The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry 9781138503823, 9781315145563

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Concrete Poetry, Playfulness and Translation
2 The Origins of the Untranslatable: The Earliest Western Visual Poetry
3 Concrete Poetry in China: Form, Content, Theme and Function
4 Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry in Chinese Characters
5 Exploring the Structures of Chance: Transcreating Noigandres Ideogramas into English
6 Transcreation without Borders
7 Edwin Morgan as Transcreator
8 Constellations and Ideograms: Eugen Gomringer’s Multilingual Concrete Poetry
9 The Intermedial Recoding of Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções
10 Concrete North America: Some Questions of Reception
11 Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network
12 Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry
Index

Citation preview

The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry

This volume addresses the global reception of “untranslatable” concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of “transcreation”, that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This demanding body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature. John Corbett is a CAPES International Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Sao Paulo. His numerous books and articles include Language and Scottish Literature (1997) and Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (1999). Ting Huang is a literary translator and doctoral candidate in the E ­ nglish Department at the University of Macau, where she took an MA in Translation Studies in the Portuguese Department and her Bachelor’s degree in Portuguese Studies. She has translated Azul Corvo, by Brazilian novelist, Adriana Lisboa (2019).

Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies

36 A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality Kobus Marais 37 A Sociological Approach to Poetry Translation Modern European Poet-Translators Jacob S. D. Blakesley 38 Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies Methodological Considerations Edited by Kobus Marais and Reine Meylaerts 39 Translating and Interpreting in Korean Contexts Engaging with Asian and Western Others Edited Ji-Hae Kang and Judy Wakabayashi 40 Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of/for Translation Identity, Mobility and Language Change Edited by Karen Bennett and Rita Queiroz de Barros 41 Translating the Visual A Multimodal Perspective Rachel Weissbrod and Ayelet Kohn 42 Using Computers in the Translation of Literary Style Challenges and Opportunities Roy Youdale 43 The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry Edited by John Corbett and Ting Huang For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-­A dvances-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/bookseries/RTS

The Translation and Transmission of Concrete Poetry Edited by John Corbett and Ting Huang

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, John Corbett and Ting Huang; individual chapters, the contributors The right of John Corbett and Ting Huang to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-50382-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14556-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Fig 0.1  a e i o u by Eugen Gomringer.

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xiii xvii 1

JOH N COR BET T

1 Concrete Poetry, Playfulness and Translation

9

SUSA N BASSN ET T

2 The Origins of the Untranslatable: The Earliest Western Visual Poetry

21

J U LI A NA DI F IOR I PON DI A N

3 Concrete Poetry in China: Form, Content, Theme and Function

36

LI LI

4 Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry in Chinese Characters

56

CHEN LI

5 Exploring the Structures of Chance: Transcreating Noigandres Ideogramas into English

71

C L AU S C L Ü V E R

6 Transcreation without Borders

97

K . DAV I D J AC K S O N

7 Edwin Morgan as Transcreator T I N G H UA N G

112

viii Contents 8 Constellations and Ideograms: Eugen Gomringer’s Multilingual Concrete Poetry

127

R AQ U E L A B I - S Â M A R A

9 The Intermedial Recoding of Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções

150

SI MON E HOM E M DE M E L LO

10 Concrete North America: Some Questions of Reception

168

O D I L E C I S N E RO S

11 Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network

184

JOH N COR BET T

12 Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry

203

CHRIS MCCABE

Index

217

Figures

0.1 a e i o u by Eugen Gomringer v 2.1 Detail of ‘Syrinx’ Supplément grec 0384, 028–29v*, by courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France 23 3.1 Detail from ‘The Second Obituary for the World’ (第2回世界讣闻, 1937) by Ou Waiou 44 3.2 Detail from ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land’ (被开垦的处女地, 1942）by Ou Waiou 45 3.3 ‘Train’ (火车) by Yin Caigan, by courtesy of the author 47 3.4 ‘A Lad Picking Oranges’ (小伙采桔子) by Yin Caigan, by courtesy of the author 48 4.1 ‘A War Symphony’ (戰爭交響曲) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 58 4.2 Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Bohdan Piasecki, by courtesy of the translator 59 4.3 English Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Cosima Bruno, by courtesy of the translator 60 4.4 Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Yi-ping Wu (吳怡萍) and Ci-shu Shen (沈碁恕), by courtesy of the translators 61 4.5 ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ (孤獨昆蟲學家的早餐桌巾) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 62 4.6 ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’ (消防隊長夢中的埃及風景照) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 64 4.7 ‘White’ (白) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 65 4.8 ‘Country’ by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author. English translation by courtesy of Andrea Bachner 66 4.9 From ‘Microcosmos’ (小宇宙) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 67 4.10 From ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author 68 4.11 ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author (Chinese Version) 69 4.12 From ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li (English Version), by courtesy of the author 69

x Figures 5.1 Cover of e. e. cummings, 40 poem(a)s, translated by Augusto de Campos, 1986, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 73 5.2 Décio Pignatari, ‘hombre’ (1957), from Noigandres no. 4 (1958), by courtesy of the estate of Décio Pignatari 74 5.3 Claus Clüver, translation of ‘OESTELESTE’ by Ronaldo Azeredo (1958) 75 5.4 José Lino Grünewald, ‘vai e vem’ (1959), from Noigandres no. 5 (1962), p. 181 76 5.5 José Lino Grünewald’s ‘vai e vem’ in English translation 77 5.6 Augusto de Campos, ‘eis os amantes’ (1953), from Noigandres no. 2 (1955), by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 79 5.7 Augusto de Campos, ‘here are the lovers,’ translated by Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt in collaboration with Augusto. After the coloured version in M. E. Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry: A World View, verso of frontispiece 80 5.8 Décio Pignatari, ‘um movimento,’ from Noigandres no. 3 (1956), and its translation by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos and the estate of Décio Pignatari 81 5.9 Augusto de Campos, ‘tensão,’ from Noigandres no. 3 (1956), by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 83 5.10 Haroldo de Campos, ‘branco,’ from Noigandres no. 4 (1958), by courtesy of Ivan de Campos 83 5.11 Décio Pignatari, ‘beba coca cola,’ and its translation by Mary Ellen Solt and Maria José de Queiroz, from Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry, p. 108.  Poem originally published in Noigandres no. 4 (1958) 85 5.12a Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre’ (1958), from Noigandres no. 5 (1962), p. 77, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos 86 5.12b Version of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre’, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos 87 5.13 Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt, translation of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre,’ from Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry, p. 104 87 5.14 Claus Clüver, translation of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre,’ unpublished 88 5.15 From Haroldo de Campos’s ALEA I – VARIAÇÕES SEMÂNTICAS (uma epicomédia de bôlso) and its English translation by Edwin Morgan, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos and the Edwin Morgan Trust 89 6.1 ‘The Lady of the Moon’ by François Cheng 105

Figures  xi 8.1 avenidas by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer 136 8.2 silencio ‘silence’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer 139 8.3 schweigen ‘silence’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy 139 of Eugen Gomringer 8.4 ‘Life’ by Décio Pignatari, by courtesy of the estate of 141 Décio Pignatari 8.5 ‘a e i o u’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer 144 9.1 ‘the tyger | o tygre (william blake),’ by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 153 9.2 ‘homage to edward fitzgerald,’ by Augusto de Campos, 155 by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 9.3 intraduções, by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 157 9.4 a rosa doente; rosa para gertrude; sol de maiakóvski by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos 161 9.5 a esphinge (emerson), by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of ­Augusto de Campos 163 10.1 Torres de Satélite by Mathias Goeritz, Luis Barragán and Jesús Reyes Ferreira. Image by ProtoplasmaKid – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18510340 169 10.2 Detail of poema plástico by Mathias Goeritz, by 170 courtesy of Museo Experimental El Eco 10.3 Funciones by Ulises Carrión, by courtesy of Roberto 173 Rébora. Taller Ditoria 11.1 Edwin Morgan’s Ego Network 190 11.2 Edwin Morgan’s Ego Network Grouped by Gender 191 11.3 Edwin Morgan’s Ego Network Grouped by Nationality 191 11.4 20 Most Central Alters in Morgan’s Network 192 11.5 The Social Networks of Hugh MacDiarmid and 198 Edwin Morgan 12.1 ‘Pilot Plan for Brasilia,’ by Lucio Costa. Image by ‫ר ירוא‬., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=3355646 206 2.2 forma, by José Lino Grünewald 208 1 2.3 concreto, by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of 1 Augusto de Campos 209 12.4 silencio by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer 210 2.5 La Belle Hollandaise, by Ian Hamilton Finlay by 1 courtesy of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay’ 212

xii Figures 12.6

We Built this City by Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, by courtesy of Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim. First published in Matrix Magazin’s Conceptualisms Dossier (Montreal, 2012) 214 12.7 Detail of ‘Adam and Eve Sonnet’ by Alexander Allen, by courtesy of Alexander Allen 215

Contributors

Raquel Abi-Sâmara is an Assistant Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC-MINAS), where she teaches Creative Education and Creative Writing at graduate level. She is a translator of books of poetry, fiction and philosophy from German into Brazilian Portuguese, including authors such as Paul Celan, HansGeorg Gadamer, Martin Luther, Stefan Zweig and Vilém Flusser. She published a number of articles on poetry translation. She co-edited Urban Modernization and Contemporary Culture: Dialogues between Brazil and Japan (2015) and Crossings: Brazil, Portugal and Greater China (2019). Susan Bassnett is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow and the University of Warwick, where she served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for 10 years. She is the author and editor of over 20 volumes of scholarly work, including Translation Studies (1980), Comparative Literature (1993), Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (1998) with André Lefevere and The Translator as Writer (2006) with Peter Bush. A volume of her poetry, Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations, was published in 2002, and, in 2007, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Chen Li (陳黎) was born in Hualien, Taiwan, in 1954. After graduating from the English Department at National Taiwan Normal University, he returned to his home town as a schoolteacher. He also taught creative writing at National Dong Hwa University. A winner of many important literary prizes in his country, Chen Li has published many books of poetry and he is also a prolific prose writer and translator. With his wife Chang Fen-ling, he has translated over 20 volumes of poetry into Chinese, including the works of Sylvia Plath, Seamus ­Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Wisława Szymborska. Chan Fen-ling also translated The Edge of the Island: Poems of Chen Li (2014). He has been recognised as one of the ‘Top Ten Contemporary Poets of Taiwan.’ Odile Cisneros  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She

xiv Contributors co-authored the Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater (2011) with Richard Young and co-edited Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos with A. S. Bessa (2007). A translator and critic, she has published on, and translated work by, Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, Ramón Gómez de la Serna Régis Bonvicino, and Haroldo de Campos, including a full-length translation of Campos’s experimental prose Galáxias. She is editor in chief of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and is currently building ecopoesia.com, an online resource on environment and poetry in Latin America. Claus Clüver  is Professor emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he taught from 1957 to 1998. He also was a Visiting Professor at New York University and the University of California at Berkeley, and served as a Guest Professor at the universities of Hamburg, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Lund, and several times at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Author of a book in German, Thornton Wilder und André Obey: Untersuchungen zum modernen epischen Theater (1978), he is also the co-editor of The Pictured Word (1998); Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and Their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 (2004); Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word (2005), Intermidialidade (2006), and The Imaginary: Word and Image / L’Imaginaire: texte et image (2015). Some 20 of his essays on topics in intermedial studies will be published in Portuguese translation in 2020 at UFMG. His two dozen essays on aspects of international concrete poetry and its relations to visual art and music have yet to be published collectively. John Corbett is a CAPES International Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Sao Paulo. He was formerly a Full Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Macau, and a Professor of Applied Language Studies and Head of the Department of English Language at Glasgow University. He is the author of a number of books and articles on education, linguistics and Scottish literature and language, including Language and Scottish Literature (1997) and Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (1999). He co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Scots (2003) and, with Jennifer Bann, co-authored Spelling Scots: The O ­ rthography of Literary Scots, 1700–2000 (2015). Juliana Di Fiori Pondian is a translator and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Modern Letters at the University of São Paulo, where she took her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in General Linguistics, and her Bachelor’s degree in Greek and Portuguese Literature.

Contributors  xv She has published in the areas of linguistics, semiotics and poetry. A translator of classical and modern languages, in 2018 she published an edition of calligrams by Apollinaire, with transcripts (2018), and, with Daniel Miranda, she made the first translation of the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit into Portuguese (2011). She is currently preparing an anthology of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin visual poetry, translated into Portuguese, and a compilation of articles on visual poetry by the Belgian theorist, Francis Edeline. Simone Homem de Mello  is a writer and literary translator, educated at the University of São Paulo, the University of Cologne and the University of Santa Catarina. Between 1993 and 2010, she lived in ­Cologne and B ­ erlin, and worked as an author, dramatist, opera librettist and translator. She wrote libretti for the operas Orpheus Kristall (music: Manfred Stahnke, 2002), and Keine Stille außer der des Windes, UBU - eine musikalische Groteske (music: Sidney Corbett, respectively 2007 and 2012). Her poems in Portuguese are collected in Périplos (2005), Extravio Marinho (2010) and Terminal, Escrita (2015) as well as in numerous anthologies. As a translator, she mainly works on modern and contemporary German poetry. From 2012 until 2014, she coordinated the Haroldo de Campos Reference Centre, in the Casa das Rosas museum, in São Paulo. She is currently a Coordinator for the Centre for Literary Translation Studies at the Casa Guilherme de Almeida museum, in São Paulo. Ting Huang (黄婷) is a literary translator and doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Macau, where she took her Master’s degree in Translation Studies in the Portuguese Department and her Bachelor’s degree in Portuguese Studies. She has translated Azul Corvo, a novel by the Brazilian author Adriana Lisboa (forthcoming, 2019) from Portuguese into Chinese, and she is currently working on the translation of another of Lisboa’s novels, Sinfonia em Branco, winner of the José Saramago prize. K. David Jackson is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of numerous scholarly publications, including Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa (2010) and Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (2015), and he has co-edited collections such as Transformations of Literary Language in Latin American Literature (1987); Experimental, Visual, Concrete: AvantGarde Poetry Since 1960 (1996); and Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (2005). His co-translations include Oswald de Andrade’s Seraphim Grosse Pointe (1979) and ­Patricia Galvão’s Industrial Park (1993). Li Li (李麗) is a Professor of Translation Studies at Macao Polytechnic Institute. She has published a number of articles and books on Translation Studies and children’s literature, including the monograph,

xvi Contributors Production and Reception: A Study of Translated Children’s Literature in China 1898–1949 (2010). She has translated a number of volumes from English to Chinese, including critical studies such as Jeremy Munday’s Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (2007), and Roberta Seelinger Trites’ Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (2010), and children’s novels, including CS Lewis’ The Last Battle (2014) and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (2019). Chris McCabe’s work crosses artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2013, and his five collections of poetry include Speculatrix (2014) and The Triumph of Cancer (2018), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His first novel, Dedalus, which is a sequel to Ulysses, was published by Henningham Family Press in 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. His non-fiction work includes an ongoing series of books including In the Catacombs (2014) and Cenotaph South (2016) which document his search to discover a great forgotten poet in one of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries. With Victoria Bean he is the co-editor of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (2015) and is the editor of Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (2019). He is the Head Librarian at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre.

Acknowledgements

The present volume grew out of an international round table s­ eminar held by the Department of English at the University of Macau in ­October 2016. The round table and the editors’ own research was financially supported by a University of Macau Multi-Year Research Grant: MYRG2015–00080-FAH ‘Mapping the Literary Avant Garde, 1950–2000: A pilot study.’ A number of the chapters in this volume were presented in draft form at this seminar, which was also attended by Lucas Klein, Peter McCarey, and David McAleavey, as well as graduate students and staff members from the Departments of English and Portuguese. Stranded in Hong Kong by a typhoon for the duration of the seminar, Tong King Lee travelled to Macao on a later date to deliver a presentation on experimental writing in translation. While not everyone who presented at the seminar and its offshoots is represented in this volume (and, conversely, it contains contributions by scholars who were not present in the seminar), we are grateful to all the original participants for their input, lively discussions and encouragement; they have, directly and indirectly, influenced the content of the book. We also appreciate contributors’ patience, as the volume has slowly taken shape. A special mention goes to James McGonigal, for his generous collegiality and advice throughout and beyond this project, and to Simone Homem de Mello and Augusto de Campos for their help in tracking down copyright holders. The book could not have been completed without the love and constant support of Jiuhai Huang, Chunhong Fan and Augusta Alves. Every effort has been made to trace and secure the copyright of literary texts and images. The editors apologise if any material has been included without appropriate acknowledgement and would be happy to address any oversights in future editions. The editors and authors are grateful for permissions granted to reproduce the following texts and images: Front matter: ‘a e i o u’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer. ‘Q’ by Bob Cobbing, from An ABC of Sound (Veer Books) by courtesy of the family of Bob Cobbing.

xviii Acknowledgements The lines from ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake’ and quotations from ‘ALEA I,’ ‘Seven Decades’ and ‘Transient Servitude’, by Edwin Morgan, from Collected Poems and Collected Translations, by courtesy of the Edwin Morgan Trust and Carcanet Press. The excerpt from the translation of ‘Syrinx’ by Armando Zárate, with permission of Tristán Zárate. ‘The Woman in the Moon’ by François Cheng, with permission of François Cheng. The translation ‘A Dama da Lua’ by Haroldo de Campos, with permission of Ivan de Campos. Excerpt from ‘L’Araignée’ by Francis Ponge, with permission of Francis Ponge and © Editions Gallimard. The translation ‘A Aranha’ by Haroldo de Campos, with permission of Ivan de Campos. Translations of William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, Dante’s Paraiso, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Constantine Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by Haroldo de Campos, with permission of Ivan de Campos. Excerpts from Servidão de Passagem by Haroldo de Campos, with permission of Ivan de Campos.

Introduction John Corbett

It is pleasing to discover that the earliest recorded use of the epithet ‘concrete’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a late 15th-century treatise on alchemy. It was later printed in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), a work ‘containing severall poeticall pieces of our famous ­English philosophers, collected, with annotations, by Elias Ashmole.’1 In its original sense, now obsolete, ‘concrete’ meant ‘united or connected by growth; growing together.’ It seems apt to revive this sense in the context of the present volume, which considers the roots, growth, flourishing and cross-pollination of different phases of ‘concrete poetry,’ over time and space. Despite the impersonality of its form, as we shall see, concrete poetry is and has been a curiously sociable literary genre, both in modern and ancient times. The form has always demanded and indeed created a readership that is in tune with its oblique linguistic games, and its more recent practitioners have actively sought out poets of like mind, at home and abroad. The practice and appreciation of concrete poetry ‘unites and connects’ across cultures and languages, enriching both, in part by presenting translation challenges that have demanded creative, ingenious solutions. Only from the later 16th century does ‘concrete’ evolve from a participle (e.g. ‘concrete into a stone’) into an adjective that expresses ‘congealed’ or ‘solid.’ It is this concern with materiality, of course, that primarily characterises concrete poetry, whether it is made manifest graphically or phonetically. The material on which the written poem is carved, embroidered, typed, printed or projected – whether rock, silk, a white page, canvas, a wall or computer screen – becomes part of the communicative process. Sound poetry, in turn, foregrounds the substance of the voice, its aural quiddities, in live performance or via an audio or video recording. Of course, as Susan Bassnett reminds us early in this volume, all poetry plays with the material patterning of sound and, to a certain extent, the graphic qualities of text, in that we can recognise a traditional poem as a poem because it has a regular metrical or rhythmical pattern, pronounced consonance, assonance and rhyme, and falls into an array of lines on the page. Concrete poetry, however, focuses on visual and/or aural substance to the apparent detriment of sense. The traditional metrical pattern, and even the regular poetic line,

2  John Corbett are disrupted, and the reader is invited to interpret creatively the interaction among the elements of the graphic or phonetic forms of the characters, and the visual or vocal spaces in which they are situated. When, in the early 20th century, Ezra Pound, whose poetry and essays influenced many of the avant-garde poets discussed in the present volume, urged his fellow poets to deal with the ‘concrete’, he did not have in mind a concern with the literal materiality of the text itself. In his essay, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ (1913), Pound makes the following recommendation: Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. 2 For Pound, the essence of ‘concrete’ lay in its contrast with ‘abstract’ and, in this early period of his literary career, to make a poem concrete was to deal with unvarnished images. Not long after he published this brief manifesto, he would become the literary executor of Ernest Fenollosa, and embrace the sinologist’s theory that the Chinese ideogram was a natural medium for poetry, in that the Chinese written character allegedly bears within it the visual, embodied origins of its meaning. In Pound’s edition of Fenollosa’s essay on the poetic qualities of the ideogram, or ideograph, the notion of ‘concrete’ again resurfaces in the discussion of its pictorial qualities: 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. 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.3 Pound practised the ‘ideogrammic method’ for much of his later career; his poetry proceeds in part by placing ‘concrete’ images adjacently so that the reader infers their abstract relation. But Pound’s ideogrammic method, for all its emphasis on the concrete, is not yet ‘concrete poetry.’ Only later did a new generation of visual and sound poets reinterpret Pound and Fenollosa to create a new kind of ideogram (albeit one with ancient precedents, in the West and East), that is, a poem as an ‘original picture,’ or as a series of vocal sounds, whose enigmatic, compounded elements must somehow be related to produce meaning.

Introduction  3 The reinterpretation of Pound and Fenollosa’s conception of the ­ hinese ideogram by later Western avant-garde poets drew also on a C sense of ‘concrete’ that is not recorded in the OED until 1834, namely ‘A composition of stone chippings, sand, gravel, pebbles, etc., formed into a mass with cement; used for building under water, for foundations, pavements, walls, etc.’ The development of reinforced concrete in the 19th century led to its use in a number of modernist architectural movements in the 20th century, from the constructivist buildings of Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s to the Brutalist architecture of Europe and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. The association of concrete as a building material with unvarnished, progressive modernity wedded the first phase of concrete poetry to a modernist architectural aesthetic, as Chris M ­ cCabe observes in his chapter in this volume. The first recorded use of ‘concrete poetry’ in the OED is indeed the English translation of the Brazilian ‘Noigandres’ poets’ manifesto for the new literary genre, ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’ (1958), a document that alludes directly to the architect, Lúcio Costa’s Plano Piloto de Brasília (1957), the blueprint for Brazil’s new, futuristic, concrete, capital city. Much like the curvaceous modernist buildings that Oscar Niemeyer designed for Brazil’s utopian capital, there is an essential playfulness to concrete poems, a feature identified in Susan Bassnett’s opening chapter as one that also presents practical challenges to the translator. Bassnett relates the pleasurable playfulness of concrete poetics to its manifestation in poetry more generally; nevertheless, the conceptual wittiness of concrete poetry does seem to demand particularly inventive responses from those who seek to reconstitute it anew in a different language. The very act of attempting to translate the apparently untranslatable results in a necessary redefinition of the process of translation itself. In an essay on cultures in circulation, Homi Bhabha writes: Translation is an iterative process of revision that moves back and forth in geographic circulation and discursive mobility, each time motivated by what is ‘untranslatable’ – from one language to another, from one culture toward others – and therefore must be the cause for starting again from another place, another time, another history.4 The geographical and temporal transmission of ‘untranslatable’ concrete poetry, and the consequent, necessary reinvention of translation in the process are the primary concerns of the present volume. The challenges of reinvention have been met by non-translations, literal translations, translations-with-exegesis and creative translational strategies that are so innovative that they require new ways to describe them, giving rise to coinages such as ‘transcreations’ and ‘intraductions.’ The dissemination and circulation of concrete poetry goes beyond the body of work itself, to the translation of its neo-modernist manifestos,

4  John Corbett and to oft-repeated legends of its origins, and accounts of its apparently spontaneous eruption in various countries in the middle years of the 20th century. However, two complementary chapters follow Bassnett’s lead in offering a useful corrective to the notion that the governing principles of concrete poetry are a purely modernist invention. Despite its avant-garde progressiveness and novelty, concrete poetry has precedents that stretch back well beyond the 20th century, as the chapters by Juliana di Fiori Pondian and Li Li demonstrate. Di Fiori Pondian argues that the Alexandrian poets, of around the 3rd century bce, who produced the Greek pattern poems known as technopaegnia, pioneered most of the features that we now associate with concrete poetry, namely a visual and aural iconography, and a dense, puzzling, playful, textual content that teaches the reader new ways of reading. She illustrates her argument with a detailed analysis of ‘Syrinx’, attributed to Theocritus, and a discussion of how a selection of contemporary Western translators into English, Portuguese, Spanish and French has attempted to solve the problems it poses. The modern translator of a proto-concrete poem like ‘Syrinx’ needs not only to reconstitute the visual shape and aural patterning of the source text in the target language; even more demanding are the challenges of reconstituting the dense verbal allusions to Greek literary culture and of reproducing the riddling linguistic tricks that obfuscate the poem’s content. The issues of interpretation and translation that are raised in this chapter echo, time and again, throughout the volume. If concrete poetics drew on Fenollosa and Pound’s conception of the Chinese ideogram, it is reasonable to ask how, if at all, concrete poetics have been and are represented in Chinese literature. In her chapter, Li Li shows that the Chinese ideogram was indeed used in ancient Chinese pattern poetry, though (unlike the case of the ‘Syrinx’) the visual patterns, which include graphic representations of pagodas and tortoises, were not necessarily related to the content of the poem. The complex aural and visual patterning of the Chinese characters themselves is practically impossible to reproduce in contemporary Western translations. The discussion of Chinese characters is further complicated by the fact that ideograms are found in ‘simplified’ forms, officially adopted by the People’s Repulic of China in 1949, and in ‘traditional’ forms, which are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. Both simplified and traditional styles are represented in the present volume, in the chapters by Li Li and Chen Li, respectively. As Li Li observes, early Chinese pattern poems were marginal to mainstream literature; they were social and occasional poems written to prove the author’s ingenuity and wit, as a token of comradeship or demonstration of love. One example discussed is a petition poem, whose medium (a palindromic poem in the shape of a tortoise, embroidered on silk) was part of the gift to a ruler who had the power to grant a favour. The tradition of writing these sociable or petitionary pattern poems, though peripheral in Chinese literary history, survived into the early 20th century, when the techniques filtered

Introduction  5 into Chinese modernist poetry that paralleled developments in the West, without necessarily being in direct contact with it. Li Li considers the case of the Hong Kong poet, Ou Waiou (鸥外鸥), active from the 1930s, whose literary experiments in many ways recall those of e. e. cummings in the West and equally prefigure concrete poetics. A Chinese visual poet of the present day, Yin Caigan (尹才干) also appears to have reinvented aspects of familiar concrete poetics, without much evidence of direct contact with the avant-garde tradition elsewhere. Ou Waiou and Yin Caigan are potent reminders that the ‘spontaneous’ eruption of concrete poetics can still happen without much apparent influence from outside. When East-West contact does occur, as in the case of Chen Li (陳黎), the distinguished Taiwanese poet who discusses his own experimental work and its translations in the present volume, the Chinese concrete poem becomes almost a textbook illustration of Pound’s conception of the ideogrammic method. In Chen Li’s most celebrated poem, ‘A War Symphony,’ we see a Chinese character (兵) being ‘dismembered’ into 乒 and 乓, until it becomes a new ideogram (丘). From the conceptual frame given by the title of the poem, and the visual conjunction and meanings (and, indeed, sounds) of these characters, the reader is invited to construct a narrative that engenders meanings beyond those of the characters in isolation. Chen Li’s experimental poetry in Chinese represents Asian literary culture’s re-appropriation of Western avant-garde modernist aesthetics, channelled from Pound via the Chicago Review anthology of concrete poetry that he read as a student. While Susan Bassnett, Juliana di Fiori Pondian and Li Li discuss precursors of modern Western and Asian concrete poems, which extend to 17th-century pattern poems, such as George Herbert’s ‘Eastern Wings’ and Apollinaire’s ‘calligrams,’ the heart of the present volume consists of an extended series of chapters that deal with a small but important group of concrete poets and translators who contributed to the main wave of Western concrete poetry from the 1950s to the 1970s. Among the Brazilian pioneers of the form, the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, who made up two-thirds of the ‘Noigandres’ group, both pioneered the form and contributed to its theorisation. Fenollosa’s conception of the poetic nature of the Chinese ideogram and Pound’s advocacy of the ‘ideogrammic method’ were central to their literary programme. Claus Clüver’s chapter on the ‘Brazilian ideogram’ illustrates the ways in which the de Campos brothers and their contemporaries rethought Fenollosa’s linguistics and Pound’s poetics to give a conceptual framework for the new genre of concrete poetry, and Clüver discusses how these ‘Brazilian ideograms’ have been rendered in English. K. David Jackson’s chapter on Haroldo de Campos’s ‘transcreations’ takes up the issue of his translation practices in particular, and addresses two issues: first, the way in which Haroldo’s ‘cannibalisation’ of world literature through translation realises a tenet of Brazilian modernism that originates in Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928), and, second, how the desire

6  John Corbett to translate the untranslatable, to paraphrase Bhabha, above, led Haroldo to the concept of ‘transcreation.’ Haroldo de Campos’ reimagining of the literary translator’s task involves the translator in going beyond the literal paraphrasing of the source text, often accompanied by exegetical matter (as seen, largely, in the more literal translations of ‘Syrinx’), and gives him or her the role of effectively composing an original text that seeks to recreate the impact on the target culture that the original work had on the source culture. Among the most distinguished of the English language translators of the Brazilian concretistas was the Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan. Morgan’s active engagement with the experimental poetry of the de Campos brothers, among others, arguably influenced his own poetry. Ting Huang’s chapter on Morgan’s translation of Haroldo de Campos’ Servidão de Passagem as ‘Transient Servitude’, which was informed by an extended correspondence between de Campos and Morgan, gives a valuable insight into the source poem, a key text in the ‘second phase’ of concrete poetry, and how it was ‘transcreated’ into English. Turning to another pioneer of concrete poetry, Raquel Abi-Sâmara contributes a chapter on the poetics of Eugen Gomringer’s ‘constellations.’ While Gomringer and the Brazilian Noigandres poets collaborated, and agreed together on the ‘concrete’ label for the new form, Gomringer’s view of the ‘constellation’ differed from the de Campos brothers’ view of the ideogram. As Abi-Sâmara shows, Gomringer was much more influenced by visual aesthetics than by Poundian imagism, and he sought in his ‘constellations’ to achieve a universal language that would render translation unnecessary. Indeed, some concrete poems, like Gomringer’s ‘ping pong’ (1953), which consists of an arrangement of these two onomatopoeic words in such a way as visually to suggest a table-tennis match with two players, seem to require no translation, at least into languages that use the Roman alphabet. But other concrete poems do seem to find themselves in translation. When, for example, Virna Teixeira came to produce a Brazilian version of Edwin Morgan’s sound poem, ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, the Scottish poet encouraged her to change the phonetic structure. In an early version, she kept Morgan’s lines as they were simply providing a literal gloss of the title in Portuguese, as A Canção Do Monstro Do Lago Ness. However, in a later published version, she Brazilianised the song. Thus, while Morgan’s monster disappears under the surface to the sound of ‘blm plm/blm plm/blm plm/blp,’ Teixeira’s monster descends to ‘blu plb/blu plb/ blu plb/blb.’5 Even a universal language, it seems, can have local dialects. By this point in the volume, it should be clear that the conjunction of concrete poetry and translation results in an array of different possible strategies for rendering into different languages enigmatic literary texts that foreground their formal ingenuity and materiality. This expansion of the frontiers of translation remains a consistent motif through different phases of the concrete poetry project, right up to the present day. Simone

Introduction  7 Homem de Mello’s chapter is a valuable discussion of Augusto de Campos’ more recent poetry, which extends the early poetics of the concrete movement into an allusive ‘verbivocovisual’ mode that effectively inhabits the translational spaces between different media. Like the poet of the ancient Greek ‘Syrinx,’ Augusto de Campos in a series of later poems demands the reader juggle a wealth of allusive references. He calls these poems intraduções (‘intraductions’), which, alongside his brother, Haroldo’s ‘transcreations’ represent a distinctive mode of literary translation that continues to trace their origin to the aesthetics of concretismo. The encounter with the enigmatic and ‘untranslatable’ concrete poem in one language and the challenge of reconstituting it in another have contributed to literary innovation across languages and cultures. The processes of writing and translation are themselves enmeshed in a web of other activities, including magazine and book editing and publishing, exhibiting in public spaces such as galleries and parks, and, increasingly, transmission via websites. What concrete poetry and its translation represent for its practitioners and readers is continually renegotiated in and through such activities. One of the most important of these activities, in the days before digital communications, was physical correspondence. Odile Cisneros’ chapter testifies to the importance of correspondence and personal contacts to the transmission of concrete poetry in Central and North America. She notes that, as with the case of China, concrete poetry has tended to exist on the margins of the literary tradition in the United States, despite the importance of international anthologies published there in the 1960s and 1970s. American concrete poets were influenced by contacts with like minds in Central and South America, with the de Campos brothers again emerging as influential figures, directly and indirectly. The relationship between concrete poetry and architecture in Mexico parallels that found in other countries, while the relative longevity of concrete poetry in Canada has been supported by a particular infrastructure of government-funded support for the literary and visual arts there. John Corbett takes the specific case of the Scottish poet and translator, Edwin Morgan, and considers how his correspondence with other agents in the concrete poetry movement positions him in an international network of concrete poets, translators, scholars, gallery curators, editors, publishers and interested readers. By drawing in part on the methods of social network analysis, Corbett seeks to show how the meaning and ethos of concrete poetry and associated practices, such as ‘transcreation,’ were negotiated by central and peripheral players in Morgan’s global correspondence network. Finally, Chris McCabe looks at the recent translations that have occurred as concrete poetry has been reassessed and integrated into the digital poetics of the 21st century. Revisiting the ‘translation’ of an architectural ethos into the poetics of the original Noigandres poets, ­McCabe traces this vital line into the poetry that is made possible by digital media. As the chapters amply demonstrate, a poetry that foregrounds its

8  John Corbett materiality will be affected by the arrival of new media, and the affordances of computer screens, algorithmic manipulation, and digital projection have led to a reappraisal of concrete poetry and a reinvigoration of concrete practices, even as the concrete has become largely ‘virtual.’ The present volume cannot, of course, hope to be comprehensive in its coverage. There are obvious lacunae: individual, generic and geographical. Given the emphasis on the de Campos brothers, more space might have been given to their fellow Noigandres poet, Décio Pignatari’s equally innovative translation practices. Visual poetry in the Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets is also overlooked here, not because of any lack of interest or importance in these subjects, but because the space and time required to give them adequate coverage was lacking.6 That said, the chapters in the present volume offer a variety of perspectives and instances of scholarship and practice on three continents, extending from the Americas through Europe to Asia. There is a certain amount of repetition and overlap, as is inevitable when individual authors approach a common topic; however, the result is, we hope, a set of lively, reverberating conversations that the reader is invited to participate in and extend. Active engagement in the production of meaning has always been characteristic of the form, from the earliest conundrums of ‘Syrinx’ (di Fiori Pondian) and the sociable ingenuity of ‘Tea’ (Li Li) to witty digital installations such as the ‘Adam and Eve Sonnet’ (McCabe). As the chapters that follow demonstrate, at its most intense, this engagement takes the form of creative transcreation.

Notes 1 ‘concrete, adj. and n.’ OED Online. March 2019. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com [Accessed 25 April 2019]. 2 Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’t by an Imagiste,’ in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March 31). Reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions, 1954, pp. 4–5. 3 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (eds.). New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 46. 4 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘On Disciplines and Destinations,’ in Diana Sorensen (ed.) Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 7. 5 See Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990, p.  248 and Na Estação Central, selected, introduced and translated by Virna Teixeira, Brasilia: Editora UnB, 2006, pp.  90–91. See also http://­ papelderascunho.com/?m=200709 [Accessed 25 April 2019]. I am grateful to Virna Teixeira for discussing this translation with me. 6 Interested readers are referred to John Milton, ‘Literary translation theory in Brazil,’ Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal 41 no. 2 (1996): pp. 196–207; Nancy Perloff, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017; and Eman Younis ‘Rhetoric in Visual Arabic Poetry: From the Mamluk Period to the Digital Age,’ in Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil 11 no. 1, (Jan/Jun, 2015), pp. 118–145.

1 Concrete Poetry, Playfulness and Translation Susan Bassnett

Introducing Playfulness The opening sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella engaged the 16th-century reader immediately with something new, different and entertaining. For a start, the sonnet is composed in alexandrines, rather than in the expected iambic pentameter, and the last three lines offer an absurd image of a pregnant male poet struggling with his own inability to write: Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool’, said my Muse to me, ‘Take up thy pen and write.’ The reader is invited to smile at this admission of helpless foolishness. The Muse chastises the poet, and were that Muse a contemporary of ours, she would be saying, simply, ‘Just get on with it.’ However serious the love Sidney felt for his Stella might be, and the ensuing sonnets build on that emotion, this opening poem sets a more joking tone and uses an unfamiliar form. This was, in its day, a very avant-gardist piece of writing. Centuries later, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh used a comic parallel with his own local community to write about the Trojan War. In his sonnet, ‘Epic’ he draws ironic parallels between the Trojan War and local rivalry. The opening lines set the scene: I have lived in important places, times When great events were decided, who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims. The local Duffys confront old McCabe, ‘stripped to the waist,’ and Kavanagh then widens the gyre noting ‘That was the year of the Munich bother,’ the year, of course, when the seeds of the Second World War were sown. The poet asks himself which was more important, the local

10  Susan Bassnett conflict or what politicians were failing to resolve in Munich, and then concludes with these lines: Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance.1 In both these poems the reader is confronted with the unexpected: Sidney mocks himself, and in so doing pokes fun at love poetry in general, while Kavanagh weaves the narrative of the Trojan War, the Second World War and a local struggle between Irish peasants together to show both the absurdity and the tragedy of conflicts over land, comparing the greatest poem in the Western canon to a fight between local Irish families. In both these examples the reader is engaged through the absurdity of the situation depicted by the poet, and the final lines leave that reader with a great deal to think about. The key to both these poems is the shock created by breaking conventional expectations, and doing so in a way that combines shock with the ludic. There has been a vast amount written about poetry and about the difficulties of translating poetry, but not a great deal about poetry and humour. What there is tends to focus on satire and irony, rather than on playfulness, unless the poet in question is writing for children. Indeed, playfulness in poetry tends to be associated with writing for children where the use of rhyme is often combined with the unexpected. Shel Silverstein’s four-line poem ‘The Slithagadee’ is just such an example: in the final line of the poem the I-speaker is cut off mid-sentence as he boasts that the creature will never catch him: ‘You may catch all the others but you wo….’ The break in the word signifies that the boasting has all been in vain: the speaker is the creature’s latest victim.

The Tale and the Tail The late Anthea Bell, who translated the Asterix books, where linguistic playfulness is essential, once told me that she was trained in lexical games by her father, Adrian Bell, the compiler of the first Times crossword. Play is crucial to crossword solving, and wordplay is a strong element in the Asterix books, which reach a reading public that spans generations. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland similarly reaches a vast global public, and the Index Translationum lists Carroll’s work as the 13th most translated text of all time. Carroll’s writing is full of jokes, puns, word games, and parodies, and one of the best-known is ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ which is set out in the shape of a mouse’s tail, a play on the words ‘tale and tail.’ Carroll writes that while the mouse was speaking, Alice’s ‘idea of the tale was something like this,’ and there follows the visual image with a story being told about a nonsensical trial. As the tail twists down the page the letters become gradually smaller until at

Concrete Poetry, Playfulness & Translation  11 the very tip of the tail the poem consists of just single words. This visual representation of a tale being told as a tail can be described as an early example of a concrete poem. One of the most generally accepted definitions of concrete poetry is that the visual element of the poem is a vital structural feature. The current Wikipedia entry on concrete poetry declares it to be ‘an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than the verbal significance.’ This facile definition can most certainly be challenged: although the visual element may be given greater prominence than in other more traditional poetic forms, the typographical is not ‘more important’ in conveying meaning, it is one element in the construction of meaning, which will also depend on the agency of the reader. Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that ‘the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern,’ by which he meant the ‘unperceived intricate systematizations of [one’s] own language,’2 and in poetry, as Charles Davy (1965) points out, patterns become more complex as they are articulated, involving sounds of words and their symbolic meanings. With concrete poetry there may be visual patterns, verbal patterns and sound patterns, and these can interact in ways that become realisable during the reading process. There is also a strong element of playfulness, and here the role of the reader is crucial.

Challenging Expectations: Filippo Marinetti The shock effect of poetry by Apollinaire or Marinetti, for example, depended on challenging expectations and engaging readers in different ways. In his Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti declared that his new poetry would sing of danger, excitement, revolt against what he claimed was an antiquated museum culture. This was the age of the machine, he proclaimed, the age of the beauty of speed, the age of the ‘great-breasted locomotives,’3 of aeroplanes tearing across the skies, where the new sounds will be the roar of engines and the chatter of machine-gun fire. War, declared Marinetti, should be glorified as the only cure for a stagnant world. In his poetry for this new vision of the world, Marinetti experimented with sounds, and he also experimented with typefaces, using different colours and different fonts, sometimes including letters cut out from newspapers or his own sketches. One of his best-known poems, Après la Marne, Joffre Visite le Front en Auto (‘After the Marne, Joffre visits the front by car’) (1915), uses a whole range of such techniques to create a poem that is as much a visual artefact as it is a piece of writing. The inspiration for the poem was the visit of General Joffre after the Battle of the Marne when his French troops held back the German forces. A sentence in French in the lower centre of the poem says that this is ‘Verbalisation dynamique de la route’ (Dynamic verbalisation of the route). In the top left is the word ‘FRANCE,’ in the bottom left ‘PRUSSIENS.’ Marjorie Perloff sees this poem as ‘maybe the first instance of visual

12  Susan Bassnett notation in poetry,’ combining letters, words, numbers, crosses (which might indicate graves or plus signs) and serpentines to convey that dynamic verbalisation. She adds: He also uses typography as an expressive marking, so that changes in letter size indicate an increase or decrease in volume, onomatopoeic repetitions of letters and words dramatise wartime sounds and heavily or lightly inked letters indicate verbal emphasis.4 Scattered across the page are words representing sounds which suggest the battlefield – a ‘toumb a toumb; tatatatata; traac craaac; tap tap tap’ – while the phrases ‘Mon ami’ and ‘Ma petite’ are drawn out as ‘Mon Amiiiii’ and ‘MaAa AAapetite,’ possibly reproducing the way in which General Joffre’s words floated across in the wind.5 Perloff also points out that there is a performative element in much of Marinetti’s writing, and there is a short piece on YouTube of Luciano Chessa (17 Feb.  2015) performing another of Marinetti’s war poems about conditions on the Alpine battlefields, ‘Carso=A Rat’s Nest: A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love’ (c.1917). Here too the sounds of war (‘tuum tuum’) and the ‘popopopop’ of a motorcycle are combined with drawings of rats and cockroaches, a sketch of the captain smoking a long pipe on the left side, drawings of the mess hut and the latrine and even a rat on a high wire labelled ‘topo equilibrista’ (balancing rat). Marinetti’s concrete war poem combines sound and image, and sentences in French or Italian with nonsense, jokes and occasional obscenities in such a way as to create an impression of the chaos in which he was living. Hearing this poem read aloud gives added insight into what Marinetti was trying to do through a combination of words, sounds and images.

Is Concrete Poetry Trans-national? In an essay on concrete poetry and translation, Kirsten Malmkjaer (1987) refers to the German T. Kopfermann, who suggests that concrete poetry can be seen as international, given that the language elements are not necessarily tied to the author’s mother tongue. This is certainly the case with Marinetti, and also with Apollinaire, a man of Polish descent, born in Italy, who grew up speaking Italian, Polish and French and who was able to switch languages with ease. Kopfermann suggests that the ‘concrete’ in concrete poetry consists in the linguistic items used, and these are purportedly used in such a way to eliminate from them any ­semantics – they are language as material, purely and simply. This leads on to his assumption that, at least between Indo-European languages, it is not necessary to translate concrete poetry, something that Malmkjaer challenges. Questioning Kopfermann’s notion of internationalism, Malmkjaer notes that most anthologies of concrete poetry do include at the very least glossaries

Concrete Poetry, Playfulness & Translation  13 and in the case of the two Marinetti poems cited above both contain linguistic elements that require some form of translation if the reading experience of target language readers is to be enhanced. She concludes that concrete poetry is ‘neither more nor less translatable than any other type of poetry,’6 pointing out that any translation will reflect the set of priorities established by the translator. However, ‘The Mouse’s Tale/Tail’ not only depends on word play, but also relies on Western typography for it to be effective. Translating it into a character-­based language, for example, would present problems. Similarly, translation into a non-Western alphabet would present problems with the famous ‘apple’ poem by Reinhard Doehl (1965). This text consists of multiple repetitions of the German word ‘Apfel’ (apple) set out in the shape of an apple. In creating the shape, parts of the word have to be cut around the edges, leaving 55 full spellings of the word ‘Apfel.’ A reader’s first reaction to this poem is to see the word repeated within a shape of the actual object and to admire the playfulness of creating a piece about an apple from its lexical definition. So dominant is the word ‘Apfel’ that a reader has to look very closely to see the elusive intruder, the word ‘Wurm’ (worm) inserted in the lower right-hand side of the apple image. I have often been surprised by how long it takes some students to find that ‘Wurm’ when given the text in class. The question is, however, whether this poem would work in a non-related language. The ­German ‘Apfel’ and ‘Wurm’ map perfectly onto English ‘apple’ and ‘worm,’ with the pattern of a two-syllable word and a monosyllable intruder, but if we think of a Spanish translation we would have polysyllabic words ‘manzana’ and ‘gusano,’ and in Welsh we would have ‘afal’ but with a much more obvious worm, ‘mwydyn.’

Strategies for Translating Poetry In 1929 an essay by Ezra Pound entitled ‘How to Read’ first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. In this essay, Pound sets out his theory of poetic translation. He urges us to ‘chuck out the classifications which apply to the outer shape of the work,’7 that is, the identifiable formal aspects, and to look at what is actually going on in a poem. He then goes on to identify what he calls ‘three kinds of poetry’ – I would prefer to term these as three ‘aspects’ of poetry. The first is melopoeia, which refers to the musical properties of words and which adds a dimension ‘over and above their plain meaning.’ This can be appreciated by a foreign reader ‘with a sensitive ear’ but is practically impossible to translate, ‘save perhaps by divine accident or for half a line at a time.’8 His second aspect is phanopoeia, ‘the casting of images upon the visual imagination.’9 This, he claims, can be translated ‘almost, or wholly intact,’10 adding that it is almost impossible for a translator to destroy, unless the translator is incompetent or ignorant.

14  Susan Bassnett But the third aspect, logopoeia ‘does not translate.’ For this is the use of words beyond their direct meaning, and which ‘holds the aesthetic content of which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation.’11 Under this we might include word play, double meanings, puns, culturally specific words, and allusions which can only be translated, as Pound puts it, when a translator, having ‘determined the original author’s state of mind,’ may or may not be able to find ‘a derivative or an equivalent.’12 Pound was a founder of the Imagist movement, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he should appear to be arguing that the casting of images on the visual imagination is the easiest aspect of poetry to translate. The translation of multidimensional words used by a poet in specific ways beyond what he calls their direct meaning is pretty well impossible, as is the reproduction of meaningful musical properties that are language-­ specific, though Marinetti’s phonetic sounds of war and machines appear to be transcultural. Pound, of course, was not taking concrete poetry into account when he endeavoured to articulate his theory, but his advice to translators to ‘chuck out the classifications’ and look at what is going on in a poem would surely be applicable to any form of poetry. One of the founding fathers of Translation Studies, the poet and translator James Holmes also endeavoured to set out his ideas about poetry and translation. In ‘Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form’ (1988) Holmes defined four translation strategies: what he called mimetic form, that is, retaining the form of the original; analogical translation, that is finding a form in the target language that would have a similar function to that of the source language (e.g. the alexandrine instead of iambic pentameter); content-derivative translation where the translator takes the semantic material as a starting point; ‘deviant or extraneous form’ where a completely new form is used by the translator, perhaps because the source language form does not exist or as a deliberate attempt at innovation.13 What Holmes, like Pound, was trying to do was to urge translators to look at both the form and content of a poem and to establish a set of priorities, recognising that no poem can ever be translated in such a way as to be identical to the original, since transformation is an inevitable part of all translation. What both Pound and Holmes were saying is that the translation of any poem involves several stages: the translator first has to read the poem, then to decide on which elements to try and foreground and then to restructure the poem in such a way as to reach a new readership in another time and place. Both acknowledge that the final product is going to be very different from the starting point. The task of any translator of any poem is to decode and then re-encode that poem in another language, which always involves reconfiguration.

Alphabet Poetry and Literation In 1978 Peter Mayer edited a collection of poems that includes ancient texts, sacred texts, poems by Pope, Coleridge and Burns, and work by

Concrete Poetry, Playfulness & Translation  15 concrete poets such as Kurt Schwitters, Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin. The volume is entitled Alphabetical and Letter Poems. A Chrestomathy. Edwin Morgan, the great Scottish poet and translator, wrote the Foreword, explaining the significance of an anthology of poetry about alphabets, which opens with this extraordinary sentence: Alphabets, like musical scales, or fingers and toes, or stars and constellations, or stone circles, or abacuses, or sea waves, or comets and eclipses, or genealogies, or bird and fish migrations, owe their interest and appeal to a combination of regularity and chance.14 Regularity and chance: here Morgan is making an important point. The playfulness of the unexpected in poetry comes precisely from that ­combination – the expectation of regularity and the sudden chance interruption of that expectation. Morgan draws attention to the long tradition of alphabet poems in languages around the world, then turns to highlight the different weight which different cultures give to certain letters of the alphabet: ‘in a Hungarian dictionary the letter K is as fat in entries as in English it is thin’ (Morgan, 1978, p. 8), noting that each language carries its own feelings about certain letters, a point which anyone who does crossword puzzles in more than one language can see straight away. As a translator from several languages, Morgan knew only too well how different languages are from one another and the extent to which linguistic diversity is linked to cultural difference. He also makes two other important points: he draws attention to the way in which so many of the alphabet poems play games with the reader, noting that the very idea of playfulness is multi-layered and resists definition: Play effects readily arise when attention is drawn to rearrangeable components, especially if sound and sight are both involved. Qualities will appear, too, which may be hard to describe merely in terms of ‘comedy’ or ‘seriousness’, perhaps reminding us of the ambiguous nature of speech and language-instruments equally of communication and secrecy.15 He also draws attention to the lineage of concrete poetry, pointing out that ‘new men of letters from Schwitters and the futurists to Cobbing and the concretists have emerged to remind us of the literation basis of language and language culture.’16 Morgan himself experimented with that literation basis, creating such well-known sound poems as ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song,’ ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card,’ ‘Nine one-word poems’ and the ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake,’ which consists of the letters ‘s’ and ‘z’ arranged in a sequence: s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz Zs Zs zs zs zs z. 

16  Susan Bassnett Here there is a play on the words ‘Hungarian’ and ‘hungry,’ also a play on the frequency of the ‘sz’ combination in the Hungarian language, together with the use of the sibilant ‘s’ to suggest a snake’s hiss and ‘z’ to suggest sleeping. The use of capital letters can be taken to hint at the snake digesting something large before falling asleep.

Bob Cobbing One sequence of poems included in Mayer’s anthology is Bob Cobbing’s ‘ABC in Sound,’ a tour de force consisting of 26 sections, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Some sections are made up of different recognisable languages (English, French, German, Latin, Japanese), others are made up of sound clusters, while others such as the ‘O’ section consist solely of letters. The section for ‘M’ consists of a list of Scottish surnames starting with McAllister, ending with McTaggart, while the ‘S’ section is laid out on the page as a gradually expanding image, with the first line consisting of just one word ‘Sign’ and the last line being ‘Systematicwholeofspeechsounds.’ The ‘Q’ section plays with the sound of the letter: Q Kew Queue Cue Q Coo! Listening to a recording of Cobbing’s work, made in 2014 by the Argentinian performers, Gastón Mazières and Martin Virgili, who comprise the Ensamble Orquesta Negra, what I found interesting were the sections omitted, which include ‘Q.’ This is perhaps not surprising, since although most of the poem can be read transnationally, the Q section is very definitely aimed at English readers. ‘Kew’ refers to Kew Gardens in London, a ‘queue’ is a line of waiting people, a ‘cue’ is used in billiards and ‘Coo,’ here with an exclamation mark refers not only to the sound made by a pigeon but to a now outdated English slang expression of surprise. If we return to the questions posed by Kirsten Malmkjaer about translation and concrete poetry, what we appear to have in Cobbing’s ‘ABC of Sound’ are some sections that transcend linguistic frontiers and some which appear to be firmly located in one cultural and linguistic context. What this means is that some sections, such as ‘Q,’ might require glosses for a non-English reader though others, as demonstrated by the Argentinian performance, would not.

Concrete Poetry, Playfulness & Translation  17

Creating a Concrete Poem through Translation The joking effect of Reinhard Doehls’ poem depends on the presence of the ‘Wurm,’ but there is another worm in a poem by the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos, his translation of William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ (1794). This tiny but deeply disturbing poem consists of two short, four-line verses: Oh rose, thou are sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. Critics have extensively debated the meaning of the poem, but one underlying message is clear: the worm, whatever it is, is killing the rose, and the final word ‘destroy’ is unequivocal. De Campos translated the poem into Portuguese in 1978 creating what he called an iconographic version, that is, turning Blake’s rhyming stanzas into a concrete poem, through a visual representation. De Campos’ version consists of a circle of words that spiral inwards from the opening ‘O’ Rosa, estas doente! Um verme pela treva Voa invisivelmente…’ until the words almost vanish in the tiny centre of the image (see also Homem de Mello, this volume). Commenting on the translation, Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira points out that Augusto de Campos, as a translator, transforms the text, breaking with the untouchability of the original – his translation does not represent, but re-presents the original. Still, further, de Campos does not silence Blake’s voice, he does not translate Blake into Portuguese only, but also into Portuguese literature, into his own concrete poetry.17 Vieira’s argument is that de Campos has created a new poem in a new context, one that is not so much a translation as a new piece of Brazilian literature created in the spirit of the anthropophagic function of discourse which both the de Campos Brothers, Haroldo and Augusto, were promoting (e.g. Haroldo de Campos and María Tai Wolff, 1968). She refers to Haroldo’s coining of the term ‘transtextualization’ (cf. the chapters by Clüver, Jackson and Huang in the present volume) whereby a translation becomes an autonomous creation, albeit retaining its debt to an original, and argues that what Augusto de Campos does in this translation is to ‘herald a new axiomatics of translation in that there is a shift-away from sacred textuality towards textualised otherness.’18 She also recounts how 14 years after the publication of that translation, on the occasion of Blake’s 227th birthday, two Brazilian artists built a

18  Susan Bassnett spiral model of the Portuguese concrete version of the ‘sick rose’ poem out of plastic tubes of human size that people could walk through – ‘a translation resituated to be seen, felt, and lived.’19

The Road North – A New Kind of Poetry? On 16th May, 2010, two Scottish poets, Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay, set off from Edinburgh on a journey through Scotland that they would later publish as a blog, a collaborative audio and visual word-map. They chose that date because their guide on that journey was the 17th-century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, author of Narrow Road to the Deep North, who set off on his own journey round Edo, Japan, on that same day in 1689. Cockburn and Finlay created an interactive map of Scotland which readers can access by clicking on the highlighted sites which they call ‘stations.’ For each station there is a kind of diary, with photographs, maps, texts in English and occasionally in Gaelic, various sounds – wind, sea, animals – and poems, some concrete, some in more familiar forms. Some poems are written in sand, some are shaped like circles or wave-like bands, and throughout there are references back to Basho’s journey, so the Scottish poets’ journey is interwoven with that of the Japanese poet. In an essay in The Author (2014), Cockburn explains the rationale for the project and how they carried it out. They planned originally to publish poems at each station via QR codes that could be read by mobile phones, whereby scanning a code would mean that a poem about a landscape could be heard in situ, but they gave up on that idea and opted instead for labels: We wrote our verses on parcel tags from the post office, pinned on fenceposts or tied to trees along the way, and photographed with our mobiles…For us, ‘the thing with the labels’, which eventually we came to call simply ‘poeming’, became our practice-what we did when we stopped somewhere we felt a connection to. 20 The Road North exists in various forms – it can be accessed via the internet, with or without sound, there is a print version of some of the poems, in short, there is a range of alternatives offered to the reader who can choose which way to access the material. This kind of text resists categorisation, though I suspect that, had Marinetti had the option of using electronic media, he too would have used the internet as a means of reaching an audience.

Conclusions Can we apply the same strategies for translation which Pound and Holmes suggest are applicable to poetry in general, or does concrete poetry resist translation? This is the question that underpins this essay.

Concrete Poetry, Playfulness & Translation  19 Malmkjaer is of the view that translating concrete poetry involves the same choices as translating any other poem, and she rejects the idea that concrete poetry is somehow more ‘international’ than other forms of poetry. I find myself in agreement with her. If a concrete poem relies on sound effects, then Pound’s admonition about the problems posed by melopoeia is applicable, though where such sound effects are transnational as in Marinetti’s ‘Carso’ poem there is no need for translation. In some concrete poems, it is the sound effects that dominate, in others the visual element may be most significant, in some there may be a mixing of different languages, in others there may be an interweaving of the visual and the sounds – but whatever the techniques used, the objective is to startle the reader and to invite that reader to think beyond more traditional boundaries and categories. The playful dimension is also crucial, and here the whole vast area of culture-bound humour also needs to be taken into consideration. What might be more applicable to the translation of concrete poetry therefore is a more functionalist approach, asking what the original is doing and then seeking an equivalent effect. In the case of ‘The Slithagadee’ the whole point of the poem is that the I-speaker is eaten by an imaginary monster before he can complete his sentence and that is the effect that a translator would have to think about recreating. In the case of Augusto de Campos’ translation of William Blake, here we have a deliberate attempt to deconstruct a ‘classic’ English poem and to reinsert it into a different literary system in a completely new way. De Campos’ translation can be seen as an example of what Octavio Paz defines as the proper task of the translator – freeing the verbal signs of a poem into circulation, then returning them to language. Pound adds: The idea of poetic translation, as Valery once superbly defined it, consists of producing analogous effects with different implements.21 In the case of concrete poetry, reproducing analogous effects may well involve very different implements than those chosen by the original writer, but that, surely, is the challenge of the game.

