This was not to be (Pound died a year later), however, and so "Ideograms in China" had to wait until 1984 for its English debut, in a limited edition, and until now for its first general release.
Both Pound and Michaux found in Chinese ideograms the same freedom that poets in the early 19th century found in Egyptian hieroglyphs -- a freedom from words, a way to capture reality through something other than the sieve of grammar.
A difference, however, was that Pound saw this as a method, something he could transplant and nourish. It was not merely a matter of a simple correspondence between the sign and what it represented. Rather, it was a process, something he was always interested in, perhaps because it could then lend itself to teaching.
Michaux was not interested in methodology as such, and his agenda for the Chinese ideogram was much less ambitious. "It is precisely because I managed to liberate myself from words, those sticky hangers-on, that . . . I see [in ideograms] a new language, turning its back on the verbal, a liberator." Never mind that for the Chinese their characters were just as prolix as were words to him; he had discovered an "unexpected, soothing mode of writing in which one would finally be able to express oneself far from words . . . "
It was just this freedom that Michaux had discovered in China itself. In 1930-31 he had traveled in Asia, and in "Un Barbare en Asie" (published in 1932 and later translated by Sylvia Beach as "A Barbarian in Asia") produced one of the most percipient of accounts of travel in the Far East.
Indeed, he was the first to describe the semiotic encounter. He discovered a tradition of painting/writing that was at once concrete and abstract, one that he thought grounded not in common mimesis but in signification itself.
"The Chinese have a talent for reducing being to signified being (something like the talent for algebra or math) -- if a battle is to take place, they do not serve up a battle, they do not simulate it. They signify it. This is the only thing that interests them, the actual battle would strike them as vulgar."
Though this was even in 1930 more an ideal than an actuality, Michaux found in this signification a way out of his own aesthetic dilemma. Drawing or painting could and did translate into writing -- and vice versa. From this conviction he built his meditation on what the Chinese ideograph meant to him.
Intended as an introduction to author Leon Tchang's "La Calligraphie Chinoise," "Ideograms in Chinese" takes the form of a commentary in which the history of calligraphy is lightly sketched and Michaux's own uses for it are revealed.
These are different from those of Pound, being personal rather than pedagogic. Michaux wanted to teach himself, not others. He discovered an ultimate -- what he thought writing ought to be. "Distances preferred to proximities, the poetry of incompletion preferred to eyewitness accounts, to copies . . . the motion of a sudden inspiration and not prosaically, laboriously, exhaustively traced . . . this is what spoke to me, what seized me, what carried me away."
Carried him away to that ideal terminal for the romantic, the land of the exotic. At the same time that Michaux subscribed to such an ideal, however, he also -- being the most open of artists though the most hermetic in his methods -- shows us a kind of practicability. Pound's interest was to make the world a better place; Michaux's was to make people better persons.
It is this desire that still speaks to us well over half a century later, and it is for this reason that we still read Michaux and emerge refreshed.
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