Early Writings

by Ezra Pound

  Contrast, for example, Gray’s line:3

  The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

  with the Chinese line:

  Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each contains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the question is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?

  On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as the phonetic symbols of Gray. All that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:

  Moon rays like pure snow.

  Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our subjective operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object, which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. am

  Suppose that we look out of a window and watch a man. Suddenly he turns his head and actively fixes his attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focused upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say:

  Man sees horse.

  It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily denote these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters:

  If we all knew what division of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much this same manner.

  But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.

  The thought-picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words, but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.

  The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession.

  Contrast the Laocoön statue with Browning’s lines:4

  ’I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he

  And into the midnight we galloped abreast.’

  One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.

  Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structure of detached Chinese words. The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that therefore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.

  But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.

  For example, the ideograph meaning ‘to speak’ is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning ‘to grow up with difficulty’ is grass with a twisted root (vide Plates 2 and 4). But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, original pictures to compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a ‘messmate’ is a man and a fire (vide Plate 2, col. 2).

  A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them. an

  The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants=spring.

  The sun sign, tangled in the branches of the tree sign=east (vide Plate 2).

  ‘Rice-field’ plus ‘struggle’ = male (vide Plate 2, col. 3).

  ‘Boat’ plus ‘water’ = boat-water, a ripple (vide Plate 2, col. 1).

  Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so universally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it? If it be so universal, it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.

  I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types: one, that a sentence expresses a ‘complete thought’; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.

  The former has the advantage of trying for some natural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought can not be the test of its own completeness. But in nature there is no completeness. On the one hand, practical completeness may be expressed by a mere interjection, as ‘Hi! there!’, or ‘Scat!’, or even by shaking one’s fist. No sentence is needed to make one’s meaning more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence really completes a thought. The man who sees and the horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.

  In the second definition of the sentence, as ‘uniting a subject and a predicate,’ the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all; it is a little private juggling between our right and left hands. The subject is that about which I am going to talk; the predicate is that which I am going to say about it. The sentence according to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.

  If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.

  Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the Middle Ages. According to this logic, thought deals with abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the ‘qualities’ which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling depended upon the natural
order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the ‘thing’ as a mere ‘particular,’ or pawn. It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.

  The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will, have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:

  If we regard this transference as the conscious or unconscious act of an agent we can translate the diagram into:

  In this the act is the very substance of the fact denoted. The agent and the object are only limiting terms.

  It seems to me that the normal and typical sentence in English as well as in Chinese expresses just this unit of natural process. It consists of three necessary words: the first denoting the agent or subject from which the act starts, the second embodying the very stroke of the act, the third pointing to the object, the receiver of the impact. Thus:

  The form of the Chinese transitive sentence, and of the English (omitting particles), exactly corresponds to this universal form of action in nature. This brings language close to things, and in its strong reliance upon verbs it erects all speech into a kind of dramatic poetry.

  A different sentence order is frequent in inflected languages like Latin, German or Japanese. This is because they are inflected, i.e. they have little tags and word-endings, or labels, to show which is the agent, the object, etc. In uninflected languages, like English and Chinese, there is nothing but the order of the words to distinguish their functions. And this order would be no sufficient indication, were it not the natural order—that is, the order of cause and effect.

  It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb ‘to be,’ and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logicians these have seemed more primitive than the transitive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration, or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the transformation going on.

  The intransitive form derives from the transitive by dropping a generalised, customary, reflexive or cognate object: ‘He runs (a race).’ ‘The sky reddens (itself).’ ‘We breathe (air).’ Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word ‘state’ would hardly be recognised as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say ‘The wall shines,’ we mean that it actively reflects light to our eye?

  The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all transitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific law and with ordinary experience. The English passive voice with ‘is’ seemed at first an obstacle to this hypothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a generalised transitive verb meaning something like ‘receive,’ which had degenerated into an auxiliary. It was a delight to find this the case in Chinese.

  In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians’ view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost; but in Chinese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions passing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning ‘to be lost in the forest’ relates to a state of non-existence. English ‘not’ = the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.

  Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a specific colored verb the universal copula ‘is,’ followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree ‘greens itself,’ but ‘the tree is green’; not that monkeys bring forth live young,’ but that ‘the monkey is a mammal.’ This is an ultimate weakness of language. It has come from generalising all intransitive words into one. As ‘live,’ ‘see,’ ‘walk,’ ‘breathe,’ are generalised into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs are in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely bare existence.

  There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no such original conception: our very word exist means ‘to stand forth,’ to show oneself by a definite act. ‘Is’ comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. ‘Be’ is from bhu, to grow.

  In Chinese the chief verb for ‘is’ not only means actively ‘to have,’ but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely ‘to snatch from the moon with the hand.’Here the baldest symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.

  I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how poetical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and individual verbs.

  Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for-word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical English. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.

  Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the individual written word. How are such words to be classified? Are some of them nouns by nature, some verbs and some adjectives? Are there pronouns and prepositions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages?

  One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature before they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat.5 Nature herself has no grammar. ao Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions! A ‘part of speech’ is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for another. They act for one another because they were originally one and the same.

  Few of us realise that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation; that they still retain life. It is only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises, or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast
them at will.

  One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, budding forth one from another. Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated. The Chinese language naturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begun to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions. We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness of our own formalisms. This is especially sad in poetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.

  Let us go further with our example. In English we call ‘to shine’ a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, ‘bright.’ If we need a noun we say ‘luminosity,’ which is abstract, being derived from an adjective. To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbitrarily cut off from its power of action, say ‘the sun’ or ‘the moon.’ Of course there is nothing in nature so cut off, and therefore this nounising is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once the verb ‘shine,’ the adjective ‘bright’ and the noun ‘sun,’ we should probably call it an ‘infinitive of the infinitive.’ According to our ideas, it should be something extremely abstract, too intangible for use. ap

  The Chinese have one word, ming or mei. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally, ‘the sun and moon of the cup’ for ‘the cup’s brightness.’ Placed as a verb, you write ‘the cup sun-and-moons,’ actually ‘cup sun-and-moon,’ or in a weakened thought, ‘is like sun,’ i.e. shines. ‘Sun-and-moon cup’ is naturally a bright cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid scholar may spend a week trying to decide what ‘part of speech’ he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English.