Notes 1 Kavanagh, 1972, p. 233. 2 Whorf, 1956, p. 252. 3 Marinetti, 1909, np. 4 Perloff, 2009, pp. 107–108. 5 ‘Animated visual poem by Italian Futurist poet F. T. Marinetti (World War  I)’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYrdMqrHi5k [Accessed 02 April 2019]. 6 Malmkjaer, 1987, p. 41. 7 Pound, 1968, p. 25.

20  Susan Bassnett 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Holmes, 1998, p. 27. 14 Morgan, in Mayer, ed. 1978, p. 7. 15 Morgan, in Mayer, ed. 1978, p. 8. 16 Ibid. 17 Vieira, 1998, pp. 184–185. 18 Vieira, 1998, p. 189. 19 Ibid. 20 Cockburn, 2014, p. 20. 21 Cited in Paz, 1992, p. 160.

References Campos, Haroldo de, and María Tai Wolff. “The Rule of Anthropophagy: ­Europe under the Sign of Devoration.” Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (Jan.–Jun., 1986), pp. 42–60. Cockburn, Ken. “Following Basho around Scotland.” The Author (Spring, 2014), pp. 19–20. See also www.the-road-north.blogspot.com. Davy, Charles. Words in the Mind. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965. Holmes, James. “Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Forms.” In Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation. ­Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1988, pp. 23–34. Kavanagh, Patrick. The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, Peter Kavanagh (ed.). Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1972. Malmkjaer, Kirsten. “Translating Concrete Poetry.” Ilha do Desterro no.  17 (1987), pp. 33–46. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Futurist Manifesto.” Le Figaro Paris ­(February 20th 1909). Mayer, Peter. Alphabetical and Letter Poems. A Chrestomathy. London: The Menard Press, 1978. Paz, Octavio. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” Trans. Irene del Corral. In Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds.) Theories of Translation. An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 152–161. Perloff, Marjorie. “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-garde: A Musicologist’s Perspective.” In Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (eds.) The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 97–117. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays. New York: New Directions, 1968, pp. 15–40. Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires. “New Registers for Translation in Latin America.” In Peter Bush and Kirsten Mjalmkjaer (eds.) Rimbaud’s Rainbow. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998, pp. 171–196. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language Thought and Reality. Boston: MIT Press, 1956.

2 The Origins of the Untranslatable The Earliest Western Visual Poetry Juliana Di Fiori Pondian Between Alexander the Great’s expansion of the Greek empire, and its dismantling by the Romans, between about 323 and 146 bce, there was a period of intense invention in Western art, stimulated by contact between Eastern and Western cultures. Among the poets who appeared in this period is a group whose critical reception has always been mixed, but whose work has nevertheless always been read: the Alexandrian poets. They were the first in the Western world to experiment with the possibilities of poetic composition, deploying graphic and aural resources in a new and very different way from that of the heroic era, and their surviving oeuvre consists in all sorts of poetic games, such as anagrams, acrostics and palindromes. Characterised by virtuosity and erudition, these poets combined the rare, the obscure, the eccentric, the enigmatic and the whimsical, which relates their work directly to the formally ‘difficult’ poetry described by Ezra Pound in his anthology, Confucius to Cummings (1964). The present chapter argues that the origins of Western poetry in the ‘untranslatable,’ ‘ideogrammic,’ ‘concrete’ tradition lie in the Alexandrian poets’ collection of technopaegnia, or ‘games of skill,’ the first extant examples of visual poetry in the West. This collection of six poems is attributed to four different poets who flourished in the 2nd and 3rd centuries bce: Πέλεκυς (‘Axe’), Πτέρυγες Ερώτος (‘Wings of Eros’) and Ωιόν (‘Egg’) are attributed to Simmias of Rhodes, considered the inventor of the genre; Συρίγξ (‘Syrinx’ or ‘Pan Pipes’) is attributed to Theocritus; and two poems on the same theme, βωμός (‘Altar’), known as ‘Doric’ and ‘Ionian,’ are attributed, respectively, to Dosiadas, and to Julius Vestinus (or, according to some, to Besantinus). These are all, up to a point, what we might call ‘pattern poems’ or, with Apollinaire, ‘calligrams,’ that is, poems whose outlines, produced by the arrangement of the lines, visually reproduce their subject. In short, Πέλεκυς is in the shape of an axe, and the βωμός poems are in the shape of an altar. Therefore, the technopaegnia have frequently found their way into anthologies of visual poetry, although some, like Apollinaire and the later concrete poets, either deny their status as precedents or ignore them completely. The purpose of this chapter, then, is, by considering one

22  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian example in detail, to reappraise these poems and to identify in them traces of characteristics that allow us, in some respects, to acknowledge them as a framework for a genre of poetry that (i) exploits all the sonorous and graphic potential of verbal matter, testing its limits, and (ii) doggedly pursues the ‘synthetic-ideological’ rather than ‘analytic-­ discursive’ construction of poetic matter, long before Apollinaire’s formulation.1 In this genre, language itself is taken to be the matter of the poem, not only because its physical traces are re-signified to compose a pictorial icon, but because games are forever being played with language itself, via homonyms, synonyms and homophones, in sophisticated verbal constructs in which the word is objectified and made concrete. In this respect the Alexandrian collection can be compared to the work of Lycophron of Chalcis; the first Brazilian translator of the Alexandrian’s work, Trajano, has pointed to its Baroque elements, noted Mallarmé’s interest in it and argued for it to be rightfully regarded as a precursor to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 2 The lineage from Joyce to the Baroque poets, to which Trajano refers, is a familiar narrative in the poetics of Brazilian concretismo. The poems of the technopaegnia add to the tortuous word-games and obscurities of Lycophron’s style a visual element, which prefigures the calligrams of Apollinaire and the ideogrammic method proposed, later, by Pound and Fenollosa. If Pound posed the question, ‘How does Chinese define ‘red’ without using ‘red’?’ and answers it with pictographs of rose, rust, cherry and flamingo, then, as we shall see, much earlier, ‘Syrinx’ posed the question, ‘How does one refer to something without ever mentioning it?’ Thus, in certain respects, the technopaegnia can be considered antecedents of early and later modernist traditions. For the reader – and the translator – their word-games invite a series of clues and obstacles that reside in the way in which they approach lexical semantics and reference. The poems combine the following elements: (i) pre-calligramic visuality; (ii) sonority, highlighting innovations in the rigid metrical system of Greek verse; and (iii) a synthetic-ideographic mode of composition that relies on enigmas and riddles, in which each proposition embodies a hidden narrative, encrypted in a single word or expression that is often a compound neologism. The name ‘Syrinx’ itself has two referents: the chaste nymph who was pursued by the goatish Pan, and the set of pipes that he played. It is no wonder that Ernst Robert Curtius described these poems as ‘torture for the translators!’3 By adapting the Poundian method of criticism through comparison and translation, this chapter presents a detailed analysis of one of the poems of the technopaegnia, ‘Syrinx’ or the ‘Pan Pipes,’ which is attributed to Theocritus, and which is considered a masterpiece of the genre. Through a detailed comparison of the original with a selection of its translations, we aim to make a case for ‘Syrinx’ as a continuing point of reference for experimental poetics.

The Origins of the Untranslatable  23

‘Syrinx’ ‘Syrinx’ (Figure 2.1) has been called ‘the most obscure poem in Greek literature’4 as well as being described as an uglier monster than Polyphemus and, most damning perhaps, a tedious piece of work. However, it is possible to read ‘Syrinx’ as a virtuoso composition, erudite and sometimes lyrical, demonstrating a mastery of varied poetic techniques on several levels. In its theme and its compositional structure

Figure 2.1  Detail of ‘Syrinx’ Supplément grec 0384, 028–29v*, by courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 5

24  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian it bears an immediate resemblance to religious verse such as Homer’s Hymn No.19: with each verse, the poet depicts a character, in this case, the divine goatherd, Pan. Pan’s genealogy, his physical characteristics and some of his stories, especially his involvements with nymphs, are described or alluded to. However, ‘Syrinx’ differs from Greek hymns proper in that the object of veneration is not named once. There are only clues and puzzles that, once solved, are associated with this divine character. A major clue, obviously, is the visual presentation of the poem, which is in the form of ‘Pan pipes,’ the triangular flute that has become synonymous with the god. The poem is organised into ten couplets, each couplet regularly decreasing in length, foot by foot, from hexameter to dipole. Each couplet, or pair of couplets, deals riddlingly with someone or something associated with Pan. As well as being organised into couplets the poem falls into two parts: the first half (lines 1–10) dealing with the myths surrounding Pan’s genealogy, and the second half (lines 11–20) consisting of dedications. The puzzles presented to the reader vary in type, from allusions to particularly obscure mythical episodes, to punning ideas based on homonymy, homophony and synonymy. Thus, a multitude of references to Pan are constituted playfully through unlikely cultural and traditional allusions, or linguistic games. The vocabulary of the poem displays the poet’s erudition in its use of neologisms, archaisms, rare words, and unusual compounds and blends. While the poem is commonly attributed to Theocritus, the authorship has been contested. Relatively little is known about Theocritus: he was born in Syracuse and lived in the first half of the 3rd century bce, during a time in which Alexandrian poetry flourished. He is credited with incorporating new themes into Greek poetry, taking as his main subject the countryside and the man in the field. Some of the varied pieces of his work that are preserved show a taste for epigrams and couplets. His interests and style therefore seem consistent with the ‘Syrinx,’ although this is the only pattern poem attributed to him. The Greek original is here compared to four modern vernacular translations: (i) Anthony Holden (English, 1974), (ii) José Paulo Paes (Portuguese, 1995), (iii) Armando Zárate (Spanish, 1978) and (iv) Félix Buffière (French, 1970). The original poem is discussed alongside its translations, with a detailed focus on four couplets that illustrate the challenges presented to the translators.

Translations of ‘Syrinx’ The four translations were selected for their apparent desire to engage with the original in a poetic manner. Three were composed in the 1970s and one, by Paes, in 1995. While Paes is the first to translate ‘Syrinx’ into Portuguese, there are earlier translations into English (Edmonds, 1912; Paton, 1918) and French (Legrand, 1925) as well as

The Origins of the Untranslatable  25 into other languages. Even so, there are few translators who have had the tenacity to persevere with the challenge that this text offers. Of the four translators considered here, Félix Buffière is the only Hellenist by training, an expert in Homer and a professor of Greek at the University of Toulouse, France. He has translated a number of classical works. Anthony Holden is an English writer, biographer, editor and critic. Among the classical works which he has translated – besides ‘Syrinx’ – is Greek pastoral verse and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Armando Zárate, the first translator of ‘Syrinx’ into Spanish, is not primarily a Hellenist but a poet and essayist, a scholar of visual poetry and professor at the University of Vermont (USA). He translated the Greek visual poems in an article, ‘The visual texts of the Alexandrian period’ (1978). Finally, José Paulo Paes was a highly regarded poet, editor, researcher and multilingual translator in Brazil, who translated a selection of Greek literary texts, among them two of the six technopaegnia. In all the cases selected, the translations are accompanied by an essay or explanatory notes that expound on the complex meanings of the original, verse by verse. This chapter, then, presents an overview of the translation strategies used by modern writers to approach an ‘untranslatable’ poem.

The Riddles of ‘Syrinx’ We begin with the title of the poem or, rather, its absence. While the poem has no title in Greek and its authorship is uncertain, the translations all assign it to Theocritus and name it ‘Syrinx,’ with only Zárate domesticating the Greek proper name to its Spanish form, ‘La Siringa.’ As noted, the name can refer either to the nymph pursued by Pan or to his trademark pipes. The opening couplet and its translations are given below: Οὐδενός εὐνάτειρα, Μακροπτολέμοιο δὲ μάτερ, μαίας ἀντιπέτροιο θοὸν τέκεν ἰθυντῆρα, The bedmate of Nobody, mother of The Warmonger, bore the nimble pilot of The Stone-swapped’s nurse; A concubina de ninguém, a mãe do Luta-de-Longe deu à luz o pastor ágil da que foi ama-de-leite do Trocado-por-Pedra, Templa tu sonido, oh mujer de Ninguno, madre de la Largaguerra, que pariste al rápido protector de la nodriza de Antipatro, La propre épouse de Personne et la mère d´Au-loin-combat de la nourrice de Pourpierre enfanta l´agile gardien

26  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian The opening couplet invites the reader to solve the kind of riddling periphrases that will characterise the poem. The ‘bedmate of Nobody’ (οὐδενός εὐνάτειρα) is Ulysses’ wife, Penelope. Ulysses named himself ‘Nobody’ (οὒτις) in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey (IX, 278). Their son, Telemachus (τῆλε + μᾶκος) literally means ‘distant battle,’ and is translated as various compounds, ‘The Warmonger,’ ‘Luta-de longe,’ ‘Largaguerra’ and ‘Au-loin-de-combat.’ Synonyms of the components of Telemachus’ name are then compounded to rechristen him as ‘Macroptolemy,’ μάκρος (= τῆλε) and πτόλεμος (= μᾶκος). The second line expects the reader to work out the identity of ἀντιπέτροι (‘he who was exchanged for a stone’), which, in translation, is ‘The Stone-swapped,’ ‘­Trocado-por-pedra,’ ‘Antipatro’ and ‘Pourpierre.’ This lexical compound refers to an episode, recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony, in which the infant Zeus is replaced by a stone, when his father, Chronos, seeks to devour him. Also associated with Zeus is the μαία, here translated as ‘nurse’ ‘ama-de-leite,’ ‘nodriza,’ ‘nourrice,’ which refers to Amalthea, the goat who gives milk to Zeus as a child (cf The Odyssey, IX, 116–117, 210). The fact that Theocritus’ readers might have identified μαία, ‘Maia,’ as the mother of Hermes, might represent a deliberate red herring.6 Amalthea’s swift-footed goatherd, translated more or less opaquely, as her ‘nimble pilot,’ ‘pastor agil,’ ‘rápido protector’ and ‘agile gardien,’ is, of course, the god Pan. By the tortuous process of allusive association, then, Pan is the guide (that is, the goatherd) of the milk-nurse (the goat, Amalthea) of the Swappedfor-a-stone (Zeus) to whom Penelope, the wife of Nobody (Ulysses) and mother of Struggle-Far (Telemachus), gave birth. Despite her reputation for chastity in Ulysses’ absence, there is an alternative version of her narrative, recorded by Duris of Samos (c. 350 bce – after 281 bce), in which Penelope sleeps with all 108 of her suitors and gives birth to the goat-god as a result. From the outset, then, the poem presents considerable challenges to the translator. The main obstacle is the compounding and reformulating of names that allude to mythological and epic characters. Another is the rare and archaic quality of the Greek vocabulary. These words are likely also to have appeared to be unusual to the original readers: •

• • •

εὐνάτειρα, according to Kwapisz is ‘rare and poetic’7 and extant in the work of three tragedians. The translators opt for normalising strategies in their choice of more widely used terms: ‘bedmate,’ ‘concubina,’ ‘mujer’ and ‘épouse.’ μαίας, ‘an old epic word for ‘nurse, mother,’’8 becomes the more mundane ‘nurse,’ ‘ama-de-leite,’ ‘nodriza’ and ‘nourrice.’ θοὸν, ‘a poetic word’9 is also expressed in the target languages by the more prosaic ‘nimble,’ ‘ágil,’ ‘rápido’ and ‘agile.’ ἰθυντῆρα, ‘found twice in Hellenistic poetry and never before,’10 is translated as ‘pilot,’ ‘pastor,’ ‘protector’ and ‘gardien.’ The translators do not attempt to reproduce the rarity of the Greek word. The

The Origins of the Untranslatable  27 Portuguese ‘pastor’ even gives a clue to the occupation of the divine goatherd that the more generic term in Greek withholds. A characteristic of the sound-patterning of the Greek poem, apart from its regular metre, is its alliteration. Kwapisz suggests that the sound-­patterning in the Greek poem, which is characteristic of other works by Theocritus, is here mimetic in that it evokes the music of the Pan pipes.11 Dupont-Roc and Lallot also suggest that the poem calls to mind ‘le son de la syrinx, souffle de Pan renvoyé par Echo’ (‘the sound of the Pan pipes, Pan’s exhalation returned by Echo’).12 However, apart from some isolated alliteration between certain phrases (e.g. ‘Luta-de-Longe  … luz’; ‘propre épouse de Personne’) none of the translators attempts to recreate the metrical, rhythmical or alliterative patterning of the original, choosing instead to reconstitute the semantic content and preserve the triangular shape of the poem. There is another feature of the sound-patterning that the translators do not attempt to reproduce, namely the fact that every couplet in the first half of the poem (lines 1–10) begins with the vowel , i.e. οὐ (lines 1, 3 and 5) and ὅς (lines 7 and 9). The repetition is not at all random if we think of these ‘o’s’ as a visual representation of mouthpieces, and so the succeeding couplets can be taken to represent the pipes of the flute. The combination of baroque textual content, complex sound-patterning and striking visual shape makes ‘Syrinx’ clearly a pioneer of ‘verbivocovisual’ aesthetics. And so the poem continues, with each couplet reduced in length by a foot, until the ‘turn’ half-way through the poem. Lines 3–6 offer the reader a further series of riddles that have Pan as the solution. Presumably if the reader has not solved the riddle in the first couplet, he or she may treat these couplets as supplementary clues. More likely, if the shape of the poem and the riddling first couplet have suggested a solution to the reader, he or she may enjoy the playful ingenuity of the successive allusions. To give a further illustration, the final couplet before the ‘turn’ (lines 9–10) is as follows. ὅς σβέσεν ἀνορέαν ἰσαυδέα παπποφόνου Τυρίας τ’ ἐ conquered parricide-like armies, drove them out of Tyre’s girl, o que soube dar fim à homônima arrogância do mata-avô, dela salvando a jovem tíria; que empleó la soberbia, tan luego el nombre del que mató al abuelo y lo expulsó de la Tiria, (…) Brisa d´orgueil d´un nom évoquant le meurtrier de son grand-père et éloigna de la Tyrienne.

28  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian In this couplet, a new strategy is introduced to reveal further characteristics of Pan. The allusion here is to the historical wars between Athens and Persia, and the appearance of Pan that emerged as a portent of Athens’ victory. Rather than mention the Persians directly, another linguistic game is played: the hapax legomenon, Παπποφόνου, refers to ‘grandfather killer’ an allusion to Perseus, who, in numerous stories, was unintentionally responsible for his grandfather’s death.13 The suggested name of ‘Perseus’ (Περσεύς) evokes the homophone ‘Persians’ (Περσεύς) against whom the Greeks were fighting, with Pan’s support. The chain of allusions is tortuous. The sole function of the periphrasis (παπποφόνου, ‘grandfather-­murderer’) is to evoke a homophone (Περσεύς = ‘Perseus’ > ‘Persians’) that refers to an army rebuffed by the Athenians, with Pan’s help. This chain of allusions is maintained in the translations, given that all the target languages have similar forms for Perseus/Persians. Thus, three of the four translators opt for literal translations of ‘grandfather-­murderer’ (e.g. ‘mata-­avô) which, for a reader conversant with the mythology, might evoke Perseus/Persians. Holden chooses a different solution, with ‘parricide-­like’ perhaps having a faint aural echo of ‘Perseus/Persian-like’ but it is so faint as to be barely discernible, at least without an explanatory note. The significance of the main reference in the second line of the couplet must also be deduced by way of a linguistic game. ‘Tyre’ is another name for the mythological figure of Europa, who was born in the Phoenician city. Via ‘Tyre’ and ‘Europa’ (Εύρώπη), the reader is led to the European lands (that is, the Greek territory) from which the Persians were expelled, thanks to Pan. The riddling strategy is similar to that in the previous line: a character is alluded to indirectly, not for his or her relevance to the poem’s content, but because his or her name (which is unmentioned) is homonymous with another entity (an army, a territory) which is relevant. To nudge the reader in the direction of Tyre being a female (Europa) rather than the Phoenician city, the translators personalise the reference: ‘Tyre’s girl,’ ‘a jovem tíria’ (=‘the young Tyria’), ‘la Tiria/la Tyrienne’ (=‘the Tyrian maid’). Again, here, the translations give more of a clue to the riddle’s solution than does the original poet. The first half of the poem, then, is a series of puzzles that reconfigure how the reader approaches a text. To make sense of the riddling content, the reader has to identify characters referred to by periphrasis, transfer from the sense of one homophone to another and situate the references in his or her detailed knowledge of mythology and history. The translators have to find some means of taking their readers on a similar journey, a semantic quest through a labyrinth of riddles to which the answer is always Pan. At the very centre of the poem (line 11) there is a particularly enigmatic reference to the Pan pipes as τόδε τυφλοφόρων ἐρατὸν/πᾶμα, literally, ‘wellloved by the blind-carriers.’ The compound τυφλοφόρων (‘blind-carriers’) needs to be decrypted here. To do so, the readers must realise that the hapax legomenon, a compound neologism composed of τυφλός (‘blind’)

The Origins of the Untranslatable  29 and φόρων (‘to carry, load or wear’), invites them to play another linguistic game. The first element of the compound, τυφλός (‘blind’) must be replaced by a synonym, πήρος (‘disabled, maimed’). The second step is to substitute this synonym (which can be inflected πήρα) by a homophone that means ‘wallet’ or ‘purse.’ By means of these substitutions the reader’s arrival at Πήροφόροι, meaning ‘those who carry the bag’ a paraphrase for rustics or herdsmen who play the Pan pipes. The steps in this series of substitutions, which involve synonyms, homophones and periphrasis, are, again, impossibly difficult for the translators to follow. Holden picks up on the fact that ἐρατὸν πᾶμα can mean either ‘loved possession’ or ‘lovely catastrophe’ and offers ‘blind’s fond blight’ as a translation, which, while being alliterative, hardly leads the readers to the herdsmen and their pipes. Buffière and Zárate propose a more precise translation of the unique neologism as porte-aveugles, ‘carry-the-blind,’ or the more explanatory los conductores ciegos ‘the blind drivers,’ but again there is not even a tenuous association that the reader can make in the target languages between ‘blind drivers,’ ‘purse carriers’ and ‘herdsmen.’ Paes comes the closest to emulating the linguistic game when translating the concept in the Portuguese line, o doce dom dos de cajado mas não cegos (loosely, ‘sweet gift of the cane holders, who aren’t blind’). The translation preserves the sense of ‘blind’ from the source text but substitutes for the wallet or purse something that may be associated both with the blind and with herdsmen (cajado, ‘cane,’ which may be visualised as ‘walking stick’ or alternatively ‘shepherd’s crook’). The substitution therefore performs the task of reworking the riddle in Portuguese, by posing the question, ‘Who carries a cane but is not blind?’ to which the answer is a herdsman, a player of the Pan pipes. The second half of the poem, with the couplets still gradually decreasing in length, turns from description to dedication. Here we consider only the final two couplets of the poem (lines 17–20). ἁδύ μελίσδοις ἔλλοπι κούρᾳ καλλιόπᾳ νηλεύστῳ. play sweet tunes to your mute girl, a Calliope, u n s e e n. que com doçura e de alma alegre possas tocar para a de lindo rosto, a jovem muda, a i n v i s í v e l.

30  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian suave canta con la núbil muda de la bella invisible voz. (…); oui joues-en des airs mélodieux pour la fille muette à la jolie voix et qu´on ne voit pas. Echo, who has appeared in earlier couplets, returns to the poem in these final lines disguised as poetry itself, or vice versa. She is ‘your mute girl/a Calliope’ in Holden’s translation, the Muse who inspires ‘sweet tunes,’ including the song of the Syrinx poet. By this point the reader should be familiarised with the kinds of linguistic games the poet is playing. Καλλιόπη (Calliope) is the Muse of epic poetry. Her name comes from the compound κάλλος (‘beauty’) + ὄψ (‘voice’), that is, ‘the one with the beautiful voice,’ an epithet which is here applied to the ‘mute girl,’ ἔλλοπι κούρᾳ, to produce an oxymoron. The sweet-voiced mute is also νηλεύστῳ ‘invisible.’ The riddle is solved by the nymph Echo, who, despite lacking her own voice, invisibly brings forth a beautiful sound. We can compare Echo with the pipes, which also cannot produce music independently, but require Pan’s breath to produce their unseen sounds. The final lines, then, through association, condense a set of simultaneous references. They comprise a dedication to Echo, to the Muse Calliope and, by extension to the poetic art, to the unseen music of the Pan pipes themselves. Reconstituting all these references in the target languages is again a considerable challenge. Holden retains the proper name of the Muse, Calliope, while Paes changes ‘beautiful voice’ into ‘lindo rosta’ (‘beautiful face’), distancing himself from the original sense. Buffière and Zárate opt for the translation of the periphrasis, ‘à la jolie voix’ and ‘de bella invisible voz.’ These choices have implications for the translation of the indirect oxymoron, ‘sweet voiced mute.’ Paes loses the original contrast in sense by changing ‘voice’ to ‘face’ but establishes a new oxymoron by having the ‘beautiful face’ invisible. By translating the periphrasis, Buffière and Zárate keep the contrast in sense but lose the explicit, punning reference to the Muse. Holden keeps the Muse’s proper name but relies on the reader being able to break the name down into its component parts. The definite article (‘a Calliope’) gives the reader a clue to the way he or she must read the reference, the ‘mute girl’ is a kind of Calliope, and so we are invited to understand that there must be some kind of significance in the name to be deduced.

The Origins of the Untranslatable  31 The last word, νηλεύστῳ, is another hapax logomenon in Greek, a coinage that probably originates with this poem. Denials with the prefix νη are poetic and relatively rare. The novelty of the coinage is, again, not conveyed in any of the translations: ‘unseen,’ ‘invisible’ and ‘qu’on ne voit pas.’ Paes and Holden both compensate with a graphical feature, increasing the space between the letters in this final word, and creating a void to represent what cannot be seen.

Translating the Untranslatable The previous section presented an analysis of selected lines from the poem to illustrate the nature of the linguistic and cultural games being played. In this section we return to and summarise those recurrent challenges posed by the original text – the visual and aural patterning of the poem, and the dense textual riddles – and we consider how the translators have addressed those challenges. The translators all, naturally, reconstitute the triangular form of the original poem that represents Pan’s pipes and provides a visual key to the riddling couplets. Even in this characteristic, however, there is variation, as Holden and Paes compose line lengths that strictly conform to the shape of the pipes, while Buffière and Zárate allow a little more asymmetry while generally maintaining the triangular shape. None of the translators, however, attempts to write lines of metrical regularity. As we have seen, the translators attempt isolated instances of sound-patterning, mainly alliteration (e.g. ‘bore the nimble pilot of The Stone-swapped’s nurse’; ‘La propre épouse de Personne’), but these are not exploited sufficiently for us to assert that explicit sound-patterning is responsible for the mimetic effect of the music of the pipes, as Dupont-Roc and Lallot have claimed for the original.14 Far beyond the challenges of reconstituting the visual and aural matter of the original, however, are the demands of recreating the poetic lexis and cryptic content of the lines. In this respect the most obvious characteristic that none of the translators explores is the frequency in the original of coinages, hapax logomena, rare and archaic words. ‘Syrinx’ includes at least one neologism in each line, that is, each line presents the reader with a word that occurs only and exclusively in that poem. The text is thus made strange, and the sensation of reading it might be analogous to that experienced by the reader of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In the translations, however, the vocabulary of the poem is consistently normalised. This normalisation might be attributed, in part, to the available dictionaries of Greek, which generally present definitions of the lexis of ‘Syrinx’ without reference to its strangeness. Textual strangeness apart, the enigmatic content of the poem follows two main strategies. First, there is an appeal to periphrasis, synonymy and homophony in the construction of riddles whereby names are

32  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian occluded and referents withheld. Then, once the names are decrypted, intertextual association causes their referents to shift from one possibility to another. The identification of the referents of periphrastic riddles (‘Wife of Nobody’ = Penelope, ‘Grandfather’s Murderer’ = Perseus, ‘Sweet-voiced Mute’ = Echo) demands of the translator and reader a knowledge of the Greek literary and cultural repertoire, no matter what target language the texts are translated into. This demand is no doubt partly applicable to all translations, but it is extremely pertinent here. The translator has to lead the reader on a journey of deduction that is analogous to that of a reader of Greek who is well-versed in the cultural allusions and who has the capacity to leap from one possible sense to another. As we have seen, in the final lines, it takes a number of conceptual leaps to go from Calliope to Echo to the Syrinx (i.e. the Pan pipes) as objects of the poem’s final dedication. The aural, visual and textual demands on the translator can be conceptualised as a set of constraints. We can draw upon Bloomfield’s schema to classify the strategies undertaken by the four translations studied here15: 1 translation of meaning only, without regard to constraints; this choice is usually signalled in some critical apparatus (notes, preface, etc.). 2 translation of the meaning and prioritisation of some constraints rather than others (which are left aside); 3 translation that is faithful to the constraints, to the detriment of the semantic content, which ends up being considerably modified or even neglected; 4 translation of semantic content and constraints, treated on an equal footing; 5 reinvention of the constraints and/or additions of semantic layers by the exploration of the possibilities of the target language. When faced with a poem endowed with densely allusive content, negotiated by way of riddling periphrases and neologisms, the translator must first decipher the puns and puzzles, and then reformulate them in his or her own language, attempting to attain the degree of obscurity and challenge present in the original. The ‘transcreations’ discussed elsewhere in this volume (cf. the chapters by Clüver, Jackson and Huang) would, in Bloomfield’s framework, fall into the fourth degree. The translations of ‘Syrinx’ presented here waver between degrees 0 and 1. The strangeness of the original vocabulary is generally conveyed, if at all, by hyphenated compounds or upper-case letters. Sometimes a Greek compound neologism is translated as a narrative phrase (e.g. del que mató al abuelo for the compound παπποφόνου, ‘grandfather-killer’). Arguably, these

The Origins of the Untranslatable  33 features weaken the strangeness of the original text, by offering increasingly more explicit explanations of the enigmatic compounds. Further explanation, of course, is provided by the ample commentary and notes that each translator provides as a key to the content. It may reasonably be asked to what extent it is possible to read and enjoy ‘Syrinx’ without the commentary and notes. Trajano recalls Ezra Pound’s observation that Eliot’s addition of notes to The Waste Land added nothing to his pleasure in the poem, before stating that, in the case of his own (i.e. Trajano’s) translation of Lycophron, ‘Creio que [as notas] não são fundamentais para a fruição estética do texto. Mesmo assim, resolvi incluí-las caso o leitor tenha interesse em se adentrar em outros planos do poema’ (‘I believe that [the notes] are not fundamental to the aesthetic enjoyment of the text. Even so, I have decided to include them if the reader has an interest in exploring other planes of the poem’).16 The ‘Syrinx’ translators, in contrast, present the notes and commentaries as essential parts of the experience of reading the poem. However, it is fair to point out that in the earliest surviving manuscript of the poem (of Constantine of Rhodes, in the 10th century ace), the lines of the poem are surrounded by explicatory marginal notes, and these have served as the basis for all editors, translators and commentators to this day. We can think of this marginalia as the copyists’ paratexts, which have now become part of the text itself.17 By incorporating their own keys to the riddles, the translators are following the tradition of incorporating the paratext into the text, presenting it, as it were, whole. An alternative perspective would argue that the puzzles should not need a solution for the poem to be aesthetically pleasing. A contemporary analogue would be that of the Oulipo group of writers who employ constraints, or word-games, to generate their literary texts. For example, their texts employ palindromes, or lipograms (in which all words that include a particular letter are avoided) or all nouns are replaced by the seventh noun following it in a given dictionary. Some of the Oulipo group, such as Raymond Queneau, was not in favour of the constraints being made manifest to readers; others, like Georges Perec, disagreed. Marcel Bénabou comments on this debate in terms that are applicable to reading and translating ‘Syrinx.’ Mais ces contraintes ou ces structures auxquelles l’écrivain oulipien fait appel comme point de départ obligé de ses travaux, quel est leur statut par rapport au lecteur? Doivent-elles nécessairement être portées à sa connaissance, et si oui, de quelle façon? Doiventelles, une fois accomplie leur mission (à savoir aider à la production d’un texte), demeurer perceptibles au sein du texte dont elles ont favorisé la naissance? Ou bien ne devraient-elles plutôt, comme les échafaudages une fois construite la maison, disparaître?18

34  Juliana Di Fiori Pondian ‘But these constraints or structures to which the Oulipian writer appeals as the starting point of his work, what is their status in relation to the reader? Do they necessarily have to be brought to his attention, and if so, how? Should they, once they have accomplished their mission (that is, to help to produce a text), remain perceptible in the text they gave birth to? Or should they rather, like scaffolding once the house is built, disappear?’ Bénabou proceeds to argue that texts produced in response to a set of textual constraints may reveal the key to their puzzles or not, depending on three types of circumstance, which he terms, le dévoilement oblige (‘obligatory unveiling’), le dévoilement externe (‘external unveiling’) and le dévoilement interne (‘internal unveiling’). In the case of dévoilement obligé, the identification of the constraint, or the key to the puzzle, is indispensable to the intelligibility of the text. In this case, text and the constraint cannot in any way be separated. There is also the dévoilement externe, in which the constraint or key remains invisible to the unsuspecting reader. In this case, the revelation or solution is made by the reader himself, on his own initiative, but it may also be made available in the form of a separate paratext. Finally, in the dévoilement interne the keys to the solution of the puzzle of the text are subtly offered within the text itself, metaphorically or by allusion. The text of ‘Syrinx’ does not determine which of Bénabou’s dévoilements are appropriate to its translation. The translators have followed the early copyists in assuming that the paratexts are essential to the text, or at least that they should be available to the reader, and so they all have followed the route of le dévoilement oblige or externe (which would be to follow Trajano’s preference, in his translation of Lycophron). Few have the confidence to present a translation of ‘Syrinx’ with dévoilement interne, relying on the shape of the poem, the music of its verse and the riddling enigmas to intrigue and please the reader, and perhaps to point him or her in the direction of the solution, Pan. The present chapter has argued that ‘Syrinx’ provides a framework for a type of poetry that, though it has latterly been associated with radical late modernist avant-gardes, has been practised through the ages. It is self-consciously ‘difficult,’ and it draws upon visual and aural patterning, textual games and intertextual allusions to invite its readers to read in a new way. Its visual quality is only one aspect of its difficulty, and in order to recreate the poem the translator has to understand and recombine the visual, aural, textual and intertextual relations in a particular graphic space. That difficulty is the mother of invention.

Notes 1 Gabriel Arbouin, Les Soirées de Paris, no. 25, June 15, 1914. 2 Trajano, 2017, p. 7.

The Origins of the Untranslatable  35 3 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. William Trask. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 278. 4 Kwapisz, 2013, p. 140. 5 From the earliest MS (10th century) in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément grec 0384, 028-29v*. 6 Kwapisz, 2013, p. 145. 7 Kwapisz, 2013, p. 144. 8 Kwapisz, 2013, p. 145. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Kwapisz, 2013, p. 143. 12 Dupont-Roc and Lallot, 1974, pp. 185–190. 13 The story is found in Sophocles, Larisaioi, Ps-Apolodoro 2.4.4, Paus 2.16.23, Hyg., Fab., pp. 63.5. 14 Dupont-Roc and Lallot, 1974, pp. 185–190. 15 Bloomfield, 2016, pp. 982–983. 16 Trajano, 2017, p. 19. 17 Cf. Genette, 1987. 18 Bénabou, M. “Exhiber/Cacher”, s/d. Available at https://www.oulipo.net/fr/ exhibercacherr [Accessed 2 May 2019].

References Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes. Paris: Mercure De France, 1918. Arbouin, Gabriel. “Devant L’ideogramme D’apollinaire.” Les Soirées De Paris, No. 25, 15 June 1914. Bénabou, Marcel. Exhiber/Cacher: Les Oulipiens Et Leurs Contraintes. https:// www.Oulipo.Net/Fr/Exhibercacher [Accessed 21 April 2019]. Bloomfield, Camille and Hermes Salceda. “La Contraintes Et Les Langues (Portugais, Italien, Français, Espagnol, Anglais).” MLN – Founded In 1886 As Modern Language Notes 31, no. 4 (September 2016). Buffière, Félix. Anthologie Grecque: Première Partie, Anthologie Palatine, Tome XII (Livres Xiii-Xv). Vol. 12. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1970. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Literatura Europeia E Idade Média Latina. Trans. ­Teodoro Cabral E Paulo Ronai. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1996. Dupont-Roc, R. and J. Lallot. “La Syrinx.” Poétique 18 (1974), pp. 176–193. Edmonds, J. M. The Greek Bucolic Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 (1ª ed. 1912). Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris, Seuil, 1987. Holden, Anthony. Greek Pastoral Poetry. London, Penguin Classics, 1974. Kwapisz, Jan. The Greek Figure Poems. Leuven; Paris; Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013. Legrand, Ph. E. Bucoliques Grecs. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1927. Lícofron. Alexandra. Trans. Vieira Trajano. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017. Paes, José Paulo. Poemas Da Antologia Grega Ou Palatina: Séculos Vii A.C A V D.C. São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 1995. Paton, W. R. The Greek Anthology, Vol. 5. London: Heinemann, 1918. Pound, Ezra. Confucius to Cummings – An Anthology of Poetry. New York, New Directions Publishing, 1964. Zárate, Armando. “Los Textos Visuales De La Epoca Alejandrina.” Em: ­Dispositio – Revista Hispánica De Semiotica Literaria Iii, no. 9 (1978).

3 Concrete Poetry in China Form, Content, Theme and Function Li Li

Introduction While the Chinese ideogram has been a constant source of inspiration to concrete poets writing in Western languages (see Clüver, this volume), the development of concrete poetry in China has a fragmented and discontinuous history. Antecedents of modern Chinese concrete poems can be dated back to the 4th century ace. There are several Chinese names for poems that combine verbal and visual elements, including 图像诗, 图案诗, 具象诗 and 具体诗, but this kind of poem has never occupied a dominant position in Chinese literary history. The recent history of such poems follows different paths in Taiwan (see Chen Li, 1997, and his chapter in this volume) and on the mainland. In mainland China, in the 1930s, the poet, Ou Waiou, experimented with techniques now associated with concrete poetry, but his work did not attract wider attention until the 1980s.1 In Taiwan, too, concrete poetry tended to be a marginal pursuit until late in the 20th century. Shen and Wu (2012, 16) observe that ‘this kind of writing [concrete poems] was always taken lightly by writers and scholars. Therefore, almost no serious attempt had been made before the concrete poetry movement began in Taiwan [i.e. in the 1950s and 1960s].’2 Scholars have since approached Chinese concrete poetry from various perspectives: some focusing on the techniques used in writing concrete poems (Ding, 2000); some on the challenges and methods of translating such poems into a different language (Bruno, 2012; Shen and Wu, 2012; Lee 2015; Lee & Chan 2018); and others offering an investigation into the history of Chinese visual poetry in relation to arts, such as calligraphy, couplet-writing and paper-cutting (Tan, 2018). Compared with mainland China, more critical attention has been afforded to poets from Taiwan, such as Chen Li (陈黎) and Zhan Bing ( 詹冰). The present chapter, then, focuses on the relatively neglected topic of concrete poetry in mainland China. It begins by considering the ancient tradition of writing pattern poems in Chinese, before turning to exemplars of concrete poetics in 20th- and 21st-century China. In doing so, the chapter illustrates how Chinese concrete poets have made use of the visual potential of the ideogram, but also how, perhaps ironically, they now draw on Western alphabetical languages in their work.

Concrete Poetry in China  37

Pattern Poetry in Ancient China In ancient China, some poems were written in particular shapes and forms, for instance, huiwen (回文, ‘circular’ poems), baota (宝塔, ‘pagoda’ poems) and wugui (乌龟, ‘tortoise-shaped’ poems). Some of these poems have been anthologised (e.g. Wang, 2007; Hinton, 2008). Three of them are mentioned here as illustrations of each tradition: Xuanji Tu, Tea and Embroidered Tortoise Poem. A Huiwen Poem: Xuanji Tu Xuanji Tu (璇玑图, Picture of the Turning Sphere) is credited to Su Hui (苏惠), the wife of Dou Tao (窦滔, the feudal provincial governor of Qinzhou, 秦州) during the kingdom of the Former Qin (351–394 ace). The story behind the poem is that Dou Tao was exiled to a remote desert area, where he met a young girl and made her his concubine. As time went on, the relationship between Su Hui and Dou Tao deteriorated. Later when Dou Tao was ordered to move to another place, the concubine went with him. Since Su Hui refused to join them, Dou Tao ended his relationship with her. However, not long afterwards Su Hui began to regret her actions and to miss her husband dearly. She expressed her feelings by writing a pattern poem, using silk threads in five different colours and weaving them onto a piece of brocade. The poem was later sent to Dou Tao, who left his concubine and was reconciled with Su Hui. The poem contained 840 characters, and was circular and palindromic (huiwen 回文). The intricacy of its form is such that ‘[t]he poem is in the form of a twenty-nine by twenty-nine character grid, and can be read forwards or backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, as well as within its color-coded grids.’3 At some point during the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912 ace) the additional character 心 (xin, ‘heart’) was added to the centre of the poem, giving it a total of 841 characters. Certain key elements of the ancient Chinese pattern poem are exemplified here: its social function (petition, compliment), its materiality (silk, coloured thread) and the fact that its formal ingenuity is conceived of as a gift to the receiver. A Pagoda Poem: Tea There is a long tradition in China of arranging poems in the shape of a pagoda, effectively a pyramid that is either right-side-up or inverted. The single character in the first line (in a ‘normal’ pagoda) or last line (in an ‘inverted’ pagoda) serves not only as the title and a preview of the main content of the poem, but also decides the rhyme of the following or preceding lines. The number of the lines in a pagoda poem normally ranges from five to fifteen (the most popular being seven lines), and each subsequent line adds one or two characters. These poems are

38  Li Li often characterised by natural themes, which include seasons such as spring, plants such as tea and flowers such as the lotus. The earliest pagoda poems in China can be dated from the Sui Dynasty (581–619 ace). Later, many poets during the Tang (618–907 ace) and Song Dynasty (960–1279 ace), including Linghu Chu (令狐楚, 766–837 ace) and Bai Juyi (白居易, 772–846 ace) continued the tradition. Below is the pagoda poem entitled Tea (茶), written by Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831 ace) during a farewell party on the occasion of Bai Juyi’s promotion, together with an English translation.4 茶 香叶，嫩芽。 慕诗客，爱僧家。 碾雕白玉，罗织红纱。 铫煎黄蕊色，碗转曲尘花。 夜后邀陪明月，晨前独对朝霞。 洗尽古今人不倦，将知醉后岂堪夸。 Tea Fragrant leaves, budding delicately. Praised by poets, adored in the monastery. Ground by white jade, sieved through red mesh to purify. Warmed in a pot till golden in hue; served, swirling, in cups, frothily. After nightfall, carousing with the moon; before sunrise, in the gloaming, solitary. Famed in our ancestors’ time as a restorative, a long-renowned remedy for insobriety.

The translation from Chinese to English presents obvious challenges. In the Roman alphabet, it is difficult even to achieve an incremental increase in the number of characters in each line while retaining the sense. The rhyme on each line is also difficult to maintain in English – here, half-rhymes on unstressed syllables have been used. The intricate sound effects in each line have been abandoned in the attempt to replicate the sense of the original. Some of the content is also culturally specific. The most taxing line to translate is arguably the fifth, the beginning of which refers to the oxidisation of tea leaves in a clay receptacle. ‘Warmed in a pot’ does not wholly capture this sense, but the balance of the half-lines depends on the concept of actions done to the tea in different containers (pot, cups). The translation is a negotiation of the visual shape, the intricate sound patterns and the propositional content – and ultimately involves a compromise. Embroidered Tortoise Poem In the year 845 ace, during the Tang Dynasty, the wife of General Zhang Kui, who had been stationed on a remote frontier for ten years, embroidered a poem (eight lines with seven characters in each), expressing how

Concrete Poetry in China  39 much she missed her husband and her wish for him to return. She composed her poem in the shape of a tortoise, a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture, and presented it to the emperor, who subsequently agreed that the husband be reunited with his wife. 暌离已是十秋强，对镜那堪重理妆。闻雁几回修尺素，见霜先为制 衣裳。 开箱叠练先垂泪，拂杵调砧更断肠。绣作龟形献天子，愿教征客早 还乡。 The meaning of the poem can be paraphrased as follows, in my translation: My husband has been absent from home for more than ten years and I am now not even in a mood to put on make-up. Every time I hear a wild goose5 , I will write a letter to my husband, hoping the wild goose will bring my message to him. Every year when the frost comes, I make clothes for him. When I open the case to put the clothes inside, I cannot help first shedding tears. When I am washing clothes, I am even more heartbroken. I have embroidered this poem in the shape of a tortoise to be presented to the emperor, hoping that my husband will be allowed to return soon. While the English paraphrase here gives the sense of the poem, a ‘full’ translation would presumably also have to be embroidered in the shape of a tortoise and recreate the formal patterning in some respects. The translator would face the challenge of arranging the poem in eight lines of equal length. These three poems illustrate some of the early Chinese traditions and the intricate visual and verbal techniques that later Chinese poets drew upon but which present challenges to modern translators. That said, in Chinese literary history, while both the Tang and Song dynasties witnessed abundant poetic production of a high literary quality, in comparison with other poems written during these dynasties, pattern poetry was quite limited in terms of quantity and themes. According to Wang Yiran (王义然), there are altogether only 21 pagoda poems in the 900-volume A Complete Collection of Poems of the Tang Dynasty in which over 49,800 poems are included.6 The composition of pagoda poems was evidently a marginal activity, and it is reasonable to ask why such poems were created at all. As mentioned above, in order to write pagoda poems, strict rules had to be followed, including the number of characters in each line, the rhyme and the shape of a normal or inverted pagoda. Writing pagoda poems was even more formally demanding than composing poetry in more popular stanzas, such as the five-character Jueju (绝句), which simply demanded five words in each line and four lines in total for a single poem. As with poetry in other

40  Li Li languages, and across cultures, difficulty and intricate formal demands were associated with beauty. Pagoda poems tended to be occasional poems, directed towards a particular addressee, and the composition and offering of a pagoda poem may be regarded as means of showing the recipient respect. It is accepted that there is value in the ingenuity the virtuoso poet demonstrates by rising to the considerable formal challenges encountered in the process of writing a pattern poem. While they also composed occasional poems, the female poets of the palindromic Xuanji Tu and Embroidered Tortoise poem, unlike the male authors of the celebratory pagoda poems, had very strong pragmatic purposes for writing: the former in order to win back the heart of her husband, and the latter to impress the emperor with the gift of a poem in the symbolic image of a tortoise. Ling7 has noted the prominent role taken by women in composing pattern poems in ancient China, and he further argues that women in ancient times, being confined within their homes, without independent social status or even the right to speak out, had to resort to novel poetic forms to express their feelings and attract the attention necessary to impress more powerful males. But why did the two women poets, who were living around 500 years apart, choose embroidery as the medium and method to achieve their own different purposes? Chinese embroidery has a long history extending over a period of 5,000 years. Embroidery was one of the basic skills women in ancient China had to learn, either to make a living or to cultivate their temperament. So embroidery is a delicate skill associated with female artisanship, it would likely have been a skill familiar to both of these two women poets, and furthermore the gift of embroidered silk would have had value in itself owing to the quality of the brocade: the poems would be long-lasting, portable and eye-catching. Turning to the relationship between the form and the content of the pattern poems, no matter whether it was the intricate pictogram of the pagoda, the delicate embroidery that made up the palindromic grid of the Huiwen, or the symbolic tortoise, the material shapes and ornaments functioned largely as a spectacular means of attracting the attention of the target reader, which in turn was intended to achieve a social purpose, such as petitioning or complimenting. In other words, the forms themselves were not necessarily closely connected with the content of the poems. For example, in the pagoda poem, Tea, the shape of the pagoda has nothing to do with the content and theme of tea. As noted above, the pagoda form was also used to write about flowers such as the lotus. Likewise, the form of Huiwen, the tortoise, while it symbolised longevity, had only a tenuous connection with the theme of the poets missing their husbands. In short, the forms of the patterned precursors of concrete poetry in ancient China served largely either as a formal challenge for the poets themselves or as a pragmatic tool by which the ornamentation achieved the purpose of attracting attention to a petition or a compliment. While the

Concrete Poetry in China  41 visual patterns usually bore little or no relation to the content and themes of the poems, what they did, particularly in the case of the palindromic Huiwen poem, was to direct the readers’ attention to its material substance, and offer different ways to navigate the reading of the text. These aspects would become important to modern concrete poets, in China as elsewhere.

Early Concrete Poems in Modern China Pagoda Poems from the 1920s to 1940s The traditions of writing pattern poetry in Chinese, while marginal, did extend into modern times. In the two decades from 1920, in China, as far as I have ascertained, a handful of pagoda poems were written. One example is the seven-line pagoda poem beginning ‘咦’ (‘yi’ is a modal particle that indicates surprise or is used to signal a satirical mood). Its author was Hu Shih (1891–1962), an enthusiastic pioneer of the use of Baihuawen (白话文, that is, modern Chinese) to create modern Chinese poems. This poem was composed as a response to another seven-line pagoda poem, written by Hu Mingfu (胡明覆) specifically to mock Hu Shih’s slow composition of a poem written in Baihuawen (it took him three hours).8 As with ancient Chinese pagoda poems, we find male poets using the form to engage in virtuoso displays of sociability, here mock insults or bantering. In addition, in one of her essays, Bing Xin (1900–1999), the pen name of Xie Wanying (谢婉莹), one of the most prolific writers in 20th-century China, tells the story of writing a pagoda poem, to which was added two more lines by Mei Yiqi (梅贻琦, 1898–1962), the longest-serving President of National Tsinghua University (1931–1948). It was composed on the occasion of a visit by Mei Yiqi to Bing Xin and her husband when they were staying in Kunming city, in Yunnan Province. The original poem, written by Bing Xin, describes her husband, jokingly, as a ‘stupid bookworm’ who went to a food store and haberdasher to buy provisions and a piece of cloth, but when he arrived, could not remember what he wanted to buy. The poem attributes his ‘stupidity’ to his education at Tsinghua University. The poem consists of seven lines beginning with the title 马 (‘horse,’ a character that is a homophone for the name of the provisions). The last two lines take the form of a coda, added by Mei Yiqi as a response to the original poem, retorting that the ‘stupid husband’ was chosen by Bing Xin herself because of her ‘bad eyesight.’9 It is unclear when exactly this poem was written, but from the fact that the couple went to Kunming in 1938 and stayed there for about two years, it can be concluded that the poem was composed during 1938–1940. As with the ancient pagoda poems, the form of the modern-day pagoda poems has nothing to do with the content or theme expressed. The pagoda is again simply a set of constraints demanding a virtuoso performance, but here a female is also drawn into the bantering, sociable relationship that involves

42  Li Li both her husband and their mutual male friend. These early 20th-century exemplars, enjoyable though they may be as playful, occasional poems, hardly rescue Chinese pattern poetry from the literary margins.

Ou Waiou10 (鸥外鸥, 1911–1995): ‘A Solitary Walker in the Desert’ In the early 20th century, more serious uses of pattern poetry in Chinese began to emerge. One practitioner, Ou Waiou, began writing in the 1930s, and he published regularly during the 1930s and 1940s; however, for a long time, his work was neglected by Chinese literary critics. It is only from the 1980s onwards that his name and poems have been mentioned by scholars such as Bachner (2014). Chan argues in relation to Ou Waiou’s poems that ‘[h]is works went missing in the history of modern literature for a long time. In the 1980s he revisited Hong Kong and reconnected with the local literary circle, and many Hong Kong critics began to marvel at his progressiveness.’11 His relative invisibility, rediscovery and belated recognition may in some part be attributed to his formal experiments during the 1930s and 1940s. Ou Waiou is now regarded as one of the pioneers of modern concrete poetry in China. In the Collection of Poems by Ou Waiou (1985), the poems are arranged according to the periods in which they were written: 46 poems written during the 1930s and 1940s, 8 poems written during the 1950s and 1960s and a few poems written during the 1970s and 1980s. In the Collection, only around 11 poems from the earlier period manifest characteristics of the kinds of formal experimentation we now associate with concrete poetry: 1 ’Love Took a Bus’12 (爱情乘了BUS, 1933) 2 ‘Walls of the Naval Port of Singapore’ (军港星加坡的墙, 1936) 3 ‘Butter of National Defence of the Third Reich’ (第三帝国国防的牛 油, 1936) 4 ‘The Second Obituary for the World’ (第2回世界讣闻, 1937) 5 ‘Feelings about being a Father’ (父的感想, 1937) 6 ‘Brush Your Names with Paste’ (用刷铜膏刷你们的名字, 1938) 7 ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land’ (被开垦的处女地, 1942) 8 ‘Infectious Disease Took a Fast Train’ (传染病乘了急列车, 1942) 9 ‘Those Who Became Fat by Eating Paper Notes’ (食纸币而肥的人, 1942) 10 ‘The Spiritually Mixed’ (精神混血儿, 1942) 11 ‘Auction by Taking Advantage of Others’ (乘人之危的拍卖, 1943) The formal characteristics of these 11 poems can be summarized as follows. First, there is often a mixture of non-Chinese languages/letters/ brand names, often in English or with Arabic numbers. Some Roman

Concrete Poetry in China  43 letters, and mainly English words or names, are used in the poems, such as Bus in ‘Love Took a Bus;’ Made in Europe in ‘Walls of the Naval Port of Singapore;’ war, which appears 50 times in ‘The Second Obituary for the World;’ ABCDE in ‘Those Who Became Fat by Eating Paper Notes;’ and Sharkskin, Pigskin13, George and Rose in ‘Brush your Names with Paste.’ Next, these poems make use of different character sizes and/or font sizes. Their visual impact is thus an important part of their stylistic effect. Ou Waiou’s earliest attempts to use different character sizes in poetry can be dated back to 1936 when he wrote two poems: ‘Walls of the Naval Port of Singapore’ and ‘Butter of National Defence of the Third Reich.’ In the first poem, larger-sized characters were adopted in the first and second stanzas. In the first stanza, three Chinese phrases ‘sail boats’ (帆船), ‘steamships’ (汽船) and ‘warships’ (兵船) were put in quotation marks in the shape of a ship, with a size much larger than the rest of the characters in the stanza. The overall visual impression is that the poem is the first page of a book for kindergarten-age children. In the second stanza, the phrase ‘53 million tons!’ (5千3百万吨!) was repeated twice in a single line with a successively larger font size, intending, presumably, to indicate how much money the European steamships carried from Hong Kong. In ‘Butter of National Defence of the Third Reich,’ in the sixth stanza, the characters in two lines in quotation marks ‘Germans: eating of butter is not allowed!’ (‘日尔曼人：不准食用牛油!’) are again larger than the rest, presumably indicating the volume and intensity with which the then German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, addressed his audience. When it comes to the use of different font sizes in Ou Waiou’s poetry, two poems are particularly eye-catching: ‘The Second Obituary for the World,’ which predicted the outbreak of the Second World War, and ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land,’ which describes the deteriorating situation in the city of Guilin, where many people from Hong Kong fled after their city was occupied by Japanese armies in 1941. In ‘The Second Obituary for the World,’ ‘WAR!’ (in Roman capital letters, together with the exclamation mark) is repeated 50 times altogether, in three different font sizes (a detail is shown in Figure 3.1). It is worth noting that immediately after the title of the poem, there is an instruction: ‘Please read with a voice to sell a Special Edition’ (请以卖号外的声音朗读)14. At the end of the poem, Ou added a note to the effect that: This poem, composed at the beginning of 1937 before the Second World War, predicted the outbreak of the war by showing various unusual aspects. So I used the English word ‘war’ to imitate the sound of a newsboy selling an extra edition and at the same time conveying the Chinese meaning of war. Will it be regarded as ‘formalism’? Some would think so. 15

44  Li Li

Figure 3.1  Detail from ‘The Second Obituary for the World’ (第2回世界讣闻, 1937) by Ou Waiou.

It is worth attending to the final two sentences of the endnote. Ou’s concern about the experimental characteristics of the poem being regarded as ‘formalism’ suggests his awareness that this kind of poetics was excluded from the then dominant literary norm. The repetition of the word ‘war’ and the arrangement of the font size from smaller to larger characters formally conveys a sense of the increasingly urgent imminence of conflict. In ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land,’ the use of different font sizes is the most intricate among all his poems; for example, in the first part of the first stanza, the Chinese character ‘山’ (mountain) is arranged vertically three times in three different font sizes – in the first sequence, the largest one is in the second line, with the other two in the same font size; in the second sequence, the largest one is the first and the other two are the same size; and in the third sequence, the smallest one is the first and the other two are in an equally large font size. In addition, the characters in some lines are much larger, and, sometimes, even within a single line, the first few words are much smaller than the rest. The repeated use of the Chinese word 山 (‘mountain’) and the combination of different font sizes, together with some enlarged words and lines, help to create a visual image of the city of Guilin, surrounded by mountains of different heights (see Figure 3.2). In ‘Infectious Disease Took a Fast Train,’ which is another poem describing the impact on the city of Guilin of the influx of refugees from Hong Kong, in the first stanza, a larger font size is used in five lines out of ten, creating a visual image of the distances travelled by displaced persons arriving in Guilin. Here, it seems that the people described by the characters that use a smaller font size are walking from afar while the larger font sizes are reserved for those who are closer to the reader. In ‘Those Who Became Fat by Eating Paper Notes’, the characters in three lines are larger than the rest, creating an image of those who became fat after eating paper notes. To sum up, in Ou Waiou’s poems the modulation of font sizes is usually to do with the iconic representation of the concept of ‘largeness,’

Concrete Poetry in China  45

Figure 3.2  Detail from ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land’ (被开垦的处女地, 1942) by Ou Waiou.

