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I pretty sure that I'm not getting the full meaning of this post but I do
see that the part about the deograms leving out part of the thought and that
having to be supplied by the reader.  I'm not going to be able to discuss
this knowledgably but it did bring to mind that Chinese poetry can be a work
of visual art beyond the calligraphy.  That is to say the poet might choose
symbols that visually flow from one to the other or might have a piece of
one symbol appearing in the next.  This would give the poem a meaning
different from the same one spoken (and of course dialects get in the way
there.)

Then I was struck that this was not much different from what some "speakers"
of sign language do.  A poet in sign language attempting to be artistic
would not try to translate a spoken or written poem as close to word for
word as possible but would try to do it in such a way as to do a dance of
the hands.  This would be easier of course if instead of translating
something from a spoken language the poem was composed from the first in
sign language.

Anyway, I think I'll be thinking of this ideogrammic method post from time
to time as it has brought up a method of communication that I hadn't thought
of before.

Regards,
   Rick Parker


RicK Seddon wrote:

> This Zen posting struck a cord.  or is it chord.  (Oh well the list is use
> to my speling :>) by now).  TSE's friend, cheerleader and editor, Ezra
> Pound,  was much into Chinese poetry.  His "Cathay", published in 1915, is
a
> free translation of  poems mostly by the ancient Chinese poet Li Po.
> Pound's study of the Fenollosa notebooks which led to "Cathay" supplied
> Pound with the summary thinking that he needed for the "ideogrammic
method"
> which ties a neat knot around his ideas of Imagism and Vorticism.  Pound
had
> a technical word for what the answer on the Zen list is trying to say.  He
> called this relationship of words, logopoeia.  He felt that logopoeia,
"the
> dance of intellect among words", is  impossible to translate into another
> language.  Fenollosa believed that Chinese was a language properly without
> syntax.  That the ideograms supplied the syntax.
>
> My point with this longwinded exercise is that you may be closer to the
> truth than you realize.  In the ideogrammic method Images are set side by
> side without syntax to create meaning in (not at)  the boundary.  That
> meaning is totally unstated and might be incorrectly thought of as
"reading
> between the lines".  One is actually reading between the Images.  TWL may
be
> TSE's only Imagist poem and it for sure had a Vorticist as an editor.
Many
> people reject the meaning they receive from the boundry and continue to
> attempt to extract meaning directly from the Images.  The isolated Image
may
> very easily seem nonsence since the intended meaning lies not in the Image
> but in the boundry.