ABSTRACT
Authorities on Chinese script inform us that when its characters are read rapidly they func tion as logographs , mere signs for words and no more (Needham 1958; Cooper 1 978). However, with the pondered reading required by poetry in any language, the make-up of characters may assume some importance, so that in a stanza about mountains a whole series of characters may occur in which the mountain element is present (Teele 1 949). The distinc tion, in other words, has again to do not with the putative nature of the characters but with their actual functions in different kinds of texts and readings, though professional Sinologists continue to insist that the characters are essen tially non-poetic in the visual sense. With astounding insight, Ezra Pound drew on the visual and paratactic functions of Chinese script in his edition of Fenellosa's essay 'The
Chinese written character as a medium for poetry' ( 1 936) and in his translations of poetry (Cathay 1 9 1 5) and of writings by Confucius. At all events, the effect of the Chinese example on Pound's own poetry is indisput able: indeed, his imagist techniques radically transformed poetry in English and several other western languages (Yip 1969; Kenner 1 970; George Steiner 1975: 358; Po-Fei Huang 1 989). Chinese script likewise prompted the visual brilliance of Calligrammes, the work of Pound's French contemporary Guillaume Apollinaire. As adapted to the tanka and other highly structured verse forms in Japanese, the sheer layout of these characters and the links between them further lay behind the experi ment Renga: a Chain of Poems ( 1 969) that coordinated, in vertical and horizontal read ings , sonnets and stanzas of sonnets composed by the four poet-translators Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguinetti and Charles Tomlinson (Tomlinson 1979). Reci procally , translations of Western verse into Japanese script have put particular emphasis on set structures of syllabic characters (Naito 1993).