‘quantity’ or ‘urgency,’ be it a louder voice, a larger amount, a fatter person, the imminence of a war or the approximation of distance. The different font size itself is concretely meaningful insofar as it serves as a means of expressing the content of the poems in an eye-catching and emphatic way. The alliance of form and content makes Ou Waiou’s poetry different from the earlier proto-concrete poems in China, where the forms (Huiwen, tortoise or pagoda) were largely ornamental, and loosely connected, if at all, with the content of the poems.

A Contemporary Concrete Poet: Yin Caigan (尹才干) For a long period after the 1940s, there is no surviving evidence that concrete poems were composed, or at least published, in China. This state of affairs continued until the end of the 1970s, when the devastating ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) finally drew to an end, and there existed more favourable opportunities for experimental forms, including concrete poetry, to resurface. Yin Caigan, who is presently regarded by numerous scholars as the foremost contemporary concrete poet in mainland China, began to write his first concrete poems in 1978. Up to now, he has written about 200 concrete

46  Li Li poems of various shapes about diverse themes. His concrete poems have begun to attract increasing attention from readers, as is shown in academic articles, graduate dissertations and research projects (for example, see Hong, 2017; Shao, 2018). Even so, it was not until the year 2000 that Yin put forward his theories of Chinese concrete poetry, arguing that a concrete poem is a special kind of text, at the same time poetic and pictorial. Later, on October 15, 2006, he started a blog on the Sina (新浪) website and began to post his own concrete poems there. Other Chinese poets have followed Yin’s example. Another prominent concrete poet, Tianma Changsi, the penname of Liang Xiaohua (梁晓 华), started to study and write concrete poems in 2009, and up to now he has written around a dozen concrete poems in different shapes such as a key, a ladder and the Great Wall, addressing themes such as nature, life, the environment and Buddha. The remainder of this chapter, however, will focus on the work of Yin Caigan, as he is one of the most prominent practitioners of concrete poetry in China today, someone whose work is achieving recognition in part through his adoption of social media as a means of dissemination.

Combining Form and Content Yin has employed many different forms in his concrete poems – to name a few: glass, slingshot, lantern, leaf, cross, bottle, umbrella, spindle, train and tree – and the themes involved are also very diverse, ranging from love, family, friendship, social customs, beliefs, cultures and celebrities to aesthetics. Unlike the ancient pattern poets and those who created the pagoda poems between the 1920s and 1940s, Yin has aimed to combine form and content in his concrete poems, arguing that the relationship between the form and the content of a concrete poem is mutually complementary; in other words, the form is the content and the content is the form (see Yin, 1993, 2016). As an illustration, we may consider one of his most widely discussed concrete poems, entitled Train (火车), which was composed in 1984 (Figure 3.3). The ideograms that make up this poem are concerned with the progress of the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn and winter), presented in four different colours (green, red, yellow and white) together with their principle characteristics (flowers, rain, fruit and snow), conveyed via the unusual visual metaphor of a train. According to Yin, the choice of this mode of transport was inspired by his personal experience of travelling frequently by train between the capital city of Sichuan Province (Chengdu) and his hometown as a college student during the 1980s. The fleeting and changing scenery outside the train window during the four seasons, together with the noise of the wagon wheels on the rails, took root in his mind. The whole poem, which is arranged like a vivid picture of a moving train, is a

Concrete Poetry in China  47

Figure 3.3  ‘Train’ (火车) by Yin Caigan, by courtesy of the author.

combination of form (train), sounds and colours, and is evocative of the train whistling and the wheels (shown as five concentric circles) clashing with the rails.

Different Functions of Concrete Poems: Contextual Translations Compared with the narrowly occasional nature of earlier pattern poems, Yin’s concrete poems perform various functions, drawing on different contexts and situations beyond the purely ‘literary.’ A number of scholars have commented on the relationship between the visual and verbal language of concrete poems and that of advertisements. For example, Solt observes that ‘[t]he visual poem as a functional design can humanize the materials and techniques of the mass media of communication, can make them available to the human spirit.’16 When comparing concrete poetry and advertisements, Bierma has also argued that ‘an advertisement is most effective and successful when both its picture (shape, illustration) and content are easily remembered’ and that an ‘advertisement and concrete poem complete each other to form a concrete poetry advertisement.’17 At the request of some restaurant owners, Yin created several concrete poems to advertise their establishments. The commissioning of these poems complicates Solt’s definition of concrete poetry as a form that ‘humanizes’ the functional logos of the mass media, as it returns poetry to the domain of public relations. The interweaving of poetry, promotion and landscape is further complicated by the setting of Yin’s poetry into tourist sites in China. Poetry and tourism are two fields that have long been closely linked; for example, in ancient China, many famous poets wrote poems during or after their visit to a scenic spot. The concrete

48  Li Li poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, embedded his work into the Scottish landscape to create an ‘avant garden’ that he named ‘Little Sparta,’ which is now a tourist site.18 Scholars have also explored the interaction between the two, by which the use of poems can help to promote tourist attractions or even, in hospitality training, to develop an awareness of service breakdowns and the perceptions of customers (Bryant and Eaverly, 2004; Robinson and Lynch, 2007). In 2014 in Yinshan (印山) Park of Wusheng County (武胜), Sichuang Province, the poet’s home town erected a stone with one of his concrete poems, entitled ‘Unable to Walk out of the Feeling of Disappearance’ (走不出逝去的心境). According to the poet himself (personal communication), he did not know beforehand that his poem would be used in the park. Consequently, two years later, in 2016, the poet was invited to create some further concrete poems for the orange garden of a rural tourist resort, and, in the end, six of his concrete poems were used. Figure 3.4 is a photograph of one of them, with the title ‘A Lad Picking Oranges,’ in the shape of an orange. This poem depicts a picture of two lovers – a young woman and man – picking oranges together with the oranges witnessing their love and happiness. 小伙采桔子 While some concrete poetry in the West might be described as appropriating the language and visual style of advertisements in order to critique the mass media and a consumerist ethos, Yin’s poetry might be seen as being appropriated by commerical institutions to promote them. But the relationship is more complex than such a reading might suggest. While prompted by a commission, Yin’s concrete poems about oranges, for example, draw on the themes of love that motivated earlier pattern poems, particularly by females, and celebrate a bucolic idyll that is also valorised in ancient Chinese poetry.

Figure 3.4  ‘A Lad Picking Oranges’ (小伙采桔子) by Yin Caigan, by courtesy of the author.

Concrete Poetry in China  49

Shaping the Development of Concrete Poems in China According to Lefevere, patronage refers to ‘something like the powers (persons, institutions) that can further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting of literature.’19 Numerous scholars have discussed the forces that have shaped the development of concrete poetry in China from perspectives such as the influences of Chinese and Western poetics, and the translation of Western concrete poems into Chinese (e.g. Tong, 2015/2018; Lu, 2016; Tan 2018); however, the poets discussed here remain relatively neglected by earlier scholarship. In the case of Ou Waiou, there is little evidence of why he wrote poems in an experimental form in the 1930s and 1940s. Was he influenced by someone else? Some scholars have argued that Ou Waiou’s poetry was influenced by Futurists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) and Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944), and by the Cubists (e.g. Zhang, 2009; Chan, 2016). Indeed, his contemporary, Tu Meng, once called Ou Waiou the ‘Chinese Marinetti.’20 However, Ou Waiou himself consistently denied that he had ever followed or been influenced by anyone else in his poetic compositions. As he wrote in 1944: I have been writing poems for over a decade. What I have done, in the past ten years, is simply to take a certain road in an endless desert, where I have left some of my footprints. These prints are my own: there was no trace in front of me to follow; they are not sufficient enough for others to follow either. 21 Despite Ou’s avowal of his uniqueness, it is possible to identify some of the shaping forces that have furthered or hindered the writing of concrete poems in China. They include the following. The Chinese Ideogram It is a common assumption that Chinese characters originated from pictures, and while the Chinese written character, or ideogram, does not necessarily guarantee the creation of concrete poems, the ideogrammic characteristic of the Chinese language has inspired the creation of concrete poems, in the West as in China (see Clüver, this volume). The Noigandres poets of Brazil approached the ideogram via Pound and Fenollosa, who, when talking about the quality of the vividness of the detached Chinese character, argued that ‘a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes’ and showed ‘how poetical is the Chinese form and how close to nature’ and that ‘the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature…, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.’22

50  Li Li Like his Western counterparts, Yin Caigan acknowledges the importance of the Chinese ideogram in relation to his concrete poetry: Chinese, as an ideographic language, has its obvious advantages for Chinese concrete poets…. An individual Chinese character has its structural beauty and the combination of Chinese characters combines the beauty of a painting together with its image…. The formal construction of concrete poems, namely their architectural beauty, is exactly a reflection of the characteristics of the Chinese characters. 23 Ancient Chinese Pattern Poems As we have seen, though relatively few pattern poems were created in ancient China and while they never occupied a very important position in Chinese literary history, they did provide continuous inspiration for future concrete poets in terms of their ingenuity of form and content. In an email interview with me, Yin Caigan responded to my question of how he began to write concrete poems by stating that, in 1978, his Chinese teacher taught him two ancient pagoda poems, which interested him so much that he decided to attempt to compose his own. In this respect, contemporary Chinese concrete poetry can be seen as an extension of the past rather than a break with it (see also Chen Li, this volume). Changing Poetics Before the New Culture Movement that began in 1919, concrete poems never entered into the discussions of mainstream Chinese poetics. Since the 1920s, with the surge in the translation of Western literary works and the creation of new poems in modern Chinese, people began to think more about the formal elements of a poem and the relationship between those formal elements and content. However, as the example of Ou Waiou attests, formal experimentation was, for a period, stigmatised in Chinese artistic circles, particularly in the decades leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Changing Politics The ten-year Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976) was devastating in almost every aspect of Chinese society, be it cultural, political or economic. It partly explains why so few concrete poems were composed or published during this period in mainland China, whereas in Taiwan concrete poems began to flourish and gain recognition

Concrete Poetry in China  51 (cf. Ding, 2000; Shen and Wu, 2012). In the postscript to Collection of Poems by Ou Waiou published in 1985, the poet explained why a disproportionate number of poems written in the 1930s and 1940s were included in the book: During the Cultural Revolution, those who were responsible for ‘external investigation’ spent lots of money, time and energy looking for my ‘reactionary poems’ and ‘reactionary articles’ in the libraries across the whole country to be used as evidence of my crimes.24 Ou Waiou was actually prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution mainly because of his formal experiments in the composition of poetry as illustrated earlier in this chapter. What happened to him during this particular period of time sheds some light on the paucity of Chinese concrete poems. However, perversely, the Cultural Revolution itself, in spite of the devastation it caused, helped to preserve some of Ou’s poems, as he noted ironically in the postscript to the same book: Anyway, the reason why more poems written in the 1930s and 1940s were included in this Collection owes, I should say, to those ‘comrades’ who worked so hard to collect my ‘criminal records’. 25 The Development of the Internet in Modern China Concrete poetry, which for much of Chinese literary history has been peripheral, began to gain in visibility and popularity with the development of the internet in China. As in the West, the internet in China has allowed for the broad dissemination of hitherto minority interests and stimulated broader recognition of previously marginal activities. Unlike the situation in some other countries where ‘concrete poetry was mainly distributed via small press magazines and exhibitions,’ 26 modern concrete poems in China began to attract the public’s attention via the internet. Many scholars have discussed the impact, opportunities and challenges that the modern technology has brought for concrete poems, either in the way of creation or reading (e.g.: Bean and McCabe, 2015; Ling, 2018). For example, the poet Yin Caigan has published many of his created concrete poems, together with his ideas about concrete poems and other relevant information, on his blog on the Sina website (http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1259799290), which has had, to date (early 2019), more than 451,000 visits. The rise of digital media has given anyone who is interested in concrete poems easy and convenient access to the information concerned, and certainly it has helped the speedy dissemination of a new wave of concrete poems.

52  Li Li

Conclusion As we have seen, various forces have contributed to the shaping, and at times suppressing, of concrete poetry in China, in a history of over 1,600 years, resulting in a movement from simplicity to diversity in terms of form, content and function, and from separation to integration in terms of the relationship between form and content. The further development of modern technology will no doubt bring about more opportunities and ways of creating, reading and utilizing concrete poems in the future, thus resulting in a more diversified understanding of the relationship between the form and content of a concrete poem and its possible functions. As Solt indicated, ‘[t]he poem comes alive once again in the world it has been assumed would destroy it.’27 If this is true of concrete poetry in the West, it is even more true in China.

Notes 1 Chen, 2019; Cheng, 2017. 2 Shen and Wu, 2012, p. 16. 3 Hinton, 2008, p. 08. 4 Translated into English by Li Li and John Corbett. 5 In ancient China, a wild goose was used to carry messages over long distances, so it symbolizes letters or messages. 6 http: http://www.yywzw.com/n2621c61.aspx. 7 http://www.zgshige.com/c/2018-08-20/6946462.shtml. The original text is as follows: 奇怪的是，为何图像诗多为女性所作，且多为闺怨诗？古代女子养在 深闺，守着牢笼，愁肠百结，没有位置，没有话语权，没有赐予女子以理服人的权 力，女子多只能以情动人，且用奇特的诗歌形式，以唤起注意，以求打动人心，让 人印象深刻. 8 胡明覆的这首宝塔诗为：“——痴！适之！勿读书！香烟一支！单做白话诗！说时 快，做时迟。一做就是三小时！” 胡适回应的宝塔诗为：“——咦！希奇！胡格哩, 说我做诗！这话不须提。我做诗快得希，从来不用三小时”. 9 Bing, 2014, p. 151. 10 Ou Waiou is the penname for Li Zongda (李宗大). He was born in Dongguan (东莞), Guangdong Province and later spent his childhood in Hong Kong before returning to Guangzhou. He lived and worked in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Guilin before moving to America in 1941 and he died there in 1945. 11 Chan, 2016, p. 141. 12 This is my translation of the Chinese title. All of the titles of the poems are my translations of the corresponding Chinese ones. 13 The poet added an endnote to explain that sharkskin and pigskin were popular clothing materials, woven with animal fibre. 14 号外 (Haowai) refers to a special or an extra edition of a newspaper published in response to an event of great significance or public interest, such as the declaration of a war. 15 This is my translation of the Chinese text. The source text is as follows: 此 诗写于第二次世界大战前的1937年初，通过各方面不同寻常的动态，预见大战 的迹象已迫近。所以利用英语“WAR”一词作为叫卖号外时惊呼 “喎呀”的拟声, 又兼用了原词“战争”的意义。不会为视为“形式主义”吧？有人会这样看的。(Ou, 1985, pp. 27–28).

Concrete Poetry in China  53 16 Solt, 1970, p. 61. 17 Bierma, 1985, pp. 60, 71. 18 See, for example, Sheeler, Jessie, and Andrew Lawson. Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Frances Lincoln, 2003. 19 Lefevere, 2004, p. 15. 20 Tu, 1934, p. 237. 21 Ou, 1944, p. 2. 22 Fenollosa, 2001, p. 108. 23 Yin, 1993, pp. 173–174. 24 Ou, 1985, p. 210. The original reads: 在 “文化大革命”中，那些负责“外调工 作”的人，不知花了多少的公帑、多少宝贵的岁月、多少的舟车奔波，跑遍了全国 的图书馆去搜集我的 “黑诗”、“黑文”作为罪证. 25 Ou, 1985, p. 211. The original reads:不管怎样，这本诗集中三十年代到四十年 代之作分量这么多，应该说是那些为了找寻我的“罪证”而辛勤奔走的“同志”们 拜赐的呢! 26 http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/concrete-poems-just-are ­[Accessed 2nd May 2019]. 27 Solt, 1970, p. 61.

References Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Bean, Victoria and Chris McCabe (ed.). The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2015. Bierma, Tineke. “Concrete poetry: the influence of design and marketing on aesthetics.” Master’s diss., Portland State University, 1985. Retrieved from https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4446& context=open_access_etds. Bing, Xin (冰心). zhiqiu fanren de xingfu (只求凡人的幸福). Shidai Huawen Shuju (北京；时代华文书局), 2014. Bruno, Cosima. “Words by the Look: Issues in Translating Chinese Visual ­Poetry.” In James St. André and Peng Hsiao-yen (eds.) China and Its Others Knowledge Transfer through Translation, 1829–2010. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, pp. 245–276. Bryant, Marsha and Mary Ann Eaverly. “Classical Tourism in Debora Greger’s Poetry.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37, no. 3 (2004). pp. 67–91. Chan, Kwok-kou (陈国球). “Leftist Poetics and the Sensory World: Re-Reading Poems of the ‘Missing Poet’ Ouwai Ou of the 1930s and 1940s” (左翼政治・ 前卫文学──谈鸥外鸥的革命美学与感官世界) Journal of National Chengchi University (政大中文学报), no. 26 (2016), pp. 141–182. Chen, Li. Intimate Letters: Selected Poems of Chen Li, trans. F. L. Chang. Taipei: Bookman, 1997. Chen, Pu (陈朴). “wenhua pingxi: xin meiti rang shige zoujin dazhong” (文化 评析：新媒体让诗歌走近大众). Guoxue Wang (国学网).March 1, 2019. http:// www.guoxue.com/?p=47963. Cheng, Ching Hang (郑政恒). “xianggang xiandai zhuyi shige de xianfeng: Ou Waiou de qianwei shige” (香港现代主义诗歌的先锋: 鸥外鸥的前卫诗歌). Paper presented at the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature Biennial

54  Li Li Conference: Text, Media, and Transcultural Negotiation, Hong Kong, June 2017. Ding, Xu-hui (丁旭辉). Taiwan xiandaishi tuxiang jiqiao yanjiu (台湾现代诗图像 技巧研究). Kaohsiung: Chunhui, 2000. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry. San Francisco: City Lights Publisher, 2001. Hinton, David. Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. Hong, Gaohui (洪高慧). “Creative Reading and Writing: Magic Concrete Poems” (创意读写:会魔法的图像诗). Primary Teaching Design (小学教学设计), no. 16 (2017): pp. 58–59. Lefevere, André. (ed.). Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. Shanghai: Foreign Language Education Press, 2004. Lee, Tong-King. Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics. Amsterdam: Brill, 2015. Lee, Tong-King and Chan Wing-kit, “Transcreating Memes: Translating ­Chinese Concrete Poetry.” In Jean Boase-Beier et al. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. ­187–206. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_10. Ling, Yu (凌逾). “wangluo shidai de tuxiangshi chuangyi” (网络时代的图像 诗创意). zhongguo shige wang (中国诗歌网), August 20, 2018. http://www. zgshige.com/c/2018-08-20/6946462.shtml. Lu, Jie (卢婕). “Research on the Dynamic Force for Chinese Visual Poetry from the Perspective of Comparative Literature” (比较文学视野下的中国图像诗歌 发展动力研究). World Literature Studies 4 (世界文学研究 4), no. 1 (2016), pp. 14–20. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.12677/wls.2016.41003. Ou, Waiou (鸥外鸥). Ou Waiou shiji (鸥外诗集). Guilin: Xindadi Publishing Press (桂林：新大地出版社), 1944. Ou, Waiou (鸥外鸥). Ou Waiou zhi shi (鸥外鸥之诗). Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing Press (广州：花城出版社), 1985. Robinson, Martha G. and Paul A. Lynch. ‘Hospitality through poetry: control, fake solidarity, and breakdown’. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research 1, no. 3 (2007): pp. 237–246. Shao, Yanan (邵亚楠) and Li Zhihua (李志华). “xuesi jiehe ‘qun’ er youde— ‘tuxiangshi ketang shilu ji pingxi” (学思结合 ‘群’而有得——‘图像诗’课堂实录 及评析). Primary School Teaching (小学教学) no. 6 (2018): pp. 35–36. Shen, Ci-Shu and Wu Yi-Ping. “Translating beyond languages: the challenges of rendering Tai Wan’s visual concrete poems in English.” The AALITRA Review: A Journal of Literary Translation, no. 5 (2012): pp. 15–30. Solt, Mary Ellen. Concrete Poetry: A World View. Indiana University Press, 1970. Available at http://www.ubu.com/papers/solt/index.html. Tan, Hanwei. Chinese Visual Poetry: The Path of a Picturesque Literature. San Francisco: 1 Plus Publishing & Consulting, 2018. Tianma, Changsi (天马长嘶). “wenxue qipa— zhongguo tuxiang” (文学奇葩 ——中国图像诗), tianjin shi wangkan (天津诗网刊） （blog), May 27, 2015, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_683d68650102vorv.html. Tu, Meng (屠蒙). “Ou Waiou, Xu Chi, yu Lin Yingqiang” (欧外欧徐迟与林英强). Shiri Tan (十日谈), no. 41 (1934): p. 237.

Concrete Poetry in China  55 Wang, Eugene. “Patterns Above and Within: Picture of the Turning Sphere and Medieval Chinese Astral Imagination.” In Wilt Idema (ed.) Book by Numbers. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007, pp. 49–89. Yin, Caigan (尹才干). wenqu (文趣). Chengdu: Chengdu University of Technology Press (成都：成都科技大学出版社), 1993. Yin, Caigan (尹才干). Yin Caigan shihua (尹才干诗话). Beijing: Xiandai Publishing Press (北京：现代出版社), 2016. Zhang, Songjian (张松建). xiandaishi de zai chufa (现代诗的再出发). Beijing: ­Peking University Press (北京：北京大学出版社), 2009.

4 Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry in Chinese Characters1 Chen Li

I have always been interested in words. Growing up in Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, I soon became interested in the form of words and their etymology. When I was young, I read dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and, as Taiwan has retained traditional Chinese orthography, I became sensitive to the many roots and forms of Chinese characters, ideograms and pictographs. My own name, for example, is ‘Chen Li’ but it was originally ‘Chen Ying-wen’ (陳膺文)—‘chen’ (陳) means ‘to express,’ while ‘ying’ (膺) means ‘bosom,’ and ‘wen’ (文) means ‘words,’ and consequently, as a child, I thought, ‘Oh, I am meant to be someone who speaks or writes from his heart’. So I have always been fascinated by the mysterious, formal components of Chinese words and their histories. But I also became aware that Hualien is culturally diverse, and that this diversity, too, is reflected in language. I learned that Hualien was first called ‘Rio Douro’ or ‘River of Gold’, a name given by early Portuguese colonists who found the precious metal in the nearby Liwu river. For this reason, my interest in the hidden history of Chinese words became intertwined with a fascination for the effect that different cultures and languages have had on our history. I discovered that about a hundred years ago, Japanese immigrants in Taiwan, ordinary people, had written thousands of poems about Hualien, using the Japanese forms of tanka and haiku, and I started to translate them into Chinese. I liked the formal discipline of these poems, the three-line haiku of 5-7-5 syllables and the five-line tanka of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. My own poetry, then, is in part an extension of ancient Chinese traditions but it is also certainly influenced by other cultures. I began writing poetry of my own in 1974, beginning with the poem, ‘Impression of the Sea.’ In this poem, the sea is a woman, rolling with her many lovers under a blue quilt, and the way in which the Chinese characters are spaced in the final two lines is an attempt to give a visual impression of the rolling waves. The poem shows that I was interested in the visual qualities of poetry from the start. Then, when I was a student of English at Taiwan Normal University, just before I graduated, a kind librarian gave me an old copy of the Chicago Review,a special edition from 1967 that was an anthology of concrete poetry.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   57 I could see from the names that the poets came from all around the world – America and Britain, Italy and France – but my eye was caught by Chinese characters, or kanji, in a poem by the Japanese poet, Seiichi Niikuni (1925–1977). I saw that he had written a poem using two separate components, for ‘river’ (川) and ‘shore’ (州) to produce the combined poem, ‘river or shore’ (kawamatawashū, 川または州). I was very impressed by this poem, and by another, ‘rain’ (ame, 雨), which deconstructed the Chinese character and aligned the components to give the visual impression of falling raindrops. These examples inspired me to start experimenting myself with poems that exploited the visual characteristicsof Chinese characters. By no means all of my poems are experimental in nature, but for the past two decades I have written many types of concrete poetry: hidden-character poems, obsolete-character poems, non-character poems and poems which I call ‘modern Chinese haiku’ and ‘Tang poetry haiku’, attempting not only at visual and audio effects, but at the specific features of Chinese characters or ‘Chineseness’. These experimental poems do offer creative challenges to translators. However, sometimes only a gloss is required to understand them. When I was on my way to my first international poetry festival, in Rotterdam in 1999, I could explain, for example, the underlying idea of my most famous poem, ‘A War Symphony’ (1995, Figure 4.1) to a Russian engineer who was sitting in the seat beside me, by showing him the poem and using a few English phrases. The whole poem consists of many lines but only of four characters—兵, 乒, 乓 and 丘 (you may even say that it is composed of only one character 兵, since the other three characters can be seen as its variants). The first stanza is composed of hundreds of 兵 (bing), meaning ‘soldier.’ The second stanza is made up of 乒 (ping) and 乓 (pong), which look like one-legged soldiers; they are onomatopoeic words, imitating the sounds of gunshots or collisions: when combined, they are associated with ping pong (‘table tennis’). It turns out that there is a famous concrete poem by Eugen Gomringer that is also about ‘ping pong’ but at the time I wrote the ‘A War Symphony’ I was not aware of it. The coincidence is remarkable; I am also struck by the fact that Gomringer’s ‘Ping Pong’ was written in 1953, and I was born the following year. In the last stanza of ‘A War Symphony,’ you see hundreds of 丘 (qiu) characters, which visually suggests a soldier without legs and literally means ‘small hill,’ having the implication of ‘tomb.’ The Taiwanese artist, Xiu-jing Wu (吳秀菁), has made an animated version of the poem, 2 and it has been translated several times. Strategies used in the translation of my experimental poetry are discussed by TongKing Lee (2015). The Polish poet Bohdan Piasecki, who teaches translation in England, years ago translated this poem into English (Figure 4.2). In the first stanza, he substitutes ‘A man’ for 兵 (‘soldier’). In the second

58  Chen Li

Figure 4.1  ‘A War Symphony’ (戰爭交響曲) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

stanza, ‘Ah man’ and ‘Ah men’ are used to replace the scattered onomatopoeic words, 乒 and 乓. And in the third stanza, 丘 is replaced by ‘Amen,’which may be interpreted as a prayer at the funeral. The translation represents a thoughtful attempt to reproduce the visual narrative and find functional equivalents in English for the Chinese characters.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   59

Figure 4.2  Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Bohdan Piasecki, by courtesy of the translator.

Another English version of the poem was composed by Professor Cosima Bruno who teaches at SOAS, University of London (Figure 4.3). Bruno’s version is a comic-like presentation that draws upon Futurist poetics. It substitutes the Chinese characters with onomatopoeic words in upper and smaller case, in a variety of typefaces, such as tum, TUM, bom, BOM, BOO, bomb, BOOM, toum, TUUM, BOUM and TOUMB to imitate the sounds of the army marching or bombs exploding. In the first two stanzas, the lower-case words are capitalised and getting bigger in the latter half, which suggests the battle is getting closer, more violent and bitter. In the third stanza, the words are scattered with ‘tomb’ and ‘TOMB’ interspersed between, which suggests the soldiers are wounded, defeated or killed. In the last stanza, the capitalised word ‘TOMB’ is

60  Chen Li

Figure 4.3   English Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Cosima Bruno, by courtesy of the translator.

repeated numerous times but the typeface becomes smaller and fades away, which suggests that the dead soldiers may ultimately be forgotten and become insignificant to the world. Compared with Piasecki’s version, it is more of a ‘transcreation,’ taking the original poem as the inspiration for a new creation, which adds new meanings. A further translation of ‘A War Symphony’ is Professor Yi-ping Wu (吳怡萍) from Taiwan and her student Ci-shu Shen (沈碁恕) (Figure 4.4). What is interesting is that Wu and Shen’s version consists not of words but of lines in different shapes to present the battlefield and the graveyard. Instead of translating the poem into words, they draw shapes to show us the picture of the war. The straight line similar to the letter ‘i’ is very much like a soldier wearing a helmet; the crooked line similar to ‘j’

Figure 4.4  Translation of Chen Li’s ‘A War Symphony’ by Yi-ping Wu (吳怡萍) and Ci-shu Shen (沈碁恕), by courtesy of the translators.

62  Chen Li implies a wounded or crippled soldier; the semi-circular bump or hunch in the last stanza suggests a corpse or of a tomb or grave. This ‘non-­ verbal’ translation of the poem appeals to the idea of concrete poetry as a universal medium, but it loses the aspect of musicality, which remains important, even to my visual poetry. I admit that I was not always aware of the importance of musicality to my concrete poems. When I composed the poem ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ (孤獨昆蟲學家的早餐桌巾; Figure 4.5) I collected all of the 347 Chinese characters with 虫 (meaning ‘insect’) as

Figure 4.5  ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ (孤獨昆蟲學家的早 餐桌巾) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   63 their radical and presented them as a ‘tablecloth’ with blank characters dispersed to give the poem its visual symmetry. Because it is organised around a single radical, ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ is more conceptual than ‘A War Symphony’. In her collected translations of my poems, Chang Fen-ling (2014) leaves the poem in its original form, translating only the title and adding an author’s note in English explaining how to ‘decode’ the poem. As the whole poem is ‘visually rhymed’ with the same radical, this ‘character tablecloth’ possesses its own, special ‘musical visuality.’ At first I thought of the musicality of this poem as purely visual, since even I did not know how to pronounce some of the more obscure characters; it was not until it was better known, and taught in schools, that I was asked how it should be read aloud by schoolchildren. I thought at first that it was unreadable in this way, until I realised that Google now has a function whereby if you copy the poem into the search bar, it will read the characters aloud, like gunshots. The polyphony of concrete poems often comes as a surprise, even to me! It was not until I was asked to read ‘A War Symphony’ aloud at the poetry festival in Rotterdam in 1999 that I realised that the final character 丘 (qiu, ‘tomb’) can evoke the sound of the wind blowing leaves over graves. The gathering together and piling up of Chinese characters with the same radical in ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ exemplifies what I call the ‘law of large numbers’, namely that beauty comes from plenty. I apply a similar strategy to two other concrete poems. In ‘A Prayer of Gears’ (齒輪經), 16 characters with the radical 齒 (‘tooth/ gear’) are used to evoke the theme of this poem that life is an endless process of striving, gnawing and compromise. In ‘Dada’ (達達), 52 characters with the radical 辶 (pronounced as chuo, meaning ‘walking/moving’) are presented to add comic elements to a poem that has erotic and sensuous implications. Many of my concrete poems take the shape of a square, a circle, a triangle or a pyramid, drawing on traditional Chinese pagoda poems (see Li Li, this volume). I also present them in many other poetic forms according to the messages I attempt to convey, such as shapes representing a butterfly, a vending machine and the Island of Taiwan (in ‘18 touches’ 十八摸) as well as irregular or unnameable shapes. Here, I present only a few examples. The poem, ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’ (消防隊長夢中的埃及風景照; Figure 4.6), recalls traditional Chinese pagoda poems; however, it is more abstract. The positioning of the Chinese character 火 ‘fire’ in successive rows changes and intensifies the meanings (炎 ‘inflammation’; 焱 ‘flames’; 燚 ‘enormous flames’). The poem represents the eruption of a pyramidal inferno.

64  Chen Li

Figure 4.6  ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’ (消防隊長夢中的埃及風景照) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

Another ‘abstract’ concrete poem ‘White’ (白; Figure 4.7) consists of two related characters: ‘white’ (白) and ‘day’ (日) plus a number of non-characters. The whole poem is a process of peeling off, or fading out, or declining: from characters to shapes to dashes, and then to dots, from solid lines to dotted lines, with shades of colour becoming paler. It is a process brightness becoming darkness, daytime becoming night-time, life becoming death. The space below the last dotted line represents the disappearance of the light, and finally the complete blankness which symbolises the deep of the night. Here lies the paradox: the deep of the night is not black, but white, since the paper on which the poem is written is white: after the night is over, the day is bound to reappear. In this way, I present the cycle of night and day, of dying and rebirth. Only after this poem was completed, the paintings of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), an American painter whom I like very much, came into my mind. The poem may also remind the viewer of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Homage to Malevich,’ a ‘translation’ of the Russian Suprematist’s famous painting, ‘Black Square’, into a concrete poem that also takes the form of a black square made up of the alternating words ‘black’ and ‘block’. Many of these connections are accidental or unconscious, and I only become aware of them after the process of composition is over, or they are pointed out to me by others.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   65

Figure 4.7  ‘ White’ (白) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

My volume of poetry Light/Slow (輕／慢, 2009) brings together another poetic form that plays upon the hieroglyphic nature of Chinese characters. It is part of the nature of the ideogram that several characters lie latent or hidden in one character. What I do is make those ‘hidden’ characters come on stage to play their roles. Professor Andrea Bachner has translated one of them, ‘Country’ (國 Figure 4.8), into English. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, Professor Bachner (2016, pp. 112–113) observes: In this poem Chen Li stages the ‘abbreviated history of a country’s decline’ as an exercise in graphic form. The Chinese character for

66  Chen Li

Figure 4.8  ‘Country’ by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author. English translation by courtesy of Andrea Bachner.

country, 國, is stripped of its power, one element, one stroke at a time, until nothing is left but a single dot without any conventional semantic meaning. That the elements of the Chinese character for country refer to weapons—spear (戈), arrow (弋), and dagger (匕)— transforms the second line and the beginning of the third line into an appositional phrase, rather than a mere series in which 國 loses more and more of its elements. The dot, the last remnant of the character 國, together with the commas that separate the different stages of decay, invoke an image of blood drops. This felicitous formal structure leads to the execution of the word country and, by extension, of the idea of nationhood, as if the graphic elements of this Chinese character determined its semantic meaning. The implication is that the idea of country – and perhaps, more specifically, the Chinese nationalism invoked by the character’s use in the terms 國家 for ‘nation’ and 中國 for ‘China’ – is bound to lead to violence and to self-destruction. The characters or radicals 或 (‘or’), 戈 (‘spear’), 弋 (‘arrow’), 匕 (‘dagger’), 乚 (‘hook’) and 丶 (‘dot’) are all component parts of the character 國 (‘country’). This poem can be seen as a variation of ‘A War Symphony’: the gradual process of a solid and stable country falling apart. The three lines are symmetrical in form: the first and the third lines consist of seven components; the second line consists of eight components (I follow this rule of symmetry in all of the 30 ‘character haiku’ that I write). A reader might argue that in poem the eighth character of the third line is missing. I would respond that it is not missing because the last entity is a blank, a component that exists by virtue of its absence, here implying the country’s complete destruction or non-existence. Some of my more recent haiku draw on obsolete Chinese characters. The poem 扂 ‘Dan’ plays with an obsolete character of unclear meaning. It is made up of two characters: 尸 (‘body’ or ‘dead body’) and 占 (‘possess’). When the first character, 尸, is combined with other characters, new meanings are formed, for example: 尸 (‘body’) + 比 (‘successive’) → break ‘successive’ wind, and so 屁 (‘fart’). A succession of re-combinations results in a fresh and vital, if scatological, poem.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   67 Similarly, ‘Love Poem’ (情詩) is made up of obsolete or rarely used Chinese characters and punctuation marks. The obscurity of the meaning of the characters helps reveal the theme of this poem: all words of love are meaningless or false; they are significant (or true) only to lovers falling in love. In the blind eyes of lovers, even meaningless words are loving and beautiful. Reading and translating Japanese haiku inspired me to write about contemporary life using similar poetic forms. The result of such experimentation is my book of three-line poems: Microcosmos: 200 Modern Haiku (小宇宙：現代俳句200首), whose title comes from Bartok’s Microcosmos, a musical composition containing 153 piano pieces. These ‘modern Chinese haiku’ also play with form and visualisation. This experimentation can be seen in two complementary haiku. Microcosmos II:48 can be seen as a ‘self-translation’ of Microcosmos II: 47 (­Figure 4.9). The Chinese punctuation mark ‘。’ (a period) can be taken as the visual representation of a lit or unlit light bulb, which interrupts the silence (……), ending with a pause (,).

Figure 4.9  From ‘Microcosmos’ (小宇宙) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

68  Chen Li Finally, I found myself reworking the kind of haiku that I read and translated in my youth. One day in 2008, I spent a whole night skimming through a famous collection of 300 Tang Poems on the internet which prompted me to write 12 poems which I called ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’. I devised the following formula for composing them: with the original classical poem visible on the page, I made some characters faded or faint in order to highlight the characters I selected. The highlighted characters, combined in sequence, formed a new poem. The result can be seen in Figure 4.10, a reworking of Li Po’s classic poem, ‘Still Night Thoughts.’ (In front of my bed: bright moonlight/I wonder if it is frost on the floor/Looking up, I see the bright moon/Dropping my head, I miss my home town.) In most of the Tang poems, I could find a ‘hidden’ message. However, I had a problem with the 12th poem. I had a good poem but failed to transform it with the rule I had set for myself. An idea struck me:

Figure 4.10  From ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author.

Writing and Translating Concrete Poetry   69 why not use an S-shaped proof-reader’s mark to change the order of the characters? In this way I exchanged 線 (‘line’) with 遊子 (‘wandering son’), transforming the traditional line of sewing thread into the modern thread of an internet conversation, and so twisting a classical Tang poem into a contemporary haiku. The original Tang poem speaks of a mother’s love for her son being represented by a closely woven coat that she sews for him. Her love is so great that nothing can repay it. Inside this poem I found a ‘hidden’ modern message, ‘Loving mother & wandering son’s online intensive talk’ (Figures 4.11 and 4.12), and so I brought the poem into the internet age, where their love is represented by a different kind of thread, namely, an intense online chat. (A loving mother’s hand and a line of thread made the coat for the wandering son’s back./Before he left she made intensive stitches fearing that he would be slow to return../What was the talk that the gratitude of the inch-tall grass is enough for all the sunshine of spring?) As this chapter has shown, my experiments with concrete poetry relate strongly to Chinese traditions, as well as to influences from other cultures, whether Japanese, European or American. As I mentioned at the outset, not all of my poetry experimental but all of it is shaped by an engagement with Chinese traditions. Looking back over my visual

Figure 4.11  ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li, by courtesy of the author (Chinese Version).

Figure 4.12  F  rom ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ (唐詩俳句) by Chen Li (English Version), by courtesy of the author.

70  Chen Li poetry, I am struck by the fact that many poems, like ‘A War Symphony’ take the shape of square blocks, like the poems of Seiichi Niikuni that I read in an American magazine, when I was studying in Taipei. Others, like ‘Country’, pick apart the components of a single Chinese character to release hidden meanings. Those poems reveal, perhaps, my childhood interest Chinese riddles that require you to guess a word by recombining Chinese characters. I have also been long fascinated by palindromes, by visual symmetry. These fascinations help me to do what the ancient Chinese classical poets were also doing, and that is to devise and then break a set of rules, or constraints, to make a line of poetry surprising and fresh. The classical poets were the avant-garde poets of their time. They had their rules, and now we have to make our own rules, drawing on our traditions and our own experiences in a fresh way, to make our poetry new.

Notes 1 The English translations of Chen Li’s poems in this chapter are by Chang Fen-ling and Chen Li, unless otherwise stated. The chapter is based in part on Chen Li’s contribution to a seminar on ‘Experimental Poetry Across Cultures’ at the University of Macau, in October 2016, and in part on an interview given to Ting Huang and Luka Cheung during the same event. An edited recording of this interview can be watched on YouTube, ‘An Interview with Chen Li: https://youtu.be/N-dn9XCG-j4 [Accessed 3May 2019]. 2 Available on Youtube, ‘Chen Li 陳黎: A War Symphony 戰爭交響曲’ at https://youtu.be/jZjj5y-7e9Q [Accessed 3 May 2019].

References Bachner, Andrea. “The Secrets of Language: Chen Li’s Sinographic Anagrams.” In Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner (eds.) The Oxford Book of Modern Chinese Literatures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 112–130. Chang, Fen-ling, tr. The Edge of the Island: Poems of Chen Li. Taipei: B ­ ookman Books, 2014. Lee, Tong King. Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015.

5 Exploring the Structures of Chance Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English Claus Clüver In 1952, three young São Paulo poets, Décio Pignatari (b. 1927), Haroldo de Campos (b. 1929) and his brother Augusto (b. 1931), privately published what was to be the first issue of a slim periodical intended to present the new kind of poetry they were ‘inventing’ and which they gave an enigmatic title, Noigandres, derived from one of Ezra Pound’s cantos. The second issue did not appear until February 1955 but contained work by Haroldo and Augusto composed in 1953.1 Augusto’s set of six multicoloured poems, poetamenos, was designed to translate Anton von Webern’s musical use of Klangfarbenmelodie (‘melody of timbres’) into a verbal equivalent, where the ‘instruments (phrase/word/syllable/ letter[s])’ were printed in six different colours, their ‘timbres’ (each to be read by a different voice), which ‘were defined by a graphic-phonetic or ‘ideogrammic’ theme.’2 The poetamenos poems were the first to which the poets assigned the label ideograma (‘ideogram,’ or Chinese written character), which they used for much of their subsequent work.3 But Décio’s 1955 visit to the ‘Hochschule für Gestaltung’ in Ulm, Germany, on his extended trip to Europe led to his encounter with Eugen Gomringer, the Swiss-Bolivian secretary of the academy’s rector, Max Bill.4 He discovered that Gomringer had been developing a new form of highly condensed verbi-visual poems that came close to their own exploration of a spatial syntax and which he called ‘konstellationen,’ in an act of homage to Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés – one of the principal models for aspects of poetic structure also used by the Noigandres poets (see Abi-Sâmara, this volume). Planning to publish a joint anthology, the Brazilians and Gomringer agreed, in an intercontinental act of baptism, to use the label ‘poesia concreta/ konkrete poesie/concrete poetry’ for this new kind of poetry. Noigandres no.  3, which contained new poems by Décio, Augusto and Haroldo as well as texts by Augusto’s younger brother-in-law, Ro­ naldo Azeredo (b. 1937), was labelled poesia concreta on its cover and was published in connection with the ‘I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta’ (São Paulo 1956 / Rio de Janeiro 1957), which exhibited concrete poster poems side by side with concrete paintings and sculptures. Consequently, the next issue of Noigandres (no. 4, 1958) was a portfolio

72  Claus Clüver containing three poster poems by each of the original São Paulo poets and by Ronaldo. It also contained a ‘poema-livro,’ LIFE, by Décio, as well as a booklet with the ‘plano-piloto para poesia concreta’ (‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’) which represented a condensed version of the theoretical and programmatic statements with which the Noigandres poets had accompanied their poetic experiments since 1954. Noigandres no.  5: do verso à poesia concreta (1962) (‘from verse to concrete poetry’), which contained the collected work of these four poets and also that of Augusto’s other brother-in-law, José Lino Grünewald (b. 1931), who had joined the group in 1958, 5 was meant to indicate the end of the collaborative effort of the Noigandres poets culminating in what they later considered the ‘heroic phase’ of Brazilian concrete poetry. They would henceforth proceed along separate paths, although in many instances still producing ideogramas that exhibited characteristic traits of the previous collective enterprise. These characteristics can be briefly summarised by understanding the Noigandres ideogram as a ‘verbivocovisual’ intermedial text operating with highly reduced verbal material (but operating usually with the entire word as its minimal semantic unit) and relying on carefully organised structures achieved by interrelating the verbal units according to a spatial syntax that also semanticises the white of the page. These structures can often be seen as resulting from exploring the possibilities inherent in the element of chance encountered in the verbal material selected; in fact, it appears that this element, usually with regard to spelling, but often also involving similarities of sound or visual appearance, was frequently a decisive factor in that selection. From the outset the three originators accompanied their poetic production with statements, at times lengthy, in which they developed their theories for the construction of a ‘new’ poetry based on what they considered to be the most forward-looking innovations in the work of masters of the previous generation, poets as well as composers and visual artists, some of whom had yet to find the recognition they have meanwhile achieved.6 And they also accompanied their critical analyses of their models’ texts with translations, some of which were ultimately published collectively, such as Augusto’s translations of e. e. cummings and the three poets’ version of selected cantos by Ezra Pound in 19607 and the two brothers’ version of selections from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1962.8 Their activity as translators led in turn to the publication of a number of essays reflecting on the task of the translator and the problems of translating poetry, especially the more challenging and unusual texts with which they were dealing. Haroldo’s first extended statement, a conference paper delivered in 1962, already formulated the essential thesis of what became known as his theory of ‘transcreation’ (transcriação). Starting from the premise that creative texts are ultimately impossible to

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  73 translate, he found that this opened up the possibility for a recreation of such texts, which will provide new, autonomous aesthetic information, but will result in an isomorphic relation between the two texts: they will be different in their language, but ‘as isomorphic bodies will crystalise themselves within the same system.’ The translation of creative texts will thus be ‘a parallel creation, autonomous but reciprocal.’9 Such a recreation ‘translates not just the meaning, it translates the sign itself, that is, its physicality, its very materiality (sound properties, visual imagery, in short all that constitutes […] the iconicity of the aesthetic sign).’10 Such an enterprise requires the most searching engagement with all aspects of the source text and thus becomes a critical as well as a creative undertaking. What this may entail in practice was illustrated by Augusto in his striking translation of what he considered e. e. cummings’s most accomplished poem (which has all the markings of a concrete poem), ‘l(a.’11 Original and translation are printed on the cover of A ­ ugusto’s e. e. cummings: 40 poem(a)s, published in 1986 (see Figure 5.1), where he chose a typeface for both texts that appeared to enhance the ‘leaf’ aspect of its semantic content and furthermore rendered it in two shades of green emphasising its two semantic elements.12 In an introductory essay preceding the two texts in the book, intradução de cummings, he offered a minute analysis of the original and a discussion of the choices he made for his ‘untranslation’ or ‘non-translation’ which to his mind failed to render many subtleties of the original but would help, by comparison, realise the perfection of cummings’s text ‘charged with iconicity.’13

Figure 5.1  Cover of e. e. cummings, 40 poem(a)s, translated by Augusto de Campos, 1986, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

74  Claus Clüver Iconicity and isomorphism are key terms that also dominate the Noigandres poets’ theory of concrete poetry. In a previous study I have explained and exemplified their concept of isomorphism and the three phases of its development.14 The interdependence of all elements of the poetic sign that Haroldo emphasised in his discussion of poetic transcreation marks most of the Noigandres ideograms of the ‘heroic phase’ (and of many of their post-concrete poems) and makes it often difficult, if not impossible, to render even ‘transcreations’ of these texts that would have an isomorphic relation to their original, especially since these ideograms rely, almost exclusively, on an element of chance (as does cummings’s ‘l(a’). In their ‘Pilot-Plan for Concrete Poetry’ of 1958 they refer to their work as a ‘chronomicrometering of chance.’15 In the ideograms that appear to be realisations of this programme, the selection and distribution of the words employed are determined by a precise schema that makes the way the text appears seem inevitable and at times even predictable, as in the following poem by Décio Pignatari, one of the three examples explored in my earlier study (Figure 5.2). The text derives entirely from the accident that in Spanish the words for ‘man’ (hombre), ‘hunger’ (hambre) and ‘female’ (hembra) are identical except for the vowels, and even in this respect the similarities are close: reading the words in the given sequence makes it appear as if hombre were changed into hambre by the linguistic law of ablaut and then transformed into hembra by a simple vowel switch. This is phonetically the most ‘logical’ and thus satisfactory sequence, but it places between two semantically corresponding terms, hombre and hembra, a word separated from both by a semantic gap that can only be filled by the reader’s imagination. A series of steps following a set of rules that can easily be retraced results in a structure in which hambre appears in a descending diagonal, while hembra is inevitably moved directly below ‘man.’ By means of a spatial syntax this achieves a semantic statement which, inasmuch as we still share the socio-cultural and aesthetic codes that were dominant in the 1950s, makes us regard Pignatari’s manipulation of his material as most satisfactory: we move from the phonetically most logical to the

Figure 5.2  Décio Pignatari, ‘hombre’ (1957), from Noigandres no. 4 (1958), by courtesy of the estate of Décio Pignatari.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  75 semantically most pleasing. The happy union of a heterosexual couple (if that is where our narrative leads) is likely to take precedence over aural pleasure, so that the third column may indeed appear as the text’s ‘solution.’ The semanticisation of space and of the location and ‘movement’ in space of verbal signs that have not been emptied of their semantic charge creates the isomorphic relationship postulated by the creators of the Brazilian concrete ideogram. It relies entirely on the accident found only in Spanish that these three written signs have these orthographic and semantic relationships. Any transcreation would have to operate with three similarly spelled words that would permit the creation of an identical structure resulting in a comparable semantic statement. Such an attempt has not been made, to my knowledge. Pignatari’s text itself appears to be entirely intelligible with a simple word gloss. It is again the accident that in Portuguese rua (‘street’) and sol (‘sun’), with its iconic ‘o,’ are each spelled with three letters that makes Ronaldo Azeredo’s ‘ruasol’ untranslatable.16 The word ‘sol’ appears at the end of the first line, on the far right, after ‘rua’ has been repeated three times. In each of the next three lines sol moves farther to the left, until in line 5 it has disappeared, leaving only an ‘s’ where sol appeared in line 1, which turns the final word into the plural visually represented by the succession of five lines of rua and is also a reminder of the sol that has now vanished from the scene/text. Another accidental feature is the fact that all letters except for the ‘l’ of sol have the same height, so that the ‘l’ becomes the marker to show the movement of the ‘sun’ through the ‘streets’ in each subsequent line. There is no Western language where the equivalents of these two words have the same number of letters – except perhaps Spanish, if one were to use via instead of calle. But this choice would introduce three dots above three ‘i’s’ into each line and thus violate the demand of a strict isomorphism. Moreover, a line of vias would create as little of a sense of a street as would a line of English ‘ways’ (which would work even less, along with ‘sun,’ because the ‘y’ of ‘way’ would not have the power to serve as a marker as does the ‘l’ in the original). Another text by Ronaldo, ‘OESTELESTE,’ published in 1958 in Noigandres no. 4, can be easily translated into English, because in both sets of words, oeste / leste and ‘West / East,’ the number of letters is the same; in Portuguese, these are identical except for the first (O and L plus ESTE);

Figure 5.3  Claus Clüver, translation of ‘OESTELESTE’ by Ronaldo Azeredo (1958).

76  Claus Clüver in English, they end in the same two (EA and WE plus ST). This permits the creation of an identical structure in both languages, except that the height is necessarily different: four lines rather than five lines of capital letters (essential for the visual effect). Again, copyright problems do not permit the reproduction of the original. But a literal translation (see F ­ igure 5.3) would also highlight a significant difference: ‘oesteleste’ (‘West-East’) is the order in which these two words are conventionally linked in Portuguese, whereas English ordinarily has ‘East-West,’ the order given in the translation above. The original itself does not seem to invite much contemplation about its semantic content except for the fact of the spelling of the two words (and perhaps their etymological base). But the translation also makes us aware of the qualities that make the original a satisfying concrete poem. Its five lines not only offer a more pleasing shape but also a more interesting link derived from the verbal material: ‘ELE’ works better than ‘TW.’ Gomringer insisted that concrete poems have the character of games, and that their structures provide the rules for playing the game. Clearly, this simple text makes us primarily explore its structure and ways to play the game of making it meaningful. It foregrounds its self-referentiality. One of the formally simplest and materially sparsest concrete ideograms is José Lino Grünewald’s ‘vai e vem’ (see Figure 5.4). It has also profound semiotic implications. Stefan Ferreira Clüver, who transposed these into a film bearing the very poem as its title, made these observations in ‘Notes’ accompanying his film: What intrigued me about the poem? How two simple, formal transformations of a commonplace generate some very complex

Figure 5.4  José Lino Grünewald, ‘vai e vem’ (1959), from Noigandres no.  5 (1962), p. 181.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  77 possibilities for meaning making. First, by violating the syntactic closure of the phrase vai e vem with a repetition of the ‘e’ at its end, a regular verbal pattern is created that can go on indefinitely: ABA becomes ABAB. Second, by giving this syntactic alteration a graphic statement that connects beginning and end, the way in which the now endlessly repeating phrase signifies is radically altered: it becomes an ideogram. This ideogram, however, is quite different from those in current writing systems that have become as conventional as letter-based ones. The poem generates its own rules for making meaning because, as an ideogram, it can only be understood as a graphic violation of the linear, cumulative signifying conventions of language.17 The poem’s structure can be just as well executed in an English version (Figure 5.5), which easily conveys its semantic conception while again inverting the sequence according to convention (the Portuguese says ‘goes and comes’). But Grünewald’s text makes its visual impact by the accidents of the spelling of the words involved: the three-letter verbs both begin with a ‘v’ and the conjunction consists in a single ‘e,’ which assumes a striking appearance as a square standing on its tip inside a square formed by the verbs. There is no gain involved in printing the English version shown above. A simple gloss is all any reader needs to deal with the original, which invites by its striking form to explore its implications. In the minimalist ‘oesteleste’ and ‘vai e vem’ there is not even a voice to guide our reading; we are faced with the materiality of the words and with their spatialised structure. ‘Hombre’ and ‘ruasol’ have at least

Figure 5.5  José Lino Grünewald’s ‘vai e vem’ in English translation.

78  Claus Clüver an implication of an impersonal narrative. But the earliest ideograms, Augusto’s poetamenos poems, certainly have both, once we have found out how to access them. Besides the introductory poem, they all have the young author celebrate his love for Lygia (his future wife). But this new kind of Erlebnislyrik (that is, lyric poetry communicating a personal experience) is presented in highly unconventional ways. All poems are inscribed in an unmarked square.18 Their multicoloured and at times multilingual material ranges from discursive phrases to syllables and single letters. The third, ‘lygia finge’ (‘lygia fingers’), is a remarkable example of Augusto’s application of the lessons learned from their major models. The square serves as an active space for the distribution of the verbal elements, as does the page-spread of Un coup des dés. As in Mallarmé and cummings, the choice of font and the careful and exact placement of the verbal material are extremely important, and that material can be split up into fragments, down to a single letter (with the final ‘l’ leading back to the ‘lygia’ of the beginning). The text employs several languages and portmanteau words as in Finnegans Wake. And all of it amounts to an ideogram fulfilling Pound’s emphasis on phanopeia/melopeia/logopeia while not only transposing Schoenberg’s and Webern’s concept of Klangfarbenmelodie but actually, in its initial lines, providing an intersemiotic imitation of the initial five bars of Webern’s Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone and Piano, op. 22 of 1930.19 Are these texts translatable? The French translator of Augusto’s poems, Jacques Donguy, demonstrated quite successfully that they are, even ‘lygia finge,’ which uses five colours and words or fragments from at least five languages. In Donguy’s bilingual edition, which places the original side by side with his translation, only six words have been replaced with their French equivalents (at least two others are alike in both French and Portuguese) without disturbing the structure. But this was possible because there was no French in the original. Doing the same by introducing English words would conflict with the very significant English fragments contained in the original. The most accessible and visually most expressive of these six poems, ‘eis os amantes’ (‘here are the lovers’; see Figure 5.6), was turned into English for Solt’s 1968 anthology by Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt in collaboration with Augusto (see Figure 5.7). Originally in blue and orange letters, it is printed in the anthology in white and orange letters against a blue background and its English translation in blue and white letters against an orange background. 20 Since he could not reproduce the original in colours in his Anthology, Emmett Williams imitated the effect by printing the orange parts in italics, preserving the original font. Here is a corrected version of his text: Version printed in Emmett Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n. p.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  79

Figure 5.6  Augusto de Campos, ‘eis os amantes’ (1953), from Noigandres no. 2 (1955), by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

This verbi-visual representation of the sexual intercourse of two lovers becomes immediately recognisable as such by the placement of verbal elements as if crossing the long line representing the climax as well as by the use of the two colours. A translation requires employing suitable verbal material in a structure endowing the two timbres with gendered identity and developing their interconnection. The orange (italic) wedge on top separates two words in blue placed at the far edge, and in the line below the wedge the words have not only moved much closer but also show an attachment of the two colours composing portmanteau words (irmã, ‘sister,’ with a masculine ending um, also denoting ‘one,’ on the left and gemeo, ‘twin,’ also suggesting outro ‘other’ as well as gemido ‘moan,’ on the right). Next, directly below these two words, we find cimaeu, ‘meabove’ and baixela ‘shebeneath,’ now clearly identifying orange as denoting the human protagonists without gender distinction. In the following line the two colours are firmly attached to each other, forming a single (portmanteau) word, with the orange still on the right but saying ambos (‘both’) and the blue containing ‘echo’ as well as ‘heart’ (coração, formed by part of eco and part of ambos).

80  Claus Clüver

Figure 5.7  Augusto de Campos, ‘here are the lovers,’ translated by Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt in collaboration with Augusto. After the coloured version in M. E. Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry: A World View, verso of frontispiece.

The English translation renders this as ‘shechome’ while the French, emphasising the heart, has ‘etcœrlesdeux.’21 The climax is represented by a spaced line going in the original from the left edge to the right; the English translation, which interestingly places ‘lovers’ and ‘kinless’ further out, is very close to the original line and possibly even enriches it. The Portuguese ends in uno(s)empre, where the bracketed character turns ‘one’ into a momentary plural while cutting the ‘s’ from sempre, ‘always.’ The English does pretty much the same but turns ‘ever’ into ‘sever.’ The moment of fertilisation still intertwines the two colours; the ‘t’ in the centre of that line is in the shape of a cross, which may be read as a reminder of the final destiny of all created life. In the following line the bodies are again separated, and the translation shows more clearly that the ‘she’ is now on the left and the ‘he’ (corresponding to ‘I’) on the right (but without any indication of ‘above’ or ‘below’), reinforcing the crossover effect. It all ends with a line in the centre, corresponding to the line

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  81 directly above it: ‘inhumanother.’ The original emphasises ‘one in another,’ with ‘human’ implied. Donguy wrote ‘inhymenautre,’ extracting still another implication from the Portuguese. The structural demands of Décio Pignatari’s ‘um movimento’ (see ­Figure 5.8, left) are less complicated but possibly more challenging. The two parts of the poem offer two views of the same celestial image: the appearance of a battlefield ‘beyond the clouds,’ with the first part emphasising the movement in the sky that produces it, and the second, its mirage-like and momentary nature, the final momento mirroring the opening movimento. Structurally, the poem’s 23 lines are held together by a vertical axis of ‘m’s (somewhat similar to Arno Holz’s form of the Mittelachsengedicht). An isomorphic effect is achieved by its longest horizontal, horizonte, reaching to the right, which is then qualified by two four-letter adjectives, puro and vivo, extending to the left and placed one below the other, the first creating a ‘pure horizon,’ the last a ‘vivid moment.’

