After Words

Abstract

Ernest Fenollosa’s brief essay, never corroborated by academic Sinologists but introduced into discussions of poetics by its editor Ezra Pound, insists on the superiority of Asian language systems over their European (Aryan) counterparts. In Eastern languages:

etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous.

[Chinese] ideographs are like bloodstained battle-flags to an old campaigner.

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a

Medium for Poetry