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Ethnography and poetic method: Southwest China, Joseph Rock, and Ezra Pound’s “Drafts & Fragments: Cantos CX–CXVII”

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Abstract

Ezra Pound’s final section of the Cantos—known as Drafts and Fragments—is difficult to interpret given that Pound, probably intentionally, did not offer clear directions on the arrangement and order of the poems before his death. Much of the critical discussion of these last pages has focused on their textual history and the extent to which the poems culminate in a reflective, even confessional, reassessment of the author’s life and political views. While the final cantos are open to various interpretations, a close examination of Pound’s source material suggests that his vision of paradise may have had ideological and political dimensions and in some ways represent a working through or re-articulation of his fascist views. Such an interpretation, however, is both supported and complicated by Pound’s engagement with ethnographic research on Southwest China, and in particular the writings of Joseph Rock, which reveals a sense of reflexivity and a complex engagement with problems of representation and authenticity in ethnographic discourse.

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Notes

  1. Neither the older spelling ‘Na-khi’ nor the Mandarin romanization ‘Naxi’ is particularly intuitive for non-Chinese speakers. An approximate pronunciation is ‘Na-she’. In order to remain consistent with current usage and scholarship, I will use the spelling ‘Naxi’. There are currently approximately 286,000 Naxi living in the southwest of China, mostly in Yunnan province. The city of Lijiang is the Naxi cultural capital. Today, the Naxi are particularly well known for their unique pictographic script, music, and the matriarchal structure of family organization.

  2. There was, in fact, a correspondence between Pound and Rock. Rock wrote at least one letter to Pound from Hawaii on January 3rd 1956, summarizing his work on the Naxi. This letter, it is presumed, was a response to a letter from Pound but which is now lost (see Wallace 2003, p. 252, note 52).

  3. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New Directions Books, 1996. Further references to this work will be abbreviated Cantos with page references and canto number (when not stated elsewhere) given parenthetically in the text.

  4. The pictographs mentioned here are known as Dongba script, a system of writing that was likely developed during the tenth century in Southwest China. Technically, Dongba script is not a language, and its use is limited to mostly religious purposes. Pound was likely interested in Dongba symbols because of their pictographic and ‘ideographic’ nature, but also because of their association with Bon religious practices. More on the Naxi and Dongba script can be found in Jackson (1979).

  5. 2Mùan 1bpö is a Naxi ceremony that can be translated as ‘Worshipping Heaven’ (Rock 1947, v. 1, p. 69).

  6. Daniel Perlman describes the meaning of these plants and symbols in Naxi society: “Artermisia is a plant involved in the Na-Khi ceremony whose strong pungent odor is supposed to remove all impurities. Arundinaria is bamboo, also used in the ceremony, but here included for its music as well as its relation to the circular pictogram below it, the Na-khi sign for Fate that secondarily means a bamboo winnowing tray. ‘Neath luna’ recalls ‘under Fortuna’ [Canto 97], and Fortuna, or fate, is now the winnower—preserving the good, casting out the evil: fostering as well as destroying … the image of the luna is intriguing … Whatever it symbolic intention … it is certain that the source is an exactly similar pictogram—except for the tilted position—used in Na-Khi writing to represent the moon” (1971, p. 76).

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Mather, J. Ethnography and poetic method: Southwest China, Joseph Rock, and Ezra Pound’s “Drafts & Fragments: Cantos CX–CXVII”. Neohelicon 43, 501–514 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0341-1

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