Figure 5.8  Décio Pignatari, ‘um movimento,’ from Noigandres no.  3 (1956), and its translation by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos and the estate of Décio Pignatari.

82  Claus Clüver Translations into Romance languages as well as English can start almost literally and obtain at least two ‘m’s; a German version is hard to imagine. Augusto’s translation into English achieved a parallel in the use of the same number of ‘m’s (in as many lines) as the original (see Figure 5.8, right). 22 English also allowed him to imitate the effect that the opening (um/movi/mento; ‘a movement’) is echoed in the end (num/mo/mento; ‘in a moment’). The translation’s first ten lines come close to the meaning and effect of the original’s first eleven. Qualifying a plural ‘clouds’ with an unexpected ‘dim’ adds another ‘m,’ and using ‘field of combat’ instead of ‘battlefield’ not only adds one more but also reinforces the alliteration found in the original (compondo / campo / combate); in fact, the effect is further strengthened by ‘far from…field’ (and ‘forming’ and ‘firmament’ farther down). The poem’s second part starts with a portmanteau word, mira/gem/ira, which emphasises the rage (ira) contained in the word. The translation achieves an identical effect, neatly spacing ‘mi rage.’ But it adds in a separate line ‘mirror,’ not contained in the verbal semantics of the original but, beginning with the same three letters as ‘mirage,’ suggesting the echoing effect of the opening and final lines. And it provides the missing ‘m’ and the extra line. Then the translation gains three ‘m’s by substituting ‘a limpid / firm/ament’ for horizonte puro, a mentally less striking image than the isomorphic effect of the original horizonte puro. But ‘limpid’ and ‘lively,’ standing in for puro and vivo, are linked by alliteration. English syntax does not permit placing ‘lively’ last, which is a significant feature of the original. 23 Augusto would probably also consider this an ‘untranslation’ failing to convey some of the subtleties of the original, but it certainly stands in a near perfect isomorphic relation to Décio’s poem. In contrast, Augusto’s own poem ‘tensão,’ published like ‘um movimento’ in Noigandres no. 3, is such a perfect example of an isomorphic text exploiting the visual, aural and semantic qualities offered by the accidents of Portuguese spelling that it seems impossible to create a similar text in any other language (see Figure 5.9). Seven couplets of three-letter units are placed in a structure that permits meaningful readings in various directions. Three of the couplets begin with a ‘c,’ three with a ‘t,’ one with an ‘s’ – and an ‘s’ opens the second line of every couplet on the diagonal. All but one of the three-letter units end with a nasal ‘m’ (the same sound as in são); it would take too much space to enumerate all the rhymes or near-rhymes that pervade the text. 24 The couplets are either composed of two three-letter words or consist in a split six-letter word. There exists a ‘tension’ between ‘with sound’ on top and ‘without sound’ at the bottom and between ‘they sing’ (top) and ‘they fall’ (bottom), and the two statements spelled out in the top and the bottom lines ‘also contain tension’ (middle line). Again, this text is highly self-referential in all its aspects.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  83

Figure 5.9  Augusto de Campos, ‘tensão,’ from Noigandres no.  3 (1956), by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

Figure 5.10  Haroldo de Campos, ‘branco,’ from Noigandres no. 4 (1958), by courtesy of Ivan de Campos.

Any transcreation of’ ‘tensão’ using comparable verbal material would have to satisfy the formal expectations as much as any semantic concerns. The translation provided by Donguy in his bilingual French edition does not really do either; but these shortcomings may nevertheless permit the French reader to perceive the perfections of the original printed by its side better than any simple prose gloss. 25 It would seem that a gloss might be the best one can do, however, with an equally perfect and intriguing poem by Haroldo de Campos, ‘branco’ (see Figure 5.10): branco = white; vermelho = red; estanco = I stanch, I stop; espelho = (I) mirror. The poem can be read as entirely self-­reflexive or as referring to an object in the extra-textual world that it would ­‘mirror’ – for example, a painting by Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian which shows black and red shapes against a white background (cf. Chen Li’s comments on his poem ‘White’ 白 in this volume). 26 That interpretation would consider it to be an intersemiotic transposition.

84  Claus Clüver An English translation, or even a transcreation, would be expected to include a verb that rhymes with ‘white’ and has a similar effect as ‘stanch’ or ‘stop,’ and another verb that rhymes with ‘red’ and says something similar to ‘I mirror.’ It would probably not be a flaw if the rhyme had the personal pronoun ‘I,’ although this should be understood as referring to the text itself: an intransitive ‘I stop.’ Since this text can be read horizontally as well as vertically and diagonally, the mirroring function of espelho should be perceived as also referring to its placement between the repeated estanco. Readers who are not familiar with Portuguese will be perfectly well served by the gloss provided above, which will permit them to explore the semantic aspects of the text, realising that the visual structure opens up an increasingly large white space between the heavy black letters saying ‘white’ (an effect that would not have its equivalent in a painting). Besides this semanticisation of the blank space the poem achieves a striking effect from its sound qualities – a quality not communicable by a gloss. It might be hard to imagine that any transcreation into English could also achieve that effect. But that effect has indeed been achieved. In his Anthology of Concrete Poetry Emmett Williams included the original ‘branco’ and also a gloss for readers of English. And then he added an English version by Edwin Morgan, in the shape of the original, that rhymes ‘white’ with ‘midnight’ and ‘red’ with ‘mirrored,’ an eye rhyme. The first choice is unexpected; but besides rhyming with ‘white,’ coming after ‘red’ it also brings to mind a colour association: black, the colour literally shown in the bold letters. But it does not support any reading of the poem as an ekphrastic text.27 Décio Pignatari’s popular poem ‘beba coca cola’ (see Figure 5.11, top) is an anti-advertisement based on reading the Portuguese version of the slogan ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ as if the brand name were in Portuguese, where coca means ‘cocaine’ and cola ‘glue.’ The text proceeds via several inversions, exploiting the accident that these four-letter words have exchangeable vowels: beba can be turned into babe (‘drool’) and ‘coca’ into caco (‘shard, piece of trash’). In subsequent lines the text alternates beba and babe in a column on the left while first isolating cola and coca as items of consumption and then offering another inversion, cola caco, which in lines 5 and 6 leads to moving caco above cola to the left, completing the vertical column of four-letter words – to conclude in cloaca (‘cesspool’) in a final line on the right, which is polemically a nice touch but does not arise out of the structural strategy employed so far, although it contains all of the letters of the brand name. In Solt’s anthology Décio’s text is printed in white letters in a red square, thus adding the conventional colours (but retaining the concrete font). 28 And below, in an inversion of colours, it offers the same structure but in an English translation created by Solt and Maria José de Queiroz (see Figure 5.11, bottom). It offers on the left a column of four five-letter words, ‘drink’ and ‘drool’ in alternation, but besides the

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  85

Figure 5.11  Décio Pignatari, ‘beba coca cola,’ and its translation by Mary Ellen Solt and Maria José de Queiroz, from Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry, p. 108.  Poem originally published in Noigandres no. 4 (1958).

alliteration there is no connection (except a vague semantic one) between the two verbs. And ‘glue’ in line two has as little to do with ‘cola’ as does ‘shard’ with ‘coca,’ except that these are the English translations of the Portuguese nouns whose places they occupy. (Their brevity allows them to fill these places.) The same is true of ‘cesspool’ – there is no inherent logic for its appearance here, and not the slightest indication that it is an inversion of the brand name. (But the word rhymes with ‘drool’ and is thus formally connected to the preceding lines). By itself, the English text makes no sense as a poem. Why did Solt, who was certainly fully aware of the structural as well as the semantic qualities of the original, decide to offer a translation imitating its form, instead of offering a gloss in the notes at the end of the volume, as she did in other instances? It is likely that she felt that providing readers with this juxtaposition invites them to understand Décio’s text in all its dimensions exactly by making the verbal semantics available while highlighting the structural deficiencies

86  Claus Clüver of the English text. As a literal translation that echoes only some of the formal devices of the original it serves the critical function emphasised in Haroldo’s early essay. The several published translations of Haroldo’s ‘nascemorre’ (see ­Figure 5.12) may not even achieve that function, because they appear to have missed its delicate isomorphic structure. The poem has been habitually spoiled even in reproductions of the original, which may explain why translations are so inadequate. The poem is a visual enactment of the cycle of life and death in its literal and allegorical sense, built on the phrase se / nasce / morre (‘if / it is born / it dies’). It depends entirely on the careful manipulation of its visual appearance and on the accident that the two most important verbal units, se and re, happen to appear at the end of the two key words – at least as sounds: nasce and morre. The text is constructed as a series of four triangles turning over two visually marked vertical axes and two implied horizontal ones. The first triangle is the result of the dissatisfaction with the irregular shape formed by a superimposed se / nasce / morre, which becomes visually more satisfactory by adding another nasce, and visual and semantic completions are achieved in a triangle ending in morre. That final re suggests a rebirth of the phrase as another triangle. With its re placed directly below the final syllable of the first triangle it looks like its mirror image turned to the right and upside-down and is composed of the phrase renasce remorre (literally, ‘is reborn, dies again’). Following the inverted pattern of the first, it necessarily ends in re. That re reappears in the next line on the left exactly below the vertical line of ce re re at the end of the first block of the first triangle, and that sequence is continued as re ce ce re in a new triangle which, as an upside-down shape extending to the left, mirrors the preceding triangle and is composed of the

Figure 5.12a  Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre’ (1958), from Noigandres no. 5 (1962), p. 77, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  87 opposite verbs, desnasce desmorre, which look like neologisms (‘unlives, undies’), but at least denatus (‘deceased’) is found on tombstones in older monastic cemeteries. The only other possible version of the triangle, an upside-down mirror image of the first, is placed in the next line without a space and running the original words together as if to speed up the process. It ends necessarily in se, the final sound of nasce and simultaneously the se at the top of the poem. The cycle is ready to begin anew, and it can only assume the four shapes into which the text has formed itself. That form has not been understood even by readers of the original. A major misunderstanding involves the connection of the two lower triangles to the ones on top. During a series of events honouring the poet at no less than the Centro Literário Haroldo de Campos in São Paulo some years ago, I saw the poem decorating a wall, but with the lower part moved to sit much farther to the right. That procedure also marks the poem’s translation into English printed in the Solt anthology on the verso of the page that reproduces the Portuguese text – but with a remarkable error in the latter (Figure 5.12b). The failure to align the two re’s is a clear indication that this pivotal feature of the text was not understood. 29 It is therefore no surprise that the translation by Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt not only shows the lower part farther removed from the top but also aligned with it on the left, a decision not justified by any internal formal relationship (see Figure 5.13).30

Figure 5.12b  Version of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre’, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos.

Figure 5.13  Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt, translation of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre,’ from Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry, p. 104.

88  Claus Clüver In this translation, the structure is made awkward from the outset by the use of the passive ‘to be born’ versus the active ‘to die,’ and by the use of infinitives where the original has conjugated verb forms. Their subject could be masculine, feminine or neutral, while the translator into English would have to make a choice. If the text is taken to be largely self-­ reflexive, ‘if / it is born / it dies’ would be most persuasive. The translators aimed in the following to compensate the uneven rhythms of the opening phrase by creating parallel three-word phrases; they also avoided the use of any neologism in the second and third triangles. They opposed ‘to be reborn’ with ‘to die again.’ Thus, ‘again’ necessarily becomes the link to the third triangle, but it is not visually linked to any ‘again’ above it, nor does it reappear in what is to come. The proper effect would be achieved if ‘not to be born’ in the third triangle were aligned on the right with ‘to be reborn’ above. ‘Not to be born’ is perfectly balanced by ‘not to be dead,’ but that phrase is unique here and does not equal ‘not to die’ in the fourth triangle. This is an altogether flawed translation. It does not even help as a critical tool to understand the finer points of the original. A translation into English that comes close to following the structure of the original might look like Figure 5.14 (below). Here, ‘it lives’ justifiably takes the place of ‘it is born.’ The key word becomes ‘it,’ close in appearance to ‘if’ and the second word of the basic phrase – a pronoun only implied in the original but here forming both vertical and diagonal connections. The connections by means of ‘it’ are not as elegant as the use of re in the original but they work, and the final ‘it’ is a visually and aurally satisfactory link to the opening. ‘Again’ in the second triangle stretches it unduly; one might think of using ‘relive’ and ‘redie,’ but ‘relive’ has very different connotations from renascer, and re would not have a structural function here.

Figure 5.14  Claus Clüver, translation of Haroldo de Campos, ‘nascemorre,’ unpublished.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  89 Some of the most creative translations of Haroldo’s poems have been produced by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, as exemplified elsewhere in this volume (e.g., Huang). The Solt anthology contains his version of Haroldo’s ALEA I – VARIAÇÕES SEMÂNTICAS (uma epicomédia de bôlso), along with the original, both published in volume 5 of the periodical Invenção which the Noigandres poets had begun publishing in 1962.31 It has recently been reproduced as it appeared in Invenção in Jamie Hilder’s Designed Words for a Designed World (2016, pp. 54–55). The second part of Alea I is a permutational text developing lines of five letters, each two of them containing the letters that in the end are resolved as ‘MUNDO / LIVRE’ (‘free world’). Below are the first four and the last six of the total of twenty-six lines. Morgan had to accommodate a four-letter and a five-letter unit, and therefore decided to offer the text in thirteen lines formed by versions of ‘FREEWORLD’; see below lines 1–4 of both texts and lines 21–26 of the original and 10–13 of the translation (see Figure 5.15 below). Each of Morgan’s lines is a near-intelligible text, although one line does not feed into the next; but they are more intriguing than Haroldo’s, at least for the non-native. In a note next to his aleatoric text Haroldo invited the ‘reader-operator’ to continue producing other variations ‘within the given semantic parameter.’ In correspondence, while working on his book, Hilger reminded me of the earlier publication of Alea in a separate small booklet as an author’s edition of 1964, which was reproduced as such, in reduced images, in Concreta ‘56: a raiz da forma, the large catalogue of the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the ‘I Exposicão Nacional de Arte Concreta.’32 Here, the text ends in ‘MINDO LUVRE’ – inviting the reader to construct, inevitably, ‘MUNDO LIVRE’ as the next variation, but formally suggesting a continuation of the process, implying that this phase/phrase is not

Figure 5.15   From Haroldo de Campos’s ALEA I – VARIAÇÕES SEMÂNTICAS (uma epicomédia de bôlso) and its English translation by Edwin Morgan, by courtesy of Ivan de Campos and the Edwin Morgan Trust.

90  Claus Clüver necessarily final. But even though Morgan also translated Haroldo’s note, the last line of his version looks very final. Once it was to be published along with the original, Haroldo obviously decided to provide the ‘closing’ couplet for his text as well. To my knowledge, there does not exist a separate volume with English translations of Noigandres ideograms, nor of the poetry of any one of the poets, like the individual anthologies of French translations of Augusto’s and Haroldo’s poems by Jaques Donguy and Inês Oseki-Déprés, respectively, and the Spanish translation of Augusto’s poems by Gonzalo Aguiar. This may be in part because it is easier to find verbal equivalents to Portuguese in other Romance languages than in English. But there is also no collective French or Spanish translation of the ideograms – which would have to equal the second part of Noigandres no. 5, which has never been republished. The reasons for this situation are complex, and have to do with the production and critical reception of concrete poetry in different countries over the years, with the accessibility of the texts, and the lack of familiarity with Brazilian culture and its language. It also depends on the good fortune of having a skilled translator like Edwin Morgan, a poet in his own right, become interested in these Brazilian texts. But as our sampling of available translations has shown, there are specific difficulties involved in translating or transcreating the kind of ideogram created by the Noigandres poets (as well as several similar poems in other languages included in the Bann, Solt or Williams anthologies). The challenge is considerable. In the eyes of the Noigandres poets, accomplished translators themselves, a transcreation with a similar effect as the original should be, in their terminology, isomorphic to the original (see further, Jackson’s and Homem de Mello’s contributions to this volume). The more reduced the verbal material is, the more it relies on its accidents and on its precise visual placement on the page, the greater will be the difficulty of finding material in the target language that would permit the creation of such an isomorphic relation. The difficulty is increased by the absence of an extra-textual voice and, in most instances, of a message to be communicated. But these very qualities also indicate the possibility to enable readers to gain access to the original with the aid of a simple gloss and to explore the ways in which the original text functions – if that is the chief interest. A convincing translation, however, offers its own rewards; it usually also serves the critical function indicated by Augusto’s text about ‘untranslating’ cummings. That function may possibly also be served by such a flawed translation as the one employing the structure of Décio’s coca cola with unsuitable verbal material which nevertheless conveys the semantic meaning of the original. But it is rare to encounter such perfection as shown in Augusto’s transcreation of the cummings poem into Portuguese. 33

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  91

Notes 1 The edition of 100 copies was delayed because of the difficulty and expense of printing multicoloured texts. 2 ‘instrumentos: frase/palavra/silaba/letra(s), cujos timbres se definam p/um tema gráfico-fonético ou ‘ideogrâmico.’ Introduction to poetamenos, reprinted in A. de Campos, D. Pignatari, and H. de Campos, Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 29. All prose translations are mine. 3 The first explanation for their use of ‘ideograma’ was provided by Augusto in 1955 in two essays combined in 1956 into ‘pontos-periferia-poesia concreta,’ reprinted in Teoria, pp. 31–42. They derived the label from an essay by Guillaume Apollinaire and from Ezra Pound’s exploration of the Chinese ideogram, based on Ernest Fenollosa’s study. In 1977 Haroldo de Campos united translations of the Fenollosa-Pound essay and of texts by Sergei Eisenstein, Chang Tung-Sun, Yu-Kung Chu, and S. I. Hayakawa in a volume entitled Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem, which is still in print. For a discussion of the Brazilians’ understanding of Pound’s use of ‘ideogram’ see my essay ‘From Imagism to Concrete Poetry,’ pp. 123–124. 4 Max Bill, the creator of what he called ‘konkrete kunst,’ was well known to the young Brazilians: he had spent time in Brazil in the early fifties, where he received the grand international prize for sculpture at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951. The artists of the Grupo Ruptura, which was formed in 1952 and with some of whom the Noigandres poets got in touch that year, were much indebted to Bill’s ideas. Pignatari came to visit a few Brazilian artists who had begun to study at Ulm with Bill. 5 They published Grünewald’s collection of poems, Um e Dois (cover by Décio Pignatari), the second part of which features his concrete poems. 6 A selection of these statements was first published in 1965 as Teoria da Poesia Concreta: Textos Críticos e Manifestos (with three subsequent revised and enlarged editions, the latest in 2006). 7 A. de Campos, trans., e. e. cummings: 10 poemas (1960, constantly enlarged in three subsequent editions), and A. de Campos, D. Pignatari, and H. de Campos, trans., Ezra Pound: Cantares (1960). 8 A. de Campos and H. de Campos, trans., Panaroma de Finnegans Wake (1962, 4th revised and enlarged edition in 2001); cover by Décio Pignatari. The three poets’ translations of poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, including a version of Un coup de dés, did not appear until 1975 (Mallarmé, 3rd ed. 1991). 9 ‘Admitida a tese da impossibilidade em princípio da tradução de textos criativos, parece-nos que esta engendra o corolário da possibilidade, também em principio, da recriação desses textos. Teremos, como quer Max Bense, em outra língua, uma outra informação estética, autónoma, mas ambas estarão ligadas entre si por uma relação de isomorfia: serão diferentes enquanto linguagem, mas como os corpos isomorfos, cristalizar-se-ão dentro de um mesmo sistema.’ H. de Campos, ‘Da tradução como criação e como crítica,’ 1962/1963. Reprinted in H. de Campos, Transcriação, p. 4. 10 ‘Então, para nós, tradução de textos criativos será sempre recriação, ou criação paralela, autônoma porém recíproca. Quanto mais inçado de dificuldades esse texto, mais recriável, mais sedutor enquanto possibilidade aberta de recriação. Numa tradução dessa natureza, não se traduz apenas o significado, traduz-se o próprio signo, ou seja, sua fisicalidade, sua materialidade mesma (propriedades sonoras, de imagética visual, enfim tudo aquilo que forma, segundo Charles Morris, a iconicidade do signo estético, entendido por signo icônico aquele “que é de certa maneira similar àquilo que ele denota.” O significado, o parâmetro semântico, sera apenas e tão somente a

92  Claus Clüver

11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 0 2

21 22

23

baliza demarcatória do lugar da empresa recriadora. Está-se, pois, no avesso da chamada tradução literal.’ H. de Campos, ‘Da tradução,’ p. 5. From e. e. cummings, 95 Poems (1958), reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 673. This transmutation of an essential element, which surely would not have been accepted by cummings, continues the practice of the designers of Mary Ellen Solt’s anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1970), who rendered certain poems in the original font in white against a coloured field, such as Augusto’s terremoto (p. 97), which looks like a constellation against a dark blue sky, enhancing the dominant ‘star’ motif of the poem. On the designer’s use of colour to indicate the translation of Augusto’s ‘eis os amantes’ see note 19 below. A. de Campos, ‘intradução de cummings,’ p. 26. See C. Clüver, ‘Iconicidade e isomorfismo em poemas concretos brasileiros’ (2006). German version: ‘Ikonizität und Isomorphismus in brasilianischen konkreten Gedichten’ (2008). It has remained unpublished in English. ‘Cronomicrometragem do acaso.’ A. de Campos, D. Pignatari, H. de Campos, ‘plano-piloto para poesia concreta’ (1958), in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, p. 217. For copyright reasons the poem cannot be reproduced here. It was published in Noigandres no. 4 (1958). There are versions on the internet, e.g. http://www.antoniomiranda.com.br/poesia_visual/ronaldo_azeredo.html ­[Accessed 16 July 2019]. S. F. Clüver, ‘Viewing Notes’ for his film vai e vem, 1998, p. 1. In 1973 Augusto published poetamenos separately in an edition of 25 x 25 cm cardboard squares for each text, contained in a cardboard folder (edition of 500 copies). See C. Clüver, ‘Klangfarbenmelodie in Polychromatic Poems.’ It was featured on the front cover of the anthology’s publication as nos. 3/4 of Artes Hispánicas / Hispanic Arts (1968), with the translation on its verso. In its book publication as Concrete Poetry: A World View (1970), original and translation appeared on recto and verso of the inside frontispiece. For some reason the colour indications are reversed: the verbal elements that are blue in the original appear in orange in the Solt version against the blue background, while what is blue in the translation against the orange background is orange in the original. That change affects the use of italics in my citations. A. de Campos, poètemoins, trans. J. Donguy, p. 39. Augusto composed his translation after Pignatari’s death in late 2012. In a note attached to its publication in ZUNÁI - Revista de poesia & debates he wrote that he ‘had the idea of translating the poem “um movimento” into several languages in order to make him better known abroad.’ He also recounted the history of the poem, which was actually a refashioning of a phrase coined by Haroldo de Campos. Augusto’s translation is based on the text as published in Noigandres no. 3. In this form it was reprinted in the 1977 and 1986 collections of Pignatari’s poetry. In the version of ‘um movimento’ published in D. Pignatari, Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–2000 (2004, p. 100), all vertical structural relations except for the column of ‘m’s have been disregarded. The importance of that final ‘vivo’ is strikingly expressed in the ending of the musical transposition of Décio’s poem by Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, where an a-capella choir has the male voices move below a certain pitch that serves as the equivalent of the central column of ‘m’s’ and the female voices above that pitch when they carry the text; all singing stops after ‘momento,’ and all voices whisper ‘vivo.’ I own a copy of the score of Oliveira’s um movimento, which is still unpublished; a recording by the Santos group Madrigal Ars

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  93

24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31

32 33

Viva, with Klaus-Dieter Wolff conducting, is found on the cassette Balalaica, Ed. Nomuque, 1979. A more detailed analysis of all these relationships is found in Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira, p. 197. See A. de Campos, poètemoins, trans. J. Donguy, pp. 66–67. In his bilingual Spanish edition, A. de Campos, poemas, Aguilar printed only the original text (p. 48) and provided a ‘traduccion literal’ in the ‘Notas,’ p. 92. One might think of Malevich’s Black Square and Red Square of 1915. In a much earlier study I related the poem to Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Black of 1936. Haroldo commented in a letter dated 8 June 1978: ‘You are right in equating my poem with Mondrian: poems of that phase were written under the direct instigation of the reduced structures of Mondrian and Malevich and the music of Webern – an affinity of structures … not properly (or much more than) on the thematic-descriptive level.’ See C. Clüver, ‘Painting Into Poetry,’ esp. pp. 31–32 and 34. On the internet I came across a German transcreation (without an indication of source or translator) where the sound quality was the dominant concern: all words were monosyllables, and ‘weiss’ was rhymed with ‘heiss,’ while ‘rot’ found a vaguely assonantal pairing with ‘stopp’ as a translation of ‘estanco.’ As in Morgan’s version, any suggestion of an ekphrastic quality was thus eliminated. – Inês Oseki-Dépré did not include a version of ‘branco’ in her Anthologie. The São Paulo poet Régis Bonvicino took his clue from walls with red tiles seen in some bars at the time where each tile featured the advertising slogan in the conventional Coca-Cola font above the curved design: he created a vertical strip beginning with a copy of that tile and placed each line of Décio’s poem in a red ‘tile’ using the same font (with the design) for the parts derived from the brand name. See R. Bonvicino, totem para décio pignatari (1979), 78.5x11cm. I have placed the poem and this particular error in a much broader context in my essay ‘Concrete Poetry: Critical Perspectives from the 90s’ in K. D. Jackson et al., eds., Experimental – Visual – Concrete (1996). Inês Oseski-Dépré’s translation into French, in other respects interesting, also shows the lower triangles not only moved too far to the right but several lines lower than the original (see H. de Campos, Une Anthologie, p. 47). H. de Campos, ‘ALEA I – VARIAÇÕES SEMÂNTICAS,’ Invencão no.  5 (December 1965–January 1966): p. 33; translation by E. Morgan p. 34. Reprinted in Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 105, translation by Morgan p. 106. The two texts are not included in Haroldo’s Xadrez de Estrelas: Percurso Textual 1949–1974 or any later edition of his work, except that in the ‘Critical Appendix’ to Haroldo’s Signantia: Quasi Coelum the critic Severo Sarduy quotes the second, here under discussion, in his essay ‘Rumo à concretude,’ p. 122. H. de Campos, Alea – variações semânticas, 1962–63, reproduced in Concreta ‘56, pp. 178–179. E-mail from Jamie Hilder to C. Clüver, August 15, 2014. Augusto has also translated several later poems of his own into English, with the help of Charles Perrone. See A. de Campos, expoems, p.o.w.7, 2012.

References Aguilar, Gonzalo. Poesia Concreta Brasileira: As Vanguardas na Encruzilhada Modernista. Translated by Regina Aída Crespo, Rodolfo Mata, Gênese Andrade. EdUSP, 2005.

94  Claus Clüver Azeredo, Ronaldo. “oesteleste.” Noigandres no. 4, 1958. Reprinted in Noigandres no. 5, p. 141. Azeredo, Ronaldo. “ruasol.” Noigandres no.  4, 1958. Reprinted in Noigandres no. 5, p. 141. Also in M. E. Solt (ed.) Concrete Poetry, p. 116. Also in E. ­Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. Bann, Stephen (ed.) Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology. London Magazines Edition, 1967. Bonvicino, Regis totem para décio pignatari. Edições Groovie, 1979. Paper strip, 78.5x11cm. Campos, Augusto de. expoems. Translated by Augusto de Campos and Charles A. Perrone. p.o.w.7. unit4art, 2012. Foldout with 8 pages. Campos, Augusto de. “intradução de cummings.” In Augusto de Campos, trans. e. e. cummings: 40 poem(a)s. pp. 25–31. Campos, Augusto de. “lygia finge” and “eis os amantes.” Noigandres 2 (1955): n.p. Reprinted in A. de Campos. VIVAVAIA, pp. 71, 75. “lygia finge” also reprinted in K. D. Jackson et al. (eds.) Experimental – Visual – Concrete, p. 15. Campos, Augusto de. Poemas. Antologia bilingüe. Selección, traducción y estudio crítico: Gonzalo M. Aguilar. Serie del Sinsonte. Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1994. Campos, Augusto de. poetamenos. Noigandres no. 2 (1955): n.p. Reprinted in: A. de Campos, VIVAVAIA, pp. 63–77. Campos, Augusto de. poetamenos. Edições Invenção, 1973. Folder with loose cardboard inserts, 25x25 cm. Campos, Augusto de. Poètemoins: anthologie. Preface and translation Jacques Donguy. Bilingual edition. Éditions Al Dante, 2011. Campos, Augusto de. “tensão.” Noigandres no.  3 (1956): n.p. Reprinted in: A. de Campos, VIVAVAIA, p. 95. Also in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. Campos, Augusto de. VIVAVAIA: Poesia 1949–1979, 1979. 5th ed., revised. Ateliê Editorial, 2014. Campos, Augusto de, trans. e. e. cummings: 10 poemas. Bi-lingual edition. Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Serviço de Documentação, 1960. Campos, Augusto de, trans. e. e. cummings: 40 poem(a)s. Editora Brasiliense, 1986. Campos, Augusto de, trans. “a movement,” by Décio Pignatari. ZUNÁI  – Revista de poesia & debates. Ano 9, ed.  26 (March 2013). http://www.­ revistazunai.com/materias_especiais/decio_pignatari/poematraduzido.htm. Campos, A. de, and H. de Campos, trans. Panaroma de Finnegans Wake. Bilingual edition. Coleção Ensaio, 23. Conselho Estadual de Cultura, Comissão de Literatura, 1962. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos. Teoria da Poesia Concreta: Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950–1960. 1965. 4th ed., rev. by Geraldo Gérson de Souza and Gênese Andrade. Ateliê Editorial, 2006. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, trans. Ezra Pound: Cantares. Bilingual edition. Coleção Letras e Artes, 8. Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Serviço de Documentação, 1960. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, trans. Mallarmé. 1975. 3rd ed. Editora Perspectiva, 1991.

Transcreating Noigandres ideogramas into English  95 Campos, Haroldo de. Alea – variações semânticas, 1962–63. Edições Noigandres (author’s edition), 1964. Reproduced in Concreta ‘56: A Raiz da Forma, pp. 178–179. Campos, Haroldo de. “ALEA I – VARIAÇÕES SEMÂNTICAS (uma epicomédia de bôlso).” Invencão 5 (December 1965–January 1966): p. 33; translation by Edwin Morgan p. 34. Campos, Haroldo de. Une Anthologie. Translated and edited by Inês Oseki-­ Dépré. Éditions Al Dante, 2005. Campos, Haroldo de. “branco.” Noigandres no. 4 (1958): n.p. Reprinted in H. de Campos. Xadrez de Estrelas. n.p. Also in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with translation by Edwin Morgan and comment by H. de Campos. Campos, Haroldo de. “Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica.” In H. de Campos. Transcriação. Org. by Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega. Editora Perspectiva, 2013, pp. 1–18. Campos, Haroldo de (ed.) Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem. Texts translated by Eloysa de Lima Dantas, 1977. 4th ed. EdUSP, 2000. Campos, Haroldo de. “nascemorre.” Noigandres no. 5 (1962): p. 77. Reprinted in H. de Campos. Xadrez de Estrelas. n.p. Also in M. E. Solt (ed.) Concrete Poetry, p. 103, with translation by Marco Guimarães and Mary Ellen Solt, p. 104. Also in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. Campos, Haroldo de. Xadrez de Estrelas: Percurso Textual 1949–1974. Editora Perspectiva, 1976. Clüver, Claus. “Concrete Poetry: Critical Perspectives from the 90s.” In K. D. Jackson et al., (eds.) Experimental – Visual – Concrete, pp. 265–285. Clüver, Claus. “From Imagism to Concrete Poetry: Breakthrough or Blind Alley?” In Rudolf Haas (ed.) Amerikanische Lyrik: Perspektiven und Interpretationen. Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1987, pp. 113–130. Clüver, Claus. “Iconicidade e isomorfismo em poemas concretos brasileiros.” Translated by André Melo Mendes. Dossiê: 50 anos da poesia concreta. Myriam Corrêa de Araújo Ávila et al. (eds.) O eixo e a roda (FALE, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), no. 13 (July–December 2006), pp. 19–38. German version: “Ikonizität und Isomorphismus in brasilianischen kon­ kreten Gedichten.” Lusorama: Zeitschrift für Lusitanistik (Frankfurt/Main), nos. 75–76 (Nov. 2008), pp. 18–39. Clüver, Claus. “Klangfarbenmelodie in Polychromatic Poems: A. von Webern and A. de Campos.” Comparative Literature Studies no. 18 (1981): pp. 386–398. Clüver, Claus. “Painting Into Poetry.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature no. 27 (1978): pp. 19–34. Clüver, Claus. “Traduzindo Poesia Visual.” In Cânones & Contextos. 5º Congresso ABRALIC [Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada]—Anais. Vol. 1. ABRALIC, 1997, pp. 311–327. Clüver, Stefan Ferreira. vai e vem. A film from the poem by José Lino Grünewald, 1982/1998. Colibri Motion Pictures, 1998. 18 min., black and white. Clüver, Stefan Ferreira. “Viewing Notes by the Filmmaker.” Unpublished, 1998. 5 pages. Concreta ‘56: a raiz da forma. Exhibition catalogue, Museu de Arte Moderna, 26 September–10 December 2006. Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2006. cummings, e. e. “l(a.” 95 Poems. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958.

96  Claus Clüver Grünewald, José Lino. “vai e vem.” Noigandres no. 5 (1962): p. 181. Reprinted in J. L. Grünewald. Escreviver, p. 77. Also in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. n.p. Grünewald, José Lino. Escreviver.  1987. 2nd ed. rev. and enl., org. by José ­Guilherme Correa, rev. by A. de Campos. Perspectiva, 2008. Grünewald, José Lino. Um e Dois. São Paulo: Authors’ edition, 1958. Cover design: D. Pignatari. Hilder, Jamie. Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement 1955–1971. McGill-Queens University Press, 2016. Jackson, K. David, Eric Vos, and Johanna Drucker (eds.) Experimental – ­Visual – Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Rodopi, 1996. Noigandres no. 2 (February 1955). Authors’ edition, unpaged. [Edition of 100.] Contains Haroldo de Campos, “cyropédia ou a educação do príncipe,” and Augusto de Campos, “poetamenos.” Noigandres no. 3 (December 1956). poesia concreta. Authors’ edition, unpaged. Contains poems by A. Campos, H. Campos, D. Pignatari, and R. Azeredo. Noigandres no.  4 (March 1958). Authors’ edition. Folder with poster-poems, with three poems each by D. Pignatari, H. de Campos, A. de Campos, and R. Azeredo, composed in 1957 except ‘terra’ (1956). Also contains poema-livro LIFE by Pignatari, and “plano-piloto para poesia concreta.” Cover by Hermelindo Fiaminghi. Noigandres no. 5. antologia: do verso à poesia concreta. Texts by Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, José Lino Grünewald, Ro­ naldo Azeredo. Massao Ohno Editôra, 1962. Pignatari, Décio. “beba coca cola.” Noigandres no. 4 (1958): n.p. Reprinted in D. Pignatari. Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–2000 (2004), p. 128. Also in M. E. Solt (ed.) Concrete Poetry, p. 108, with translation by Mary Ellen Solt and Maria José de Queiroz. Also in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. Pignatari, Décio. “hombre.” Noigandres no. 4 (1958): n.p. Reprinted in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. A modified version was published in D. Pignatari, Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–2000 (2004), p. 127. Pignatari, Décio. “um movimento.” Noigandres no.  3 (1956): n.p. Reprinted in E. Williams (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, n.p., with comment by H. de Campos. A revised version appeared in D. Pignatari, Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–2000 (2004), p. 100. Pignatari, Décio. Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–1975. Livraria Duas Cidades, 1977. Pignatari, Décio. Poesia pois é Poesia: 1950–1975 / Po&tc: 1976–1986. Brasiliense, 1986. Pignatari, Décio. Poesia pois é poesia: 1950–2000. Ateliê Editorial; Editora da Unicamp, 2004. Sarduy, Severo. ‘Rumo à concretude.’ In H. de Campos. Signantia: quasi ­c oelum / Signância: quase céu. Editora Perspectiva, 1979, pp. 117–125. Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.) A World Look at Concrete Poetry. Topical issue. Artes Hispánicas / Hispanic Arts, vol. 1, nos. 3–4 (1968). Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.) Concrete Poetry: A World View. Indiana University Press, 1970. Williams, Emmett (ed.) An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, 1967. 2nd ed. Primary Information, 2013.

6 Transcreation without Borders K. David Jackson

This chapter explores Haroldo de Campos’ borderless world of ‘transcreation’ that he shared with Augusto de Campos in five decades spent translating world texts. As a theorist and artist of translation and literary texts, Haroldo de Campos was an undocumented crosser of international borders and a multilingual devourer of literary texts. He cites the ‘universal’ baroque heritage of the 16th-century world of voyages and its code of writing as the historical precursor of ‘galactic’ voyages through the contemporary universe of poetic arts, across worlds of languages and translations. To translate without borders is his instructive and open ‘exercise of self-criticism,’ where travelling through texts is a corrective of theory. Haroldo ‘devours’ a universal cultural legacy when his circle of Brazilian ‘cannibals’ reads Pound’s Chinese characters. Forms cease to have borders when ‘everything can coexist with everything,’ as Haroldo posits in a foundational essay.1 The question remains whether borderless global literature is a survivor and avatar of modernism, or its antithesis.

Transcreation ‘Transcreation’ is the neologism coined by Haroldo de Campos to describe the practice of translating inventive texts, chosen from world literature, from Christian Morgenstern to Oliverio Girondo, Homer and Dante to Octavio Paz. 2 In the poetic workshop of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, translation was always considered a creative activity deserving of a new and different designation. Haroldo added linguistic theory and a poetic orientation to the idea of world literature, while Augusto specialised in poetic translation of creative texts (see Costa, Guerini, and Homem de Mello).3 Transcreation points to a scientific method and philosophy of translation, with attention to the phono-semantic qualities of the text; to the craftsmanship of the artist-creators, who left signs of their personal creativity in each translation, as if it were the signature of an artist on the canvas; and to translation that crosses literatures and languages. ‘Transluciferation, Transtextualization, Transficcionalization, Transparadization’ are other parallel creative terms that Haroldo used for transcreation, as if they were baroque voices declaiming

98  K. David Jackson diverse world poetic texts that he ‘re-imagined.’ The terms are associated with comprehensive reading of texts through the ‘trans,’ and as such they represent a universalist faith, a neobaroque affirmation and openness to universal translation characterised by formal variability and a critical focus on tradition. In the transcreative method, Thelma Medici Nobrega finds a rhythm of nearness and distance, an oscillation between attention to the linguistic composition of the original and to a creative re-writing.4 The translator must employ precise instruments to discern the linguistic parameters of a text before attempting to re-create it artistically. Transcreation is a process meant to reveal what the two texts have ‘verbovocovisually’ in common.5 With his multilinguistic background and wide reading from a universal library of texts and criticism, Haroldo practised transcreation in Poundian terms, as a dance of the intellect among languages and as a movement that joined comparable expressive components across languages, like a choreographer of poetry. Pound contributed to the idea of world literature with his ‘Make It New’ aesthetic and his challenge to translate from different languages, cultures and historical periods. On translating Dante, for example, Haroldo comments: […] the characteristic use of rhyme as a support for esthetic information: rhyme, a redundant feature, a ballast, begins to produce original information because of its unusual role […] avoiding normal expectations, it ends up being converted into a surprise factor generating original information […] [Dante] invented a sextinadupla […] 60 verses, in 5 stanzas of 12 verses each, on 5 word-rhymes (donna, tempo, luce, freddo, petra), followed by a coda of 6 verses.6 The Camposes selected for translation literary works with a high degree of creativity and originality, a personal paideuma centered on literary modernity, yet attentive to all time periods. For Haroldo, the transcreator is also a choreographer of semantics, who is always putting verses into multidimensional movement; the transcreator acts like a conductor of mobile semantic music, arranging musicians on the stage, coordinating a new spatial distribution, orchestration and instrumentation, timbre and register. He evaluates the lexical, sonorous, visual and rhythmic qualities of texts before re-inventing them and re-writing them in Portuguese: […] the translation of creative texts will always be re-creation, or parallel creation, autonomous although reciprocal. The more full of difficulties the text, the more it is open to re-creation, more seductive in its open possibilities for re-creation. In a translation of this kind, one does not translate only the meaning, one translates the sign itself, that is, its physicality, its materiality (sonorous properties,

Transcreation Without Borders  99 visual images, in sum, everything that makes up […] the iconicity of the esthetic sign) […] The meaning, the semantic parameter is only and no more than the ballast that demarcates the field of the ­re-creative effort. It is the contrary of so-called literal translation.7 Creative translation is a kind of aesthetic or artistic hybridity, acting through transgressive appropriation carried to its limits, where any text can be expropriated and its meaning altered. Haroldo recommends a non-reverential attitude towards tradition, in acting through expropriation, reversion and de-hierarchisation, a method that reflects the ‘Cannibal Manifesto’ of Oswald de Andrade (1928) and its theme of cultural devouring (Haroldo confesses that transcreation could be a ‘cultural modality of Oswald’s anthropophagy, perhaps’).8 At a conference at the University of Oxford (1999), he defended his position by placing transcreation between Brazilian baroque hybridity and global transculturation, a process he defined as ‘non-reverential assimilation of the universal cultural legacy.’9 Transcreation was born in an avant-garde environment with a team including Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and other collaborators; it was launched in the journals Noigandres and Invenção along with the concrete poetry movement. At the official presentation of the movement in December 1956, at an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, inter-art translation included sculptures, paintings and poems in an international aesthetic atmosphere. The series of poetic translations that followed focused on principles of Saussurean linguistics, choosing challenging, dense texts whose meaning depended on poetic language, departing from Mallarmé, Pound, Joyce and cummings.10 The three poets opened a translation workshop as a form of creation,11 such that literary translation always played a central role in their activities, alongside essays and poems. They did not distinguish between the roles of poet, critic or translator. Haroldo established himself as a theorist of poetic translation in two books, A Arte no Horizonte do Provável (1969), addressing the topic in essays such as ‘Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda,’ and in A Operação do Texto (1976), where he observed that the classification of different texts could serve as a guide for strategies of translation, from construction (the mirror-texts of Poe) to production (Vladímir Mayakovsky) and deconstruction (Friedrich Hölderlin). The first case is notable for the interaction of sound, rhythm and meaning; the second for the singularity of the creative work; and the third for going against communication by making comprehension difficult. In these two books he began to compose his world library of authors who would be the nucleus of his early activity as a translator.12 After four decades dedicated to the analysis and practice of translation, he published O Arco-­ Íris Branco (1997), where he revisited problems of translation in relation to a series of poets, with special attention to the German of Goethe,

100  K. David Jackson Arno Holz and Christian Morgenstern. Interested in enlivening the page, he reviewed problems such as tension (Hegel), critical reflection (Holz), nonsense (Morgenstern), visuality and metric disruption (Stramm) and painting and music (Wang Wei). There followed Crisantempo: no espaço curvo nasce um (1998), a book full of transcreations from multiple languages and literatures. His last work of translation is the bilingual Greek-Portuguese edition in two volumes of Homer’s Iliad (1999–2002). After a half-century of literary activity, Haroldo’s transcreation that ‘centres and de-centres’13 finds itself firmly rooted in the Brazilian literary vocabulary; it refers to the vast work of translation by Haroldo and Augusto and their contribution to the theory and practice of translation on an international level. Two recent anthologies of Haroldo’s theoretical essays, Da transcriação: poética e semiótica da operação tradutora (ed. Queiroz, 2011) and Haroldo de Campos –Transcriação (ed. Tápia and Nóbrega, 2013), with important essays on the translator, attest to the acceptance of the term and, moreover, to the recognition of translation as creation, the theory of ‘parallel creation, autonomous in relation to the original,’14 that is continually reaffirmed by the presence in the bookstores of reeditions and expanded editions of his works, such as A ReOperação do Texto (2013), Metalinguagem e Outras Metas (2013) and Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe (2008), and by a series of homages, essays and university theses, e.g. Céu Acima: para um ‘tombeau’ de Haroldo de Campos (ed. Tenório da Motta, 2005), Haroldo de Campos, Tradutor e Traduzido (ed. Costa, Guerini, and Homem de Mello, 2019).

Transcreative Choreography Transcreation promotes dialogue and constitutes an intertext among languages. It works on the basis of etymology of symbolic forms found in language and their changes over time. In his work as translator, Ha­ roldo explored visual and rhythmic interchanges as well as verbal and syntactical correspondences through parallelism and parataxis.15 Transcreation opens the doors to a deep understanding of the text and a greater awareness of the role of the translator as creator, of an operation in search of solutions that reflect as much the aesthetic expression of the original as its linguistic structure and graphic form. In the remainder of this chapter, examples of poetic translation from world texts in different languages are selected to illustrate the translator’s approaches to linguistic reading and analysis. In an essay on Edgar Allen Poe,16 Haroldo contemplates the sonority of the word-refrain ‘NEVERMORE’ and its position at the end of the quatrains, where the poem, according to its author, actually begins by a method of regression in which the story is told from the end to the beginning, posited entirely on that one evocative mysterious word. Jakobson identifies the

Transcreation Without Borders  101 expressive qualities of this poem, pointing out the alliterations, sonority of the vowels, chiaroscuro, use of echo and mirroring (‘raven-never’). In his solution, Haroldo maintains the ‘phonic-semantic configuration’ of the accents in trochaic rhythm by using seven syllables in Portuguese: ‘E-o-cor-vo-sem-re-vo-o / pá-rae-pou-sa,-pá-rae-pou-sa.’17 He prefers to give more importance to the expressiveness of the text than to a formal and aesthetic analysis. Translation requires a re-writing of Poe on the basis of deeper meanings and correspondences between depth and form. Latin In an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus, overtaken with his own beauty reflected in a fountain, drowns as he attempts to possess it: fons erat inlimis, nitidiy argenteus undis, quem neque pastores neque pastae monte capellae contigerant aliudue pecus, quem nulla uolucris nec fera turbarat nec lalpsus ab arbore ramus; gramen erat circa, quod proximus umor alebat, siluaque sole locum passura tepescrere nullo. hicpuer et studio uenandi lassus et aestu procubuit faciemque loci fontemque secutus, dumque sitim sedare cupit, sitis altera creuit, dumque bibit, uisae correptus imagine formae spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse quod umbra est (OVID III, 415–417) Fonte sem limo, pura prata em ondas límpidas, jorrava. Nem pastor se achega, nem pastando seu rebanho montês, ou gado avulso, acode. Nem pássaro, nem fera, nem tombando, um ramo perturba a úmida grama que o frescor irriga. O bosque impede o sol de aquentar este sítio. Da caça e do calor exausto, aqui vem dar Narciso, seduzido pela fonte amena. Se inclina, vai beber, mas outra sede o toma: Enquanto bebe o embebe a forma do que vê. Ama a sombra sem corpo, a imagem, quase corpo. (Campos, 1998: 210) In a commentary on this translation, Brunno Vieira notes the translator’s linguistic and stylistic analysis of the Latin text; Haroldo employs intensive use of enjambments (um ramo/perturba), anagrammatic phonic combinations (úmidagrama), the coordinative linking of syntagmas

102  K. David Jackson (lassus et aestus becomes caça e calor), assonance in vowels (a/e/u), alliteration (t/e/b), agglutinate synalephas (sitims EdArE cupit, sitisAltE rAcreuit gives rise to be-bEOEm-bebe), and maintaining the dodecasyllabic rhythm with the neologism quase-corpo for quod umbra est.’18 English In the case of the well-known poem by William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (‘Carrinho de Mão Vermelho’), it was essential to maintain the simplicity of the vocabulary and the eight-line structure, four of which end with only one word of two syllables: tanto depende de um carrinho de mão vermelho vidrado pela água da chuva perto das galinhas brancas

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

As in the original, there is a disconnect between each pair of lines, promoting a delay in completing the phrase that opens a space for amending the original image or idea, and thus the transcreator mirrors that structure, incomplete because it is emended with abrupt closure, by limiting the final line of the couplets to two syllables. French In translating ‘L’Araignée’ (‘A Aranha’) by the French poet Francis Ponge (1899–1988), Haroldo maintains the density of the web of words and finds equivalents in Portuguese for the phonemes: Moscas e moscarrões efêmeros, abelhas vespas, zangões, ferrões cupins, carunchos, trasgos monstros, duendes, diabos…

Mouches et moucherons abeilles, éphémères guêpes, frelons, bourdons cirons, mites, cousins monstres, drôles et diables…19

Italian When he published Dante Alighieri: 6 Cantos do Paraíso, Haroldo considered the work to be part of his theory of transcreation: ‘It is about a way of translating that is eminently concerned with the reconstitution of original aesthetic information into Portuguese.’ His goal was to produce

Transcreation Without Borders  103 an ‘isomorphic’ text in relation to the original, and the method was to prefer a ‘topographical’ analysis rather than a ‘programmatic attack,’ that is, to attack some of its most difficult Cantos with a text that attempts to be autonomous, never simply a didactic aid to the reading of the original.20 La Gloria di colui che tutto ove per l’universo penetra e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove. Nel ciel he più della sua luce prende fu’io, e vidi ose che ridire nè san è può chi di là su discende; A Gloria de quem tudo o mais commove pelo universe penetra e resplende e mais, e menos, suas partes move. No alto céu, onde mais a luz se incende eu fui, e vi tais coisas, que dizer não sabe ou pode quem de lá descende; In his essay ‘Haroldo de Campos e ilsuperamento dei limiti,’ Umberto Eco considers the difficulties that Haroldo faced in translating Dante. Citing Douglas Hofstadner (Le ton beau de Marot. In Praise of the Music of Language), Eco highlights the endecasyllable (11-syllable line) and the rhyme, the deep structure of the terza rima and the breathing that distinguishes the verses by means of the vocabulary, such that if, in translation, a word is passed from one line to another, the rhetorical rhythm and breath of the first line are lost. Additionally, the translator must simultaneously reproduce an archaic text and modernise it through translation: ‘Campos suonano medievali e modernissimo al tempo stesso, edegli era ruiscito veramente a ricreare nel suo portoghese brasiliano immagini e suoni della Divina Commedia.’ In stating that Haroldo has overcome all the limits inherent to modernisation, rhyme, the deep structure of terza rima and the phonetic coherence on the line, Eco considers him to be the greatest modern translator of Dante: ‘(non temo di affermarlo) il più grande traduttore di Dante.’21 Greek In translating the poems of Constantine Cavafy (Konstantinos Kaváfis) by consulting multiple translations, both to Portuguese and to other languages, Haroldo emphasises the phonic reconstitution in Portuguese of the Greek text: […] my idea, following Pound, was to restore a phonic image (‘melopaica’) for what sounded to me like the poetic idiom of Kaváfis

104  K. David Jackson […] radically attentive to the phonic layers of the original and attempting to ‘mine’ it in Portuguese, even though in order to do so I may have forced and arbitrarily interpreted (only on the surface?) Kaváfis’s text. 22 As an example from line 23, ‘e toda essa paraphernalia’ is meant to reproduce the phonic and prosodic effect of ke tétoia prághmata (‘e tais coisas’). Haroldo is especially interested in recreating the ironic skepticism of the Alexandrian poet by ‘recontextualizing’ his lexical forms, including neologisms, in terms of Brazilian literary tradition, rather than estranging Portuguese by making it appear to be Greek. Beginning with the imitation of sound, the transcreator passes to ‘transcontextualization’ by Brazilianising Cafavy. In ‘À espera dos bárbaros,’ ПEРIMENONTAΣ TOYΣ BAPBAPOYΣ, Haroldo relies on famous verses of Carlos Drummond de Andrade from ‘Poema de Sete Faces’ to convey irony: E nós, como vamos passar sem os bárbaros? Essa gente não rimava conosco, mas já era uma solução.23 Καί τώρα τί θά γέυουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους. Οί α̋ υθρωποι αὐτοί η̈́ σαυ μιά κάποια λύσις. Translating from Languages Unknown to the Translator A curious example that Haroldo mentions is Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem by Omar Khayyam, ‘The Rubaiyat,’ which presents the case of a translator without knowledge of a single word of Persian, who made his translation on the basis of English and French with the aid of the orientalist Franz Toussaint. Haroldo notices how Jorge Luis Borges, in the essay ‘El Enigma de Edward Fitzgerald,’ confirms Fitzgerald’s misreading, as he certainly had no complete understanding of the original text; at the same time Fitzgerald invented a tradition and passed on to us a great classic of the English language. 24 It was common practice to translate from third languages without knowing the original, guided by other criteria, as was the case of Machado de Assis’ ‘Lyra Chinesa’ (from translations by Judith Gautier) and Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (from the French translation by Alfred Gerardin). Haroldo, moreover, re-invented the expressiveness of an unknown language through improvisation, the ‘transitory splendor,’ in the words of an earlier Brazilian translator, Octávio Tarquinio de Sousa, evoking the re-invention of an original from an unknown language. 25 Haroldo also translated classical Chinese poetry of the T’ang by following a phonic transliteration of the characters by François Cheng (L’écriture poétique chinoise, Paris, Seuil, 1977; Figure 6.1).

Transcreation Without Borders  105

Figure 6.1  ‘The Lady of the Moon’ by François Cheng.

A Dama da Lua o para-vento de nuvem ensombra o lume da lâmpada se inclina lenta a Via-Láctea a estrela da manhã declina Ch’angO agora arrependida do roubo do filtro celestial? Entre o mar esmeralda e o céu azul Noite-após-noite um coração absorto (The Lady of the Moon//The windmill of clouds/enshadows the lamp’s luminescence//bends slowly toward the Milky Way/the morning star sets// Is Ch’ang O now repentant/for his theft of the celestial filter?//Between the emerald sea and the blue sky/Night-after-night an absorbed heart). Haroldo is one of the first translators of Chinese into a romance language, without knowledge of the target language, to base his translations on a transliteration of the Chinese characters as an approach to a textual reading. His transcreations from Japanese, Hebrew, ancient Greek and a few other languages were also based on a comparison of previous translations, on phonics and on interpretive readings. In this process one can affirm that a main characteristic of transcreation, which is hardly ever mentioned, is research, that is, the comparative study of sources and the analysis of meaning. In the work of transcreation, the researcher, the scholar, the historian, the comparatist and the musician all collaborate in the same person.

106  K. David Jackson The internationalisation of the creative conscience, in an avantgarde context, is one of the main contributions of transcreation to contemporary Brazilian literature. 26 On analysing the breakdown of the concept-­model of education that marked the developmentalism of the 20th century, since My Formative Years (1900) by Joaquim Nabuco, the essayist Silviano Santiago thought it was time to exchange it for a new comparative international model: Cosmopolitan, the nation is ready to take its place at the councils of the planet. Self-modeled, the discursive subject – whether confessional, artistic, or scientific – can and should give itself the luxury of criticism and self-criticism in a new paradigm.’27 The posture of transcreation is an answer avant la lettre to this new demand for international dialogue, since transcreation started with a cosmopolitanism, with knowledge from outside and a creative and self-critical creative discourse that turns the Brazilian reader into a devourer of a world literary legacy.By changing the ‘formative moments’ in the nation’s literary history, transcreation represents ‘diférence… a dialogic moment of difference against a universal background.’28 And in opening up to a wide literary world in its choice of texts, there is a consequent recognition of the cosmopolitanism inherent to the baroque model and to the idea of universality of all texts. In choosing inventive texts from among masterworks of world literature, the autonomous ­re-creating of the transcreator repositions the centre of the dialogue between Brazilian creativity and international literature. Marked by the ‘trans,’ and taking up the voyage theme in a manner comparable to the ships of the voyages to India and the great transatlantic liners of early modernity, the translator travels through seas to dialogue, and perhaps to devour the great innovative works of world creation in a crossing of oceans that necessarily confronts and incorporates difference and otherness. In the case of transcreation, it is the Brazilian author, in the guise of Argonaut and cannibal of letters, although now cosmopolitan, who performs the transfusion or transplant, the textual operation that incorporates difference into the Brazilian literary body: ‘I can only conceive of nationalism from a modal point of view, non-ontological: the Brazilian way of dialoguing with the universal, articulating features differentially, specifying choices, renewing itself as it innovates.’29 O grande Haroldo (‘the great Haroldo’) as my young daughter Sophia used to call him, never abandoned his creative art of translation or his awareness of literary craft. For half a century his translations brought to Brazilian readers a wide selection of innovative contemporary poets, anchored in concepts of semiotics and structural linguistics at the centre of the modernist avant-garde. In theory and practice, Haroldo and Augusto have continued to occupy a position of international leadership by

Transcreation Without Borders  107 expanding the modernist universe through translation. Haroldo left us his galactic voyage and his vision of participatory literature, open to the world of letters and languages.

A: Selected Collaborations Involving Haroldo de Campos Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos & Décio Pignatari. Noigandres (São Paulo). 5 nos., 1952–1960. Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos & Décio Pignatari. “Plano Piloto para Poesia Concreta.”Tempo Presente 1 (1959): 26–27; reprinted in Teoria da Poesia Concreta. Invenção, 1965. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari & Haroldo de Campos. Cantares de Ezra Pound Serviço de Documentação/MEC, 1960. Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos & Décio Pignatari. Teoria da Poesia Concreta Invenção, 1965 (2nd edn., enlarged, Duas Cidades 1975; 3rd edn., Brasiliense 1987; 4th edn. Ateliê, 2006). Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, José Lino Grünewald & Mário Faustino. Antologia Poética de Ezra Pound. Ulisséia, 1968. Campos, Augusto de, José Paulo Paes. ABC Da Literatura, de Ezra Pound. Cultrix. 1970. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, José Lino Grünewald & Mário Faustino. Ezra Pound: Antologia Poética.Ulisséia, 1968 (2nd & 3rd edns. published as Ezra Pound: Poesia. Hucitec/UnB, 1985, 1993). Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos & Boris Schnaiderman. Maiakóvski: Poemas. Tempo Brasileiro, 1967 (5th edn published by Perspectiva, 1992). Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos & Décio Pignatari. Mallarmé ­Perspectiva (Coleção Signos), 1974; (3rd edn., enlarged, 2002). Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos. Traduzir e Trovar 1968. São ­Papyrus, 1968. Campos, Haroldo de, Augusto de Campos. Panaroma do Finnegans Wake. Conselho Estadual de Cultura, 1962; (2nd ed., Perspectiva, 1971; 4th ed. (Coleção Signos), revised & enlarged, 2001). Campos, Haroldo de, Augusto de Campos & Boris Schnaiderman. Poesia Russa Moderna. Civilização Brasileira, 1968 (2nd ed., Brasiliense, 1985; 6th ed., revised & enlarged, Perspectiva, 2001). Pignatari, Décio, Haroldo de Campos, José Lino Grünewald & Mário Faustino. Ezra Pound: Poesia. Edited with an introduction and notes by Augusto de Campos. Hucitec, 1983.

