Visiting scholar Tomoyuki Endo discussed the relationship between the structure of Chinese ideograms, the importance of audience imagination and the analysis of modern poetry
By JULIE HUANG – arts@theaggie.org
On Nov. 19, the UC Davis Department of English hosted scholar Tomoyuki Endo, visiting this quarter from Tokyo’s Wakō University, to give a short talk on the connections between Chinese characters and modern poetry.
A professor and translator of 20th century Japanese and English literature, Endo’s most recent translation, co-translated with Forrest Gander, is Shuri Kido’s “Names and Rivers,” which was longlisted for the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association.
Endo began his talk by reading a quote from Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos,” a modernist poem that includes Chinese characters.
“I dare to imitate his style and way of reading,” Endo said.
Endo continued by describing how artists in the early 20th century experimented with color, texture, composition and material in order to create more abstract ways of expressing thoughts and feelings than previous artistic traditions, such as naturalism, which tries to represent subjects accurately to how they appear in real life.
“It’s kind of embarrassing for me to talk about American poetry to Americans, but let me try,” Endo said.
Specifically, Endo explained how Pound applied the structure of Chinese characters to the creative processes of writing poetry: by using the guiding principle that Chinese characters are shorthand pictures, where the combination of two pictures depicting concrete concepts results in the creation of a more abstract concept. For example, the concrete character which means “sun,” when combined with the character meaning “tree,” creates the abstract concept of “east” as a direction.
Similarly, Pound’s poetry revealed abstract and artificial constructs of human culture by combining more concrete ideas to create new ways of thinking about things.
“This is the very fundamental principle of writing poems after the 20th century,” Endo said. “After breaking the pentameter, what is it that poets have to follow? Is there a principle or some rules to write good work?”
Endo connected the principle derived from the structure of Chinese characters to a quote by Antoni Tapies, a painter and sculptor who stated that, “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using [their] own imagination. [They are] compelled to participate in the creative act.”
“One has to participate in the completion of a poem in order to create [their] image,” Endo said.
With that in mind, Endo then engaged in an analysis of “Alba,” another poem of Pound’s, in order to more clearly walk through the process by which, through the imagination of an audience, concrete elements of language can convey more abstract feelings. He pointed out how the structure of consonants within the poem created the feeling of a sensory experience.
“The fricatives and laterals [within “Alba”] suggest the movement of air,” Endo said. “In this room, I would say, a light breeze is blowing.”
Endo proceeded to analyze “Preludes” by T. S. Eliot using the same principle of, through the participation of the audience’s imagination, concrete elements creating more abstract complexities.
“‘A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps,’” Endo said. “[Eliot] doesn’t say it, but we can easily guess that the horse is blowing air out of its nose.”
Endo paired the poem with a visual of a horse-drawn carriage in the rain, in which steam was not only coming out of the horse’s nostrils but also from raindrops falling onto the back of the horse.
“From this one line, you come out with two different images,” Endo said. “I would say that’s the magic of poetry.”
Using the poem “Burning the Small Dead” by UC Davis Professor Emeritus Gary Snyder as a final example, Endo once again illustrated the significance of Tapies’ quote.
“[The poem] looks like just description after description, plainly speaking,” Endo said.
However, each seemingly disjointed piece of imagery, when taken as interrelated parts of the poem’s overall structure, creates a sense of time and geography within the poem.
“Snyder picks up all these images of light, fire or heat and lines them up in one poem,” Endo said. “We are forced to find the coherence of these images.”
For example, “Burning the Small Dead” mentions Deneb and Altair, which are stars that are, respectively, 1,400 light-years and 16.7 light-years away.
“The light we see from Deneb is as old as Lady Murasaki’s ‘The Tale of Genji,’ but you can see it at this moment,” Endo said.
Endo finished his talk by reading “A Love Letter,” a poem by Nanao Sakaki, whom Snyder regarded as a friend and a great teacher in his poetic endeavors.
“I was looking through his archive [in Shields Library] and was totally surprised to find my essay from 30 years ago or so, when my hair was black,” Endo said.
While reading “A Love Letter,” Endo instructed his audience not to read the words alongside him but only to focus on the sensory qualities of the auditory experience.
“After hearing it read aloud, you will surely know Sakaki is a great poet,” Endo said.
Written by: Julie Huang — arts@theaggie.org