B: Transcreations by Haroldo de Campos Bere’shith: A Cena de Origem [and other studies of biblical poetry]. Perspectiva 1993, 2001. Crisantempo: no espaço curvo nasce um. Perspectiva, 1998. Dante: Seis Cantos do Paraíso. Recife: Gastão de Holanda Editor, 1976. (Limited edition of 100, illustrated with 10 lithographs by João Câmara Filho). Fontana/ Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 1978.

108  K. David Jackson Éden: Um Tríptico Bíblico. Perspectiva (Coleção Signos), 2004. Escrito sobre Jade [22 Classical Chinese poems; bilingual edition]. Tipografia do Fundo de Ouro Preto, 1996. Hagoromo de Zeami: O Charme Sutil [Japanese Classical Theatre; bilingual edition in collaboration with Darcy Yasuco Kusano and Elsa Taeko Doi.] ­E stação Liberdade, 1994. Ilíada de Homero, Vol.1. Edited and introduced by Trajano Vieira. Mandarim, 2001; São Paulo: Arx, 2002, 2003. Ilíada de Homero, Vol. 2. Edited by Trajano Vieira. Arx, 2002, 2003. Mênis: A Ira de Aquiles [Canto I d’AIlíada, bilingual edition].With an essay by Trajano Vieira. Nova Alexandrina, 1994. Os Nomes e os Navios. [Canto 2 d’AIlíada]. Edited, with an introduction and notes by Trajano Vieira; translated, with an essay by Haroldo de Campos; based on a translation by Odorico Mendes (1874). Sette Letras, 1999. Pedra e Luz na Poesia de Dante [bilingual edition]. Imago, 1998. Poemas de Konstantinos Kaváfis. Cosac Naify, 2012. Qohélet-O-Que-Sabe [Ecclesiastes]. In collaboration with Jacó Guinsburg. Perspectiva, 1990, 1991. Transblanco: Em Torno a Blanco de Octavio Paz. In collaboration with Octavio Paz. 1985. Rio de Janeiro: Guanabara, 1985; 2nd edn., enlarged. Siciliano, 1994. Ungaretti: Daquela Estrela à Outra. In collaboration with Aurora Bernardini; edited by Lucia Wataghin. Ateliê Editorial, 2003.

C: Selected Theoretical Works by Haroldo de Campos O Arco-Íris Branco: Ensaios de Literatura e Cultura. Imago, 1997. A Arte no Horizonte do Provável e Outros Ensaios. 1969. Perspectiva. (Coleção Debates) 1969, 1972, 1975, 1977. “Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica.” Tempo Brasileiro: Revista de Cultura (Rio de Janeiro) 4–5 (1963): pp. 164–181. Da Transcriação: poética e semiótica da operação tradutora. Ed. Sônia Queiroz, UFMG, 2011. “The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation.” In A Dialogue with the Brazilian Poet, edited and translated by K. David Jackson. OUP, 2005, pp. 3–13; translated from the Spanish, “Tradición, traducción, transculturación: El punto de vista del ex-céntrico,” Reflejos: Revista del Departamento de Estudios Españoles y Latinoamericanos (Jerusalem) 3 (dez. 1994): pp. 7–11. Haroldo de Campos – Transcriação. Ed. Marcelo Tápia & Thelma Médici Nóbrega. Editora Perspectiva, 2013. Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem (Edited with an introduction, “Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama”), 1977. Cultrix, 1977, 1986, 1994; Edusp, 2000. “The Open Work of Art,” Dispositio: American Journal of Comparative and Cultural Semiotics (Ann Arbor) 6, nos. 17–18 (Summer-Fall 1981): pp. 5–7. A Operação do Texto. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1976. (Revised and enlarged 2nd edn. published as A ReOperação do Texto. Perspectiva, 2013).

Transcreation Without Borders  109 “Petrografia Dantesca.” Pedra e Luz na Poesia de Dante. Imago, 1998. O Segundo Arco-Íris Branco. Iluminuras, 2010. “A temperature informacional do texto.”Revista do Livro (Rio de Janeiro) 5 (Jun. 1960): pp. 61–70; “The Informational Temperature of the Text,” trans. Jon Tolman, Poetics Today (Tel Aviv) 3, no. 3 (Summer 1982): pp. 77–82. Traduzione, transcreazioine. Saggi. Daniele Petruccioli, ed., trans. Andrea Lombardi. Gaetano d’Itria, Oêdipus, 2016.

D: Selected Literary Essays by Haroldo de Campos “Ezra Pound: La vida, texto.” Plural: Critica, Arte, Literatura (México) 50 (1975): pp. 23–27. “Francis Ponge: Visual Texts.” Books Abroad (Norman, OK) 48 (1974): pp. 712–714. “Maiakóvski em português: Roteiro de uma tradução.” Revista do Livro (Rio de Janeiro) 6 (July–December 1961): pp. 23–50. “Mephistofaustian Transluciferation: Contribution to the Semiotics of Poetic Translation.” Dispositio: American Journal of Comparative and Cultural Semiotics (Ann Arbor) 7, nos. 19–21 (1982): pp. 181–187.

Notes Unless otherwise stated, translations from the works quoted are by the present author. Full details of texts quoted below are given in Sections A-D and the References. 1 ‘Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração,’ Colóquio/ Letras 62 (July 1981): pp. 10–26; English translation, ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Signo of Devoration,’ Maria Tai Wolff, trans. Latin American Literary Review XIV, No. 27 (Jan.-Jun. 1986): pp. 42–60. 2 Cf. Haroldo de Campos, A Educação dos Cinco Sentidos. Iluminuras, 2013, pp. 127–132. 3 From Mayakovsky, Cummings, and Pound to the Provençals, Blake, Donne, Dickinson, Mallarmé, Valéry, Keats, Hopkins, Rimbaud, Rilke, Stein, Stramm, Borges and Carroll. 4 ‘Transcriação e hiperfidelidade,’ Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução, 7 (2006): pp. 249–255. 5 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Acredito no rigor e exijo competência,’ interview with Juremir Machado da Silva, April 1991, in Correio do Povo, Porto Alegre (17 September 2014). 6 ‘Petrografia Dantesca,’ 1998, p. 23. 7 ‘Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica,’ p. 35. 8 O Arco-Iris Branco, p. 56. 9 ‘The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation.’ Jackson, 2005. pp. 3–13. 10 The comparative context supporting the concept of Weltliteraturis characteristic of Brazilian literature, whether in the bricolage of Machado de Assis or in key figures of literary criticism such as Paulo Rónai, Otto Maria Carpeaux, Sérgio Milliet and Patrícia Galvão, among others. 11 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Da Tradução,’ 1963. 12 The themes extend from Pindar to Ungaretti and Leopardi, from Haikai and visual poetry to Kitasono Katue.

110  K. David Jackson 13 ‘Opúsculo Goetheano,’ In Haroldo de Campos, A Educação dos Cinco Sentidos. Illuminuras, 2013, pp. 38–41. 14 Simone Homem de Mello, ‘Haroldo de Campos, o constelizador,’ Revista CULT, 180 (18September 2013). 15 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Tradução, Ideologia e História,’ Cadernos do MAM. Rio de Janeiro, n. 1, dez 1983, p. 60. 16 Haroldo de Campos, ‘O texto-espelho (Poe, engenheiro de avessos),’ in A Operaçãodo Texto. Perspectiva, 1976, pp. 23–41. 17 A Operação do Texto, p. 37. 18 Brunno G.V. Vieira, ‘Contribuições de Haroldo de Campos para um Programa Tradutório Latino-Português,’ Terra Roxa e Outras Terras: Revista de Estudos Literários 7 (2006): pp. 80–88. 19 O Arco-Iris Branco, p. 223. 20 Haroldo de Campos, Dante Alighieri: 6 Cantos do Paraíso, p. 7. 21 Unberto Eco, ‘Haroldo e il superamento dei limiti,’ in Traduzione, transcreazioine. Saggi, p. 7. 22 Konstantinos Kaváfis, tr. Haroldo de Campos, ed. Trajano Vieira. Cosac Naify, 2012, pp. 52–53. 23 Haroldo’s lines can be glossed as ‘And us, how are we going to get on without the barbarians?/These people did not rhyme with us, but it was already a solution.’ The wording of the second line recalls Drummmond de Andrade’s Mundo mundo vasto mundo/se eu me chamasse Raimundo/seria uma rima, não seria uma solução or ‘World, world, vast world/If I was called Raimundo/it would be a rhyme, but it wouldn’t be a solution.’ 24 An English version of this essay ‘The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald,’ can be found in Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, tr. Eliot Weinberger, Esther Allen & Suzanne Jill Levine. Penguin, 1999, pp. 366–368. 25 Kháyyám, Omar. Rubáiyát Tr. Otávio Tarquínio de Sousa. 15th edn. José Olympio, 1979. 26 See the essay by Geovanna Marcela da Silva Guimarães, ‘A Transcriação de Haroldo de Campos e a Identidade Nacional,’ Zunái-Revista de ­poesia & debates. http://www.revistazunai.com/ensaios/geovanna_guimaraes_­ haroldodecampos.htm [Accessed 16 April 2019]. 27 ‘Anatomia da formação: literatura brasileira à luz do pós-colonialismo,’ Folha de S. Paulo (08 September 2014). 28 ‘The Ex-Centric’s Viewpoint,’ Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet, pp. 3–13. 29 Haroldo de Campos, O Arco-Íris Branco, 1997, p. 9.

References Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antropófago.” Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo) 1, no. 3 (1928): p. 7; trans. Leslie Bary. “Cannibal Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review (Pittsburgh) 19, no. 38 (1991): pp. 35–47. Barbosa, João Alexandre. Biblioteca Imaginária. São Paulo: Ateliê, 1996. Cavafy, Constantinos. 90 e mais quarto poemas. Jorge de Sena, trans. 3rd. ed. Asa, 2003. Costa, Walter, Andréia Guerini and Simone Homem de Mello (eds.) Haroldo de Campos Tradutor e Traduzido. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2019. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Vol. 1. R.W. Franklin (ed.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 297.

Transcreation Without Borders  111 Eco, Umberto. “Haroldo e il superamento dei limmiti.” In Andrea Lombardi and Gaetano D’Itria (eds.) Traduzione, Transcreazione Saggi. Salerno: ­Oèdipus, 2016, pp. 5–7. Hofstadner, Douglas. Le ton beau de Marot. In Praise of the Music of Language. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Jackson, K. David (ed.) Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2005. Morgenstern, Christian. Das ästhetische Wiesel. Zürich: Diogenes, 1981. Motta, Leda Tenorio da. Céuacima: para um ‘tombeau’ de Haroldo de Campos. São: Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2005. Sena, Jorge de. Poesia de 26 Séculos. Porto: Inova, 1971. Silva, Luciana de Mesquita. “Olhares em trânsito pela tradução: Os Irmãos Campos tradutores.” Revista Gatilho, 1, no. 2 (Nov. 2005), n.p. Vieira, Brunno. 2006. “Contribuições de Haroldo de Campos para um programa tradutório de latino-português.” Terra roxa e outras terras–Revista de Estudos Literários 7 (2006): pp. http://www.uel.br/pos/letras/terraroxa/ g_pdf/vol7/7_8.pdf [Accessed 16 April 2019].

7 Edwin Morgan as Transcreator1 Ting Huang

In 1952, concrete poetry was inaugurated in Brazil by the Noigandres trio: Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003), Augusto de Campos (b.1931) and Décio Pignatari (1927–2012). Arguing for the visual functionality of a poem, the Noigandres poets had their attention focused on what is widely referred to as the materiality of the words and reading a poem in totality as a point of departure for the gradual realisation of a new poetics. The label ‘concrete’ allied the new poetics with a movement in the visual arts that became popular in the 1940s. Launched officially in December 1956 within an exhibition of Concrete Arts in the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, concrete poetry aligned its theoretical principles with the experimental trend of concretism in painting and sculpture. From contemporary concrete artists to their theoretical precursors, composers as well as painters, figures like Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Albers, Cage, Bill and Mondrian had all played an important role in situating Brazilian concrete poetry in a mirante culturmorfológico2 (‘cultural-morphological vantage-point’). The shared aesthetic creeds between experimental music, concrete art in general and concrete poetry had, in many ways, equipped the Brazilian concrete poets with a broad aesthetic vision and accordingly, a multi-modal model to work with. Taken from James Joyce’s modernist epic, Finnegans Wake, the portmanteau word ‘verbivocovisual’ was used by the Noigandres poets to define the synaesthetic nature of concrete poetry. By aligning with the spatialising tendency conspicuous in concretism practised by their European counterparts, the Brazilian concrete poets widened effectively their field of operations. But the overall cultural environment pressed the Noigandres poets to embrace eclecticism at both conceptual and technical levels. A ‘timelag’ of social modernisation had withdrawn the Brazilian artists farther and farther from the cultural experience of their European counterparts. In the context of the Brazilian literary landscape, the socio-economic modernisation that Brazil had undergone since the 1920s pressed Brazilian intellectuals to adopt a new atitude estética3 (‘aesthetic attitude’) to liberate the arts from the still-predominating Parnassian miasma. At the same time, due to the growing aspiration for the establishment of a distinctive national

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  113 identity, the issue of creating a national literature also came to the fore. From this perspective, we may consider Brazilian concrete poetry as the continuation of the early Brazilian avant-gardes, thereby a neo-avantgarde movement that followed a set of similar but more radicalised criteria.4 Thus, Brazilian concrete poetry did share many qualities such as eclecticism, experimentation and social consciousness with earlier Brazilian cultural movements that originated in the decades after the First World War.5 This eclectic mentality had rendered Brazilian concrete poetry not simply an avant-garde movement as in the case of Germany and the United States, but also a national ‘cultural project that carried certain weight.’6 Placed in this wider historical and cultural context, concrete poetry in Brazil became a site of tension with regard to national modernisation as well as a commodity to be exported for the sake of internationalism. This tension between nationalism and internationalism also provides a convincing rationale for the political and social valence of the translation theories and practices of the de Campos brothers, which emphasise the functionalism of translation as an intermediary agency. This tension found analogues beyond Brazil. Responding to the rapid urbanisation of São Paulo since the 1930s, then, which was a potent symbol of national modernisation, the de Campos brothers called for Brazilian poetry to engage more with social consciousness and experimentalism in poetry writing. This appeal struck a chord with Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) in Glasgow in the early 1960s. The Scottish city was likewise experiencing fast-paced modernisation and witnessing intensive building construction at the time. Through the Portuguese concrete poet E. M. de Melo e Castro, who put him in contact with the de Campos brothers, Morgan began a correspondence with Augusto de Campos in early 1963. Morgan’s correspondence with Augusto, and shortly afterwards with Haroldo de Campos, would prove to be fundamental for his development as a poet and a translator. Morgan and his compatriot, Ian Hamilton Finlay, became champions of concrete poetics in Scotland and part of a wider network of poets in Britain, ­Europe and the Americas (see Corbett, this volume). Discontented with what he perceived as the narrow spectrum of operation for poetry in his home country, Morgan sought to explore a ‘new mood’ to fight against the ‘grimness and inwardness and angst’7 prevalent in Scottish poetry. In an article on concrete poetry published in 1968, Morgan endorsed it as a new medium that reconfigures the position of the poet in society.8 As he saw it, the paramount aim of extending the formal field of operations consists in sensitising the mind of anyone exposed to poetry, which would in turn elicit an extension of the social field of operations. Experimental poetry thus had a social function. For Morgan, the cloud that the Scottish world of letters had fallen under was a static parochialism that resisted dynamic, experimental internationalism. However, Morgan’s aspirations for literary renewal met

114  Ting Huang with a rebuff from the Scottish conservative camp represented by older poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Douglas Young. This animosity is recorded in Corbett’s ‘Concrete Realities’ (2015), where he recounts the heated exchanges between Morgan and MacDiarmid on different occasions such as, the International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, in 1962, where the topic of debate was ‘Scottish Writing Today.’ In the months before his first encounter with concrete poetry, Morgan made explicit his desire for the modernisation of Scottish  p ­ oetry as well as his yearning for a reappraisal of the social function of poetry. There has been far too much tradition in the last fifty years and we want to wake ourselves up and to realize that things [that] are happening at the present time, and are in the consciousness of everybody, are the things that a writer ought to be feeling and writing about. Things that are perhaps expressing one’s reaction to world events, to international events, to atomic power, to space exploration, to the whole world, cybernetics, all this ought to be reflected not only in literature but in the whole intellectual life of Scotland and it is not being reflected, and this is what I want to see.9 Morgan argued that the nostalgia for the past that he considered prevalent among Scottish intellectuals could be done away with in favour of a socially conscious poetry that deals with the ‘present time’ and is closely related to other artistic forms and world events. His subsequent encounter with concrete poetry certainly afforded Morgan the ‘nowness’ and ‘newness’ that was embedded in the ethos of concretism. One appeal that concrete poetry held for him was that it combined a sensuousness with an impersonal stance: the visual composition or aural quality of the poem suppressed the textual voice of the romantic poet. On this point, Morgan quoted approvingly the almost therapeutic power of visual poetry, described by his fellow concrete poet, Pierre Garnier, in an essay in 1963 as ‘a poetry which is desensitized yet sensitizing.’10 In concrete poetry the sensuous reaction is no longer evoked through the orderly construction or devices of elaborate diction and rhythm, but through the defamiliarised reading of an apparently unrelated set of collocations of fractured words and broken syntax, arranged in a novel typographic form. Morgan even compared the relevance of concrete poetry to Scottish society to the practice of Chinese acupuncture relieving a long-standing migraine: a Chinese doctor will undertake to cure your sciatica or migraine by inserting a series of fine gold needles in carefully selected areas of your body – these needles are not connected to any electric or therapeutic apparatus, they cure you simply by being the right kind of needle placed in exactly the right spot, or so the Chinese say. In the

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  115 same way, visual poetry depends on an exact choice and placing of separate words which are not connected to sentences but which in spite of that carry a charge that you feel when you expose yourself to the grid of the whole poem.11 It is therefore evident that Morgan’s espousal of concrete poetry goes beyond a mere formal preoccupation with a new form of expression. He looks on concrete poetry as a site of action, a means of addressing social ills. With concrete poetry, Morgan is able to harness a new poetic communication that has the power to relate poets and readers to the contemporary world. It is not necessarily the medium but the right mood that renders the poem new and present. As Morgan notes, ‘Without being “cybernetic poetry”, it is very much a poetry in a cybernetic age, and the objection commonly raised to it, that it is “trivial” and mere “play”, doesn’t understand that “play” has a new meaning in such an age.’12 For Morgan, translation was an important means of becoming involved with the concrete poetry, and in the 1960s, through translation, he initiated long-lasting dialogue and friendship with the de Campos brothers. Through his encounters with the work of concrete poets such as the de Campos brothers, in their original languages as well as in translation, and, latterly, through his own act of translation, Morgan developed new ways of thinking and practices that drew upon experimental poetics. Augusto de Campos affirmed the theoretical and political scope of concrete poetry in the first letters exchanged between himself and Morgan. In a letter sent from Augusto to Morgan dated March 21, 1963, Augusto gives a detailed account of Brazilian concrete poetry and the politically engaged sensibility that characterised a large number of the de Campos brothers’ poems in the 1950s and 1960s: in a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. […] we believe physiognomy, that may reach to a high abstracted form, a valuable form of expression; we mean rather a clarification of the process, for the first phase links concrete poetry to a whole tradition: that of the ‘poems in the shapes of things’ from the Greek Symmias to Mallarmé’s ‘A Throw of the Dice’. […] As you’ll note, many of our concrete poems are not at all descriptive. They rather try to give an image of movement itself. They are poems over the poem. So it is very different to give a title for them, and it would be even unnecessary. In these cases we just choose one important word from the context to put in the index and make possible the references. But, of course, we also tried another experience, and even an engagée concrete poetry.13

116  Ting Huang Both the de Campos brothers and Morgan would demonstrate that the battle cry of the movement, added as a postscript to the ‘pilot plan’ for concrete poetry – Mayakovsky’s ‘there is no revolutionary art without revolutionary form’14 – would also apply to the translation practice which calls for as much revolutionary recreation as does original composition. After reading Augusto’s translation of cummings’s 10 Poemas (see Clüver, this volume), Morgan commented favourably in a letter of September 16, 1963, that ‘the Cummings (sic.) poems in particular seem to bear out my belief that there is much less in poetry that “cannot” be translated than most people like to suppose.’15 Departing from the supposed untranslatability of formally creative texts, the de Campos brothers proposed a new translational poetics – ‘transcreation,’ or ‘re-creation across languages and cultures,’ which renders the target text an autonomous creation that is isomorphic to the iconicity of the source text (see further, Clüver and Jackson, this volume). In transcreation, the re-­creatability of literary texts is premised on the untranslatability that derives from the disjunction between signifier and referent. It is this alienation that inhabits the discrepancy between the representation and the represented, which in turn invalidates any alleged ‘faithful’ rendering of the source text. Translation, therefore, is not only a matter of faithful transmission of sense to sense from one language to another, but also a bodily encounter between the source and the target language. In terms of fidelity, what transcreation purports to accomplish departs from that of a formal or a semantic equivalence. Rather, transcreation seeks to be more faithful to the original’s ‘modus of intention’ than to the meaning or simply the form – a sort of ‘metafaithfulness’ embedded in conceptualising the original work as well as its translation as two individual literary creations of isomorphic physicality. For Haroldo, the notion of the translator placing more emphasis on the semantic level of the source text is itself problematic, since the representation is indissoluble from the represented; to transcreate a text is to transcreate the signs constitutive of the text, i.e. the coalescence of signifier and signified or the materiality of the source text. Thus, for Haroldo de Campos, the re-creatableness of translation is proportional to the literariness of the source text: Quanto mais inçado de dificuldades esse texto, mais recriável, mais sedutor enquanto possibilidade aberta à recriação. Numa tradução dessa natureza, não se traduz apenas o significado, traduz-se o próprio signo, ou seja, sua fisicalidade, sua materialidade mesma.16 The more difficult the text is, the more recreatable, the more seductive it is as a possibility open to recreation. In a translation of this kind, the translator should not only translate the meaning, he translates the very sign, or in other words, its physicality, its very materiality. (My translation.)

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  117 Though Morgan never explicitly described himself as a ‘transcreator,’ the statement was to be borne out by his creative recreations of the de Campos brothers’ concrete poems, some of which were later published in Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967). Morgan’s creative rendering of Augusto’s poems in English led to a specially commissioned translation by Haroldo de Campos in 1965 of Servidão de Passagem. Composed in the early 1960s, the poem typifies the advent of a new phase or salto participante (‘participatory leap’) in the development of concrete poetry. Characterised by a vigorously satirical and critical tone, the concrete poems composed during this period sought a more profound engagement with the socio-political issues that were looming large in a newly urbanised industrial nation. It was under such a politically active rubric that concrete poems took on a more comprehensible form of writing so as to facilitate the transmission of the message carried within the poems as well as to reach a wider audience. A revolutionary theme had become evident in the concrete poems of the de Campos brothers. Paradigmatic examples created during this stage of concrete poetry are Décio Pignatari’s Beba Coca-Cola (1957; ‘Drink Coca-Cola’), Augusto de Campos’ Greve (1962; ‘Strike’) and Haroldo de Campos’ Servidão de Passagem (1965; ‘Transient Servitude’). The term ‘participatory leap’ was initially proposed by Décio Pignatari at the Second Brazilian Conference of Literary Criticism and History (II Congresso Brasileiro de Crítica e História Literária) in 1961. He then offers his explanation of the term in an essay entitled ‘Contemporary Situation of Poetry in Brazil’ (A Situação Atual da Poesia no Brasil) published in the first number of the literary magazine Invenção (1962). In this article, Pignatari astutely recognises the need for a poetic dynamics to account for the political implications evoked by the structure and semantics of a concrete poem. Pignatari asserts that ‘concrete poetry is the first grand aggregation of contemporary poetry, as well as a “projected” poetry – the only poetry resulting from our time.’ (A poesia concreta é a primeira grande totalização da poesia contemporânea, enquanto poesia ‘projetada’ – a única poesia consequente de nosso tempo.)17 That is, poetry is not limited to the verbal level, for it is ‘projective.’ It invites the reader to read the poem cumulatively so as to gain a perceptive consciousness that is then projected onto the poem and onto the reader’s social situation. Pignatari calls for concrete poetry to participate in modernity and to engage in political activities, thereby to take a ‘leap’ into the socio-political fields. ‘The puma will make a leap’ (A onça vai dar o pulo), claims Pignatari, on the eve of the Brazilian military’s coup d’état of 1964, ‘Concrete poetry will and will have to make a meaningful-­ semantic-participatory leap.’ (A poesia concreta vai dar, só tem de dar, o pulo conteudístico-semântico-participante.)18 However, the renewal of interest in political content inevitably leads to poetic compositions that favour expressiveness over the ‘materiality of the words.’ By taking up

118  Ting Huang and articulating questions of social concern the concrete poetry of this period undergoes an evolution: it places more emphasis on a participatory encounter with readers as well as with the outer world. Compared with the poems created in the ‘orthodox’ period of the 1950s, concrete poetry in the 1960s is characterised by more flexible aesthetic criteria, which is manifest in the dynamic emergence of semiotic poems, orchestral poetic performance and other multi-media performative poems. Servidão de Passagem is a key work of this new phase. It can be divided into two parts: the prefatory poem – ‘proem’ – and the poem. The proem starts by minutely describing a world packed with contradictions and uncertainties. mosca ouro? mosca fosca. mosca prata? mosca preta. mosca íris? mosca reles. mosca anil? mosca vil. mosca azul? mosca mosca. mosca branca? poesia pouca.

fly gold? fly dim. fly silver? fly black. fly iris? fly worthless. fly indigo? fly vile. fly blue? fly fly. fly white? poetry little. (my literal translation)

fly of gold? fly gone dry. fly of silver? fly of cinders. fly of rainbows? fly of rags. fly of indigo? fly of indigence. fly of blue? fly of flies fly of white? Poetry no-poetry. (Morgan’s translation)

The proem begins with a series of questions and answers: mosca ouro?/ mosca fosca./mosca prata?/mosca preta./mosca íris?/mosca reles./mosca anil?/mosca vil./mosca azul?/mosca mosca. The hopeful questions are met with abruptly negative responses. Through a series of apparently rhetorical questions, Haroldo seems to take pleasure in his repetitive interrogation about the ‘fly’ (mosca) and its colours. In the questions, Haroldo implies a visual perception that challenges the established and obvious attributes of a fly; the ideas/images are thereby constructed rather than natural or transparent. While the reader endeavours to comprehend these rhetorical questions, Haroldo suddenly shifts the subject matter to poetry, ending with a negative yet suggestive note mosca branca?/poesia pouca. The sceptical and introspective tone is obvious throughout the proem. Note that the repeated recourse to colours – gold, black, indigo and white – appeals to a visual topography, a pastiche of social attributes (wealth, nobility and innocence) codified into colour. The social impasse and political division that characterised immediately pre-­dictatorship Brazilian society is reified through the semantically contradictory yet aurally rhyming pair addressed to the repeated subject matter. Towards the end of the proem, the contrasting dual ‘a poesia é pura?/a poesia é para’ (‘poetry is pure?/poetry is for’) echoes the line poesia pouca (‘poetry little’), suggesting the poet’s commitment to a socially relevant ­poetry that is antithetical to white, blue, yellow, red or any other ‘pure’

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  119 but socially unengaged colour. Haroldo calls into question the possibility of achieving a ‘pure’ poetry in an ‘impure’ time of political and economic instability. Echoing the title Servidão de Passagem, a legal term meaning ‘right of way’ or ‘right of passage,’ the concrete poets were pressed by a national crisis to take on a new form and voice new concepts, as if traversing a land that is no longer theirs. These rhythmic patterns of the proem are intensified in the succeeding poem. Haroldo takes us further on his pessimistic exploration of social issues pertinent to Brazil, including alienation and racial segregation. The scene that Haroldo depicts is a bleak, exploitative cycle that sees no end – homemmoendahomemmoagem (‘mangrindstonemangrinding’), here só moagem (‘only grinding’), sem miragem (‘without mirage’). This hopeless vision can also be captured on the semantic level, where rhyming words and fragments fuse and fissure until they blur. onde mói esta moagem onde engrena esta engrenagem moenda homem moagem moagem homem moenda engrenagem gangrenagem … só moagem ossomoagem sem miragem selvaselvagem servidão de passagem

where does this grinding grind where does this gear engage grindstone man grinding grinding man grindstone gearchanging gangrene (to cause gangrene) +gem … only grinding bone-grinding no mirage junglesavage right of passage (my literal translation)

where does this grinding grind where does this gear engage grindstone man’s grinding grinding man’s grindstone gearchanged gangrengaged … lonely grindinghood bone-grindinghood no mirage to brood through savage wood transient servitude (Morgan’s translation)

In verbal terms, the sparseness enables an unadorned assertion of injustice and oppression evoked by blocks of neat, echoing collocations, such as the formally repetitive groups beginning, respectively, with homem (man), and, later in the poem, quem (‘who’). Compared with the literal translation, it is evident that Morgan has found ingenious solutions to the challenge of finding echoing equivalences ‘stacked/sacked, served/swallowed.’ homem senhor homem servo homem sobre homem sob homem saciado homem saqueado homem servido homem sorvo

man sir man serve man above man below man filled man plundered man served man swallow (my literal translation)

sir man serving man super man sub man stacked man sacked man served man swallowed man (Morgan’s translation)

120  Ting Huang The poem ends with the apparently awkward translation ‘transient servitude’ (servidão de passagem), which downplays the sense of ‘right of passage’ to foreground the sense of servile subjection of man to man, of man to regime, of man to tradition and, lastly, probably most pertinently, of concrete poetry to that unknown land where poetry exists as a ‘pure’ artistic form, disconnected from social concerns. Unlike concrete poetry created in the orthodox phase (1952–1960), the more explicitly politically attuned poems composed by the de Campos brothers in the first half of the 1960s rely largely on the tension accrued through the progression of a series of ‘semantic concretions.’ This is already well demonstrated in the poem of Servidão de Passagem in which the accelerated rhythm is achieved through a repetitive syntactic pattern overlaid with consistent rhyming, as in puro-pus, vivo-virus, belo-bile, fúcsia-fúria and pura-para. However, rendering these features into English inevitably poses a formal challenge to the translator, which is to a large extent due to the lack of the target language’s lack of noun declensions and a system of verb conjugation that is much less complex than Portuguese. Morgan’s translation ‘Transient Servitude’ succeeds in being an innovative recreation based on his conscientious observance of the sound effects which he realised were integral to the original poem. In Morgan’s version, the poem is recreated in aural terms and possesses an equally intense rhythm. In the proem, it is evident from a comparison with my literal translation that Morgan’s selection of words is more sound-oriented than meaning-oriented. The alliterative pair belo-bile is recreated as the equally alliterative ‘vaunted-vomit’ instead of a more semantically faithful rendering such as ‘beautiful-bile,’ which, although it also retains the alliteration, would slow down the abrupt trochaic rhythm due to the use of the longer trisyllabic adjective, ‘beautiful.’ In this case, semantic faithfulness obviously gives way to the metafaithfulness advocated by transcreation – a sort of faithfulness embedded in conceptualising the original work as well as its translation as two individual literary creations of isomorphic physicality. It is fair to say that this metafaithfulness could not have been achieved without Haroldo providing Morgan with a painstakingly glossed version of Servidão de Passagem as well as a series of vocabulary suggestions. The correspondence between Morgan and Haroldo regarding the translation process is an illuminating testament to Morgan’s rapport with the de Campos brothers and with concrete poetry. Moreover, it demonstrates Morgan’s commitment to exploring new poetic possibilities and to bringing experimental work to Scotland. These letters, exchanged by means of air mail mainly in the years of 1964 and 1965, contain substantial discussions in their quest to arrive at le mot juste and hence are able to display a raw insight into the transcreating process as well as the formation of a web of literary friendships linked by concrete poetry (see Corbett, this volume). After receiving the word-by-word translation

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  121 and paraphrases of Servidão de Passagem from Haroldo, Morgan replied in a letter regarding his poetics of translation, I tried to reproduce as much of the sound-effect as possible, as I think this is important in poetry of this kind, and at times this meant I was going a little way from the exact sense, but never I believe very far and always in the spirit of the context as far as I understood it.19 This statement reveals that Morgan, poised between semantic fidelity and sound/graphic effects, constantly questions the tensions between visuality and textual meaning in his process of translating Haroldo’s poem. We have already mentioned the punning title, Servidão de Passagem. Morgan opts to translate it as ‘transient servitude’ instead of ‘right of way’ although the latter option would clarify the legal sense in Portuguese: the right granted to pass along a specific route of land belonging to others. The more literal but opaque translation of servidão as ‘servitude’ retains the sense of a critique of the social realities that Brazil was then facing, while passagem (‘passage’) invokes a sense of transitoriness or the idea of transition. Once translated as ‘Transient Servitude,’ Servidão de Passagem may lose the legal sense it has in Portuguese, but it retains the implicit call for a break away from temporary chains of servitude and slavery so as to create a more equal society. In the body of the poem, Morgan, as we have noted, is careful to recreate the rhythmic force that characterises the whole poem – this imperative impacts on the literal accuracy of some of his lexical equivalents in English. Morgan’s verbal selection is impressively bold. It seems that the ‘untranslatability’ of the poem, the impossibility of achieving both semantic and aural fidelities, rather grants Morgan more freedom than less in his transcreation. This is particularly noteworthy in the following table: homem forrado homem ferrado homem rapina homem rapado homem surra homem surrado homem buraco homem burra

man padded man iron-clad man rapine man scraped man beating(n.)/beats man beaten man hole man coffer (my literal translation)

bland man branded man pillage man peeled man cudgel man cudgelled man sieve man steel-safe man (Morgan’s translation)

By conjoining the semantically contradictory yet aurally rhyming terms, the stanza develops an interplay of sound effects and presents us with a clear-cut dichotomous society where the poet launches into a set of dialectical interrogations of the hard facts of existence. For the first two lines homem forrado/homem ferrado, no doubt Morgan’s attempt

122  Ting Huang to recreate in English the effect of the alliteration on ‘f’, the consonance of ‘ado’ and the assonance of ‘ra’ compromises the semantic fidelity of his substitutions of ‘bland/branded’ for the original pair forrado/­ferrado. It is interesting to note that Morgan came up with the pair ‘bland/branded’ as a revised version upon Haroldo’s calling into question his earlier translation as ‘favoured man/ferrous man,’ since according to Haroldo, in a letter, ‘“ferrous” doesn’t give the idea of exploited man, as in ferrado.’20 Haroldo expresses concern that the direct translation into English, ‘ferrous,’ fails to convey the underlying sense of ‘being marked as private property with iron.’ The couplet is a concise semantic contrast between emancipation and slavery. Its impact lies not only in the semantic contrast, however, but also in the sounds and physical cadence, the rhythm of reading. Once Morgan had settled on ‘branded,’ translating the word forrado demanded a more malleable semantic choice in order to give the necessary aural contrast. Despite the loss of literal equivalence, the choice of ‘bland’ allows the recurrence of the phonemes ‘b’, ‘a’, ‘n’ and ‘d’ contained in ‘branded’, and so there is again assonance and consonance in the pairing of the lines. And at least there is still a semantic contrast, here between being unexceptional (rather than emancipated) and branded for slavery. Morgan’s creative translation of the verses illustrates his principled negotiation of the traditional conception of translation, according to which the main goal would be the accurate reconstitution of the textual information carried by the source text. Morgan’s approach, however, is to translate the whole sign system which incorporates the source messages so as to achieve metafaithfulness. This can be seen again in the table below. de sol a sol soldado de sal a sal salgado de sova a sova sovado de suco a suco sugado de sono a sono sonado sangrado de sangue a sangue

from sun to sun welded from salt to salt salty from beating to beating trodden from juice to juice sucked from sleep to sleep sleepy bloody from blood to blood (my literal translation)

from sun to solar solder from salt to salty saline from stick to stone stunned from sap to sugar sucked from sleep to slip slumped sanguined from seep to spurt (Morgan’s translation)

Here, Morgan compensates for the loss of momentum accumulated through three repetitions of the same syllable in sol-sol-soldado with a semantic crescendo ‘sun-solar-solder’ which retains the alliteration on ‘s,’ and some assonance and consonance in the final two words. In this way, though Morgan’s transcreation weakens the original’s sound progression, the English wording affords the poem a range of new interpretations.

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  123 A key assumption in the de Campos brothers’ translation poetics is the emphasis on the role of the translator as a mediator, a major shaping force in their cultural agenda. Haroldo de Campos views transcreation as a fusion of disparate references and languages. This view is evident in his own translations in which he introduces local elements as well as foreignising compounds. As he was not highly proficient in Portuguese, Morgan’s translation relies largely on the glossary and explanatory notes provided by Haroldo. Even so, Morgan’s intention to recreate Haroldo’s poem in English on his own terms is clearly demonstrated as he, on several occasions, chooses not to heed Haroldo’s suggestions and instead, opts to translate in words with much richer implications in English. An example is the point of criticism raised by Haroldo regarding Morgan’s rendering of the verse homem fala/homem cala (‘man talk/man shut’) into ‘yakkity man/rabbity man.’ Haroldo proposes the near-rhyming pair ‘talk/balk’ that corresponds more closely to a literal translation of the Portuguese which implies ‘he who talks and gives orders/he who shuts up and obeys.’21 Morgan, in his defence, is more concerned with the multifaceted domestic connotations of the idiomatic English word ‘yakkity’ (reminiscent of the American expression ‘yakkity-yak’), which suggests an overbearing and oppressive attitude. As for the translation of quem cala, Morgan comes up with the expression rabbity that has assonance and an echoic rhythm with ‘yakkity.’ ‘Rabbity’ derives from a Cockney slang ‘to rabbit on,’ meaning to talk incessantly and to no purpose. In this instance, the sound effects override the necessity to form a pattern of semantically opposite pair as in the source text. If there is a contrast here, it is between someone who is overbearingly imperious and someone who is simply chatty. Morgan employs culturally evocative terms – dialect and colloquialism – instead of standardised lexis to recreate more lively and dramatised verses in English. It is possible that the rationale behind such usages is to serve a more important cultural purpose – the domestication of Brazilian concrete poetry in varieties of spoken English, since in Morgan’s cultural project, translation is viewed as a functional apparatus to infuse staid anglophone culture, and in particular what he perceived as stagnant Scottish literature, with the freshness and excitement he found in the experimental movements of other languages. Morgan found the philosophy and poetic techniques of concrete poetry liberating, and the impact of the challenge to translate experimental poetry on his own development as a poet was profound. The 1960s mark Morgan’s most productive years as a concrete poet; during this decade he published many of his most acclaimed concrete poems, including ‘Starryveldt,’ ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake,’ ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card,’ ‘Chinese Cat.’ In a letter, Morgan declared, ‘I’m interested in concrete poetry as an extension of technique. It’s a new instrument which you have to learn to play. You have to find out what it can do and what it can’t do.’22 It was through translation that Morgan

124  Ting Huang ‘learned to play’ the instrument of concrete poetry. Many years after the heyday of the international concrete poetry movement, Morgan wrote the autobiographical poem ‘Seven Decades’ (1990), in which he gives an expressive account of the importance of his encounter with the de Campos brothers, among other ‘foreign’ influences on his development, alongside the domestic happiness he found with a new lover: At forty I woke up, saw it was day, found there was love, heard a new beat, heard Beats, sent airmail solidarity to Sao Paulo’s poetic-concrete revolution, knew Glasgow – what? – knew Glasgow new – somehow – new with me, with John, with cranes, diffusion of another concrete revolution, not bad, not good, but new. And new was no illusion: a spring of words, a sloughing, an ablution. 23 The modifier, ‘poetic-concrete,’ recalls the many hyphenated compounds of the Pilot Plan and other manifestos of the international concrete poetry movement (see McCabe, this volume). The newness of concrete poetry inspired in him a sense of excitement and social relevance that was needed to cleanse Scottish poetry of the early 1960s of its dull obsession with tradition, and give it once more a broader perspective – it provided a necessary ‘ablution.’ Translation was always a major part of Morgan’s poetic output, as it was to the Noigandres poets. He translated from languages ranging from Russian, Hungarian, Italian, German, Portuguese to Latin and Old English. He rendered works as stylistically and temporally distant as the avant-garde poems of Mayakovsky into demotic Scots and Beowulf into modern English. A substantial part of his translations is collected in Rites of Passage: selected translations (1976). The title of this collection may well be a punning echo of the legal sense of Servidão de Passagem ‘right of passage’. For Morgan, the act of translation or rather ‘transcreation’ became a source from which his own poetry constantly gained nourishment. Thus, Morgan’s translation practice constitutes a veritable rite of passage through which his original poetry gained new perspectives and an array of technical possibilities.

Notes 1 Unpublished letters cited in the chapter are from the Morgan Papers, Department of Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library. The correspondence related to concrete poetry is in a number of boxes, in the Morgan MS collection, referred to below by the catalogue identifier, e.g. SpecColl L/5 and the relevant box.

Edwin Morgan as Transcreator  125 2 Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, ‘Plano-­ Piloto para Poesia Concreta,’ p. 215. 3 Eduardo Jardim de Moraes, ‘A Estética de Mário de Andrade,’ pp. 123–133. According to de Moraes, Mário de Andrade – the defining figure in Brazilian modernism – had proposed a new aesthetic attitude to counteract the predominating formalism, individualism and dissocialisation that characterised the then Brazilian literature. 4 Gonzalo Moisés Aguilar, Poesia Concreta Brasileira: as vanguardas na encruzilhada modernista, p. 44. 5 Luciana Stegagno Picchio, História da Literatura Brasileira, 1997, quoted in K. David Jackson, ‘Transcriação/Transcreation,’ The Translator as Mediator of Cultures 3 (2010): p. 140. 6 K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker, ‘Avant-Garde Trends: Is Concretism a New Reading of Tradition?,’ pp. 405–406. 7 Edwin Morgan, ‘Concrete Poetry,’ in Bernard Bergonzi (ed.) Innovations: Essays on Art and Ideas. London: Macmillan, p. 221. The manuscript version of this essay is enclosed in its entirety in his letter to Bergonzi dated April 17, 1967. SpecColl L/5 Concrete Poetry 1967. 8 Edwin Morgan, ‘Concrete Poetry,’ pp. 213–225. 9 Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell (eds.) The International Writers’ Conference Revisited: Edinburgh 1962. Cargo Publishing, p. 68. Quoted in John Corbett, ‘Concrete Realities,’ p. 134. 10 Pierre Garnier, essay published in Les Lettres, no. 30, 1963. Quoted in Edwin Morgan, ‘Concrete Poetry,’ p. 221. 11 Edwin Morgan, ‘Concrete Poetry,’ p. 219. 12 Edwin Morgan, ‘Concrete Poetry,’ p. 220. 13 Augusto de Campos to Morgan, 21 March 1963, Letter. SpecColl DD/3 Augusto de Campos Corres (1962–1968). 14 Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, ‘Plano-­ Piloto para Poesia Concreta,’ p. 218. Both Morgan and Haroldo de Campos translated Mayakovsky’s poetry. 15 Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence ­(1950–2010). Manchester: Carcanet, p. 104. 16 Haroldo de Campos, Haroldo de Campos – Transcriação, p. 5. 17 Décio Pignatari, ‘A Situação Atual da Poesia no Brasil,’ p. 117. 18 Ibid. 19 Morgan to Haroldo de Campos, 24 September 1965, Letter. SpecColl DD/4 Au 4848/Box 1 Haroldo de Campos Corres (1965–1968). 20 Haroldo de Campos to Morgan, 21 October 1965, Letter. SpecColl DD/4 Au 4848/Box 1 Haroldo de Campos Corres (1965–1968). 21 Ibid. 22 Edwin Morgan to John Sharkey, 8 September 1964, Letter. SpecColl L/5 Concrete Poetry 1970. 23 Edwin Morgan, 1996, p. 594.

References Aguilar, Gonzalo Moisés. Poesia Concreta Brasileira: as vanguardas na encruzilhada modernista. São Paulo: Edusp, 2005. Corbett, John. “Concrete Realities.” In Alan Riach (ed.) The International Companion to Edwin Morgan. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015, pp. 130–144.

126  Ting Huang Jackson, K. David. “Transcriação/Transcreation The Brazilian concrete poets and translation.” In Humphrey Tonkin and Maria Esposito Frank (eds.) The Translator as Mediator of Cultures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, pp. 139–160. Jackson, K. David, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. “Avant-Garde Trends: Is Concretism a New Reading of Tradition?” In K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker (eds.) Experimental-Visual-Concrete. Avant-Garde Poetry Since the1960s. Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996, pp. 404–418. Moraes, Eduardo Jardim de. “A Estética de Mário de Andrade.” In A. ­Fabris (ed.) Modernidade e Modernismo no Brasil. Porto Alegre: Editora Zouk, 2010, pp. 123–133. Morgan, Edwin. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. Morgan, Edwin. “Concrete Poetry.” In Bernard Bergonzi (ed.) Innovations: ­E ssays on Art and Ideas. London: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 213–225. Morgan, Edwin. The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence (1950– 2010). (edited by James McGonigal and John Coyle). Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. Picchio, Luciana Stegagno. História da Literatura Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, 1997. Pignatari, Décio. “A Situação Atual da Poesia no Brasil.” In Contracomunicação. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2004, pp. 99–120. Tápia, Marcelo and Thelma Médici Nóbrega (eds.) Haroldo de Campos – ­Transcriação. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013.

8 Constellations and Ideograms Eugen Gomringer’s Multilingual Concrete Poetry Raquel Abi-Sâmara Introduction Concrete poetry flourished in the 1950s in a vigorous and practically simultaneous manner in Brazil, with Noigandres group of poets (Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari), and in Switzerland, with the Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer, current director of the Institut für Konstruktive Kunst und Konkrete Poesie (IKKP), in Rehau, Germany. The polygenesis of this poetry would already be enough to justify its international and multilingual character. It certainly did not emerge only in those two countries. Mary Ellen Solt, editor of one of the earliest and most relevant anthologies of this movement, Concrete Poetry: A World View,1 includes in her collection poets from 19 countries, 2 with Switzerland and Brazil being the first to be introduced. The cultural network formed among the poets at the time – basically through the exchange of letters and artistic and cultural encounters (see also Corbett, this volume) – allowed this poetry to become an international concrete poetry movement. According to Haroldo de Campos, in November 1955 designer and poet Décio Pignatari paid a visit to the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm,3 where Gomringer worked with Max Bill4 (1908–1994), one of the artists who most influenced the concrete movement in the 1950s, and one of the most important designers of the 20th century. And without any prior contact, Décio met Gomringer.5 Discussing Gomringer’s poetry in her anthology, Mary Ellen Solt refers to this unanticipated meeting of mutual interests as the beginning of the international concrete poetry movement. In the Poema room of the IKKP, where Gomringer exhibits some of his poems, beautifully printed on recycled wood stands, there is a rectangular table with a small metal plate attached to one of its corners, where the following inscription can be read, with the title in bold letters: der junge text (‘the young text’), and just below it, one reads: an diesem tisch in der mensa der HFG ulm haben eugen gomringer und decio pignatari 1955 beschlossen, die neue poesie gemeinsam als konkrete poesie zu bezeichnen’ (‘seated at this table in the canteen of the Ulm School-HFG, eugen gomringer and decio pignatari decided that, together, they would call the new poetry concrete poetry’).6

128  Raquel Abi-Sâmara The present investigation of Eugen Gomringer’s poetics draws on theoretical texts published in Admirador 7 and on his anthologies of concrete poetry and visual poetry, in an attempt to understand how he configured concrete poetry as a universal medium. The starting point is the concrete poetic form that Gomringer called ‘constellation.’ The concept of the ‘constellation’ is key to the construction of these new poem-objects, which distance themselves from the subjective and emotional elements of the Romantic tradition. They are functional objects, which Gomringer styled as ‘thought-objects,’ envisioned by a poet-­designer to intervene in a world marked by new techniques of production, reproducibility and mass communication. For the Brazilian concretists, as is evident in their manifesto, Teoria da Poesia Concreta, there is another predominant principle of poetic construction, namely the ‘ideogram’ (see Clüver, this volume). Since form is a driver in concrete poetics (form = ­content), the relationship between these two conceptual configurations is worth exploring. Focusing on the dialogue between the cognate poetics of Gomringer and that of the Noigandres group, the present discussion will interrogate the poetics of the constellation and ideogram, which, together, represent the genesis of concrete poetics. Here, the constellation will be analysed in relation to the ideogram, the name adopted for the concrete poem by the Brazilian poets of the Noigandres group. From the start, for both Gomringer and the Noigandres group, what was important was to stress the predominance of a visual semantics in the concrete poem, of an ideographic logic, one that is no longer a grammatical, discursive logic. In the founding manifestoes of this new visual poetry, Gomringer proclaimed the shift ‘from verse to constellation,’ and, in their turn, the Noigandres poets proclaimed a shift ‘from verse to ideogram.’

Gomringer and the Noigandres Poets – An Aesthetic Dialogue In Brazil, the poets Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos founded the Noigandres8 poetry group by launching a magazine of the same title in 1952; it included poems that illustrated concrete aesthetics, although they were not yet calling them concrete poems. The official launching of Concrete Art in Brazil happened that same year, at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in the city of Sao Paulo, with an exhibition of the Ruptura Group.9 It was also in this year that Eugen Gomringer wrote his first ‘concrete’ poem, avenidas, which he called a ‘constellation,’ directly alluding to the ‘constellations’ of Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s poetic experimentation in ‘Un Coup des Dès’ (1897) exploited the space on the page in an adventurous way, including it as both part of the composition and as a semantic element. The avenidas poem (or constellation), shown below, is composed of only four

Constellations and Ideograms  129 words, but its brevity does not diminish its impact. As we shall see, the poem has been the subject of great controversy (both aesthetic and legal) in Germany in recent years. In 1953, in that same year of the foundation of HfG Ulm, Gomringer published, together with Dieter Roth and Marcel Wyss, the first issue of the innovative art magazine spirale. Also in 1953, Gomringer published konstellationen – constellations – constelaciones,10 which can be considered as the first book of modern concrete poetry, though the poet was still using the label ‘constellations’ rather than ‘concrete poems.’ As the title demonstrates, this collection of poems was multilingual. The poems collected in this volume are also composed of few words, following the Mallarmé’s dictum that a poem is made not of ideas, but of words. There are even poems that consist of a single word, like the constellation (or ideogram?) silencio (‘silence’), which, Gomringer told me, is one of the most republished poems in the world. The manifesto that proclaims vom vers zur konstellation: zweck und form einer neuen dichtung (‘from verse to constellation: function and form of a new poetry’) was also published by the poet in spirale, in 1955. In the same year, the Noigandres group published their manifestos in the articles, Poesia, Estrutura (‘Poetry, Structure’) and Poema, Ideograma (‘Poem, Ideogram’) by Augusto de Campos, and Poesia e Paraíso Perdido (‘Poetry and Paradise Lost’) and A Obra de Arte Aberta (‘The Open Work of Art’) by Haroldo de Campos.11 In December 1956, Concrete poetry was officially launched at MAM (the Museum of Modern Art) in São Paulo and then in Rio de Janeiro, by Pignatari and the De Campos brothers. Two years later, they published the famous plano piloto para poesia concreta (‘pilot plan for concrete poetry’), which appeared as a supplement to number 4 of the Noigandres magazine. As can be seen, from the start, concrete poetry established a fundamental dialogue with the visual arts, especially with Concrete Art, both in Brazil and in Europe. According to Eugen Gomringer, ‘Max Bill being awarded the Grand Prix of Plastics at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1951 had a huge impact. After that, for example, the South Americans came to Ulm and were given scholarships, including Almir Mavignier.’12 We also know that translation also played an important early role in this movement. For the Brazilian concrete poets, translation was a literary and cultural project.13 Translation can be considered as a constituent part of this new poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. The ‘cannibalistic approach’14 of poetic translations by Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos – which they called ‘transcreations’ – contributed to the development of the ideogrammic aspect of concrete poetry. Following Pound’s practice in Cathay (1915), Haroldo de Campos collaborated with Chinese experts to produce Portuguese versions of classic and contemporary Chinese poetry. These transcreations and dialogues

130  Raquel Abi-Sâmara with Chinese poetry were raw materials for the craft of original concrete poetry.15 The celebrated essay by American philosopher and Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,’ published by Ezra Pound in 1919, was a landmark for early Modernist avant-garde poetry. This essay was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil by Haroldo de Campos in 1977, in the anthology Ideograma: lógica, poesia, linguagem. Eugen Gomringer translated the same essay into German and published it in 1972, in the Kunst und Umwelt series. According to Willard Bohn, ‘although Concrete poetry combines two separate traditions – the European and the Brazilian – few traces of its double origin remain. To be sure, some observers perceive significant differences between the two schools, but these are more apparent than real.’16 Bohn observes that some critics distinguish the two traditions of concrete poetry, ‘the one conceiving poetry as a visual experience [European concrete poetry], the other as a “verbivocovisual” exercise [Brazilian concrete poetry]’17 but he believes that there is little evidence that this distinction holds up in practice. Gomringer himself perceived both similarities and differences, at least in nuance. When asked about his relationship with the poets of the Noigandres group in an interview given to Annette Gilbert, Gomringer gave the following response: We knew each other by writing for a few years, I knew the Noigandres and they knew the spiral. How exactly we have learned about each other, I don’t recall. We just somehow knew each other. I had an advantage over many Germans in that I am Bolivian and speak Spanish. That’s why I had easier access to them; I was almost one of them. By the way, it is quite interesting that Concrete poetry originated in two countries that were not protagonists in the war ­Switzerland and Brazil. It was in those countries that the two magazines, Noigandres and spiral, appeared.18 In the same interview, Gomringer mentions the supranational character of concrete poetry, a poetry, in terms of structure, that can be similar throughout the world. There are some differences, however, in the ways of approaching this quality of structure. Referring to ‘the South Americans,’ Gomringer explains that they had a closer relationship to music. I didn’t have that at all. I was very aligned to the visual arts; we had Concrete art right at our doorstep. Haroldo de Campos was more of a philologist with a very broad education, including music. You may not realize this immediately, because his poems are similar to our own, but already there are differences.19

Constellations and Ideograms  131 In his turn, Haroldo de Campos compares the two poetics thus: The poet from Ulm started from a basic cast of authors almost identical to that of the Brazilians: instead of Pound, he quoted William Carlos Williams (a disciple and friend of Ezra Pound); and added, for the German sphere, Phantasus, from Arno Holz. Gomringer produced an extremely reduced poetry, rigorous and orthogonal in its construction, thematically circumscribed to annotations about nature or the urban landscape, or else about abstract motifs of structural dynamics. […] Concrete Brazilian poetry – as represented in the ‘Poetamenos’ series and some other poems then unpublished – was more complex, of non-two dimensional (orthogonal) construction, but rather multidimensional, less concentrated, sharing in a visual Baroque manner that one can say is one of the formal constants of Brazilian sensitivity, which can be seen, for example, in our modern architecture. The contact between the Brazilians and Gomringer was reciprocally fruitful, and there was, on the one hand, an exchange of instigations and influences, without prejudice to the paths each of them was taking. 20 Not all forms of concrete poetics are the same, as Marjorie Perloff notes in ‘Writing and Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrière-Garde.’21 Although it may seem to be a unified movement, Perloff distinguishes between different manifestations of it, and raises questions about the commonly held notion that Gomringer should be considered the ‘father’ of Concrete poetry.22 She argues that Gomringer differs from another pioneer, Öyvind Fahlström, 23 and also from the de Campos brothers, since Gomringer’s work derives more from the visual arts than from a literary environment.

Gomringer’s Constellations As noted earlier, the volume Admirador brings together manifestos and essays that are fundamental for the understanding of Gomringer’s poetics and what he called the ‘constellation.’ Drawing on texts quoted in the chapter entitled ‘on the theory of Concrete poetry’ (zur theorie der konkreten poesie), 24 and also from the paratexts of two anthologies of Concrete and visual poetry organised by Gomringer, 25 we will revisit the definitions of this new form, which we will argue are vital to understanding the trans-linguistic nature of his work. The essay, by Ulrich Ernst, entitled ‘Eugen Gomringer and the concept of a global poetry: Concretism as an international movement’ (the only text in the chapter not written by Gomringer), situates Gomringer as a theoretician of a global poetry as he placed the idea of internationality in the foreground of his manifesto ‘from verse to constellation.’ This new form of poetry,

132  Raquel Abi-Sâmara according to Ernst, ‘takes on a sort of function of a ‘universal language,’ and in it ‘polyglysia is almost natural.’26 Ernst illustrates his claim with an imagery-laden passage in the manifesto: ‘The constellation is interand supra-national. A word in English can join with a word in Spanish. How well the constellation fits into an airport!’27 In using the image of an airport, the poet evokes a quintessentially modern site characterised by intense traffic, of passing through, a place which brings together people from diverse origins who speak different languages, not static people, but people on the move. This polyphonic, dynamic experience of modernity parallels that of readers encountering constellations or thought-objects. The plasticity of combining words from different languages has precedents and analogues in the poetic prose of Haroldo de Campos (Galáxias), Pound (The Cantos), Joyce (Ulysses) and Guimarães Rosa (Grande Sertão: Veredas) where neologisms are formed either by compounding whole words from different languages or by combining morphemes of words from different languages. In the case of Gomringer’s poems, the junction of languages occurs more frequently when two or more complete constellations (with each constellation composed in the same language) are brought together on the same page, as can be seen, for example, in ‘konstellationen – constellations – constelaciones. According to Ernst, ‘Concrete poetry, with its claim to experimentation and innovation, promotes a new ‘surface poetry’;28 it largely uses visual language configurations conceived, as a rule, not as mimetic but rather as self-referential.’ This poetry is announced in the manifesto as a visual object, an object of use: a thought-object – a thought-game (seh- und gebrauchsgegenstand: denkspiel). The concrete poem works through its brevity and compression. It is memorable and easy to remember, like an image. It will serve contemporary man by means of the objective nature of a game, and the poet, in his turn, will serve the poem by means of his special talent for this gaming activity. He is the one who knows the rules of both the language and the game. He is the inventor of new formulas. The new poem as a model of verbal game will be able to affect our everyday language. […] The aim of this new poetry is to give an organic function back to poetry, and thus to redefine the poet’s place for his benefit and for the benefit of society. 29 In the future, the poet announces, ‘there will be only literature of use (gebrauchsliteratur), thus the contribution of poetry will be its focus, its economy and silence.’30 ‘Silence’ also suggests an economical poetry, one made of words and not ideas, silent by the fact that it is in opposition to a wordy and individualist poetry, that is, poetry in the Romantic tradition, with its excess of verses, emotional outbursts, descriptions and abstractions. This silence implies a physical presence, the impact

Constellations and Ideograms  133 of the word, its materiality, its existence in the world and its linguistic and visual corporeality. It is the word in space, not only in the space of the page but in a social space, in the world of human and linguistic exchanges and relations, which, in short, would be the organic function that the poet also refers to. If we think about the status and role of poetry since ancient times, with the exception of Plato, who exiled poets from his ideal Republic because he saw them as harmful to morality and customs, poetry seems never to have been as discriminated against as in the mass-media society that evolved during and after the 1950s.31 Certainly, the pioneers of concrete poetry were driven by the need for renewal of what is meant by poetry, in a world of increasingly fast-paced communication. ‘The verse,’ as Gomringer says, referring to the verse of traditional poetry, no longer functions as an organizing principle of the experience in language. Its special mode of language is detached from the language of the life we live. There is no relation between the verse-poem and society (apart from the appreciation of what is long past.)32 The new poetry stands as a verbal game that, according to Gomringer, may affect our everyday language. In what sense will the poem as a verbal game, or as a constellation, affect our everyday language? This question echoes that asked by Kurt Marti in his essay ‘Gedichte wozu?’ (‘Poetry, what for?’): ‘Gomringer postulates the poem as object of use (Gebrauchsgegenstand). His constellations want to be useful verses. But usable for what? That is the question that Gomringer asks of all poetry: What are poems useful for?’33 ‘The word,’ Gomringer explains, is a dimension, it is wherever it falls or wherever it is written. It is neither good nor bad, neither true nor false. It is made up of sounds, letters, each of which has its individual and striking expression; the beauty of the material and the adventure of the sign is up to the word.34 When combined with other words in a common syntax, the word loses its absolute nature, and that loss is exactly what Gomringer wants to avoid in poetry, as his manifesto explains. But the poet also wants the word to function in relation to other words, without thereby losing its individuality, and that is why the poet associates it with other words, but in the form of a spatial constellation, not a verbal syntax: The constellation (konstellation) is the simplest possibility of organizing (ist die einfachste gestaltungsmöglichkeit) poetry based on the word. Like a group of stars (sternbild), a group of words

134  Raquel Abi-Sâmara forms a constellation. Two, three or more words – they do not have to be many – ordered vertically and horizontally (nebenoder untereinandergesetzten wörter) – establish an idea-thing relationship. And that’s that!’ The constellation is an arrangement (ordnung) and at the same time a game space with defined dimensions. It allows for the game. It allows the sequential formation (reihenbildung) of word-concepts (wortbegriffe) a, b, c and their possible variations. Thus, for example, the inversion becomes merely actual mobility in the constellation. The constellation also allows for connecting elements especially the little big word ‘and’. It gains in size, it becomes an order of magnitude, and remains in place of emptiness. The constellation is put in place by the poet (vom dichter gesetzt). He defines (bestimmt) the gaming space, the field of forces, and indicates its possibilities. The reader, the new reader, accepts the playful meaning: knowledge of the possibilities of the game has today the same meaning as knowledge of past times about the statutes of classical poetry. The poet can align (ausrichten) the constellation so that the reader can follow it point by point. […] With the constellation, something is placed in the world. It is a reality in itself, and not a poem about […]35 Gomringer’s experimental poetry is, in its origins, directly associated with the mathematical and geometric experiments of Concrete Art, modernist architecture and industrial design developed at the Ulm School, and so we find in his definition of ‘constellation,’ especially in the above-quoted words, clues to a possible spatial visualisation of poetry. A group of words forms a constellation, which in German stands as Konstellation. A group of stars, on the other hand, forms a stellar configuration, which in German is Sternbild. Although the two words can be understood as synonyms in German, there is a great difference between them in terms of imagery. The word Konstellation is defined in a German language dictionary as the position (Stellung) of the celestial bodies (Gestirne) in relation to themselves, the Sun and Earth. 36 A secondary meaning refers not to the stars but rather, by semantic extension, to the ‘situation’ (Lage) and the ‘meeting of certain circumstances’ (Zusammentreffen bestimmter Umstände), and it also expresses the idea of a point defined in space (that is, the point of intersection between the ‘circumstances’ that meet there). The definition of Sternbild in the same dictionary appears as ‘a group of stars interpreted as an image’ (als Bild gedeutete Gruppe von Sternen) as in the example of the constellation, Aquarius (Wassermann). 37 According to an etymological dictionary of the German language (Kluge, 1999, p. 473), the word Konstellation originates from the Latin constellatio (and contains in its root the word stella, ‘star’) and means ‘the position (Stellung) of

Constellations and Ideograms  135 the stars acting on the destinies of men,’ and thence the broadening to ‘position (Stellung) and arrangement of certain factors.’38 The stellar configurations (Sternbilder) that appear in the sky, such as Aquarius, Ursa Major and the Southern Cross are readings, interpretations from observers, and, in this case, they are interpretations that have lasted for millennia. The constellation (Konstellation), in its turn, is a fact, ‘it’s something placed in the world,’ to return to the words of Gomringer. In the case of the word ‘constellation,’ it is the poet who puts the word-objects in the world, who projects, ‘aligns’ (ausrichten) the words, point by point, offering them a playful space, a game space for the reader/admirer. In other words, the constellation is a composition, a drawing of things (word-things) that offers to the reader free rein of the gaze and senses. The reader decides whether the objects are inverted or not, and whether they lead the eye in vertical, horizontal, diagonal or other directions. Nevertheless, Gomringer provides orienting clues in a playful space that invites the reader to participate in the game with the given matter and, from it, compose their own stellar configurations (Sternbilder).

An Example of a Constellation: avenidas y flores We would like to focus here on Gomringer’s comment in the quotation above, on the role of the conjunction ‘and’ (und) in the constellation. He describes it as ‘the little big word “and”. It gains in size, it becomes an order of magnitude, and remains in place of emptiness.’ This comment alone functions as an introduction to one of the constellations that he identifies as exemplary in the manifesto ‘from verse to constellation, purpose and form of a new poetry,’ the widely known poem avenidas. This poem was considered extremely innovative in the 1950s, and it gained notoriety in the second decade of the 21st century, finding itself at the heart of a controversy in Germany in 2016, a full 63 years after its first publication. This poem is the sole illustration of a constellation included in the manifesto ‘from verse to constellation.’39 There, avenidas is described as ‘an example of a constellation: there are six words given in Spanish: avenidas (‘streets’), flores (‘flowers’), mujeres (‘women’), admirador (‘admirer’), y (‘and’), un (‘one’) […].’ The constellation is shown in Figure 8.1. By focusing on ‘and/und’, Gomringer stresses the combinatorial and mathematical nature of the constellation: ‘It has never been possible for mathematics to have a more direct influence on poetry.’40 Words are repeated and combined in logical sequences throughout the constellations, as in the development of a mathematical equation, with the difference that words, unlike numbers, carry in themselves images that, when combined, calculated and cast into the graphic space by the hand

136  Raquel Abi-Sâmara

Figure 8.1  avenidas by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer.

of the poet-designer, are elevated to ‘absolute’ words, with their own brightness, like stars on the page of a book (as is seen in the ‘The Book of Hours’ – das stundenbuch – among other works of the poet). In Gomringer’s case, words are not merely present on the page. They free themselves from books and gain other forms of support, project themselves and become embodied in urban landscapes, whether on the façades of buildings (such as the avenidas in Berlin), or onto sculptures in a public square (cf the poem ‘a e i o u’ that we consider below). According to Gomringer, the sensitive structure of the constellations made clear in the choice of a clean, ‘modern’ typeface, causes time to be removed from the poem, a process that the poet compares to other 20th-century modernist experiments, especially Joyce’s Ulysses. The poet asks: ‘Does the psychic issue show up in the constellation?’ And concludes by saying that ‘the constellation is an invitation, not a formal or thematic recipe.’41 This invitation was taken up, in 2016, in an unexpected fashion. In 2011, when Gomringer won the Alice Salomon Poetic Award, a large-scale version of the avenidas constellation was painted onto the façade of Alice Salomon College in Hellersdorf, a district in eastern Berlin. The constellation remained quietly on the college building until 2016, when a controversy was sparked into life by an open letter of complaint from the students’ committee to the university president, in which it was claimed that the poem represented the kind of sexual harassment to which women are daily exposed. The debate expanded to a nationwide level, as a discussion not only of sexism, but also of censorship and freedom of expression in the arts. A series of newspaper headlines indicate the nature of the debate: ‘Poem on Berlin college wall sparks sexism debate,’42 ‘avenidas y flores y mujeres: A concrete poem and a nonsensical debate on censorship,’43 ‘Berlin university outrages poet by erasing his “sexist” lyrics from wall’44 and ‘Flowers and Women

Constellations and Ideograms  137 are here again.’45 In 2018, after a court ruling, the poem was removed. However, in February 2019, Gomringer’s constellation resurfaced like a supernova, on a façade close to the one where it appeared previously. The difference is that this time the poem was multiplied, as the original Spanish version was shown alongside the German version. And its words gained their own light, as they were illuminated letters, multilingual constellations in the urban landscape of Hellersdorf. In the prolonged, active, public engagement with the possible meanings of this poem, we can begin to find an answer to a question posed throughout this chapter: ‘What is poetry for?’ Poetry is an object of use, an object of thought.

Constellations, Ideograms and Mixed Forms In an influential anthology of concrete poetry edited by Eugen Gomringer, Konkrete poesie. Deutschsprachige autoren, first published in 1972, the poet includes a brief theoretical chapter entitled ‘Definitions of visual poetry’ (Definitionen zur visuellen poesie), in which he lists six types of visual poetry in the following order: ideograms, constellations, dialectal poems, palindromes, typograms and pictograms. Before analysing the concepts of ideogram and constellation, let us clarify the use of the term ‘visual’ in an anthology of ‘concrete’ poetry. Gomringer explains – in a preface to another, more recent, edition of the anthology, published in 1996 with the title, ‘Visual Poetry’ (Visuelle Poesie) – that, from the beginning of the movement, there was an identity between the two terms. According to Gomringer: the term ‘visual poetry’ was even used to distinguish it from a second important branch of the new poetry, namely, ‘auditory poetry’, whose audio-texts (hör-texte) also possessed their qualities as writing. ‘Over time, this terminological identity has been increasingly challenged by new authors and textual production procedures. The concept of ‘visual poetry’ began to detach itself, and was reserved for these new procedures. Instead of ‘concrete’, the new texts were also called ‘word-image’ (wortbild), ‘text-image’ (textbild) or ‘image-text’ (bildtext). That is, visual poetry expanded the image of writing provided by Concrete poetry and also the ‘pictograms’ of Concrete poetry.46 Since, in the preface to the same anthology, Gomringer defines ‘constellation’ in relation to the concept of ‘ideograms,’ let us thus first consider how he conceives of the characteristics of the latter. In another essay, Gomringer, (2014, p. 165) explains: poetic ideograms are structures (gebilde) of letters and words that arise through precise actualizations of semantic and semiotic intentions and that, as a whole, represent memorable visual objects

138  Raquel Abi-Sâmara logically constructed. They are one of the classic forms of concrete poetry and were created mainly in the fifties. In contrast to other texts, they act as closed structures.47 It is evident that Gomringer’s definition of ‘constellations’ must be understood in relation to contrasts as well as to fusion with the ideograms: Constellations, like ideograms with which they often associate in mixed forms, are among the structures (gestaltungen) that are characteristic of concrete poetry. Unlike ideograms, constellations are not necessarily closed structures (geschlossene gebilde). Closed structures often prevent the application of techniques such as combination and permutation. An essential characteristic in both constellations of letters (buchstabenkonstellationen) and in ­constellations of words (wortkonstellationen) and also in syntagmatic constellations (satzkonstellationen) is the inclusion of space as a space-in-­between (zwischenraum) and a surrounding space (umgebungsraum), which not only separate isolated elements but also connects them, thus creating opportunities for associations. That is why constellations generally do not require verbal connectives. One of their special characteristics is therefore the inversion of elements, which produces semantic effects. Constellations are, in many respects, building blocks of international communication. In the best cases, constellations also consist of wise games.48 In the celebrated poem ‘Silence,’ we can see Gomringer’s ideogrammic principle in action.

‘Silence’: An Ideogram by Gomringer As we have just seen, for Gomringer, synthetically, what differentiates an ideogram from a constellation is that the ideogram is a closed structure, whereas the constellation is not necessarily a closed structure, and therefore the latter allows for the use of ‘mathematical’ techniques of combination, permutation, inversion, etc. From this point of view, a prototypical example of an ideogram by Gomringer would be the poem silencio (‘silence’), despite its inclusion in his first anthology of poems entitled ‘Constellations’ (1953). The poem was originally written in Spanish and then in German (Figures 8.2 and 8.3). ‘Silence’ is composed of a single word symmetrically written 14 times along five lines, each containing three iterations of the word, except for the third line, in which the word appears only twice, creating an empty, core space, a pause: a spatial semantics. Here, the blank space creates the meaning and realises the poem because, strictly speaking,

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Figure 8.2  silencio ‘silence’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer.

Figure 8.3  schweigen ‘silence’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer.

silence can only be articulated by the absence of words (cf McCabe, this volume). In ‘Translating visual poetry,’ Claus Clüver, commenting on the translation of Gomringer’s constellations, observes, in a discussion of different versions of ‘silence’: ‘Other structures of such constellations (or, in terms the Brazilians like better, Concrete ideograms) allow the verbal substitution of other languages – if that is worthwhile.’49 In the parenthesis, the structure of Gomringer’s ‘constellation’ is equated with the structure of the Noigandres group’s concrete ideogram. In Gomringer’s own terms, it is the relatively determined sense evoked by ‘silence,’ its closed nature, that makes it an ideogram, a reading supported by Mary Ellen Solt (1970), in her commentary on Gomringer’s work.

The Noigandres Ideogram Gomringer, in his manifesto on concrete poetry, proclaimed ‘from verse to constellation,’ and, in their turn, the Brazilian poets of the Noigandres group responded: ‘from verse to ideogram.’50 The concrete poets’ conception of the poem as an ideogram is based on the broad sense of an ideogram as a graphic symbol with a spatial or visual syntax, 51 and also on the theories of Ezra Pound (1885–1972) with respect to the relations between Chinese ideograms and poetry, which, in turn, were

140  Raquel Abi-Sâmara based on the study of the sinologist Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa’s essay, ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,’ was edited and posthumously published by Pound in the magazine, Little Review, in 1919. Fenollosa’s essay has become one of the seminal texts for modernist aesthetics and is the inspiration for Ezra Pound’s rallying cry for high modernist poetry, ‘make it new,’ as well as later concepts in literary translation, such as Haroldo de Campos’s ‘transcreation’ (see Jackson, this volume). From his studies of Chinese poetry and his observation of the visual etymology of Chinese characters, Fenollosa developed the concept of a method of ideographic (or ideogrammic) composition that would, via Pound, inspire a series of radical revolutions in Western poetry by the avant-garde movements of the early 20th and mid-20th century. To Fenollosa, ‘The Chinese language […] preserves the primitive sap, it is not like a dry branch that serves as a walking-stick.’52 The image of the ‘dry branch’ refers to the arbitrary symbols of the phonologically based writing systems of most Indo-European languages. Compared to Chinese ideograms, which Fenollosa and Pound understood, somewhat naively, to preserve an iconic etymology in their pictorial roots, Western alphabetical systems were considered to lack cohesion and an inherent poetry. While Pound initially sought to recover the cohesion and force of the ideogram through Imagism, Gomringer and the Noigandres poets attempted, by way of their conception of the constellation or reconceptualisation of the ideogram, somehow to recover or indeed create, through the visual and graphic resources available to them, a new cohesion among Western alphabetic symbols. The graphic structuring of letters and/or words in space is crucial to this poetry-without-verse. Like the Chinese ideogram, as conceived by Fenollosa and Pound, the concrete poem stands as a visual structure to be apprehended as a whole, in a Gestalt movement, 53 by looking. The ‘reading’ or, rather, the ‘appreciation’ of this poem happens, therefore, not only in the apprehension of the unity of its structure, but also in the apprehension of the structural relations between the parts that make it up. To illustrate the ideogrammic poetry of the Noigandres group, let us look here at a poem by Décio Pignatari, ‘Life.’

Pignatari’s ‘Life’: A Noigandres Ideogram For a more detailed explanation of the concept of the ideogram from the Noigandres perspective, see Clüver (this volume). It is also useful to consider the visual metaphors represented by Chinese ideograms as understood by Fenollosa, as well as how Haroldo Campos ‘reimagined,’ via his transcreations, the visual metaphors of Chinese poems in his collection Escrito sobre jade. Poesia Clássica Chinesa reimaginada por Haroldo de Campos (‘Written on jade: Chinese Classical

Constellations and Ideograms  141 Poetry reimagined by Haroldo de Campos.’)54 For the purposes of the present chapter, we will consider a single illustration, a concrete ideogram by one of the members of the Noigandres group, Décio Pignatari, entitled ‘Life’ (Figure 8.4), alongside a commentary on the poem by Gomringer.

Figure 8.4  ‘Life’ by Décio Pignatari, by courtesy of the estate of Décio Pignatari.

142  Raquel Abi-Sâmara ‘Life’ (1958) was originally published in a six-page sequence, each page consisting of one of the six elements of the poem, in the order I, L, F, E, then a vertical rectangle divided in half by a horizontal line, and, finally, on the last page, the word ‘LIFE.’ It is sometimes described as a movie-poem, since its construction is similar to that of the cinematographic process, in that it presents a frame-by-frame montage of the word ‘LIFE.’55 The rectangle formed by the juxtaposition of the letters can be read as the Chinese ideogram that means ‘sun,’ that is, the principle of life. If, in the biblical story, the beginning was the Word, Décio masterfully shows that, and this playful yet profound representation is part of the pleasure of concrete poetry. The first line of the poem, the letter ‘I,’ if interpreted by a Semitic language speaker, for example, would be seen as ‘Aleph,’ the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, the first letter of the Word that will therefore generate life. Marli Siqueira Leite has observed of this poem: In Pignatari’s work, Western writing, punctuated by the English word and marked by a greater arbitrariness between signifier-­ meaning, approaches the principle of Eastern, ideogram writing: the movement that characterizes life and is metonymically represented by the sun, becomes concrete in the composition of the text by the reader turning the page, which illuminates the work from the life-giving action of the poet.56 Gomringer also comments on the same poem: Since I am inclined to express all thoughts in a brief way, and as I have always taken pleasure in algebraic equations, it seems to me wonderful that so much can be said with a single word. I keep considering sublime, for example, the way in which my friend Décio Pignatari later drew attention to the word LIFE. It is the architecture and symbolism of that word that makes this poem into something unique to me.57 The poem ‘Life’58 is one of several Brazilian concrete poems that seek a metaphorical-visual approximation of their understanding of ­C hinese ideograms (see Clüver, this volume). The origin of this interest, as we have seen, is associated with a line of authors that these poets ‘created’ as their precursors (to adapt Borges’ famous aphorism that each author creates his precursors), particularly, here, Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. This literary and philological inheritance prompts the concrete poet to present the work as a visual metaphor that will, through the reader’s active engagement with and reflection on the text, gradually yield a particular message. Constellations, however, are more open.

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Gomringer’s Constellation, ‘a e i o u’ If the Brazilian concrete poets were inspired by what they understood as the visible metaphors underlying Chinese ideograms to make poetry in phonological alphabets more visual, then Gomringer’s constellations reverse the process. This can be illustrated by Gomringer’s poem ‘a e i o u’ (Figure 8.5). In this poem, Gomringer starts from the ‘soul’ of phonological writing, that is, of the sound elements that allow it to echo and become corporeal in the space of oral communication. He takes the Western vowel characters and, in an impressive display of graphic design, transmutes them into Chinese characters. The four vowels o,e, a and u are placed vertically one above the other and crossed and joined by the vertical line representing the vowel i. The union of the vowels allows Chinese characters to be ‘birthed,’ that is, it allows for the creation of images in another system of linguistic signs. The precise ‘i’ stroke transforms the vowel ‘u’ into the Chinese character meaning mountain (山), and the vowel ‘o’ is transformed into the C ­ hinese character meaning ‘middle’ or ‘within’ (中). This is the same character that appears in the word ‘China,’ which is composed of two elements, ‘middle’ + ‘kingdom’ (中国). The other two vowels suggest – though not so precisely as one sees in ‘u’ and ‘o’ – other ideograms: ‘a’ can evoke ‘money’ (the sign also used for the Japanese yen), and the ‘e’ looks like ‘rice field,’ or ‘cultivated land.’ In composing this poem, Gomringer had the clear intention of ‘presenting the 5 vowels u a e o i […] graphically as the spine, the structural axis of our language.’59 The poet’s own comments show he is fully aware of the multilingual potential of this poem: the image of our 5 vowel signs in this composition I made can also be read in Chinese and Japanese. The fact that a ‘grandiose poem’ was thus achieved makes me very happy. I also believe that it is a first-line structure. The ‘transformative’ nature was a coincidence, but creative coincidences count twice as much.60 ‘a e i o u’ is an intriguing and highly performative poem. Its playfulness actively engages the reader in a ‘mental performance.’61 According to the poet, this poem has taken different forms, most recently in the shape of an upright steel slab, a few metres high, installed a few years ago in ‘Professor Eugen Gomringer’ square in Hünfeld.62 ‘Originally,’ recalls Franz Mon, ‘this work was executed as a 6-meter-high flag displayed during an exhibit in the mid-1980s.’63 It perhaps typifies Gomringer’s conception of a constellation: the arrangement of letters in a visual space opens out to a multitude of interpretations across languages and cultures, here embodying both language and communication, but also the natural world, cultivation and commerce. Its meanings are evocative and profound without the reader finally pinning them down. It invites contemplation.

Figure 8.5  ‘a e i o u’ by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer.

Constellations and Ideograms  145

Conclusion Gomringer’s concrete poems (whether constellations, ideograms or mixed forms), with their multilingual ethos and their playfully enigmatic function as games or puzzles, function as a means of international, global communication. The way in which his poetry distances itself from subjective and emotional elements in search of an ideogram-like composition associates it with one of the fundamental features of C ­ hinese poetry, that is, the invisibility of the subject. ‘In classical Chinese poetry,’ writes Jingming Yao: the subject is almost totally omitted. Even in a context that implies the clear appearance of the subject and the indirect object, the subject can also be omitted. (…) On the one hand, the flexibility of syntax and morphology [in the Chinese language] makes it possible to confuse the subject with the object, which serves to establish a porosity between the poet and the world. The poet, on the other hand, does not observe from the empirical point that separates the subjective world from the objective world, and considers the self as an element of cosmological immensity; there is no distance between the self and the world nor a subordinate relationship between them.64 As it represents the internalisation of the outer elements, the indeterminacy of the subject presents a prominent trait of the Taoist spirit and, ultimately, of traditional Chinese culture. Concrete poetry also sought to suppress the personal and thus engage the reader in a dialogue with beings and things. If concrete poetry was and remains successful in its dialogic function, both in the context of the post-Second World War literary avant-garde and nowadays, we must acknowledge that its success can be attributed to the craftsmanship of its practitioners.

Notes 1 Solt, 1970. 2 The countries included in Mary Ellen Solt’s anthology, in sequential order, are the following: Switzerland, Brazil, Germany, Austria, Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, England and the United States. 3 Founded by Max Bill in 1953, the Higher School for Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG) in Ulm was ‘the most important European stronghold of avant-garde plastic experiments’ (H. de Campos, 2006, p. 83), as Haroldo points out in ‘Evolution of forms,’ one of the concrete poetry manifestos. Gomringer initially acted as secretary to Max Bill at HfG and later worked as a teacher at that school. In his essay ‘Gedichte wozu?’ (Poems for what?), Kurt Marti states that the aesthetic experiments of Gomringer were in tune with the design concepts of the School of Ulm: ‘In continuation of the work of the Bauhaus, in Ulm [HfG] they try to give a new, human face to the objects of everyday use, the most appropriate and beautiful form and the

146  Raquel Abi-Sâmara visual environment in which we live. These efforts are to be understood as Gomringer’s experiment’ (Marti, 2018, p. 14). 4 According to Gomringer, Max Bill was considered in 1950s Europe as ‘one of the leading new minds. He came from the Bauhaus and had worked a lot on the ‘good form’ (gute Form) there’ (Gilbert, 2014, p. 13). 5 de Campos, 1977, pp. 158–159. 6 During a visit I paid to the poet on March 27, 2017 in Rehau in order to research the correspondence between Gomringer and the Noigandres poets, Gomringer told me that this table has featured in some of his exhibitions of concrete poems. It is worth also mentioning here that the name of the room in IKKP where there is a permanent exhibition of Gomringer’s best-known work is ‘POEMA,’ the Spanish language word for ‘poem.’ This fact alone indicates the multilingual nature of his poetry. 7 Gomringer, 2012. 8 The word ‘Noigandres,’ as defined by the de Campos brothers and Décio Pignatari in a synopsis of the concrete poetry movement, was ‘taken (via Ezra Pound, Canto XX) from a song by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, [and] it is a term that not even the Roman scholars can determine the precise meaning of (‘Noigandres, eh noigandres / Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!’). It was taken as a synonym of poetry in progress, as a motto of experimentation and team poetic research’ (A. de Campos, H. de Campos, and D. Pignatari, 2006, p. 259). 9 The artists who were part of Ruptura Group included the Poles Anatol Wladyslaw and Leopoldo Haar; the Austrian Lothar Charoux; the Hungarian Féjer; and the Brazilians Geraldo de Barros, Luiz Sacilotto and Waldemar Cordeiro. 10 Bern, spiralpress, 1953. 11 de Campos, 1977, p. 158. 12 Gilbert, 2014, 15. 13 Jackson et al., 1996. 14 Bassnett, 2002; see also her contribution to the present volume. 15 de Campos, 2000. 16 Bohn, 2005, p. 181. 17 Ibid. 18 Gilbert, 2014, p. 15. 19 Ibid. 20 de Campos, 1977, p. 159. 21 Perloff, Ciberletras 17 (July 2007), p. 2. Available at, http://www.lehman. cuny.edu/ciberletras/v17/perloff.htm. Accessed on March 3, 2019. 22 From Emmett Williams’ introduction to Gomringer’s selection in Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967). 23 The artist, Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976), wrote the first manifesto of ‘concrete’ poetry in 1953 (published in 1954), even before Pignatari and Gomringer adopted the name themselves. Fahlström was born in Brazil, where he spent his childhood (Ö. Fahlström, manifesto para a poesia concreta. Translation by Márcia Sá Shuback. Cobogó, 2016). 24 The chapter ‘On the theory of concrete poetry’ in the book Admirador brings together the following five texts: the manifesto ‘vom vers zur konstellation. zweck und form einer neuen dichtung’ (From verse to constellation. Purpose and form of a new poetry) (1955), ‘der dichter und das schweigen’ (The poet and the silence) (written in 1964 and published in 1966), ‘das dialogische in der konkreten poesie’ (The dialogical aspect in concrete poetry) (2006), ‘die 5 vokale a e i o u’ (The 5 vowels a e i o u) (2010) and ‘eugen gomringer und das konzept einer globalen poesie’ (Eugen Gomringer and the concept of a global poetry) (undated), this last having been written by Ulrich Ernst.

Constellations and Ideograms  147 25 E. Gomringer (ed.) Konkrete Poesie. Deutschsprachige autoren. Anthologie von Eugen Gomringer, 2016. 1st ed. Reclam (1972); and E. Gomringer (ed.) Visuelle Poesie. Reclam (1996/2012). 26 Gomringer, 2012, p. 37; my translation. In German: ‘für eine solche poesie, die gleichsam die funktion einer ‘lingua universalis’ übernimmt, ist polyglossie quasi selbstverständlich’. 27 Gomringer, 2012, p. 24. 28 Ernst, 2012, p. 36. About this subject see, for example, the essay by Franz Mon, ‘zur poesie der fläche’, in the anthology of concrete poetry by Gomringer (2016), pp. 169–176. 29 Gomringer, 2012, p. 22. 30 Ibid. 31 In ‘Poetry and hunger. Conversation with unprepared readers’, by Brazilian writer and communication theorist Jair Ferreira do Santos, the author reflects on the social role of poetry from the Homeric poems that guided education in ancient Greece, down to the present day. In J. Ferreira dos Santos, Breve, o pós-humano. Ensaios contemporâneos. Editora Francisco Alves, 2002, pp. 173–183. 32 Ibid, p. 19. 33 Marti, 2019, p. 14. 34 Gomringer, 2012, p. 23. 35 Ibid, pp. 23–25. 36 Wahrig, 1986, p. 774. 37 Ibid., p. 1228. 38 Kluge, 1999, p. 473. 39 Gomringer, 2012, p. 25. 40 Ibid., p. 25. 41 Ibid, p. 25. 42 Die Welt, 7 September 2017. 43 Die Welt, 7 February 2018. 4 4 Zeit online, 24 January 2018. 45 Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22 February 2019. 46 Gomringer, 1972/1996, p. 9. 47 Gomringer, 2014, p. 165. Emphasis added. 48 Ibid, p. 165. 49 Clüver, 1997, p. 326. 50 Pignatari, 2006, p. 63. 51 cf. H. de Campos, 2000, p. 215. 52 Fenollosa, 2000, p. 129. 53 The Gestalt axiom, as Augusto de Campos explains, accounts for the nature of the ideogram. Augusto highlights a passage from Fenollosa’s text to justify his statement: ‘In this process of composing [an ideogram], two things together do not produce a third thing, but rather suggest some fundamental relationship between themselves’ (A. de Campos, 2006, p. 39). 54 H. de Campos, 2009; see also Corbett and Huang, 2019. 55 The poem is introduced as follows by Iuma Simon and Vinicius Dantas inPoesia Concreta (Sao Paulo: Abril Educação, 1982): “Kinetic poem to be leafed. Get your thumb ready for the animated images that continue on the next 5 pages. The fact being that a small vertical stroke, the letter “I”, is already a life form – LIFE – of language.” (My translation) 56 Siqueira Leite, 2013, p. 39. 57 Gomringer, cited in H. de Campos, 1977, p. 159. 58 There is also a critical aspect to Décio’s poem, as in many Brazilian concrete poems, since the typeface of the letters used in his poem is similar if not identical to that used in the popular American magazine ‘LIFE’, a weekly

148  Raquel Abi-Sâmara

59 60 61 62 63 64

publication (1936–1972) which was characterised by its photojournalism. The magazine influenced the Brazilian press, but also sparked critical debates, as evidenced by O caso Flávio (‘The Flávio case’), the recent subject of an exhibit at Instituto Moreira Sales (IMS), Rio de Janeiro. See the website https://ims.com.br/exposicao/o-caso-flavio-o-cruzeiro-life-gordon-parkshenri-ballot/. Another poem by Décio, ‘Beba coca cola’ (‘Drink Coca Cola’) (1957) can also be read as a critique of North American popular culture and its ideological impact (cf Clüver, this volume). Gomringer, 2012, p. 34. Ibid, p. 35. Clüver, 2006, p. 33. Gomringer, 2012, p. 34 Mon, 2018, p. 154. Yao, 2001, pp. 23–24.

References Bassnett, Susan and H. Trivedi. (eds.) Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice, London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Bohn, Willard. “Concrete Poetry at the Crossroads.” In K. David Jackson, ­Haroldo de Campos. (eds.) A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. University of Oxford, 2005. pp. 181–204. Campos, Haroldo de. A arte no horizonte do provável.  4th ed. Sao Paulo: ­E ditora Perspectiva, 1977. Campos, Haroldo de. Escrito sobre jade. Poesia clássica chinesa reimaginada por Haroldo de Campos. Sao Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2009. Campos, Haroldo de. Ideograma. Lógica. Poesia. Linguagem.  4th ed. Sao Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2000. Campos, Haroldo de and Augusto De Campos; Décio Pignatari. Teoria da poesia concreta. Textos críticos e manifestos 1950–1960, Sao Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 1965/2006. Clüver, Claus. “Inter Textus, Inter Artes, Inter Media.” In Aletria. Jul–Dec 2006, pp. 11–41. Available at http://www.letras.ufmg.br/poslit [Accessed on 1 July 2017]. Clüver, Claus. “Traduzindo poesia visual.” In Cânones & Contextos; Anais. ABRALIC, 1997 pp. 311–327. Corbett, John and Ting Huang. “Transcriar a Poesia Chinesa: Escrito sobre Jade.” In Andréia Guerini, Simone Homem de Mello e Walter Costa (eds.) Haroldo de Campos Tradutor e Traduzido. 2019. Sao Paulo: Editora Perspectiva. Fenollosa, Ernest. Das chinesische Schriftzeichen als poetisches Medium. ­Herausgegeben von Ezra Pound. Translated by Eugen Gomringer. Starnberg: Josef Keller Verlag, 1972. Fenollosa, Ernest. “Os caracteres da Escrita Chinesa como Instrumento para a Poesia.” Translated by Haroldo de Campos. In Haroldo de Campos (ed.) Ideograma. Lógica. Poesia. Linguagem. Sao Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2000, pp. 109–148. Gilbert, Annette (ed.) Nichts für schnell-betrachter und bücher-blätterer. ­Eugen Gomringers Gemeinschaftsarbeiten mit bildenden Künstler. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2014.

Constellations and Ideograms  149 Gomringer, Eugen. Admirador. Berlin: Mattes & Seitz Berlin, 2012. Gomringer, Eugen (ed.). Konkrete Poesie: deutschsprachige Autoren. Anthologie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972/2014. Gomringer, Eugen (ed.) Visuelle Poesie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996/2012. Gomringer, Nortrud (ed.) Poema. Eugen Gomringer. Gedichte und Essays. Wädenswil am Zürichsee: Nimbus, 2018. Jackson, David K., Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker (eds.) Experimental, Visual, Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry since the 1960s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Kluge, Friedrich Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 23rd ed., Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1999. Leite, Marli Siqueira. Ronaldo Azeredo: o mínimo múltiplo (in)comum da poesia concreta. Vitória: EDUFES, 2013. Marti, Kurt. “Gedichte wozu?.” In Nortrud Gomringer (ed.) Eugen Gomringer Poema. Gedichte und essay. Wädenswil am Zürichsee: Nimbus Kunst und Bücher, 2018, pp. 13–17. Perloff, Marjorie. “Writing as Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrière-Garde.” Ciberletras 17 (July 2007): pp. 1–24. Available at http://www.lehman.cuny. edu/ciberletras/v17/perloff.htm [Accessed on 3 March 2019]. Simon, Iuma Maria and Vinicius Dantas. Poesia concreta. Seleção de textos, notas, estudos biográfico, histórico e crítico e exercícios por Iuma Simon e Vinicius Dantas. Abril Educação, 1982. Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.) Concrete Poetry: A World View. Indiana University Press, 1970. Wahrig, Gerhard. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1993. Yao, Jingming. A poesia clássica chinesa: Uma leitura de traduções portuguesas. Centro de Publicações da Universidade de Macau, 2001.

9 The Intermedial Recoding of Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções Simone Homem de Mello

The fact that Brazilian concrete poetry has had such an influence on succeeding generations of poets in and beyond Brazil has to do not only with the quality of the poetry of its founders and with their innovative view of literature, but also with their proposal of a new literary canon and with their lifelong contribution as translators. From the very beginning of their activity as poets and critics, Augusto de Campos (b.1931), Décio Pignatari (1927–2014) and Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003), founders of the Noigandres group and coinventors of concrete poetry in the early 1950s, formulated their canon in their manifestos and critical writings. Their first translations date back to 1949, when they began to be published in the literary supplements of daily newspapers or in the magazine Revista de Novíssimos in São Paulo. In 1953, as Augusto de Campos was writing poetamenos, a series of poems considered to be a foundation stone of the concrete movement, the three young Noigandres poets started a correspondence with Ezra Pound, who – alongside Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce and e. e. cummings, with the last of whom Augusto de Campos would get in touch and start a correspondence in 1956 – was central to their conception of poetry and of translation. After the work of the Noigandres group had circulated internationally and the programmatic phase of the concrete movement was over, the de Campos brothers and Décio Pignatari dedicated themselves systematically to translating those authors. In 1960, the Serviço de Documentação do Ministério da Educação e Cultura in Rio de Janeiro published their joint translation of some of Pound’s Cantos, from which the very name of the group is borrowed,1 and Augusto’s translation of e. e. cummings’ poems. Two years later, the de Campos brothers published their translation of selected fragments of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. They would, individually, continue to translate other authors – Mallarmé, Mayakovsky and other modern Russian poets (translated in collaboration with Boris Schnaiderman), the Provençal Troubadours, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, Marino, the English Metaphysical Poets, among others – until the beginning of the 1970s. 2 Not only have the authors they translated been fundamental points of reference in Brazil in the constitution of a new canon of ‘the poetry of invention’ (as Augusto calls it, to refer to poetical lineages markedly

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  151 concerned with the materiality of language), but they have also developed individual approaches to literary translation, approaches that have a common matrix in the Noigandres years and in that joint practice of translation. Their approaches extend the inventive Poundian lineage of translation, with its aims of continually updating the tradition of world literature by constantly renewing the literary language. In 1955, Haroldo de Campos summarised their adherence to the Poundian ‘make-itnew’ principle as follows: […] the art of poetry has no experiential value as a function of history and is founded rather on a metahistorical continuum that makes Homer and Pound, Dante and Eliot, Góngora and Mallarmé contemporaries – not in the sense of a world hierarchy but rather as a vectorial metamorphosis, a qualitative transformation, a cultural morphology […].3,4 The translation poetics of all three Noigandres poets point to the constitution of a synchronic literary history, in which the selection of authors and texts to be translated and the poetic aspects to be foregrounded in the translation are in some ways connected to the avant-garde aims of concrete poetry and to the context of its contemporary reception. This new approach to literary translation can be described as an aesthetic view that does not admit a dissociation between form and content, so that the poem is translated as a dynamic complex of aesthetic information and re-engendered in its mode of functioning. Each of the Noigandres poets has developed this concept in a particular way, has laid stress on distinct aspects of the translating operation and has also denominated this process differently: tradução-arte (‘translation as art,’ Augusto de Campos), outradução (‘other-translation,’ Décio Pignatari) and transcriação (‘transcreation,’ Haroldo de Campos; see also Jackson, this volume). Although Haroldo de Campos dedicated himself most intensively to theorising this new conception of translation as art, its complexities should be investigated in all three poets’ translation practice and in their creative translation procedures. The concept of translation briefly outlined above not only derives from Ezra Pound the impulse to ‘make it new’ and the definition of the translator’s activity in terms of authorship, but also a self-consciousness in relation to translation as criticism. That is also why the contribution of the Noigandres poets as translators cannot be dissociated from their production as poets, critics and theoreticians. Although much has been written about the poetic skilfulness of their translations and about their critical conception of poetic translation (especially about Haroldo de Campos’ transcriação), that is to say, although much has been written about the presence of poetry and criticism in their translations, almost nothing has hitherto been written about the presence of translation in their poetic works.

152  Simone Homem de Mello From the very beginning, the literary programme of the Brazilian concrete movement was concerned with poetry translation as inseparable from authorial literary practice. On the one hand, translating authors who were to be recognised as relevant avant-garde predecessors could enlarge the contemporary literary repertoire in the Portuguese language, particularly because the inventive translation which the Noigandres group practised and theorised about – that is, translation as art – u ­ sually makes transparent the aesthetic complexity of the original texts and consequently foregrounds the contribution of the selected authors to the innovative quality of poetic language. On the other hand, the translation procedures themselves would generate new poetic forms and even genres. The earliest of these practices among the Noigandres poets dates back to the mid-1960s: Décio Pignatari’s ‘intersemiotic poems,’ which consist of geometrical forms that – in combination with each other – produce a non-verbal text, to be supposedly deciphered and converted into verbal language by means of a ‘lexical key.’ In the case of the de Campos brothers, this operation concerns the incorporation of certain translations into their volumes of poetry. From Educação dos Cinco Sentidos (1985) to the posthumously published Entremilênios (2009), Haroldo de Campos systematically included in poetry collections a section entitled Transluminuras, reserved for translated poetry. Whereas Haroldo used to include translations in his poetry collections, uncommented upon, alongside and on an equal footing with his own poems, Augusto de Campos has submitted – since Poesia 1949–1979 (1979) – other authors’ texts to a much more complex translation operation, which he refers to as intraduções (‘intraductions’). In all his subsequent collections – Despoesia (1994), Não (2003) and Outro (2015) – he again reserved a section for these text fragments by other authors, in general translated into Portuguese, but above all intersemiotically recoded into a certain graphic form from which they cannot be dissociated. In an interview given in 1993, 5 Augusto discussed the nature of his intraduções in some depth. He explained that he coined the term for a series of translation experiments he started doing in the mid-1970s. These experiments, as well as his other translations, are related to the idea of creative translation or ‘translation-as-art’ (tradução-arte), as he calls it. Nevertheless, the intraduções differ from his other translations insofar as they generally do not correspond to the whole original text, but consist of just a fragment of it. In his intraduções, Augusto allows himself more freedom in dealing with the text, resorting to practices that sometimes are not in the original, being at most just suggested by it. Any one of his intraduções includes non-verbal, graphic and visual elements, and its layout is frequently defined by the chosen text font, by a certain text iconisation or by an interaction of text and image, always oscillating between the verbal and the non-verbal, as in Augusto’s original poems.

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  153 In the tyger / o tygre,6 one of the few intraduções that stretch over more than one page, de Campos places side by side his translation of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ (1794) and a Turkish Sufi arabesque of the 19th century depicting a feline creature (Figure 9.1). In this dervish wall painting, the image of the animal is formed by a handwritten sentence referring to the lion of God – which hints at the inseparability of image and text. The typographical font reminds us of Blake’s ornamental handwriting, and the orthography both in English and in Portuguese includes some archaic elements. The identical first and last strophes of Blake’s poem are presented both in English and in Portuguese, so that the original and translation seem to reflect each other, analogously to the mirrored images of the feline above them. The symmetry of the tiger, mentioned in the poem, also seems to evoke the relation between original and translation, image and text, although the variations of the mirrored tigers facing each other or turning away from each other stress the ambivalence of this kind of relation. Also ‘in sol (a (cummings)’ (1984), the original poem ‘l(a’ (1958) – l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness – and the translation – so (l f o l)l (ha c ai) itude – are presented vertically side by side, apparently reflecting each other. But in this graphic arrangement, printed in two tones of green, the contiguity of original on the right side and the translation on the left side (a position opposite to the conventional one in occidental bilingual poetry editions) additionally creates a few horizontal reading possibilities; for

Figure 9.1  ‘the tyger | o tygre (william blake),’ by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

154  Simone Homem de Mello instance, reading across the first line of both poems gives ‘so’ and ‘l(a,’ suggesting the Portuguese word sol (‘sun’). The recurrent appearance of the isolated letter ‘l,’ which resembles the number 1 in serif fonts, also seems to establish a graphic continuity between both texts, suggesting a supralinear reading guided by the number ‘1’ – a numerical correspondence to the idea of ‘loneliness’ or ‘solitude.’ Once again, the original and translation appear graphically in parallel, which affords some conceptual implications. Visually, both poems seem to mirror each other, but imperfectly, and it is not possible to distinguish which one is the mirrored object and which one is the reflected image, a fact which implies the abolition of any hierarchy between original and translation. Moreover, the graphic parallelism of original and translation in these intraduções may also evoke the conception of translation as ‘parody’ in its etymological sense of ‘parallel chant.’ This idea is developed by Haroldo de Campos in his book Deus e o Diabo no Fausto do Goethe (1981), in which he theorises about his own translation practice, which is grounded on the Noigandres’ experience.7 It could be said, therefore, that some intraduções suggest a conception of literary translation as a reciprocal reflection between texts, a mise-en-abyme in which the original no longer can be distinguished, and both texts keep reflecting each other as non-identical originals existing in parallel to each other and mutually illuminating each other. Augusto de Campos states that he chose the term ‘intraduções’ because of its ambiguity. If read as in-tradução, it can be understood in the sense of ‘non-translation.’ But if read as intra-dução, it could also mean an ‘inner translation’ or ‘an essential or almost visceral dialogue with translation, which allows more freedom in dealing with the text’ in question.8 The purpose of creating the specific genre of intraduções was, in Augusto’s words, to distinguish these experiments from his translations in a strict sense. Again, derived from the avant-garde poetry programme of the Noigandres group, Augusto de Campos’ normal translation poetics implies reconfiguring several layers of the signification of the original poem. Being attentive to the aesthetic strategies involved in constituting meaning through the interaction of different text levels – from metrics, rhythm, rhyme and prosody to semantic, discursive and literary-­historical aspects – Augusto de Campos treats the poem as an organic whole in his collections of translated poetry, and he produces the translation as an autonomous poem in itself. In contrast to this ‘conventional’ practice, in his intraduções he often highlights a textual fragment, extracting it from its original context and introducing it into a new textual environment. Any one of his intraduções is a non-translation (in-tradução) in the sense that it breaks the integrity of the source text and displaces its borders, disrupting it and interfering, consequently, in the general dynamics of signification; it is also an intra-dução, because it reflects on the very nature of translation as the insertion of a text into a new

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  155 literary tradition and into a different situation of reception. Being deprived of its original context, the text fragment acquires new attributes and evokes other associations, to the extent that its very displacement can become an extra source of signification. Although the effects of this decontextualisation are what distinguishes his intraduções from regular translations, the programmatic erasure of the original enacted by the intraduções alludes directly to the Noigandres’ avant-garde ideal of poetry translation, namely, the creation of a poem that stands on its own as an autonomous artwork. In ‘homage to edward fitzgerald’ (1974), a short fragment of the notorious translation of Omar Khayyam by the eponymous English poet is quoted (Figure 9.2). Only two words – ‘life flies’9 – recall the 26th quatrain of the first edition of Fitzgerald’s The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyam, accentuating the anagrammatic play on ‘life’/‘flies’ and the pun on the final rhymes ‘flies’/‘lies’ in the second and third verse of the English translation. In breaking the linearity of the text by means of spatialising words on the page, de Campos suggests iconically the movement of flight, as well as the volatile character of life and of words. The linearity of the literary tradition is also broken when the quatrain written by a Persian poet from the 11th/12th century is displaced by the words of an English poet of the 19th century, which in their turn are quoted as a ‘ready-made’10 by a Brazilian poet of the

Figure 9.2  ‘homage to edward fitzgerald,’ by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

156  Simone Homem de Mello 20th/21st century. As with other intraduções, ‘homage to edward fitzgerald’ sets off a chain of inter-crossed references and stratifies them into a compact verbal object that only makes sense through the interactions between its visual, sonorous and conceptual/discursive dimensions. In this sense, the intraduções condense, sometimes combine or superimpose, but above all reify moments of the literary tradition as ‘verbivocovisual’ objects and embed them into the present – sometimes even by means of anachronistic references, for example, by alluding to contemporary Brazilian pop music in a translation of Mayakovsky (‘sol de maiakóvski’, 1982/1993). The idiosyncrasy of how literary history operates, displacing texts and authors from their original environment, and the erasure of origin that inevitably occurs when texts are introduced into, or transferred to, a context extraneous to them are issues that are also raised by the intraduções. The implications of Pound’s rallying cry to ‘make it new’ become very clear in ‘renovar (confúcio / pound)’ (1983), one of the intraduções in which Augusto pays tribute to the American poet, whose work was one of the main points of reference for Brazilian concrete poetry. The Chinese ideograms that inspired Pound’s avant-garde slogan (新日日新), quoted in Canto 53, are translated by Augusto as renovar dia a dia sol a sol renovar (‘renovate | day by day | from sun to sun | renovate’). Printed in red or yellow, the original Chinese ideograms and their translation into Roman letters are both presented vertically, side by side, and in symmetry, as if the upper segment would mirror the segment below. The Portuguese text follows some elements of Pound’s various translations of this motto (‘renovate,’ ‘day by day’),11 but, overall, de Campos gives a more literal rendition of the Chinese characters, and he also assimilates the paratactical ideogrammic logic of the Chinese text, its symmetry and reiterations. Augusto de Campos thus draws upon ancient and modern references, Chinese and Western writing systems and different colours to design an emblematic, ‘make-it-new’ logotype. However, this apparent synthesis at the compositional level does not obliterate the thematic discrepancy between Confucius’ ethical advocacy of self-renewal, Pound’s modernist call to renovate tradition through writing, translation and criticism, and de Campos’ aesthetic concerns, which derive from the concretistas’ avant-garde programme. It is this tension between visual cohesion and referential disruption that makes the intraduções an unstable and indeterminate genre of concrete poetry. To date, in his four books of collected poetry – Poesia 1949–1979 (1979), Despoesia (1994), Não (2004) and Outro (2015) – Augusto de Campos has published altogether 41 intraduções. This collection of 41 ‘non’ or ‘inner’ translations can be considered a kind of journey through the history of world literature, for it encompasses authors from Greek and Roman antiquity until modernity. Apart from the inclusion of two composers, Augusto’s intraduções engage with writers, mostly poets,

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  157 from several languages.12 He remembers the first of his intraduções ­(Figure 9.3), composed in 1974, as follows: The first of this series was a fragment by the Provençal troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn (1130–1220). I took two verses from a poem of his quoted by Ezra Pound in his Cantos (‘Si no’us vei, domna don plus mi cal, negus vezer mon bel pensar no val’) and I translated them as follows: ‘Se eu não vejo a mulher que eu mais desejo, nada que eu veja vale o que eu não vejo’ (in Pound’s translation [Canto 92], ‘And if I see her not, / no sigh is worth the beauty of my thought.’). These lines were cut out, fragmented and intercepted. The Provençal words are written in more archaizing letter fonts, while the translation had modern fonts. Both texts overlap and imbricate each other, engendering a third text, in which the word fragments in both languages produce hybrid words, sometimes with surprising effects. It is a kind of translation that really results in something different.13 It is evident that the conception of the intradução goes much further than that of a conventional translation. In the case of the first of Augusto de Campos’ intraduções, it includes the selection of a poem’s fragment, its translation, the fragmentation of both texts and their overlapping, the visual conception of a hybrid text containing the original and the explicit indication of a 800-year gap between both texts. The translation process includes not only an interlingual, but also an intersemiotic operation, which marks – through layout, letter design and text arrangement – the

Figure 9.3  intraduções, by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

158  Simone Homem de Mello difference between both Romance languages (Provençal and Portuguese), between original and translation, between old and new. The selected fragment also appears in Pound’s Cantos, so that its quotation opens up an even wider range of references. This hybrid genre of poetry, consisting in a found text or a readymade, differs from strictly authorial poems and is also distinct from a regular translation, being deliberately fragmentary and non-transparent in relation to the original source. What is intriguing about Augusto de Campos’ intraduções is the procedure itself: why highlight a text fragment by another author, translate it and transform it into another piece of literature? Does the fragment stand for the rest of the text or does it have an autonomous status? Is it important to know the rest of the quoted text and its network of intertextual relations for the appreciation of the intraduções? This new genre also raises the question of authorship. Who is speaking? Why is he quoting? Indeed, the situation of reception is very different from that of an authorial poem: in the intraduções, the reader cannot count upon the convention of a supposedly stable ‘lyrical I,’ for the text evokes explicitly heterogeneous voices. In this sense, Augusto’s intraduções take to one extreme concrete poetry’s postulate about the absence of a recognisable speaking subject behind the text, and the self-referentiality of writing. In some manifestos and critical texts written in the 1950s and 1960s, the Noigandres poets showed their opposition to ‘self-debilitating introspection’14 in poetry and state that, in their literary programme, ‘the will to build has surpassed the will to expression or self-expression.’15 Their focus on the autonomy of language with its verbivocovisual dimensions implies an obliteration of the subject as the assumed primary source of language: ‘Concrete Poetry is not dissociated from language or communication. But it unclothes discursive syntax from its formal armour. It affirms its autonomy and eliminates the contradiction between non-discursive nature and discursive form,’16 states Augusto de Campos. This emancipation of language from the logic of discursive self-­ expression had already been formulated by Stéphane Mallarmé in Crise de Vers (1897), one of the main points of reference for concrete poetry: The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who relinquishes initiative to the words, mobilised by the clash of their inequality; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual trail of light across gemstones, replacing the perceptible breathing with the old lyric breath or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase.17 In Augusto de Campos’ intraduções, ‘the elocutionary disappearance of the poet’ is even more complex than in his strictly authorial poems. As has already been stated, the construction of an intradução as a

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  159 palimpsest, with different layers of allusion, calls into question the existence of a centred authorial presence. In Chuva Oblíqua de Maiakóvski (Mayakovsky’s Oblique Rain, 1982), de Campos takes the silhouette of Vladimir Mayakovsky by Alexander Rodchenko as a red background for the translation of his poem ‘Homeward’ (1925). Although the silhouette ironically points to a univocal author, the network of references grows wider, since the expression chuva oblíqua corresponds to the title of a poem written by Fernando Pessoa in 1915, and the distribution of verses in falling diagonal lines on Mayakovsky’s portrait recalls Guillaume Apollinaires’s calligram Il pleut (1916). Moreover, the idea of a text double – regardless of whether the original and the translation are presented side by side or whether the original is simply referred to in the title – also implies an interlingual dialogism and deflects the focus from an authorial presence to the in-betweenness of languages. But the decisive factor of the impersonalisation of discourse in an intradução is the intermedial intricacy of concept, sound and image. This intricacy not only intensifies the polyphonic impression already created by interlingual strategies, but draws the reader’s attention to the intermedial relations themselves. As the only founder member of the Noigandres group who kept writing concrete poetry after the programmatic phase of the movement was over, Augusto de Campos gave continuity to several principles of the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958) in his subsequent works. His intermedia poetics continued to be closely aligned with Ezra Pound’s tripartite conception of poetry as phanopeia (‘throwing the object on to the visual imagination’), melopoeia (‘inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech’) and logopoeia (‘inducing both of the effects by stimulating the associations – intellectual or emotional – that have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed’),18 that is to say, the visual, sonorous and conceptual dimensions of a poetic text. In the broader context of his work – which also involves other media, such as three-dimensional, foldable, cardboard objects, holography, running texts displayed in public spaces, sound installations, digital clips, among others – the interplay of image, sound and verbal language typical of his books does not necessarily consist in their superimposition as mixed media, but above all in their exposure as intrinsic elements of verbal language itself. Augusto de Campos displays multiple strategies in associating visual, sonorous and conceptual levels in his concrete poems, including his intraduções, but in the latest examples in this genre, he seems systematically to translate one level into the other, so that the reader is more likely to uncover iconic similitude in this genre than in his authorial poems. Among the 41 intraduções Augusto de Campos has composed until now, several of them circumscribe a specific object, depicting it in words and graphic elements.19 This precise framing of an image recalls

160  Simone Homem de Mello the Imagistic principle of isolating objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called ‘luminous details.’ At the same time, they recall Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dinggedichte (‘poems of things’), most of which de Campos translated into Portuguese. The intraduções share with the genre of the Dinggedicht the immediate depiction of an object, or a work-of-art, with the greatest possible economy of means. Unlike an Imagistic poem or a ‘thing-poem,’ the phanopoetic or visual level of an intradução is frequently engendered by means of a figurative spacialisation of words and letters on the page; the use of suggestive, iconic fonts and colours; and sometimes visual allusions to extraneous codes and text types. Like his fellow Noigandres poets, Augusto de Campos has always criticised the figurative aspect of Apollinaire’s calligrams, ‘compositions in the form of heart, clock, tie, crown…,’ because ‘the physiognomic relation’ the French avant-garde poet establishes between words and depicted objects consists in a structure that is imposed on the poem and, consequently, is extraneous to the words themselves. Therefore, in Apollinaire’s calligrams, words are shaped into a fixed form, but they are not modified by it. 20 Consequently, the iconic character that some intraduções share with calligrams goes beyond the merely figurative and has a further connotation in a context in which translatability is the main issue. The illustrative use of graphic composition and the use of fonts with a physiognomic appeal are undeniable in some intraduções. In lunograma (musset) (1972/1991), the translation of the first strophe of Alfred de Musset’s Ballade à la lune (‘C’était, dans la nuit brune, / Sur le clocher jauni, / La lune / Comme un point sur un i.’) is inscribed into a white circle positioned over a white letter ‘i’ against a black background. In o som (mandelstam) (1992), the composition of white letters placed vertically in a narrow layout against a black background depicts the fall of a tree’s fruit into ‘the hollow silence of woods.’ Sometimes, the figurative character of the layout is combined with the use of suggestive fonts, such as the butterfly motif in borboltsé (1996), an intradução in which de Campos quotes both Chuang-Tzu and Décio Pignatari: the translation of the Chinese philosopher’s well-known question whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man is composed in white fonts with an apparently moving black shadow, and arranged in vertical lines forming a stylised butterfly. Nevertheless, the vestiges of Khlebnikov’s butterfly (in ‘I, A Butterfly That Has Flown’) are different in two intraduções made with the first six verses of the poem: borboleta-pó de khliébnikov (1985) is composed with a dotted font corresponding to the ‘writing of my dust,’ whereas borboleta de khliébnikov II (1994) presents the same fragment of the poem in colourful irregular handwriting. Those visual references to flying movements do not coincide, however, with the way ‘LIFE FLIES’ in the ‘homage to edward fitzgerald’ (1974), namely by means of light, antique, serif letters. And dotted fonts can also depict, in Roman letters,

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  161 the decrypted text of a Morse-code message (amorse (josé assunción silva), 1985). These examples show that the illustrative use of layout and lettering does not establish a determined, univocal correspondence between image and text, for the whole corpus of Augusto’s intraduções will show how ambiguous and polysemic an image and a graphic display can be. The depiction of William Blake’s ‘sick rose’ as a text in spiral format (A Rosa Doente, 1975) and of Gertrude Stein’s ‘a rose is a rose’ as concentric circles (Uma Rosa para Gertrude, 1988) establishes the correspondence of rose and circular form (Figure 9.4), but after some pages the same pattern can represent the sun in o sol de maiakóvski (1982/1993). Augusto de Campos thus transfers or translates to the phanopoetic sphere the multi-referential aspect that characterises his intraduções. Not only can a single poem refer simultaneously to texts from various traditions, or poetic images turn into nodes at the centre of webs of allusion, but visual patterns can also create new links to other intraduções and to the earlier texts that they recode. In this sense, unlike Apollinaire’s calligrams, the relation between the word and image in de Campos’ intraduções cannot be reduced to an illustrative function, for a much more complex conceptual translation is involved in the visual programme of this genre of poetry. Neither can the phonic complexity of Augusto de Campos’s translations be reduced to a mere poetic effect in his intraduções. His concern with melopoeia in these translated fragments, in which the sonority is often more intense than in the original, does not only ‘induce emotional correlations’ (Pound), but also implies a conceptual elaboration. Silence as the counterpoint of sound, language or utterance is one of the most frequent motifs in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções. In all his collections of poetry, we can find an intradução about this subject: o som (mandelstam) (1992), for instance, quotes a poem that Osip

Figure 9.4  a rosa doente; rosa para gertrude; sol de maiakóvski by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

162  Simone Homem de Mello Mandelstam wrote in 1908 beginning with the verse ‘Звук осторожный и глухой’ (translated into English by A. S. Kline as ‘The sound, muffled, cautious / of tree’s fruit, falling, / among endless singing / silent forest depths…’). 21 Here and in other intraduções, silence (or emptiness) is presented as the element out of which any sound (or phenomenon) can be recognised and named, and so in silence consists the central premise for language. In de Campos’s translation of this poem from Russian, the originary phenomenon of sound is concretely realised through a dense texture of alliteration and assonance (O som seco e surdo / desta fruta caindo / no murmúrio sem fim / do oco silêncio da Floresta; ‘The sound, dry and deaf / of this falling fruit / in the endless murmur / of the mute silence of the Forest’). An intradução like ‘guillotine apollinaire’ (2005), consisting of the last verse of Apollinaire’s Zone (Soleil cou coupé, a play on words that does not figure in most English translations: ‘The sun a severed neck’ [Roger Shattuck], ‘Sun corseless head’ [Samuel Beckett], ‘Sun cut throat’ [Ron Padgett], ‘Solar throat slashed’ [A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman] or simply ‘Decapitated sun’ [William Meredith]), seems to owe its very existence to the phonic complexity of Augusto’s solution: sol goela degolada (literally, ‘sun throat unthroated’). This paronomastical, punning density contributes directly to the appeal of the iconic semicircular composition of these three words, printed in red. The indissociability of sound and image also appears as a motif in eco de ausonius (1977), a quotation of the 11th epigram by Decimus Magnus Ausonius (310–393/94), in which the nymph, Echo, challenges a painter to depict a sound. How to paint an echo, how to create the image of a repeated utterance: the question of pictorial representation of speech, posed synaesthetically by the epigram and actualised in the corresponding intradução, has been known for centuries, as a notorious conundrum concerning the translation of one medium into another. The intricate relation of image and sound in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções corresponds, on a logopoetic level, to a predilection for conceits and enigmata, riddles and puzzles (see also di Fiori Pondian, this volume). Not only does the poem’s graphic conception challenge the reader to try different reading paths, but the texts themselves are frequently characterised by an oracular rhetoric with metadiscursive implications. In a esphinge (emerson) (1979), Augusto takes a fragment from the 14th/15th strophes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The Sphinx’ (1904) and presents it – in a sort of visual quotation – in form of a riddle in an almanac (Figure 9.5). And what in Emerson’s poem is an exchange between the poet and the sphinx (‘The old Sphinx bit her thick lip, - / Said, “Who taught thee me to name? / I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow, / Of thine eye I am eyebeam. // Thou art the unanswered question; / Couldst see thy proper

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  163

Figure 9.5  a esphinge (emerson), by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of ­Augusto de Campos.

eye, / Alway it asketh, asketh; / And each answer is a lie.”’) in the intra­ dução becomes a question to the readers about their attitude towards a text whose realisation depends directly on their interaction with it. Also the sophistry of the sphinx speech’s, which gives the question back to the interrogator and presents itself as mere reflection, suggests the intricacy of the interplay between different codes and media present in the intraduções. In his intraduções, Augusto de Campos – who is also, in passing, an ingenious translator of the Metaphysical Poets – has created a logopoetic genre very close in structure to Mannerist conceits and to the dynamics of Baroque emblems. The tripartite structure of an emblem – consisting of an enigmatic motto (inscriptio), either in Latin or the vernacular, a symbolic picture or icon (pictura), and an epigram or verse commentary (subscriptio) – is present in all intraduções: the poem’s title usually gives a clue to the source of the text, simply by naming the author or making a riddle out of various references; the graphic composition encodes a central motif of the poem in an abstract or figurative image, which is inseparable from the text; and the translated text framed in an intradução only makes sense if grasped simultaneously with the inscriptio and ­figura. The allusive character of Renaissance emblems, which represented a riddle for the reader, usually consisting in a challenge to identify the source of the ancient text and of the

164  Simone Homem de Mello conventional symbolic image, is also present in Augusto’s intraduções, which invite the reader to recognise and decipher the allusions. Analogous to Baroque emblems, most of intraduções optimise the triadic structure in order to create ambiguities and polysemy and to produce an indeterminate sense. Only by dealing with different dimensions of language is it possible to create such an intricate structure as Augusto de Campos achieves in his intraduções. The translational strategies that are arrayed on multiple interlingual and intermedial levels are responsible for a mode of generating meaning in the intraduções, a process that cannot be apprehended in terms of a supposedly centred authorship and an assumedly stable referentiality. The intensive dynamics of this genre can also be attributed to the fact that its synthetic poetic structure and its visual, spatial graspability contrast with the time the reader requires to decipher the allusions to the tradition. In this sense, the genre of intraduções is a precise and emblematic translation into concrete poetics of Pound’s very principle to ‘make-it-new.’

Notes 1 See Ezra Pound, The Cantos, Canto XX (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 89–90: ‘The boughs are not more fresh / where the almond shoots / take their March green. / And that year I went up to Freiburg, / And Rennert had said: ‘Nobody, no, nobody / knows anything about Provençal, or if there is anybody, / It’s old Lévy.’/ So I went up to Freiburg / And the vacation was just beginning, / The students getting off for the summer, / Freiburg im Breisgau, / And everything clean, seeming clean, after Italy. // And I went to old Lévy, and it was by then 6.30 / in the evening, and he trailed half way across Freiburg / before dinner, to see the two strips of copy, / Arnaut’s, settant’uno R. superiore (Ambrosiana) / Not that I could sing him the music. / And he said: ‘Now is there anything I can tell you?’ / And I said: ‘I dunno, sir,’ or / ‘Yes Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?’ / And he said: ‘Noigandres! NOIgandres! / You know for seex mon’s of my life / Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself: / “Noigandres, eh, noigandres, / Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!”’ 2 Augusto de Campos translated the following authors from their original languages into Portuguese: the Provençal Troubadours, Anna Akhmatova, Dante Alighieri, Alexander Blok, Lord Byron, Jorge Luis Borges, Guido Cavalcanti, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Paul Fleming, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arno Holz, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sergey Yesenin, James Joyce, Quirinus Kuhlmann, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ossip Mandelstam, Christian Morgenstern, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Kurt Schwitters, Angelus Silesius, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, August Stramm, Dylan Thomas, Paul Valéry, William Butler Yeats, Marina Tsvetaeva. 3 The translation of all quotations is mine, unless otherwise indicated. 4 Haroldo de Campos, ‘poesia e paraíso perdido,’ in Teoria da Poesia Concreta (Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2006), p. 43: ‘A arte da poesia, embora não tenha uma vivência função-da-História, mas se apoie sobre um continuum meta-­ histórico que contemporaniza Homero e Pound, Dante e Eliot, Góngora

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  165 e Mallarmé, implica a ideia de progresso, não no sentido de hierarquia de valor, mas no de metamorfose vetoriada, de transformação qualitativa, de culturmorfologia: make it new.’ 5 Augusto de Campos, ‘Um diálogo quase visceral com a tradução,’ Humboldt, A outra língua, 2007. http://www.goethe.de/wis/bib/prj/hmb/the/das/ pt3289334.htm [Accessed 10 April 2019]. 6 Augusto de Campos, ‘the tyger | o tygre (william blake),’ in Poesia 1949– 1979 (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986), 221–229. 7 Haroldo de Campos, Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981), 74. In his appreciation of Goethe’s Faust, Haroldo stresses the intertextual intensity and the parodic character of the second part of the play, recalling the etymological definition of parody as a ‘parallel chant.’ In a note, he also mentions Marshall McLuhan’s definition of parody as a ‘one road running beside another road (para hodos)’ (in From Cliché to Archetype, New York: Viking Press, 1970), which – despite of the inaccurate etymological derivation – would coincide with Haroldo’s own vision of what translation should be. On Haroldo’s association of translation with parody, see Susan Bassnett, and Harish Trivedi (eds.), Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London / New York: Routledge, 1999) and Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory (London / New York: Routledge, 2008). 8 Augusto de Campos, ‘Um diálogo.’ 9 This fragment was taken from the following quatrain of the first edition of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald: ‘Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise / To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; / One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; / The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.’ Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859). https:// web.archive.org/web/20060519151635/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/images/ modeng/public/Fit1Rub/F1859p6.jpg [Accessed 10 April 2019]. 10 In the sense of Marchel Duchamp’s repurposing of ‘ready made,’ found objects as works of art. 11 In Ta Hio: The Great Learning of Confucius (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore, 1928), a translation of a text compiled from different sources by neo-Confucian commentators, Pound translates this ideogram sequence (part of an anecdote according to which King Ch’eng T’ang had a bath tub with this inscription) as ‘Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!’ Additionally, he translates in a note a French version of this passage as ‘Renew thyself daily, utterly, make it new, and again, new, make it new’, indicating that the phrase was composed of the ideograms ‘renew sun sun renew (like a tree shoot)’. In Canto 53, he goes deeper into the ideogrammic structure and recovers connotations evoked by the radicals of ‘new, renew’ (新), namely 立 (stand), 木 (tree) and 斤 (axe): ‘Tching prayed on the mountain and / wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by day / make it new / cut underbrush / pile the logs / keep it growing.’ 12 In his intraduções, Augusto de Campos deals with a range of different languages, such as Chinese [Tcheng-Tzu]; English [William Blake; e. e. cummings, Edward Fitzgerald, Emerson, H. W. Longfellow, Marianne Moore, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens]; German [R. M. Rilke, L. Wittgenstein]; Italian [Leonardo Sinisgalli]; Japanese [Basho]; Provençal [Bernard de Ventadorn, Peire Vidal]; Russian [Akhmatova, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky]; Spanish [Gongora, José Asunción Silva]. 13 Augusto de Campos, ‘Um Diálogo’.

166  Simone Homem de Mello 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

Augusto de Campos, ‘poesia concreta (manifesto)’ (1957), in Teoria, 71. Décio Pignatari, ‘construir e expressar’ (1960), in Teoria, 175. Augusto de Campos, ‘a moeda concreta da fala’ (1957), in Teoria, 172. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’ (1886–1895), in Œuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor, G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945, 366: ‘L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils s’allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries, remplaçant la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase.’ Translated by Helen Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music (London / New York, Routledge, 2009), 167. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London / Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991), 63. That is the case of ‘rosa doente de rilke’ (rilke’s sick rose), ‘tigre de blake’ (blake’s tyger), ‘borboleta de khliébnikhov’ (khlebnikov’s butterfly), ‘a rã de bashô’ (basho’s frog), among others. Augusto de Campos, ‘pontos-periferia-poesia concreta’ (1955), in Teoria, 38. The Noigandres poets did consider Apollinaire an important predecessor of their Concrete Poetry programme, but not because of his calligrams. Apollinaire’s postulate of an ‘ideographic poem,’ which was supposed to challenge our intelligence to understand synthetical-ideographically, and not analytical-discursively, was the reason for their recognition of his importance to the new avant-garde poetry. A. S. Kline. Ossip Mandelstam: Forty-Four More Poems in Translation, 2005, 5. [Accessed 17 April 2019].

References Abbott, Helen. Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music. London / New York: Routledge, 2009. Bassnett, Susan, and Trivedi, Harish, eds. Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice London / New York: Routledge, 1999. Campos, Augusto de. Despoesia. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 1994. Campos, Augusto de. Não. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2003. Campos, Augusto de. Outro. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2015. Campos, Augusto de. Poesia 1949–1979. 2. ed. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986. Campos, Augusto de. “Um diálogo quase visceral com a tradução.” Humboldt, A outra língua, 2007. http://www.goethe.de/wis/bib/prj/hmb/the/das/ pt3289334.htm [Accessed 10 April 2019]. Campos, Augusto de, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, eds. Teoria da Poesia Concreta: Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950–1960. 4.ed. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2006. Campos, Haroldo de. Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. London / New York: Routledge, 2008. Kline, A.S. (trans), and Ossip Mandelstam. Forty-Four More Poems in Translation, 2005, 5 [Accessed 17 April 2019].

Tradition in Augusto de Campos’ intraduções  167 Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crise de vers” (1886–1895). In Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (eds.) Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crise de vers” (1886–1895). In Bertrand Marchal (ed.) Œuvres complètes. Vol.2. Paris: Gallimard, 2003 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 497), 1643–1680. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. London / Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

10 Concrete North America Some Questions of Reception Odile Cisneros

The history of concretism’s reception and its claims to constitute a worldwide movement remain under-researched1 even as, from its inception, many concrete poetry anthologies emphasised the trend’s global character. Tellingly, the titles of major English-language collections – Stephen Bann’s Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967) and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968) – announced their intercontinental reach, while others, such as Eugene Wildman’s The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism (1967) and Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), visibly highlighted geographic diversity in their selection. With its emphasis on ‘non-verbal communication,’2 concretism’s grand ambition was that a poetry based on materiality would easily transcend boundaries, whether those be linguistic, national or geographic. Important centres did develop in a variety of countries, notably, Germany, Switzerland and Brazil, but to what extent was concretism truly global? What factors determined its staying power and influence in the various contexts where it thrived? Why did other contexts remain apparently impervious to its influence? In this chapter, I am interested in probing concrete poetry’s reach in North A ­ merica, where many important early anthologies appeared or circulated. Who, for instance, were the concrete poets in the United States, and in neighbouring Mexico and Canada, two contexts often overlooked by such collections? Despite all the space devoted to ­A merican poets in her seminal anthology, Solt interestingly admits that ‘it would be an exaggeration to speak of a concrete poetry movement in the United States,’3 also mentioning only a few names for Mexico and Canada. Meanwhile, concrete poetry in Brazil, notwithstanding divisions and fractures, gained many followers and had a decades-long influence. The movement’s longevity in North America also proved more tenuous: it appeared to ‘fizzle out’ quickly but then resurfaced, decades later, in a variety of ways.4 This chapter is a first step towards defining the contours of the reception of concretism in North America, delving into the connections that brought concretism to those contexts, and the reasons for its belated, yet, in some cases, significant influence. I begin with the case of Mexico because experiments directly related to concrete poetry perhaps began earlier there than in Canada or the

Concrete North America  169 United States. The central figure in the reception of concrete poetry in Mexico is the German-born5 sculptor Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990). This is acknowledged by Solt, who included him in her anthology as the sole representative of the movement in that country: ‘To speak of concrete poetry in Mexico is to speak of Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner, who is also a painter and an architect.’6 Indeed, Goeritz is celebrated for his sculpture and architecture, and many inhabitants of Mexico City know his work, even if they do not recognise his name. Arguably Goeritz’s best-known piece is the architectural/sculptural Torres de Satélite, begun in 1957 in collaboration with the architect Luis Barragán and the painter Jesús Reyes Ferreira. These colourful constructivist towers, made from reinforced concrete, stand in a traffic island towards the north of Mexico City’s ring road, Anillo Periférico, as a gateway to an urban development named Ciudad Satélite (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1  Torres de Satélite by Mathias Goeritz, Luis Barragán and Jesús Reyes Ferreira. Image by ProtoplasmaKid – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18510340.

170  Odile Cisneros These towers were meant to symbolise the budding modernity of the brand-new affluent suburbs, concrete being the material of choice in the new architecture. His work as a sculptor also included pieces that play with materiality, such as the Dada-inspired poema plástico (1953), an illegible script in wrought iron affixed to a concrete tower in the patio of Mexico City’s El Eco Museum, also designed by Goeritz (Figure 10.2). Jennifer Josten, who has extensively studied Goeritz’s work,7 interprets poema plástico as emerging from the opposite pole of rationalist constructivism that had inspired Eugen Gomringer’s iconic poem silencio (see Abi-Sâmara and McCabe, this volume), namely Zurich Dada interdisciplinary performance, abstraction and primitivism. She writes: “In stark contrast to silencio by Gomringer, Goeritz’s design adapts the form and syntax of traditional poetry—the nine rows of characters are organized into two stanzas of four lines, followed by a one-line epilogue. But its invented alphabets deny any rational legibility.”8 In other words, the rational, constructivist design of Gomringer finds its counterpoint in an equally rational design by Goeritz that yet denies rational reading. Despite shared roots in constructivism and other avant-garde trends, this artwork was produced prior to Goeritz’s direct connection with concrete poetry. That connection happened a few years later, when Goeritz came across work by Di(e)ter Rot(h), from the Basel concrete poetry group, through an article in the review Arquitectura-México written by the critic Ida Rodríguez Prampolini. Goeritz wrote to Rot, and because

Figure 10.2  Detail of poema plástico by Mathias Goeritz, by courtesy of Museo Experimental El Eco.

Concrete North America  171 of their aesthetic affinities and common expatriate experience – both were born and raised in Germany – they hit it off. Their correspondence started around 1959 and lasted until the late 1970s. Rot’s work was discussed in the Mexican press by Rodríguez Prampolini and Goeritz. When Hansjörg Mayer – a young artist, publisher, poet and typographer, and part of Rot’s circle through Max Bense – planned a trip to Brazil, Rot encouraged him to visit their ‘Mexican friends,’ and Mayer ended up spending a month in Goeritz’s house in Mexico in 1964. They began a series of projects which included the printing of Goeritz’s series ‘Goldene Botschaft’ (Golden Messages / Mensajes de oro). Mayer created typographical designs for Goeritz’s single-word palindromic poem ‘oro,’ using the sans-serif futura font.9 The poem was also produced as a sculpture El eco del oro (‘The Echo of the Gold’) in wrought iron.10 With Mayer’s assistance and encouragement, Goeritz organised an international exhibition of concrete poetry in Mexico in 1966, the first one in Spanish America.11 The exhibit featured an extensive collection of concrete poems, little magazines, books and posters designed by more than 50 artists and poets from almost 20 countries, not only in Europe but also Brazil, the United States, Guatemala, Turkey and Japan. It took place at the National University’s Galería Aristos in Mexico City. The Noigandres group in Brazil heartily congratulated Goeritz on the success of the exhibit. Josten argues that though the exhibit was only on view for a while, its more lasting impact came through its printed form, mainly, the colour catalogue that included reproductions of poems as well as introductory texts, also widely disseminated through major Mexico City dailies.12 Just a couple years later, the excitement of experimentalism in Mexico was cut short by the increasingly repressive political climate that led to the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, which significantly shifted the attention of artists from abstract forms such as concrete poetry to more explicitly political works. Still, though concrete poetry as such was short-lived in Mexico, Josten argues Goeritz’s commitment to this idiom ‘left important traces [particularly for mail art and d]emonstrated to a wide and young audience the possibilities of a form of communication that was relatively cheap, uncensored and transmitted through artists’ networks.’13 Goeritz, thus, was fundamental in introducing concrete poetry into Mexico, paving the way for greater awareness and further contacts, such as between Octavio Paz and the Noigandres group, and for works such as Paz’s Topoemas (1968). Prior to his explicit endorsement of concretism, Paz’s journey towards the spatialisation of poetry included the experimental poems Blanco (1966) and Discos visuales (1968). For Rachel Phillips, Topoemas is the last step on the way to ‘stylistic purification’ and towards spatial poetry because it allows the presentation of a ‘paradoxical visual idea instantaneously.’14 Phillips also notes that the term topoema combines topos + poema and is conceived by Paz as

172  Odile Cisneros ‘spatial poetry, in opposition to temporal, discursive poetry,’15 thus affirming its affinity with concrete poetry inasmuch as ‘the typographical arrangement on the page formally conveys the meaning of its content.’16 In a detailed analysis of all six Topoemas, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann also contends that they ‘partly situate themselves in the tradition of the pictogram, and partly deploy the devices of “concrete poetry,” [and thus] are concrete.’17 Paz, in his note to the reader, explains that his Topoemas are an ‘implicit homage’ to, among others, ‘old and new masters of poetry: to José Juan Tablada; to Matsuo Basho; …to Chinese calligraphers and poets; … to Apollinaire, Arp, and Cummings; and to Haroldo de Campos and the young Brazilian poets of Noigandres and Invenção.’18 Although Paz did establish a fruitful correspondence with Haroldo de Campos, especially around the translation by Campos of Paz’s poem Blanco, the concrete phase exemplified by Topoemas was a brief one. Less known than Goeritz and Paz is the peculiar figure of Ulises Carrión, a poet from Veracruz, who moved to Mexico City in 1960 to attend university.19 Under a number of Spanish-exiled poets, Carrión studied medieval and early modern Spanish literature at Mexico’s National University (UNAM). While working as a librarian in Casa del Lago, a cultural centre near several museums, including Mexico’s Modern Art Museum, he soon came into contact with modern trends and Goeritz’s ideas. But he did not stay in Mexico long. He travelled to France and E ­ ngland in 1965, later pursuing graduate studies at the University of Leeds in 1971–72. Curious about the publishing house Beau Geste Press, run by Martha Hellion, Felipe Ehrenberg and David Mayor, he travelled to Devon, England. Eventually, he settled in Amsterdam, where he founded the exhibition space Other Books and So (OBAS), devoted to, as he put it, ‘other books, non-books, anti-books, pseudo-books, quasi-books, concrete books, conceptual books, structuralist books, project books, simple books, multiple books, posters, postcards, recordings, and cassettes.’20 Perhaps his most daring innovation was the concept of the ‘bookwork’ (obra-libro, in Spanish), a kind of artist’s book, described in his manifesto/essay El arte nuevo de hacer libros (‘The New Art of Making Books’), a title that recalls the Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega’s 1609 treatise, El arte nuevo de hacer comedias (‘The New Art of Writing Plays’). Carrión warns against simplistically thinking that the ‘bookwork’ is a work that merely plays with the limits of what a book is. He writes: For an artist’s book to be a bookwork, it is essential for it to look like and function as an ordinary book. That means, no unusual size, no extravagant materials, no eccentric context. The very ordinariness of the bookwork guarantees its place in the general context of culture, that is, of art … Bookworks only seem ordinary. But they

Concrete North America  173 are not. They are made to create specific rhythms of attention, specific reading conditions. And this is where the old sanctuaries of art, such as galleries, museums, etc., play a role. 21 His experimentation inside the pages of the book involved objet-trouvé ­aesthetics and appropriating texts through citation combined with other typographical and patterning procedures typical of concrete poetry. His book Poesías, for example, takes Spanish Renaissance and Golden Age poems and transcribes their rhythmic patterns into various typographical variants or simply copies – verbatim and in tongue-in-cheek fashion – works from high and popular culture (from a sonnet, to the lyrics of a popular song such as La bamba, to the very letters of the alphabet).22 In another section of the book entitled Funciones (‘Functions’), Carrión takes, for instance, a poem by the medieval Castilian poet Gonzalo de Berceo and substitutes the words for the names of the parts of speech (Figure 10.3) Further elaborations (variations) attend to visual patterning of words on the page. Though his experimentation fused a number of tendencies, as Carrillo Herrería argues, in his ‘New Art’ manifesto, Carrión acknowledged concrete poetry’s watershed self-conscious use of spatialisation in poetry: ‘For years, many years, poets have exploited

Figure 10.3  F unciones by Ulises Carrión, by courtesy of Roberto Rébora. Taller Ditoria.

174  Odile Cisneros intensively and effectively, the spatial possibilities of poetry. But only the so-called concrete, or lately, visual, poetry has declared it openly.’23 It is fair to say that he could be counted among the experimentalists in Mexico linked to concrete poetry, though his relationship was more indirect. His legacy, however, is hard to assess. Because Carrión lived abroad and carried out most of his work removed from major cultural centres, his influence (at least in Mexico) was minimal. He is only now being rediscovered. More research would be necessary for a full assessment of the impact of concrete poetry on the Mexican scene, but from this brief survey it seems to have been at best transient. Changes in the social and political climate in 1968 reconfigured the compass of aesthetic choices. Likewise, perhaps a more pervasive presence of surrealism and discursive forms in Mexican poetry (and other Spanish American contexts) in the end won over synthetic/concrete tendencies. The case of the United States is peculiar, as Mary Ellen Solt noted in the above-mentioned passage of her Introduction to Concrete ­Poetry: A World View. She wrote: Although a few isolated poets have been making concrete poems for some time, it would be an exaggeration to speak of a concrete poetry movement in the United States. The American concrete poet finds himself in the strange position of being associated with a new formal movement whose origins are foreign and many of whose foundation stones were laid by e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. 24 The paradox is, thus, that while poets in Europe and South America saw e. e. cummings and Pound as the forerunners of their concrete experiments, those very influences spawned a different tradition of American poetry that somehow competed or outdid concrete efforts in the United States. Solt observes further that while cummings remains ‘admired for his style, death to imitate,’ Pound and William Carlos Williams were the most significant influences on the development of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse,’ a style opposed to concrete poetry in that it keeps the line of verse (along with syntactic and grammatical structures), is expressive, personal and concerned with speech. It is ‘open’ but not in the same way as concrete poetry. Projective verse is only controlled by patterns of breath and largely sees form as unimportant, whereas for concrete poetry form is paramount. 25 Solt elaborates on this irony or peculiarity of the American case: Perhaps we were too close to concrete poetry to require a “movement,” for with very little effort one can find concrete poems written by distinguished American poets simply included in their collections without its having occurred to anyone to attach a new label. 26

Concrete North America  175 Among such ‘distinguished American poets,’ Solt goes on to cite Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley, noting also that none of these poets could or ‘would wish to’ be labelled ‘concrete.’27 Furthermore, no ‘unity’ is possible, Solt argues, because these poets have worked in isolation. 28 It is safe to say, then, that the first ‘real’ American concrete poet to emerge was Emmett Williams (1925–2007), but, since he lived in ­Europe from 1949 to 1966, that problematises the extent to which he could represent ‘American’ concrete poetry in its early phase. 29 Still, Williams should be credited for his Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), the first major collection to be published in the United States. In his brief ‘Foreword and Acknowledgments’ he calls Eugen Gomringer the ‘acknowledged father’ of concrete poetry and mentions the activities of Noigandres in Brazil, Fahlström in Sweden, Diter Rot in Iceland and Carlfriedrich Claus in East Germany and Vienna.30 Williams learned about concretism from the Romanian-born Daniel Spoerri, leader of the Darmstadt Circle, of which he was part. Noting the simultaneity of these dissemination efforts, Williams points out that Spoerri published the first international anthology in 1957, the year Haroldo de Campos introduced concrete poetry to Kitasono Katué of Japan.31 Williams was invested in showing the international character of concrete poetry, going on to discuss how the 1960s constituted a ‘renaissance’ of the movement in England, Germany and Sweden as well as Czechoslovakia, France, Spain and the United States, and quoting his fellow American Jonathan Williams that ‘If there is such a thing as a worldwide movement in the art of poetry, Concrete it is.’32 Emmett Williams was aware, as was Solt, that the ‘international movement’ was not cohesive, yet, in a positive light he saw it as ‘blessed with disunity’ noting that while ‘poets of a feather flock together… fortunately… they do not all sing the same song.’33 Inevitably, however, this diversity also ‘robs the label “Concrete” of any concrete meaning whatsoever,’ Williams admitted.34 Williams’s anthology, published under Dick Higgins’s imprint, Something Else Press, included a number of fellow Americans, namely, Larry Freifeld, Al Hansen, Ronald Johnson, Jackson McLow, Aram Saroyan and Mary Ellen Solt, as well as his own work. Eugene Wildman’s Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism also includes Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, according to Solt, the most experimental of the poets in this mode. 35 Besides better-known names such as Dick Higgins, Ronald Johnson, Jackson McLow and Mary Ellen Solt, the fate and impact of many other poets remains elusive. Take as an example, Larry Freifeld, who started out as a member of the Beat poets and the New York School, later becoming aligned with concretism through Williams’s and Higgins’s Something Else Press. ‘God bless America I love you stars & stripes forever’ reads the ironic first line of one of Freifeld’s poems in the Emmett Williams anthology, 36 an opening that already reveals his ambivalence towards American nationalism and

176  Odile Cisneros also foreshadows his eventual move away from the United States as well as from concrete poetry. Freifeld is one example of a poet who could not make his home comfortably in the concrete idiom, eventually abandoning the form, relocating to Israel, and pursuing other interests. Freifeld viewed the move as a fulfilment of being a poet and also being a Jew, culturally. I’m not sure I could ever have attained that in America being “a Jew writing Hebrew in the ghetto” as a friend once described my work. Here in Israel I have achieved this balance along with many other expatriated Jewish poets from English speaking countries from throughout the world.37 Al Hansen, another American concrete poet included by Williams in his anthology, is yet one more example of an early participant whose adherence to the movement proved ephemeral. Williams describes ­Hansen’s procedures in terms that recall Oulippian constraints: ‘vocabulary and forms are limited to the words, numbers and lines (straight) on chocolate-­and-silver Hershey Bar wrappers, which he transforms into dynamic visual poems.’38 A kind of American Kurt Schwitters, Hansen was attracted to collages of ephemera, where the objects assembled also enact visual puns. His poems, thus, seem transcriptions of such assemblages more than verbal arrangements in their own right. Valery Oisteanu, writing about a posthumous exhibit from 2006, observes that his works appear sculpturally playful, a kind of “outsider” Pop Art, urban-­folkloric with a splash of Fluxus anarchy, sensual neo-Dada and post-­ Surrealist erotica. But upon a more careful examination, the layers of verbal puns come alive, the invisible poetry becomes visible, and the Arte Povera conceptualism is revealed.39 Competing aesthetic trends as well as intermedia concerns thus define Hansen’s work. He also was active in the arena of performance and felt strongly drawn to extreme actions. In a letter from Hansen to Art and Artists magazine (June 1966), he vividly expounds on auto-destruction: ‘Several times I have pushed a piano off a building (first was in Berlin, 1945). It’s a wonderful experience … the only path to unique and personal art is through the door of experimentation. Destruction is a perfectly logical arena to perform in.’40 Hansen died prematurely at 67 in 1995. There are, of course, other distinguished figures, yet a certain restlessness with respect to media and aesthetics characterise their interventions. Dick Higgins, an immensely creative member of Fluxus, in particular, deserves special mention. Ronald Johnson, a further poet who experimented with concrete aesthetics, is another intriguing case

Concrete North America  177 where the synthetic tendencies of concretism yielded the epic long poem ARK.41 Clearly, more needs to be done to begin drafting the history of the transmission of concrete poetry in the United States. Still a pattern seems to emerge already from this cursory first look. American concrete poetry had to compete with both a strong poetic tradition that had renewed itself though Olson’s ‘projective verse,’ and also experimentation in the visual arts and music. Many concrete poets ended up identifying more as visual, conceptual or intermedia artists. In the face of these competing summons, concrete poetry somehow did not manage to garner enough critical mass to constitute a recognisable expression. Craig Saper and Patrick Greaney have also suggested that ‘the proliferation of “Creative Writing” programs in US Colleges and Universities, versus the scarcity of those programs in other countries, led to the marginalization of alternative poetic traditions in the United States, including Concrete and visual poetics.’42 Moving on to the case of Canada, the first Canadian concrete and sound poetry experiments date to the early or mid-1960s and came about through the influence of American sound poets Jackson McLow and Michael McClure. Mary Ellen Solt mentions bpNichol as ‘Canada’s leading concrete poet’ including his poem ‘love’ in her anthology. She writes, ‘from his text we learn that “love” is also a beautiful word to look at.’43 The three brief lines devoted to Nichol belie the prodigious richness and variety of this poet’s contribution in visual, concrete and sound poetry, to which we cannot begin to do justice in this brief survey.44 While Nichol’s experiments with visual poetry are not negligible, his most enduring impact seems to have been in the realm of sound poetry. With Bill Bissett, he was one of North America’s most prolific sound poets, extending his practice not only to solo but also to group interventions with Paul Dutton, Rafael-Barreto Rivera and Steve McCaffery as part of the quartet ‘The Four Horsemen.’ This group gave live performances across North America, also recording long-playing vinyl records (LPs), tapes and videos. Nichol and McCaffery organised the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival in Toronto (1978). Out of this festival came a Sound Poetry Catalogue45 featuring a rich introduction by McCaffery, where he reminds us that preceding Bissett and bpNichol was the Montreal Automatiste, Claude Gauvreau, whose work can be compared to Artaud’s and who went on to influence Raoul Duguay, another Québécois artist.46 The English-language context of Québec witnessed the emergence of the Vehicule Poets, among which we can highlight the work of Ken Morris and John McAulay.47 Another milestone in the reception of concrete poetry in Canada was Concrete Poetry, an exhibit which took place at the University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery in Vancouver, in 1969, co-organised by the curator Alvin Balkind, the poet Michael Morris and other Vancouver artists and poets. The unbound art catalogue, Concrete Poetry: An

178  Odile Cisneros Exhibition in Four Parts, reproduced statements by curators and artists as well as a number of works in loose leaves.48 Julia Polyck-O’Neill, who has analysed the cultural politics of the exhibit and assessed its longterm impact, argues that the ‘event remains paradigmatic in the shaping of Vancouver’s cultural identity, showing how this exhibition partakes of an avant-garde discourse still tangible in the life of the city.’49 Though a limited edition anthology edited by Stephen Bann and published by Hansjörg Mayer in 1966 already mentioned Canada in the title, 50 the movement only seems to have come to fruition almost a decade later. Several chapbooks and collections worthy of mention are as follows: Ed Birne’s anthology Four Parts Sand (1972), 51 John McAulay’s Hazardous Renaissance (1978)52 and the Poetry Toronto Books’ International Anthology of Concrete Poetry.53 By 1976 there was enough development to attract academic attention, as is seen in the compilation of A Bibliography of Canadian Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry 1965–1972 with an Introduction, a 1976 Concordia University thesis project by Nicette Jukelevics54 as well as another thesis by Jack David at the University of Windsor from 1973.55 As Stephen Scobie notes, such anthologising (and academic projects, we may add), in a way, sounds the death knoll of the movement as an avant-garde: The best date for its [concrete poetry’s] demise is, ironically, ­1967–8, the years of its apparent triumph, with the publication of the three major anthologies edited by Emmett Williams, Stephen Bann, and Mary Ellen Solt. The very definitiveness of these collections ‘froze’ Concrete Poetry in its historical moment. In the 1970s, most of the major practitioners either ceased writing, or else (as, notably, in the cases of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland and bpNichol in Canada) developed highly personal, post-concrete styles, too diverse to be meaningfully classified under the same heading.56 And while that may be the case for the United States, it is interesting that activity in Canada continued, as is witnessed by the belated publication of the anthologies previously mentioned. It should perhaps be pointed out that, in the case of Canada, state support for creative artists via cultural institutions and granting agencies, such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and provincial and federal arts councils, played a major (if paradoxical) role in promoting this type of non-conformist art under the mandate of supporting ‘Canadian arts and content’ and perhaps can account, at least in part, for the seemingly fruitful development of concrete poetry in Canada. While, sadly, Nichol’s brilliant trajectory was cut short by his untimely death at age 44, he and other poets have produced a legacy that today endures in the works of Christian Bök and Derek Beaulieu, just to mention two figures in a very rich and diverse experimental poetry scene in Canada today.

Concrete North America  179 In conclusion, through this very preliminary exploration of these three geographically contiguous contexts for concrete poetry, we can distinguish a variety of ways in which the ideas of concretism emerged and spread, in many cases through personal contacts; the kind of interactions concrete poetry had with other artistic disciplines and media; the varying chronologies of its reception; and the forces and factors which either stimulated or subdued its impact. Whether it was competition from other media/styles, political events, the migratory habits of is participants, the untimely deaths of some of the most creative figures and a host of other contextual factors not considered here, an initial image begins to emerge of the similarities and differences between these contexts. The global map of concretism that comes into view is a diffuse and amorphous one, yet one that demands further exploration to determine both its precise global reach and the idiosyncrasies and specificities of the various contexts as well as their rich and varied exchanges.

Notes 1 In his study, Designed Words for a Designed World, Jamie Hilder calls for just such a global approach to concretism, both contextually and methodologically: ‘What is required in order to move beyond the national, ancient, theoretical, and disciplinary modes is the type of critical approach that refuses the dogma of conventional critical positions. Concrete covers too grand a space to be encapsulated by a particular method, and therefore requires readers to occupy the poetry with an openness and curiosity that will be rewarded by a proliferation of critical vectors.’ Jamie Hilder, Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016, p. 34. 2 Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, ‘Plano piloto para poesia concreta,’ in Teoria da poesia concreta. Textos críticos e manifestos, 1950–1960, ed. Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, 2nd ed. Livraria Duas Cidades, 1975, p. 157. 3 Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View, trans. Willis Barnstone. Indiana University Press, 1970, p. 311. 4 This revival can be seen in various ways. At several points between 1986 and 1996, the Mexicans Araceli Zúñiga and César Espinosa were involved in a series of exhibits of visual poetry in Mexico, which they discuss in César Horacio Espinosa, ‘Las bienales de poesía visual y experimental en México,’ Tijuana Artes Blogspot, February 2, 2013, http://tijuana-artes.blogspot. com/2013/02/araceli-zuniga-y-cesar-espinosa-poesia.html. The work of the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the next generation with figures like Kenny Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, also starting in the 1990s, incorporated a number of avant-garde procedures reminiscent of concrete poetry in their work. In 1996, Goldsmith created UbuWeb as ‘a site focusing on visual and concrete poetry’ which evolved to become, as the site states, ‘the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet’ Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘UbuWeb,’ UbuWeb, 2011, http://www.ubu.com/resources/ index.html. The Canadians Christian Bök and Derek Beaulieu stand out

180  Odile Cisneros among a host of other Canadian avant-garde and experimental poets emerging in the 1990s and 2000s who have also frequently drawn from concretism’s legacy. 5 After leaving Germany in 1936, Goeritz lived for some years in Morocco, and then moved to Spain and helped found the ‘Escuela de Altamira,’ an effort to recuperate the Spanish avant-garde impulse after the civil war. ‘Mathias Goeritz,’ Banco Sabadell Collection, n.d., www.­coleccionbancosabadell. com/en/artist/mathias-goeritz/. 6 Solt, Concrete Poetry, pp. 41–42. 7 Jennifer Josten, Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico. Yale University Press, 2018. 8 Jennifer Josten, ‘Mathias Goeritz y la poesía concreta,’ in Artecorreo, ed. Maris Bustamante and Mauricio Marcin. Museo de la Ciudad de México. RM Verlag, 2011, p.  2. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 9 Solt, Concrete Poetry, pp. 191 and 290. 10 Ibid., p. 192. 11 Josten, Mathias Goeritz y la poesía concreta, pp. 3–5. 12 Ibid., p. 5. 13 Ibid., p. 6. 14 Rachel Phillips, ‘Topoemas: la paradoja suspendida,’ Revista Iberoamericana 37, no. 74 (1971): p. 200. 15 Paz quoted in Phillips, ‘Topoemas,’ p. 200. 16 Ibid. 17 Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, ‘Octavio Paz: Topoemas Elementos para una lectura,’ Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 40, no. 2 (1992): p. 1116. 18 Paz quoted in Meyer-Minnemann, ‘Octavio Paz,’ p. 1114. 19 For the information on Carrión’s biography and works, I rely mostly on an excellent MA thesis: Magdalena Sofía Carrillo Herrerías, ‘Poesías de Ulises Carrión: la poesía concreta como referencia,’ Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014, https://www.openaire.eu/search/­publication?articleId= dedup_wf_001: 4aa17401c1a01d0d2c969b619cc4868d. 20 Carrillo Herrerías, “Poesías de Ulises Carrión,” p. 7. 21 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 22 Ibid., p. 18. 23 Ibid., p. 33. 24 Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 47. 25 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 26 Ibid., p. 48. 27 Ibid., p. 49. 28 Ibid., p. 50. 29 Craig Saper traces the pedigree of American concrete poetry to the poet Bob Brown, who, ‘before there was Noigandres or the International Concrete Poetry movement, before Eugen Gomringer’s Bauhaus-inspired “constellations,” and before even Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918) … was constructing visual poems, starting in 1913, and later publishing in Marcel Duchamp’s Blindman. He later, in 1928–1932, published multiple volumes, with titles like Words, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, or Gems, in which the visual layout and design was crucial to the meaning,’ Craig Saper, ‘Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia Performance, Publishing, and Pop Appeal,’ Coldfront, October 26, 2015, http://coldfrontmag. com/concrete-poetry-in-america/. Saper has devoted an entire book-length essay to Brown: Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through The 20th Century Fordham University Press, 2016.

Concrete North America  181 30 Emmett Williams, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Something Else Press, 1967, pp. vi–vii. 31 Williams, An Anthology, p. vi. 32 Ibid., p. vii. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 58. 36 Larry Freifeld and Lonnie Monka, ‘Elazar Larry Freifeld Interviewed by Lonnie Monka,’ The Jerusalism Review, February 12, 2018, https:// jerusalism.­tumblr.com/post/170799015043/elazar-larry-freifeld-interviewed-bylonnie-monka. 37 Freifeld in Williams, An Anthology, n.p. 38 Williams, An Anthology, n.p. 39 Valerie Oisteanu, ‘Al Hansen,’ The Brooklyn Rail, May 9, 2006, https:// brooklynrail.org/2006/05/artseen/al-hansen. 40 Quoted in Oisteanu, ‘Al Hansen.’ 41 Rebecca Kosick, ‘Concrete USA: Building Ronald Johnson’s ARK’ (ACLA Conference presentation, March 2019). 42 Saper, ‘Concrete Poetry in America,’ and Patrick Greaney to Odile Cisneros, ‘Concrete Poetry and the Creative Writing Programs,’ Personal communication, March 8, 2019. 43 Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 47. 4 4 bpNichol has been widely studied in the context of Canadian poetry, but much less specifically as a concrete poetry practitioner. Many of his works and relevant criticism can be found on ‘The Official BpNichol Archive,’ n.d., http://bpnichol.ca/. 45 Steve McCaffery and B. P. Nichol, Sound Poetry: A Catalogue for the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival, Toronto, Canada, October 14 to 21, 1978. Underwhich Editions, 1978. 46 McCaffery, Sound Poetry, p. 16. 47 Ken Norris, Vehicule Days: An Unorthodox History of Montreal’s Vehicule Poets. Nuage Editions, 1993. 48 Concrete Poetry; an Exhibition in Four Parts. Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1969. 49 Julia Polyck-O’Neill, ‘Words With(out) Syntax: Reconsidering Concrete Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts.’ In Christian Bök and Gregory Betts (eds.) Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018, p. 79. 50 Stephen Bann, Concrete Poetry, Britain, Canada, United States. Hansjörg Mayer, 1966. The only Canadian representative in this anthology was bpNichol. The anthology probably had a small impact, as it was a limited edition of 56 copies. 51 Earle Birney, Four Parts Sand: Concrete Poems. New Canadian Poets. Oberon Press/Coach House Press, 1972. 52 John McAuley, Hazardous Renaissance: Concrete Poetry. Crosscounty Press, 1978. 53 John Jessop, International Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Poetry Toronto Books/Missing Link Press, 1978. 54 Nicette Jukelevics, A Bibliography of Canadian Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry 1965–1972 with an Introduction, vol. 25376. Canadian Theses on Microfiche 25376 (Ottawa: National Library/Concordia University, 1976). 55 Jack David, Concrete Poetry. Canadian Theses on Microfiche. National ­Library/University of Windsor, 1973. 56 Stephen Scobie, Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry. University of Toronto Press, 1997, p. 146.

182  Odile Cisneros

References Bann, Stephen. Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology. London: London Magazine, 1967. ———. Concrete Poetry, Britain, Canada, United States. Bath: Hansjörg Mayer, 1966. Birney, Earle. Four Parts Sand: Concrete Poems. New Canadian Poets. Ottawa: Oberon Press/Coach House Press, 1972. Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. “Plano Piloto Para Poesia Concreta.” Teoria Da Poesia Concreta. Textos Críticos e Manifestos, 1950–1960. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1975. Carrillo Herrerías, Magdalena Sofía. “Poesías de Ulises Carrión: la poesía concreta como referencia.” Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014. Concrete Poetry; an Exhibition in Four Parts. Vancouver: Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1969. David, Jack. Concrete Poetry. Canadian Theses on Microfiche. University of Windsor, 1973. Espinosa, César Horacio. “Las bienales de poesía visual y experimental en ­México.” Tijuana Artes Blogspot, February 2, 2013. http://tijuana-artes. blogspot.com/2013/02/araceli-zuniga-y-cesar-espinosa-poesia.html. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “UbuWeb.” UbuWeb, 2011. http://www.ubu.com/­ resources/index.html. Greaney, Patrick. Letter to Odile Cisneros. “Concrete Poetry and the Creative Writing Programs,” March 8, 2019. Hilder, Jamie. Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955–1971. Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Jessop, John. International Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Toronto: Poetry ­Toronto Books/Missing Link Press, 1978. Josten, Jennifer. Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. ———. “Mathias Goeritz y la poesía concreta.” Edited by Maris Bustamante and Mauricio Marcin. Artecorreo. Mexico City; Barcelona: Museo de la ­Ciudad de México; RM Verlag, 2011. Jukelevics, Nicette. A Bibliography of Canadian Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry 1965–1972 with an Introduction. Vol.  25376. Canadian Theses on Microfiche 25376. National Library/Concordia University, 1976. Kosick, Rebecca. “Concrete USA: Building Ronald Johnson’s ARK,” Unpublished conference paper. ACLA Conference, Georgetown University, 2019. “Mathias Goeritz.” Banco Sabadell Collection, n.d. www.coleccionbancosa badell.com/en/artist/mathias-goeritz/. McAuley, John. Hazardous Renaissance: Concrete Poetry. Montreal: ­Crosscounty Press, 1978. McCaffery, Steve, and B. P. Nichol. Sound Poetry: A Catalogue for the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival, Toronto, Canada, October 14 to 21, 1978. Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1978. McCullough, Kathleen. Concrete Poetry: An Annotated International Bibliography, with an Index of Poets and Poems. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1989.

Concrete North America  183 Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus. “Octavio Paz: Topoemas Elementos para una lectura.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 40, no. 2 (1992): pp. 1113–1134. Norris, Ken. Vehicule Days: An Unorthodox History of Montreal’s Vehicule Poets. Montreal: Nuage Editions, 1993. “The Official BpNichol Archive,” n.d. http://bpnichol.ca/. Oisteanu, Valerie. “Al Hansen.” The Brooklyn Rail, May 9, 2006. https:// brooklynrail.org/2006/05/artseen/al-hansen. Phillips, Rachel. “Topoemas: la paradoja suspendida.” Revista Iberoamericana 37, no. 74 (1971): pp. 197–202. Polyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Words With(out) Syntax: Reconsidering Concrete Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts.” In Christian Bök and Gregory Betts (eds.) Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018, pp. 79–94. Saper, Craig. The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through The 20th Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ———. “Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia Performance, Publishing, and Pop Appeal.” Coldfront, October 26, 2015. http://coldfrontmag. com/concrete-poetry-in-america/. Scobie, Stephen. Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry. Theory/Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Solt, Mary Ellen. Concrete Poetry: A World View. Translated by Willis ­Barnstone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Wildman, Eugene. The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1969. Williams, Emmett. An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. New York: Something Else Press, 1967.

11 Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network John Corbett

In her introduction to a collection of essays on cultures in circulation, Diana Sorensen proposes a ‘shift of the study of people and things away from notions of fixity and sedentarism in order to rediscover transnational space connections based on diffusion and mobility,’ and she argues that by establishing ‘distance from older notions of stability and containment derived from the nation-state and the area studies model’ the scholar conceptualises ‘alternative ways of thinking about space and mobility and prompts us to rethink identity (whether individual or national) as the result of circulation and exchange, and, therefore, as essentially relational’.1 This shift in the study of individuals and their place in national literatures towards an account of their dynamic role in transnational personal and institutional networks is fundamental to the present chapter, which proposes a methodology for mapping the relationships among the members of a translational literary community, namely the international concrete poetry movement of the latter half of the 20th century. Mapping this set of relationships provides an alternative way of understanding important national literary figures such as the Brazilian ‘Noigandres’ poets, and the North Americans, Jonathan Williams and Mary Ellen Solt. Considering their relationships as part of a transnational network also makes more sense of those figures whose place in a national canon is more difficult to fix, such as the Bolivian Swiss poet, Eugen Gomringer. Even the work of those members, such as Edwin Morgan, who spent most of his life based in his home city of Glasgow and was appointed the first ‘Scots Makar,’ or national bard, by the then recently devolved Scottish government in 2004, benefits from being viewed in relation to a transnational network – or indeed inter-­ related networks – of personal and professional contacts. When, like the Noigandres poets and Morgan, the members of the network combined the composition of original poetry with translation, the dynamics of the community become even more important. The community, of course, is not made up only of poets and translators but other cultural agents, such as publishers, editors, librarians, gallery curators, academics and visual artists. Overall, the interaction between the members of the network allows for the dissemination, display, discussion and

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  185 evaluation of work that then has the potential to function as a stimulus and cultural resource for other members of the movement. If someone lacks access to the network, their own social capital will be reduced accordingly, and their exposure to the cultural resources of the community will be diminished. The construction, maintenance and development of social networks that characterise transnational literary movements is, therefore, of considerable cultural interest; however, it is a topic that has been little studied in detail. The present study addresses the possibility of social network analysis (SNA) as a methodology for addressing the issues that a ‘relational’ account of the international concrete poetry movement raises and offers a preliminary case study of Edwin Morgan’s role as an increasingly reputable figure in both national and translational literary circles in the later 20th century. The conception of a literary movement as a relational network raises the question of how that network facilitates the negotiation and exchange of economic capital, insofar as some of the members of the broader community are publishers, editors and gallery curators. More pertinently to literary studies, the network also facilitates the negotiation of cultural and symbolic capital, characterised by Bourdieu as ‘prestige, reputation, fame, etc.’2 In the case of the international concrete poetry movement, as will be demonstrated shortly, cultural and symbolic capital also includes a negotiated set of aesthetic values, resources, techniques or strategies that, for the members of the network, characterise certain types of poetry as ‘concrete.’ The question then arises as to how economic, cultural and symbolic capital moves through the system, crossing geographical and ideological borders, or is arrested in its travels, and how this relational set of flows and blockages can be mapped or ‘fixed.’ One way of addressing this question is via a mixed-methods approach to social network analysis, combining a necessarily tentative quantitative analysis of the relations between members of the international concrete poetry movement with a qualitative exploration of the nature of these relations. The engagement of individual members of the international concrete poetry movement, which lasted roughly from the 1950s to the 1970s, with the community as a whole took many forms. Concrete poets wrote, published and read each other’s work, and they, and others, wrote critical and theoretical manifestos and articles on the movement. At times they translated each other’s work for further publication or for display in art galleries. The publication and exhibition of the work involved editors, publishers and curators. The work might be promoted or publicised or discussed in newspapers and magazines, radio and television programmes or on film. On occasion, members of the international concrete poetry might actually meet in person, as when Décio Pignatari travelled from Brazil to Germany, encountered Eugen Gomringer, and, together, agreed to apply the epithet ‘concrete’ to the kind of poetry they were writing (see Abi-Sâmara, this volume). The multiplicity

186  John Corbett of possible means by which members could and did interact brings to mind Bourdieu’s description of the social field as ‘a multi-dimensional space of positions such that each actual position can be defined in terms of a multi-dimensional system of co-ordinates whose values correspond to the values of the different pertinent variables.’3 Given the geographically distributed nature of the members of the network, however, one major means of interaction which bears further examination is personal correspondence. The importance of personal correspondence to the members of the international concrete poetry movement is borne out in a number of testimonies. In 1990, Edwin Morgan wrote an autobiographical poem called ‘Seven Decades’ in which he reflected on his life to that point (see also Huang, this volume). After a stanza recalling the dark period of the 1950s in which he ‘sweated to speak,’ he writes of the 1960s, a decade in which he found his poetic voice and personal fulfilment: At forty, I woke up, saw it was day, found there was love, heard a new beat, heard Beats, sent airmail solidarity to Saõ Paulo’s poetic-concrete revolution […]4 That ‘airmail solidarity’ functioned to sustain another Scottish concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, is affirmed by his son, Alec, in his introduction to his father’s Selections: Finlay was the greatest Scottish writer of letters since Robert Louis Stevenson; letters were his favourite emblem of friendship, his primary method of working with collaborators, and his weapon of choice.5 Later in the introduction, he notes that the publication of Hamilton Finlay’s early collection, The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960) arose indirectly from a raft of new letter-friendships with international poets, avant-garde artists and publishers – Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Jerome Rothenberg, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, ­Jonathan Williams, Ronald Johnson, Robert Lax, Dick H ­ iggins, ­Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ad ­Reinhardt, Gustav Metzger and countless others.6 One of Hamilton Finlay’s friends, the critic, editor and fellow-poet, Stephen Bann, has published two sizeable volumes of his own correspondence with the poet, which in total amounts to over 600 letters, written between 1964 and 2003.7 Letters were important to other members of the network, too, as Augusto de Campos has affirmed in an unpublished

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  187 interview with the co-editor of this volume, Ting Huang. Personal correspondence is, then, an acknowledged but under-researched means by which the members of the international concrete poetry network sustained and defined itself, by offering mutual support and criticism, sometimes constructive, often not. The survival of personal correspondence, in university libraries, published collections and personal archives, offers a means of mapping the dynamic infrastructure of this literary social network. As the correspondence between Bann and Finlay alone attests, the scale of the network as a whole is vast, and the challenge of mapping it in anything close to its entirety obviously lies beyond the means of a single cartographer. The present chapter, then, offers, as an initial case study, a network analysis of a sample of the extensive surviving correspondence of the late Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan. His correspondence is used to demonstrate aspects of his ‘ego network,’ that is, his engagements with others both within and beyond the concrete poetry movement. The aim of this case study is to provide proof of concept of the application of SNA to literary and translation studies, and to outline the potential for further research on Morgan’s and other concrete poets’ correspondence as a means to map the flow of economic, cultural and symbolic capital across national and cultural boundaries. In June 1962, Edwin Morgan, at this point in his career a lecturer in English at Glasgow University, noticed an article in the Times Literary Supplement by the Portuguese concrete poet, E. M. de Melo e Castro. Morgan wrote to de Melo e Castro who in turn put him in touch with the de Campos brothers, and they introduced him more broadly to concrete poetry. As it happened, Augusto de Campos was trying to contact Morgan via his compatriot, Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose little magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse served as an outlet for experimental poetry in Scotland. Morgan was a young academic and an aspiring poet who had been struggling to find his own voice in the 1950s. The ‘airmail solidarity’ that he recalls in his poem ‘Seven Decades’ – the letters and postcards and pamphlets – is now scattered across personal collections, as well as university and library archives; his own contribution is sampled in a published collection, Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox, Selected Correspondence 1950–2000.8 From the 1980s, Morgan began to deposit folders and boxes of his personal correspondence, along with other materials, such as scrapbooks, draft poems and diaries, in the Department of Special Collections in Glasgow University Library. As Morgan kept copies of many of the letters he sent out as well as those he received, the archive runs to thousands of pieces of correspondence. A modest sample of this voluminous correspondence, relating specifically to concrete poetry, alongside a broader sample of the correspondence, namely the selection published in The Midnight Letterbox, forms the data for the present study. The data, while a small sample of the whole, is sufficient to indicate the nature of the relations between Morgan and

188  John Corbett key members of the concrete poetry network, and to suggest how that specific network relates to the wider range of Morgan’s correspondents. Thus, although relatively modest with regard to the total set of data available, the present study gives a tantalising indication of how economic, cultural and symbolic capital is negotiated as it flows through a transnational literary network. SNA is a well-established means of quantifying the extent and nature of relationships of different kinds amongst members of a community. It has been used, for example, to analyse networks as diverse as urban drug users, patrons and artists in a Renaissance city, and moderate and militant suffragettes. Quantificational approaches to literary studies are relatively rare, although they have been championed by commentators like Franco Moretti. In his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), Moretti discusses the use of quantitative data to shed light on literary history, specifically the rise of the novel. He argues: […] a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole – and the graphs that follow are one way to begin doing this.9 This statement applies to the social network mappings that are presented later in this chapter. Although they are based specifically on Edwin Morgan’s personal correspondence they can be read as a map of a section of the collective system and its characteristics. Ironically, perhaps, they follow Moretti by moving from the concrete to the abstract, from the writers themselves to the relationships they are embedded within and which act as conduits for the diffusion, flow and sometimes reflux of information, ideas and cultural capital. In social network analysis, the community is conceptualised as a self or ‘ego’ (in this case, Morgan), and others or ‘alters,’ who are linked by tangible or intangible relationships. In some kinds of SNA of contemporary networks, the researcher interviews a sample of people about those whom they regard as friends, whom they would turn to for advice, whom they would turn to in order to borrow money and so on. In historical studies, the data is mined from different archives.10 In the present study, the focus is on epistolary relationships. Two sets of data have been sampled from the extensive Edwin Morgan archive, which consists of many thousands of letters of extant correspondence mainly housed in Glasgow University Library’s Department of Special Collections. One data set is based, as noted above, on the letters by Morgan that were chosen for publication in The Midnight Letterbox, Selected Correspondence 1950–2000, by the editors, James McGonigal and John Coyle. This data set gives a sense of the overall range of Morgan’s correspondence.

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  189 The second data set focuses on those boxes in GUL Special Collections that specify that they are relevant to concrete poetry. In 2016, data was collected about letters contained in the following boxes, with their Special Collections catalogue reference numbers: MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1964–1965 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1966 (1) MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1966 (2) MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1967 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1968 (1) MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1968 (2) MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1969 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1970 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 1) Concrete Poetry 1972–1974 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 2) Concrete Poetry 1970 MS MORGAN L/5 (BOX 2) Concrete-Sound Poetry (1958–1983) MS MORGAN DG/8 Eugen Gomringer Corres (1964–1967) MS MORGAN DH/12/1 DSH (1963) Dom Silvester [sic] Hoúedard Corres MS MORGAN DH/13/4 Dom Silvester Hoúedard Corres (1965) MS MORGAN DH/13/5 DSH (1966) Corres MS MORGAN DH/13/6 DSH Letters to Steve Abrams (1967) MS MORGAN DH/13/8 Re DSH (1992–1996) MS MORGAN DC/5 Henri Chopin Corres (1976–1985) MS MORGAN DF/10 John Furnival Corre (1964–1989) MS MORGAN DD/3 Augusto de Campos Corres (1962–1968) MS MORGAN DD/4 Au 4848/Box 1 Haroldo de Campos Corres (1965–1968) MS MORGAN DJ/5 Ernst Jandl Corres (1965–67) MS MORGAN DM/5 Cavan McCarthy Corres (1964–1985) MS MORGAN DZ/1 Nicholas Zurbrugg Corres (1967–1995) Even this bare catalogue listing begins to yield some general insights into the nature of the correspondence. The concrete poetry ‘phase’ begins in the mid-1960s and continues for around a decade, with some correspondence outlasting the period of greatest intensity. Some boxes deal with general correspondence to do with concrete and sound poetry, while others are devoted to correspondence with individual figures. Some individuals who are given whole boxes of correspondence are well-known poets in the international concrete poetry movement: the de Campos brothers, Dom Sylvester Hoúedard (spelled ‘Silvester’ in the earlier correspondence), Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Henri Chopin and John Furnival. Other names are perhaps less widely known but, on the evidence of the volume and longevity of correspondence, they were important in Morgan’s network, as we shall see.

190  John Corbett Not all of the correspondence in the boxes is used in the network analyses that follow: where correspondence is undated or important information about the correspondent (e.g. surname) cannot be identified, it has been excluded. There are also some surprising omissions in the concrete poetry boxes that figure in the more general correspondence represented by The Midnight Letterbox; for example, it is evident that Morgan shares the art historian and anthologist, Stephen Bann, as an alter with Ian Hamilton Finlay, but Bann does not appear in the boxes associated with concrete poetry. A social network based on archive data is, of course, unlikely to be complete or comprehensive; the present study can, however, be seen as indicative of this part of Morgan’s social network and demonstrates the kinds of ‘airmail solidarity’ that sustained him as an experimental poet over two key decades in his career. The possibility of extending the data sampling is discussed towards the end of this chapter. From Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department’s ‘concrete poetry archive,’ then, the selection studied here includes 66 letters from Morgan to a range of alters and 101 letters from alters to Morgan. The frequency of the correspondence in and out has been tagged, as has the nationality and gender of the alter. Using the SNA software, UCINET and Netdraw, we can analyse and visualise Edwin Morgan’s correspondence network that relates to the concrete poetry movement and its related activities. Figure 11.1 simply shows the network as a whole, with Morgan at the centre and his alters in a ‘constellation’ around him. There are a number of ways to manipulate this data, by grouping ­a lters according to tagged attributes such as gender and nationality (­Figures 11.2 and 11.3, respectively).

Figure 11.1  E dwin Morgan’s Ego Network.

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  191

Figure 11.2  E dwin Morgan’s Ego Network Grouped by Gender.

Figure 11.3  E dwin Morgan’s Ego Network Grouped by Nationality.

The gender grouping indicates that the male correspondents greatly outnumber the female correspondents in the network. The visualisation also shows, in this case, the strength of the ties, based on the number of letters exchanged. The two main female correspondents are Mary Ellen Solt, the well-known American concrete poet, anthologist and critic, and Jasia Reichardt, the Polish-born editor of a 1985 exhibition,

192  John Corbett Between Poetry and Painting, which was held at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Morgan’s other correspondence with women tends to be more occasional. Figure 11.3 clusters the alters by nationality. The main point to note from this visualisation is that there is a large grouping of English and American correspondents, while the other national groupings are more sparse. The Brazilian cluster consists, for example, of the two de Campos brothers and Hugo Mund. Ernst Jandl is the only Austrian. Some individuals are, of course, difficult to categorise: Eugen Gomringer is Bolivian Swiss, and Jasia Reichardt is Polish-born British. For the moment, however, the visualisation confirms Morgan’s status as an international ‘hub’ (no doubt one of many) within the concrete poetry movement: correspondence to and from him can be conceptualised as a ‘flow’ of information and cultural capital through him from different points of the globe, including Scotland. He maintains a correspondence with fellow Scots, too, notably the concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the editor, Duncan Glen. As Figures 11.1–11.3 show, then, Morgan’s network is generally male-oriented, although Solt and Reichardt are among the top 20 closest ties in the network, and it clusters into a number of national groups, with English and American figuring prominently. Using UCINET tools to analyse the strength of the ties, a value is given to each alter based on the frequency of the exchanges to and from Morgan. A measure of the degree of centrality of Morgan’s most central alters is shown in Figure 11.4. Name of alter

Degree of tie

Gender

Nationality

Cavan McCarthy Dom Sylvester Houédard John Furnival John J. Sharkey Eugen Gomringer Ernst Jandl Brian Lane Jasia Reichardt Henri Chopin Hansjörg Mayer Haroldo de Campos Ian Hamilton Finlay Duncan Glen Charles Verey Jonathan Williams Jürgen Brenner Augusto de Campos Peter Finch Mary Ellen Solt Aram Sorayan

57 22 19 15 12 11 11 11 9 9 8 7 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 6

M M M M M M M F M M M M M M M M M M F M

English English English English Bolivian Swiss Austrian English Polish British French German Brazilian Scottish Scottish English American German Brazilian Welsh American American

Figure 11.4  20 Most Central Alters in Morgan’s Network.

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  193 The sample of Morgan’s 20 most central alters adds detail to the broad visualisations shown above. A tenet of SNA is that the most central alters will share attributes with the ego, and that the alters who are most central are likely to be similar in outlook or perspective with the ego. In terms of a literary network, they will likely share a similar ethos. A more critical perspective is that the central alters will be the site of negotiation of a shared ethos. In this respect, the most central alters in this network are not necessarily the most widely known figures. Cavan McCarthy was, when Morgan began corresponding with him, a student of Russian at Leeds University, where he founded the magazine Tlaloc (1964–1970) which privileged concrete and visual poetry. McCarthy initiated the correspondence with Morgan by requesting some poems for publication, and their correspondence continued regularly for some years. McCarthy was also part of the active network of poets who orbited around Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), who, when not writing and promoting concrete poetry, served as a Benedictine monk and priest at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire. Part of this network, too, was John Furnival, an artist, poet and organiser of many exhibitions of concrete poetry, who taught at Cheltenham Art College, and co-founded Openings Press with dsh in 1964. John J. Sharkey edited an anthology of concrete poems, Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry (1971) in which Morgan’s work appeared. The list of alters continues with a litany of prominent and less prominent practitioners of concrete poetry, such as Gomringer, Jandl, Chopin, Hamilton Finlay, the de Campos brothers and Finch; editors, curators and anthologists, such as Duncan Glen, ­Jasia Reichardt and Brian Lane, respectively; and a small-press publisher who also founded the artists’ space, Gallery Number Ten in Blackheath, London. The cases of Glen and Lane illustrate the difficulty of tagging alters simply as poet, editor or gallery curator – many of the alters combined several of these functions in their career, as, indeed, did Morgan himself. The list of Morgan’s central alters, like the names mentioned in the curator’s acknowledgements in the catalogue accompanying the 1969 Canadian show, Concrete Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts, ‘points to an underlying structure of power and architecture of influence […], while underlining a series of classist, colonial and gendered dynamics.’11 In short, the network indicates the processes by which actors in the international concrete poetry movement negotiated their status within the community and accumulated – or failed to ­accumulate – cultural capital. The SNA visualisations and centrality statistics, then, give an indication of how the international network of co-correspondents practised, edited, exhibited and, through their correspondence, affirmed, contested and argued about the ethos of the literary and artistic genre. It reveals the extent and the infrastructure of the ‘airmail solidarity’ that Morgan alludes to in his autobiographical poem. In order to give a ‘thicker’

194  John Corbett characterisation of the way in which the network negotiated its values, however, it is necessary to add qualitative interpretation to the quantitative data. The negotiation of a shared communal ethos can be sensed from an example of a letter from Morgan to his most statistically significant alter in the concrete poetry community, Cavan McCarthy. A letter dated 26 January 1965 finds Morgan thanking McCarthy for a copy of his magazine and responding to comments about his own submission, ‘Spacepoem 1.’ The letter begins as follows: Dear Cavan McCarthy Many thanks for flow of letters and Tlaloc! No I didn’t at all mind your comments on the spacepoem, I wasn’t by any means entirely happy about the presentation myself, and I agree with a lot of your criticism. I don’t think however that the answer is John Furnival’s letter-pictures (which incidentally I like very much), as I am doing something different: to me, the words and sounds are important and must emerge clearly, to JF they are more like bricks with which he builds and often they are set askew or overlaid so that they cannot be read, and this is not what I am after. I think what I am doing can be done on a (horizontal rather than vertical) page. […]12 The letter continues to discuss the formal means by which Morgan hopes to achieve his aesthetic effects (‘I wanted a succession of different noises/voices mechanical/human scrambled/clear all the way through; perhaps the answer is simply different type faces’) and then goes on to discuss McCarthy’s own poetry (‘I liked your blokpoem’), before ending with references to mutual recommendations (‘I haven’t seen the ­Pergamon anthology you mention; must look out for it, even though it is badly printed!’) and concludes by passing on a copy of a booklet from ­Gomringer. The letter is typical of a more critically supportive exchange between ego and alter: there are sentiments of mutual admiration, as well as praise for absent alters that both admire. There is criticism and discussion of poetic forms, techniques and strategies, as Morgan tries to distinguish his particular brand of concrete poetry from others. And there is the mutual exchange of relevant ‘gifts’, the copy of Tlaloc and the booklet by Gomringer. Other alters in the network are mentioned – Furnival, dsh, Anselm Hollo – which reinforces the sense of a vibrant community. In some cases, the name-dropping can function as a means of extending the alter’s own network, as in the case of an earlier letter, dated 8th August 1963 to the Brazilian poet, Augusto de Campos, some of whose work, together with that of his brother, Haroldo, Morgan translated (see Clüver, Huang, this volume). Again, we see the expression of mutual

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  195 admiration, the exchange of useful gifts and the maintenance and extension of the social network to which they belong. This letter indicates, in particular, the nature of the attraction that drew Morgan to the Brazilian poets’ work: the range of stylistic effects married to the possibility of political and social comment. We also see one poet actively seeking to introduce another to the work of a third – Morgan is actively trying to change the structure of the network. In the jargon of social network analysis, Morgan is attempting to act as a broker, seeking to fill a possible structural hole in the network by naming an alter (Williams) with whom Augusto de Campos may have hitherto enjoyed no tie. Dear Augusto de Campos Many thanks indeed for sending Invenção No.2 and Noigandres 5 which reached me safely, also for your letter of 8 July. Your little vocabulary was helpful, and I have too a small Portuguese dictionary and am at present working my way through some of the poems. I am struck by the great variety of approach, from the most abstract and ‘patterned’ to the committed (I like very much your Cuba Sim Ianque Nao). It is good to keep the concrete method capable of doing different things, from effects of pure place, relation, and movement to effects of satire, irony, and direct comment. The American poet Jonathan Williams, who has been in this country recently, has done some interesting work (you may know it) which uses certain aspects of concrete technique to comment on the Negro problem in the American South. I am enclosing a few poems and translations in the hope that they will reach you this time! Two translations of poems by yourself – which I am trying to get into print, together with some other versions, in our Times Literary Supplement, a somewhat conservative organ – but we shall see. I shall look forward very much to seeing the translations of Pound and Cummings you refer to – particularly as I am gathering material for a book on the translation of poetry.13 A network does not only function to express a set of mutually-held values. The tensions that characterise a community are seen in Morgan’s correspondence with fellow Scottish concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, to whom Morgan was known familiarly as ‘Yeddie’. In a letter to Hamilton Finlay, dated March 17, 1965, Morgan acknowledges friction in the concrete poetry community: Yes, it is perhaps sad in a way about the concrete divergences which you refer to, but that was inevitable, and some of the differences were

196  John Corbett there (inherent) from the beginning, e.g. as between Eugen [Gomringer] and the Brazilians – in that case perhaps connected with the whole world of different national temperament and involvement. I always preferred the Brazilians, as you know – they were more gay, sprightly, and purposive, and I think more intelligent too; at any rate let me not defend them needlessly, the best of their work will stand, as will the best of Eugen’s, I’m sure. The rifts of course became clearer in Les Lettres when the Noigandres poets and Henri Chopin as well as others didn’t sign the Pierre Garnier manifesto. And in Brazil itself there has been wild disagreement between the Noigandres folk and the Praxis group (who see themselves as superseders). In the UK although there is some opposition to concrete as you say, it’s in many cases not strong but rather tentative or suspicious or honestly probing; George Dowden’s article in Poetmeat, for instance, was a sincere attempt to define a romanticist’s suspicion that poetry was being sold over to a cold and dreaded classicism, and no one would deny this danger exists (you say, for example, that you want ‘purity’, and that’s fine up to a point, but beyond a certain point, purity is simply death, and I would run from it crying ‘Ginsberg!’ –), which is one reason why my humour and your boasts may be of some use, both tying concrete to certain bollards of human life and human pleasure. But in fact concrete is still spreading, diversifying and I hope leavening…14 This is a lengthy quotation from a long letter, but it is richly illustrative of what might be understood as the role of ‘gossip’ in regulating the literary movement, that is, an exchange between ego and alter that evaluates absent third parties, here largely other alters: the de Campos brothers, Gomringer, Chopin and Garnier are all among Morgan’s and Hamilton Finlay’s fellow correspondents. Morgan acknowledges a set of rifts in the concrete poetry movement, both within Brazil, and between Brazil and Europe, and he extends the discussion to an assessment of criticisms of the concrete poetry movement by actors outside the literary clique. Morgan acknowledges the validity of some of this criticism in a revealing way, arguing that the humour in his own concrete poetry and the ‘boastfulness’ of Hamilton Finlay’s work serve to reconnect what might be considered a coldly formal literary genre to human concerns. Even so, there is a thinly veiled criticism of Hamilton Finlay’s desire for ‘purity’ that intimates the potential for friction between the two poets, a friction that surfaces more explicitly in letters by Morgan and Hamilton Finlay to other alters. Hamilton Finlay in more than one of his many letters to Stephen Bann, whom he shared as an alter with Morgan, complains about Morgan’s view of concrete. In a letter dated March 25, 1966, Hamilton Finlay writes, Now, Yeddie is a decent bloke, and he has done some good poems – (and many very bad ones) – but his point of view is just not concrete.

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  197 It may be right, it may be good; it is surely NOT concrete. And I personally feel worried, now, that, in Britain, ‘concrete’ is used to mean anything, almost, except something related to Bill, Mondrian, the early Brazilians, Gomringer, Arp, Albers…15 Here again, in one poet’s letter to an alter, an absent third party is evaluated and critiqued, in this case in relation to Hamilton Finlay’s conception of the core community. The impact of such friction on cultural and economic capital can be seen in a further letter by Morgan, this time to Alan Riddell, another poet and editor dated July 15, 1966. In it, Morgan laments that a rift between himself and Hamilton Finlay has resulted in the cancellation of a Scottish Arts Council exhibition in Edinburgh: The Scottish Arts Council were going to back a concrete show at Edinburgh during the Festival but this has fallen through. It’s a long, unhappy story. You know who up in Ardgay (now Ceres) [i.e. Hamilton Finlay] was angry that I and not he had been asked to put the show together, and the upshot of a mort of violent communication (and other accidental factors contributing to make him ill-disposed to the outside world in general) was that he refused either to contribute or to cooperate, and the Arts Council felt that they had had enough and washed their hands of the matter – leaving the idea at least open for a further attempt on some later occasion if the climate should become mellower. Scotland, in short, stands were it did. If Jim Haynes wants to put on a concrete show as you suggest, you had better warn him of the hazards!16 As one can imagine, Hamilton Finlay had a different view of the matter, as he reports to Bann in a slightly earlier letter, dated April 1966: E.M. simply does not answer my letters – that is, he ignores anything he doesn’t want to notice or be bothered with: he carefully cultivates the idea that I am an ‘unreasonable’, and impossible person, with talent of course – but not to be admitted to the official scene (of BBC producers, Arts Council officials etc.). This of course is the official view (didn’t I introduce concrete poetry into Scotland, and how could a person like that be allowed to have any opinions about an exhibition of concrete poetry?).17 In the letter Hamilton Finlay goes on to criticise Morgan’s statements on the characteristic humour of concrete poetry, complaining that his fellow poet only chose one poem by Hamilton Finlay to exhibit on the grounds that it conformed to his own thesis. The letters again reveal the role of correspondence in the production of a literary ethos. In more

198  John Corbett practical terms, the surfacing of a latent friction between Hamilton Finlay and Morgan impacts negatively on their cultural and economic capital in that it reduces the opportunity to have their work exhibited. While their correspondence continued beyond this spat, and the damage was, to a certain extent, repaired, the exchange illustrates that centrality within a social network is not necessarily indicative of a positive relationship between mutually supportive individuals who share a common ethos. Relationships are constantly being defined through direct address and ‘gossip,’ and it is possible for ties to be endangered or even severed over time. The value of key players and brokers within a network is evident if we look beyond the immediate environment of the concrete poetry network. In the case of Scottish literary studies it is interesting to compare the social networks of two generations of significant Scottish poets, represented by Edwin Morgan and an older poet, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978). Figure 11.5 shows a sample of their social networks of correspondence, based on the letters published in McGonigal and Coyle, eds. (2015) and Bold, ed. (1984). The sample of MacDiarmid’s network is seen on the left, while ­Morgan’s is on the right. Bearing in mind that, again, these networks are only subsets drawn from published correspondence, it is still illuminating to see how separate the two networks are. A small number of ‘brokers’ allow for communication between the two networks. Morgan and MacDiarmid, of course, corresponded directly, and their networks are also connected by a number of editors, T.S. Eliot (poet, critic, editor and publisher), George Bruce (poet, editor and BBC radio

Figure 11.5  T he Social Networks of Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan.

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  199 broadcaster), Maurice Lindsay (poet and editor), John Lehmann (longtime editor of the magazine, New Writing) and Duncan Glen (a Scottish poet, publisher and critic). The role of these ‘bridges’ as crucial sites of connection, and their function in the negotiation of cultural capital is clear in the correspondence itself. We have seen Hamilton Finlay complaining to Stephen Bann that Morgan, as he saw it, was blocking his access to such cultural brokers as the BBC and the Scottish Arts Council. Hugh MacDiarmid was notoriously vituperative in his attitude towards concrete poetry, as a letter to one of these ‘bridges,’ Maurice Lindsay, about a new poetry magazine to be published by Edinburgh University Press, attests: I had heard with delight about the EUP Poetry Scotland and will of course be glad to send stuff when I know the date by which you should receive it. There is one thing however about which I must be absolutely frank. I deplore Edwin Morgan’s association with you and George Bruce in the editorship. Morgan’s prominence in connection with ‘Concrete Poetry’ and with Ian Hamilton Finlay rules him out completely as far as I am concerned. I will not agree to work of mine appearing in any anthology or periodical that uses rubbish of that sort, which I regard as an utter debasement of standards but also as a very serious matter involving the very identity of poetry. These spatial arrangements of isolated letters and geometrically placed phrases, etc. has nothing with poetry – no more than mud pies can be called a form of architecture.18 As with the dispute between Hamilton Finlay and Morgan, the correspondence between MacDiarmid and Lindsay illustrates the ways in which the network facilitates or denies cultural and economic capital. Lindsay, as a bridge, becomes a pivotal figure: does he accede to MacDiarmid’s demands and accept that concrete poetry is beyond the aesthetic pale, or does he align himself with the poets whom MacDiarmid attacks? The letter also demonstrates quite vividly the correspondents’ consciousness that their exchanges are negotiating ‘the very identity of poetry’ and the outcome of these exchanges will have consequences in the development or suppression of literary movements. That Morgan saw himself consciously as a broker and a mediator is evident in his breakthrough collection, A Second Life (1968), which includes, on facing pages, two poems dedicated, respectively, to Hugh MacDiarmid and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His social network, connecting as it does with different constellations of the literary galaxy, allows him to draw upon the cultural resources of the earlier generation of Scottish poets as well as different schools of poets of Europe and the Americas, North and South.

200  John Corbett This pilot study of the tip of the iceberg of Edwin Morgan’s voluminous surviving correspondence offers intriguing possibilities for more ambitious and broader projects, ideally linking up the various interconnected social networks around this – and other – literary movements. Despite its international scale, it was a clique – largely male, university-­ educated, urban and aspirational. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s testiness may in part be attributed to the fact that, as an autodidact, his studies at Glasgow School of Art curtailed after he organised a student strike, and then confined to a series of remote, countryside homes by agoraphobia, he felt himself an outsider in the largely bourgeois bohemia of the concrete network.19 Even so, while he regularly mocked fellow poets like ‘Sylv’ in his correspondence with Bann, and critiqued their work sharply, he continued to publish them in his magazine, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. It is clear from the material here presented that the network around Cavan McCarthy, dsh, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Furnival and others was at least as important for sustaining the avant-garde side of Edwin Morgan’s literary persona in the 1960s and 1970s as was the ‘airmail solidarity’ between Glasgow and Sao Paulo that he mentions in ‘Seven Decades.’ It is also clear that the poets, when they were not bickering, were being actively supportive by reading, appraising, publishing, promoting and translating each other’s work. All of this networking contributed to the exchange of experimental strategies in literary expression and the accumulation of a cultural capital among the network members that then became diffused to the outside world via ‘brokers’ such as editors, larger publishers, broadcasters, cultural bureaucrats and gallery curators. A larger, more ambitious project would expand the data set of the Morgan correspondence to his other alters, and it would begin to encompass the surviving correspondence of those alters. Much of the Ian Hamilton Finlay correspondence until 1972 is held in Special Collections of the University of Kansas Library and the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana. An archive of the papers of Dom Sylvester Houédard is housed at Rylands Library in Manchester, where Stella Halkyard, one of Morgan’s alters, was an archivist. The de Campos letters are still in family collections. The correspondence of other concrete poets is dispersed around the globe, but much of their correspondence network could be retraced and the metadata captured. Once this was done, scholars would have access to a much fuller, more detailed and more accurate depiction of the means by which cultural capital is exchanged and negotiated dynamically within and through a literary movement. Acknowledgements This chapter benefited from research support from Ting Huang, Linghong Wu and Yujia Zhang, which was funded by a University of Macau, Multi-Year Research Grant, No. MYRG2015–00080-FAH. Grateful

Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network  201 thanks are also due to Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department and Professor James McGonigal.

Notes 1 Sorensen, 2018, p. 13. 2 Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230. 3 Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 230–231. 4 Morgan, 1990, p. 594. 5 Finlay, 2012, p. 5. 6 Finlay, 2012, p. 18. 7 Bann, ed., 2014, 2016. 8 McGonigal and Coyle, eds., 2015. 9 Moretti, 2005, p. 4. 10 For further examples of Social Network Analysis see Crossley et al. (2015) and Warren (2016). 11 Polyck-O’Neill, 2018, p. 81. 12 McGonigal and Coyle, eds., 2015, pp. 131–132. 13 McGonigal and Coyle, eds., 2015, p. 100. 14 McGonigal and Coyle, eds., 2015, p. 133. 15 Bann, ed. 2014, p. 101. 16 McGonigal and Coyle, 2015, p. 164. 17 Bann, ed., 2014, p. 104. 18 Bold, ed., 1984, pp. 627–628. 19 Finlay, ed., 2012, p. 8.

References Bann, Stephen (ed.) Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964–69. London: Wilmington Square Books, 2014. Bann, Stephen (ed.) Stonypath Days: Letters between Ian Hamilton Finlay and Stephen Bann 1970–72. London: Wilmington Square Books, 2016. Bold, Alan (ed.) The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson and edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Crossley, Nick, Elisa Bellotti, Gemma Edwards, Martin G. Everett, Johan Koskinen, and Mark Tranmer. Social Network Analysis for Ego-nets: Social Network Analysis for Actor-Centred Networks. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2015. Finlay, Alec (ed.) Ian Hamilton Finlay, Selections. University of California Press, 2012. McGonigal, James and John Coyle (eds.) Edwin Morgan the Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950–2010. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Verso, 2005. Morgan, Edwin. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. Polyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Words With(out) Syntax: Reconsidering Concrete ­Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts.” In Gregory Betts and Christian Bök

202  John Corbett (eds.) Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, pp. 79–94. Sorensen, Diana. “Alternative Geographic Mappings for the Twenty-First Century.” In Diana Sorensen (ed.) Territories and Trajectories, Cultures in Circulation. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018. Warren, Christopher N., Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold, and Cosma Shalizi. “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 3 (2016). http://www.digitalhumanities. org/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html (Accessed 29 April 2019).

12 Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry Chris McCabe

The unlikely naming of the concrete poetry movement, this seminal moment in modernism, has been frequently documented. The details of the meeting between the key poets, and the birth of the name ‘concrete’ to describe the new poetry, might not, in the first instance, suggest any link between this largely page-based artform and the new urban environments which were being built in the mid-20th century. In this chapter, I show how the Concrete Poetry movement, at least for the Brazilians, came about through an intertextual and intersemiotic translation of the architectural plans for the building of Brasilia. I will also demonstrate the inverse of this, discussing an example of how the architectural planning of Brasilia may have led to expression in visual poetry. It is significant that British concrete poetry was less aligned with these visions of architectural utopias, though there are examples of concrete poets with an architectural imperative. Finally, I will draw on my co-editing work for the anthology The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century to argue that the digital tools available for contemporary visual poets now allow for a fuller engagement with the translation of the architectural aesthetic of concrete poetry. As we head towards the third decade of the 21st century, the continuation of the Concrete Poetry movement in today’s visual poetry is at last finding the platforms, software and algorithms to fulfil the initial pilot plans, albeit 50 years after the movement ceased. In 1955 the Bolivian-born Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, who was working as secretary to concrete artist Max Bill, met with experimental Brazilian poet Décio Pignatari, who was a member of the Brazilian Noigandres group (see further, Abi-Samara, this volume). The meeting took place in Ulm, Germany. Both poets had been unaware of each other’s existence before then. Through conversation, and an exchange of publications, they learned that they had been developing a very similar strand of poetics. The connections were so absolute there was almost something of the occult in the occurrence. Although the Brazilian poets had been using the word ‘ideograms’ to describe their poems, and Gomringer was using the word ‘konstellations’ for his, they discovered a considerable overlap in poetic techniques involving a minimalist interest

204  Chris McCabe in the particles of language; an embracing of the open space of the page, repetition of words and parts of words; and a doing away with traditional poetic expression. A channel of communication was opened between the poets, and when the Noigandres group wrote to Gomringer the next year to suggest they use the word ‘concrete’ to describe their work, Gomringer readily accepted, saying: ‘before naming my “poems” constellations, I had actually thought of naming them “concretes”.’1 What these poets did not know, at this point in their shared revelation, was that the Swedish (and, adding to this strange network of coincidences, Brazilian-born) artist Öyvind Fahlstrom had been using the term ‘concrete’ to describe this new poetry since 1953. It was as if the word had grown out of the actual substance of the mid-century, almost overnight, like mushrooms on a pavement or the appearance of urban squatters. Two years before the Pignatari-Gomringer meeting, Fahlstrom had written a text called ‘Manifesto for Concrete Poetry,’ which began with a quote from Marinetti’s ‘The Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ from 1912: ‘To replace the psychology of the human being … with LYRICAL OBSESSION WITH THE MATERIAL,’ he wrote. The capitals are Fahlstrom’s, who goes on to write: Poetry can be not only analysed but also created as a structure. Not only as structure emphasising the expression of idea content but also as concrete structure … there is no reason why poetry couldn’t be experienced and created on the basis of language as concrete material.2 How could it be possible for such a geographically divergent group of writers to suddenly decide they were making ‘concrete’ poetry? And just how closely did these proliferating architectural images of ‘structure’ and ‘material’ align with the new forms of architecture defining urban centres in the 1950s? When the Noigandres group had named themselves they did so through picking a word they liked from Ezra Pound’s Cantos XX. There is a photograph of a young Augusto de Campos with his head nestled amidst a range of modernist publications including Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and an LP record of Pound reading his poems. The Brazilian concrete poets had rooted their mission in literary modernism. Over 40 years before, Pound had written a letter to Harriet Monroe (1915) stating the value of the ‘concrete’ in modern poetry: ‘Language is made out of concrete things. General expressions in non-concrete terms are a laziness; they are talk, not art, not creation.’3 Through this loop connecting the naming of the Brazilian concrete movement to Pound, and to Pound’s ideas on reducing poetry to its basic, essential elements, we have one basis for the naming of concrete poetry. That is, Pound as an influencer, and Pound as a definer of the use of a concrete language. Back in Europe, Gomringer was far more influenced by the concrete art of Max Bill.

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  205 Through looking at the statements, and the manifestos of the concrete poets from 1953 onwards, we can see some clear connecting principles for why the metaphor of ‘concrete’ would be so appealing to them and so applicable to their work. The word ‘concrete’ suggested a much barer structure than poems had traditionally used, suggesting a kind of Brutalism of the line which would replace lyrical expression (no adornments) with the bare elements of language (word, syllable, phoneme) in an endeavour to occupy the space of the page as cleanly as possible. But is this all there is? Are we dealing with a metaphorical concrete only, that is, a translation of one mode of working into the other? Or can there be a basis for concrete poetry that links directly to urban concrete? Jamie Hilder in his seminal book Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement 1955–1971 observes how closely the language of the influential concrete poetry statement of the Noigandres group ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’ (1958) directly borrows from the language used by Lucio Costa in his ‘Pilot Plan of Brasilia’ from 1956. Costa’s draft of statements, along with diagrams, won him the open call competition from the Juscelino Kubitschek government to build a new, modern city on a centrally located arid savannah. ‘Fifty years progress in five’ was the soundbite of the Kubitschek government. As Hilder states in a section of his book called ‘Reinforcing “concrete”’: ‘The emphasis on structural integrity and the reduction of expression to a material base is what connects concrete poetry to concrete art, but it also connects it to the sphere of modernist architecture.’4 As Hilder points out in his close reading of the two pilot plans, the Noigandres poets borrow words such as ‘ductile,’ ‘molded’ and ‘amalgamated,’ which draw heavily on metaphors of construction. Hilder talks of how ‘Ductile’ refers to the physical weakness of concrete before it could be reinforced; ‘molded’ suggests the process of pouring concrete into built forms, and ‘amalgamated’ has connotations with the chemical properties of concrete as they advanced in the 20th century. There is also a clear echo of Costa’s ‘Pilot Plan’ in the style and rhythm of the statement of the Noigandres group: ‘Concrete Poetry: total responsibility before language. Thorough realism … A general art of the world. The poem-product: useful object.’ (Noigandres) ‘Brasilia, air and road capital; City park. Patriarch’s arch-secular dream.’ (Lucio Costa)5 As can be seen here, the clipped, broken syntax of the Noigandres poets pays homage to Costa’s summoning of the future city. There is also a similar use of parataxis, with the missing articles in the poets’ version echoing Costa’s (who uses just one connective in this extract). Both examples show the writers using just a few words before introducing a

206  Chris McCabe colon, semi-colon or full stop. In this sense, the Pilot Plan of the Noigandres group can be seen as an intralingual translation of Costa’s architectural writing into the artform of poetry. Gomringer and the Noigandres group were on the verge of naming themselves as concrete poets before 1956, and Fahlstrom had already written his statement quoted above, but the architectural language of the building of the new city provided the concrete poets with the impetus of association with a moment in history, when things were being built anew. This usefully came with a new kind of language, a language describing new methods of making, which could reinforce the poets’ modernity. When looking at the drawing that Costa presented for the building of Brasilia (Figure 12.1) there is something arresting, even visually poetic in the shape that he proposed for the layout of the new city. This image suggests a plane (the ‘air and road capital’ of Costa’s text), though Costa hated the analogy. Perhaps we are subliminally led to think this by the ‘pilot’ of the title. Costa preferred a butterfly, though for me it is a dragonfly. It is also tempting to see a suggestion of the crucifix here, even a concrete poetry version of George Herbert’s poem ‘Easter Wings.’ What is significant, I think, is that the plan is both functional and open to imaginative response. For anyone with an interest in visual poetry it is impossible to look at his image and not to picture an inter-semiotic translation of this architectural plan into another form, albeit a plane,

Figure 12.1  ‘Pilot Plan for Brasilia,’ by Lucio Costa. Image by ‫ר ירוא‬., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3355646.

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  207 crucifix, butterfly or damselfly. The Noigandres poets were compelled by the poetic symbolism of these architectural plans, and the potential for architectural language to add rigour to their poetics, describing their concrete poems as ‘Space-time structures.’6

Joaquim Cardozo: City Planner as Poet There is an architectural-poetic connection between the building of Brasilia and the making of concrete poems by the Noigandres poets. Joaquim Cardozo, the engineer who made the calculations for the major structures of Brasilia, was also a poet. Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the structures that Cardozo made the calculations for, has described him as ‘the most cultured Brazilian who ever existed.’7 Interestingly, Cardozo often used poetic language to describe his engineering work, writing: Now resounds the vast canticle of surfaces that accompany the supporting points, and in it is highlighted tall and clear and dominant, the voice of the surfaces of Liouville, in the splendor of fundamental tonality appropriate to its intrinsic metrics: ds2 = [o(μ)+t(v)] • (dμ 2 + dv2)8 This strikes the reader as an incredibly poetic way to build up to giving an engineering calculation, with the use of terms that also have meaning for poetic creation: ‘canticle,’ ‘voice,’ ‘tonality’ and ‘metrics.’ One of Cardozo’s poems begins: The circle circulates, and in circle dancing Disintegrates, dissolves in several movements.9 It is impossible not to read this in the light of the knowledge that one of Cardozo’s major architectural achievements was Cardozo and Niemeyer’s inverse dome of the National Congress Hall. He is quoted as having once made a phone call to Niemeyer to say ‘I just found the perfect tangent curve that will allow the form to float in the air.’10 Cardozo uses the technique of chiasmus, a crossways repetition with variation, which also defined many of concrete poems of the 1950s. The language of m ­ aterial – ‘disintegrates’ and ‘dissolves’– is prevalent here too. Given the clear link between the poetic and literal concrete of the period I have often wondered why Cardozo didn’t use his engineer’s mind to build words into the city, to translate his literary techniques across into urban space? Cardozo did create one visual poem that hints at architectural imagery. ‘Poema’ is a series of handwritten lines that move in curves and blocks across the page. We have already seen the influence of the architectural minds on the minds of the poets, but here we see an architectural mind experimenting with connotative visual

208  Chris McCabe language. The refusal to ground the poem with a specific title leaves the reader open to interpret this work in any way they like. Is Cardozo translating his architectural knowledge into the literary sphere? Or more, is it that the engineer for the city of Brasilia is creating a poetic vision of how the city skyline, and poetry, could manifest in one form? Cardozo would be aware that no reader (or viewer) of this poem with even the slightest knowledge of his role as architectural engineer would resist asking these questions. This poetic experiment in merging urban and poetic planning into a single unified work suggests the potential for this unification that we now find being fulfilled in contemporary visual poetry.

The Utopianism of Concrete Forms Costa’s plan for Brasilia (that plane or set of wings) suggests a simple form emerging in a space, which can arguably be seen as the most egalitarian, and utopian, ideal for the creation of the modern city. This is utopian because a form in space requires human engagement to reach fulfilment; it does not come into meaning without human interaction. This can be seen as being at the heart of concrete poetry, for example, José Lino Grünewald poem forma from 1959 (Figure 12.2; the translation into English is mine). This poem grows from its own linguistic possibilities to become the thing its language suggests. Or in other words, it creates the form for what the meaning in the text would like to visually become. Augusto de Campos’s poem from 1956 concreto (Figure 12.3) begins with the word concentro (‘concentration’) then homophonically links words together: certo (‘certain’), concerto (‘concert’), corte (‘cut’), contra (‘against’), conceito (‘concept’) and centro (‘centre’) before finishing with the word concreto (‘concrete’). As Hilder says of this poem: ‘The

form reforms disforms transforms conforms informs form Figure 12.2  forma, by José Lino Grünewald.

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  209

Figure 12.3  concreto, by Augusto de Campos, by courtesy of Augusto de Campos.

poem is a solid, confident structure that links the possibilities of concrete as a cultural movement to the potential of actual reinforced concrete to transform cities as spaces of living.’11 The poem works against itself, through interplaying words with similar sounds against each other, but through doing this it eventually reaches synthesis, until its constructions seem inevitable. Despite the emphatic emphases on positives such as concerto and conceito, the ‘centre’ – centro – is not at the core of the poem’s structure but arrives near the end. The word corte – ‘cut’ – is placed near the centre, like a Gordon Matta-Clarke slice from an abandoned building. The poem is contra to its own certo, it even questions its own certo, a word which runs diagonally in bold through the piece. That emboldened word is a reinforcement that prevents the poem folding in on itself. Le Corbusier writes with awe, in his book The City of Tomorrow (first published in 1924), that a house could be built in three days and without the need for ornament. Poetry, too, could quickly manifest into the conception of a work within minutes or even seconds, being realised without the embellishment of lyric or emotion. As with most concrete poetry from the 1950s, de Campos’s poem is written in Futura, a font designed to strip away ornamentation. After 1957, Helvetica became more prevalent. Both fonts were emergent in the sense of having no associations with the past, therefore increasing the potential for the reader and viewer to complete the poem for themselves.

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Figure 12.4  silencio by Eugen Gomringer, by courtesy of Eugen Gomringer.

We can see interplay between form and structure in many of the ­ uropean concrete poems of the period too. Gomringer, two years beE fore his meeting with the Noigandres poets, created the simplest and perhaps most iconic concrete poem of the 1950s. A poem that goes even further in the removal of its centre is silencio (‘silence,’ Figure 12.4; see also Abi-Sâmara, this volume). The poem could in fact be seen as a sonnet, if we take the 14 occurrences of silencio to each represent a poetic line. But no sonnet before allowed the absence of a word to speak as volubly as the word itself: the silent centre of the poem, where silencio is conspicuously absent, becomes that silence by not being there at all. Blank space is standing in as signifier. In architectural terms, we might be reminded of how the open space that buildings create is as important as the walls that hold them up. Gomringer wrote that concrete poetry should be ‘as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs,’12 a statement which foregrounds Costa’s ‘Pilot Plan.’ The view of a developing city from above might be similar to how we receive a concrete poem, which is always aspiring to be completed by the reader. In this sense it might be that a plan for a city shares more with concrete poetry than the built, completed city itself. Concrete poetry revels in form as it emerges. Or to phrase this another way, concrete poetry is imminent: it makes the meaning it would like to suggest in the process of trying to mean it. John Cage expressed this (in a line that Edwin Morgan later turned into a sonnet) as: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.’13

Concrete as Material in British Concrete Poetry Taken as a whole, there is far less coherence to British concrete poetry of the 1960s than the emergent forms of Brazilian and European concrete of the 1950s, and far less correlation with urban building. Minimalism, space, repetition and the use of the Futura and Helvetica font were distorted with the creation of Xerox machines and a DIY approach. British concrete poetry of the 1960s is chaotic and anarchic. In British concrete poetry the typewriter takes dominance over the designed letterform;

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  211 cut-and-paste and cut-ups negate instant meaning and universal language, and scripts for sound are introduced, simultaneously drawing on the energy of Dada and pointing towards Punk. The work of Ian Hamilton Finlay is perhaps the closest to the original concrete ideals, although he was also the first to separate himself from the movement. Finlay signed off his last letter of the 1960s, to editor, poet and critic Stephen Bann, saying: ‘I trust you are remembering that Concrete Poetry (that Movement of the 60s) has but a few days to go  …’14 Finlay was tormented by the loss of ‘purity’ that began to pervade the form. Yet his devotion to silence as the dominant binary to sound, his faith in open space as a creative material and his tolerance for minimal and cleanly designed letterforms were responsible for some of the most conceptually clear and memorable British concrete poetry from this period. About seven years ago I bought a copy of Finlay’s 1967 print La Belle Hollandaise (Figure 12.5), and as I was hanging it on the wall, my son, who was then about four and playing with his toy vehicles on the carpet, looked at the Finlay work and smiled to himself. From where he was sitting, the cross in the middle of the print looked like an aeroplane. Finlay’s work retains that connection with Costa’s ‘Pilot Plan’ in a way that subsequent ‘dirty concrete’ didn’t. Finlay published Augusto de Campos’s poem cidade. city. cite. in a Wild Hawthorn edition in 1964, and de Campos had originally sent poems to Finlay’s magazine Poor.Old. Tired.Horse in 1962. John Furnival emphatically used the form of concrete poetry to reconstruct the urban environment through words. Works such as ‘The Fall of the Tower of Babel’ (1964), ‘The Eiffel (Eyeful) Tower’ (1966) and ‘How Big was my Ben’ (1978) show global landmarks reconstructed (and deconstructed) through text. What at first appear to be mimetic re-buildings are distorted into absurdist and surrealist visions, translating concrete into textblock. Perhaps the most interesting translations of architecture into concrete poetry by a British poet are the works of Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), who used his typewriter – an Olivetti he called the ‘cosmic typewriter’ – to create the illusion of 3D sculptures. Works such as ‘Trip Trap’ from 1966 are Space Age creations, layered with spiritualistic and psychedelic conceits: ‘mind trip opening / trip closing.’ We see that designed words are now replaced with lines made by the typewriter, a type of work that Morgan named the ‘typestract,’ suggesting the process of typing towards and into abstraction. At least until the 1980s dsh’s work appeared futuristic, as if predicting the basic pixelated gaming of the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64. Yet his works without text are timeless, also suggesting plans for urban zones that have yet to be built. In dsh’s world there would be no need to build these when they can be imagined. Why waste good concrete?

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Figure 12.5  L a Belle Hollandaise, by Ian Hamilton Finlay by courtesy of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay’

Walking in The New Concrete I want to end this essay by moving into contemporary visual poetry and its fulfilment of the 1950s concrete ideal. Not only were both the Concrete Poetry movement and the building of Brasilia built upon utopian and egalitarian principles, both have been commented upon as never having been fully realised. If Brasilia is forever caught in its moment, now preserved as a UNESCO heritage site, the same could be said of concrete poetry. The movement ended in the 1970s and has

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  213 now developed a cultish heritage, fetishised by art collectors. The work gathered in The New Concrete (2015), which I co-edited with Victoria Bean, demonstrates this. Through the global possibilities of the internet, kinetic and large-scale visual poetry works can be created through algorithmic software and quickly shared. Reading the ‘Pilot Plan’ with the knowledge of the digital potential artists now have at their disposal, it is possible to read a yearning for this moment in the words of the Noigandres group: ‘Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making.’15 One can see this shift in potential to move concrete poetry into architectural design in the work of Vito Acconci, a performance artist whose work was often included with that of concrete poets, who now runs Acconci Studios, specialising in sculpture, landscape and architectural design. His work in The New Concrete literally bridges the world of visual poetry and architecture. In a piece called ‘City of Words,’ he depicts a multi-dimensional cityscape created from words. In a perfect conceptual twist the work is intended for use as wallpaper, so that people can traverse the space between visual poetry and architecture by pasting it to their walls. This work is that of the designer, making use of the same software employed in architectural design. In Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim’s We Built This City (Figure 12.6), the artist creates an inter-semiotic translation of the lineated outline of the lyrics to Starship’s song ‘We Built This City’, blacks out that outline so it becomes a series of rectangular blocks; and then rotates it to horizontal, literally creating a skyline of a city on the page. During this process, she says, ‘the text has been deconstructed after several rounds in Google Translate.’ Again, we find current technology allowing for a fuller engagement with the translation of the architectural aesthetic of concrete poetry. Perhaps the most celebrated example of the scale of this transformation of concrete poetry principles into the built city can be found in the work of Jenny Holzer. Holzer’s earliest work, such as Truisms ­(1977–79), was extremely tactile broadsheets, with black italic script on white paper being wheat-pasted to buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan. Yet from 1982 Holzer has been using modern computer systems to create work on a scale that she would never have been able to fulfil before. This began in 1982 with electronic signs created for the Spectacolor board in New York’s Times Square and can be seen in The New Concrete with her ‘Xenon for Berlin’ (2001) works using LED projections to transform architectural spaces into the page

214  Chris McCabe

Figure 12.6  We Built this City by Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, by courtesy of ­Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim. First published in Matrix Magazin’s Conceptualisms Dossier (Montreal, 2012).

for compact, condensed lyrics. From what began as pasting words onto a city has developed, through use of technology, into allowing cityspace to become something that people encounter in the first instance as language. In 2015, shortly after The New Concrete was launched at The Whitechapel Gallery, I taught a course on visual poetry. A freelance architect I had never previously met, called Alexander Allen, signed up as a student. Allen had found himself playing around with language using the software he used to design buildings, then realised that what he was actually making was visual poetry. He later wrote a series of ‘Notes on Architecture and Language’ which explained this: ‘The world and its things, including architecture, present themselves in space… I wanted to use architectural space analogously to the way concrete poets use 2D space … I considered basic architectural elements such as “repetition” and “space” respectively and began riffing on them.’16 Allen’s work can be seen as the fulfilment of the potential for the inter-­ semiotic translation of visual poetry into architectural space, and vice versa. His ‘Adam and Eve Sonnet’ (Figure 12.7) is a seminal example of this. Here we have a work created in architectural software, a design for a possible built space, that a viewer can walk through as a simulated reality. Here is an architect and poet using the available technology to explore the possibilities of creating unified concrete (architecture) and concrete (poetry) works. When I first saw this piece, I sensed the future of concrete poetry that the Noigandres group had yearned for in their ‘Pilot Plan.’ The

Metaphor and Material in Concrete Poetry  215 functionality of the architect’s software makes the creation of a work like this possible. Talking about a related piece, Allen says: I suspect the compelling simplicity of [concrete] meant the genre ran out of options … I could bend the repetition into figures, indicate infinity, create a barcode version of ‘fall’ and so on at the touch of a button. This massively enhances the possibilities of artistic expression.17 Cordozo’s separate worlds of architectural engineering and literary creation find synthesis in Allen’s work. The piece is read by approaching and moving physically around it. From afar the piece looks like a single column of words beginning ‘enjoin’ and ending with ‘Adam.’ There then appears a wall inside the structure which employs the same words, but this time ending with the word ‘Eve.’ It is apparent that the words are contronyms, that is, words that are the same but with two opposite meanings. These meanings are embodied in the two wings of its physical structure. On the inside of the structure is the word ‘MORNING,’ inscribed on an internal wall. A gap between the ‘O’ and ‘R’ opens on to a view to the brighter external space (suggestive of morning), but where light and shadow creates a ‘U.’ The word now reads ‘MOURNING.’ To walk through this building is to read further into the poem; to read further into the poem is to further walk through this building. Both the reading and experience of the building take place in the same process of understanding the poem: we are inside the literary and architectural work in simultaneous time. We are no longer experiencing the one form of concrete as a translation of another, and the joins between

Figure 12.7  Detail of ‘Adam and Eve Sonnet’ by Alexander Allen, by courtesy of Alexander Allen.

216  Chris McCabe the architectural and literary worlds have synthesised. This is, if only for the moment of writing, the new concrete.

Notes 1 Eugen Gomringer, quoted in a token of concrete affection [catalogue from an exhibition at the Embassy of Brazil in London, 20 November–18 December 2015], edited by BronacFerran, p. 28. 2 Solt, 1970, p. 75. 3 Imagist Poetry, Introduced and edited by Peter Jones (Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 141–142. 4 Hilder, 2016, p. 106. 5 Solt, 1970, p. 72. 6 Ibid. 7 ‘Especial Brasilia 50 Anos’, Veja, November 2009. 8 Quoted in Andre Tavares, ‘Fearless Forms: The Fluid Creations of Joaquim Cardozo. Histories of Postwar Architecture’, [S.l.], mar. 2017. ISSN 2611– 0075. [Accessed 12 April 2019]. 9 In Portuguese, from ‘A dança dos círculos’: ‘O círculo circula e em círculo dançando/Se desfaz, se dissolve em vários andamentos.’ Joaquim Cardozo, Poesia completa e prosa, Editora Nova Aguilar, p. 316. 10 Quoted in Andre Tavares, ‘Fearless Forms: The Fluid Creations of Joaquim Cardozo. Histories of Postwar Architecture’, [S.l.], mar. 2017. ISSN 2611– 0075. . [Accessed 12 April 2019]. 11 Hilder, 2016, p. 104. 12 Solt, 1970, p. 70. 13 Edwin Morgan, ‘Opening the Cage,’ Selected Poems. Carcanet, 1990, p. 19. 14 In Bann (ed.), 2014, p. 201. 15 Solt, 1970, p. 72. 16 Alexander Allen, email message to the author, 10 May 2017. 17 Ibid.

References Allen, Alexander. “Notes on Architecture and Language” (unpublished MS, pdf emailed to author). Altman, Fábio (ed.) “Especial Brasilia 50 Anos,” Veja, November 2009. Bann, Stephen (ed.)Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964–69. London: Wilmington Square Books, Bitter Lemon Press, 2014. Bean, Victoria and Chris McCabe (eds.) The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century. London: Hayward Publishing, 2015. Ferran, Bronac. A token of concrete affection [catalogue from an exhibition at the Embassy of Brazil in London, 20 November–18 December 2015]. ­Embassy of Brazil in London, 2015. Hilder, Jamie. Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement 1955 – 1971. Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Jones, Peter (ed.) Imagist Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. London: The Architectural Press, 1971. Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.) Concrete Poetry: A World View. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Index

Abi-Sâmara, Raquel 6, 71, 170, 185, 203 Abrams, Steve 189 Acconci, Vito 213; ‘City of Words’ 213 Acconci Studios 213 Aguiar, Gonzalo 90, 93, 94, 125 Albers, Josef 197, 112 Alexander the Great 21 Alexandrian poets 4, 21 Alice Salomon College 136 Alice Salomon Poetic Award 136 Allen, Alexander 216; ‘Adam and Eve Sonnet’ 8, 214–215; ‘Notes on Architecture and Language’ 214, 216 Alters 188, 190, 192–194, 196, 200 Analogical translation 14 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 104; ‘Poema de Sete Faces’ 104 Andrade, Oswald de 5, 110; ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (‘Cannibal Manifesto’) 5, 99, 110 Andrews, Bruce 179 Anthropophagy (‘Cannibalism’) 17, 20, 97, 99, 106, 109, 110, 129 Architecture 3, 7, 131, 134, 142, 169–170, 180, 182, 193, 199, 204–205, 211, 213–214, 216 Arp, Hans 172, 197 Arnold, A. James 162 Art and Artists 176 Artaud, Antonin 177 Arte Povera 176 Apollinaire, Guillaume 5, 11, 12, 21, 22, 35, 91, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 172, 180; ‘calligrams’ 5, 21–22, 160–161, 166; ‘Il pleut’ 159; ‘Zone’ 162 Ashmole, Elias 1

Assis, Machado de 103; ‘Lyra Chinesa’ 103 Asterix 10 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus 161 Avant-garde 2–5, 20, 34, 70, 96, 99, 106, 113, 124–126, 130, 140, 145, 149, 151–152, 154–156, 160, 166, 170, 178–180, 186, 200 Azeredo, Ronaldo 75–77, 94; ‘oesteleste’ 75–77, 94; ‘ruasol’ 75, 77, 94 Bai, Juyi 38 Bachner, Andrea 53, 70 Balkind, Alvin 177 Bann, Stephen 182, 201, 216 Baota (pagoda) poems 4, 37–41, 45–46, 50, 63 Baroque 22, 27, 97, 99, 106, 131, 163–164 Barragán, Luis 169 Basho, Matsuo 18, 20, 165, 166, 172; Narrow Road to the Deep North 18 Bassnett, Susan 1, 3, 4, 5 Bean, Victoria 51, 53, 213, 216; The New Concrete 53, 203, 213 Beat Poets 175 Beau Geste Press 172 Beckett, Samuel 162 Bell, Adrian 10 Bell, Anthea 10 Beaulieu, Derek 178, 179 Bénabou, Marcel 35 Bense, Max 91, 171 Berceo, Gonzalo de 173 Bernstein, Charles 179 Besantinus 21 Between Poetry and Painting 192 Bhabha, Homi 3

218 Index Bierma, Tineke 53 Bill, Max 71, 91, 127, 129, 145, 203, 204 Bing, Xin 53 Birne, Ed 178; Four Parts Sand 178 Bissett, Bill 177 Blake, William 17, 19, 109, 153, 161, 165, 166; ‘The Sick Rose’ 17, 18, 161, 166; ‘The Tyger’ 153, 165, 166 Bloomfield, Camille 35 Bohn, Willard 148 Bök, Christian 178, 179, 181, 183, 201 Bold, Alan 201 Bookworks 172 Boulez, Pierre 112 Bourdieu, Pierre 201 Borges, Jorge Luis 104, 109, 110, 142, 164; ‘El Enigma de Edward Fitzgerald’ 104 Brenner, Jürgen 192 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 197, 198, 199 Brown, Bob 180, 183 Bruce, George 198, 199 Bruno, Cosima 53 Buffière, Félix 24–31, 35 Burns, Robert 14 Calligrams 5, 21–22, 160–161, 166 Cage, John 210 Campos, Augusto de 5, 7, 17, 19, 71–73, 78–83, 90–94, 96–97, 99–100, 106–107, 112–113, 115–117, 125, 127–129, 147–148, 150–167, 179, 182, 186–187, 189, 192, 194–195, 204, 208–209, 211; ‘a esphinge (emerson)’ 162–163; ‘a rosa doente’ 161; ‘amorse (josé assunción silva)’ 161; borboleta de khliébnikov II’ 160; ‘borboleta-pó de khliébnikov’ 160; ‘borboltsé’ 160; ‘chuva oblíqua de maiakóvski’ 160; ‘cidade. city. cite’ 211; ‘concreto’ 92, 95, 208–209; ‘Cuba Sim Ianque Não’ 195; Despoesia 152, 156, 166; ‘eco de ausonius’ 162; ‘eis os amantes’ 78–79, 92, 94; ‘greve’ 117; ‘homage to edward fitzgerald’ 155–156; ‘intradução de cummings’ 73, 92, 94; ‘in sol (a (cummings)’ 153; Intraduções 7, 150–165, 167; ‘lunograma’ 160; ‘lygia finge’ 78, 94; Não

152; ‘o sol de maiakóvski’ 161; ‘o som (mandelstam) 160–161; ‘o tygre’ 153, 165; Outro 152; ‘Poema, Ideograma’ 129; Poesia 1949–1979 94, 152, 156, 166; ‘Poesia, Estrutura’ 129; poetamenos 71, 78, 91–92, 94, 96, 131, 150; ‘renovar (confúcio / pound)’ 156; ‘sol de maiakóvski’ 156, 161; ‘tensão’ 82–83, 94; ‘uma rosa para gertrude’ 161 Campos, Haroldo de 5–7, 17, 20, 71–72, 74, 83, 86–113, 116–123, 125–132, 140–141, 145, 148, 150–152, 154, 164–166, 172, 175; ‘A Aranha’ 102; A Arte no Horizonte do Provável 99, 108, 148; ‘A Dama da Lua’ 105; ‘À espera dos bárbaros’ 104; ‘A Obra de Arte Aberta’ 129; A Operação do Texto 99, 108, 110; A ReOperação do Texto 100, 108; ‘ALEA I’ 89, 93, 95; ‘branco’ 83–84, 93, 95, 99, 108–110; ‘Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda’ 99; Crisantempo 100, 107; Da transcriação 100, 108; Dante Alighieri: 6 Cantos do Paraíso 102, 110; Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe 100, 165–166; Educação dos Cinco Sentidos 109–110, 152; Entremilênios 152; Escrito sobre jade 108, 140, 148; Galáxias 132; Haroldo de Campos –Transcriação 100, 108; Ideograma: lógica, poesia, linguagem 91, 95, 108, 130; Metalinguagem e Outras Metas 100; ‘nascemorre’ 86–88, 95; O ArcoÍris Branco 108, 110; ‘Poesia e Paraíso Perdido’ 129–164; ‘Servidão de Passagem’ 6, 117–121, 124; Transluminuras 152 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 178 Cardozo, Joaquim 207–208, 216; ‘Poema’ 207–208 Carrión, Ulises: El arte nuevo de hacer libro 172; Funciones 173; Poesías 173, 180, 182 Carroll, Lewis 10; Alice in Wonderland 10; ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ 10–11 Cavafy, Constantine 103, 110; ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ 104 Cavalcanti, Guido 150, 164

Index  219 Chan, Kwok-kou 53 Chang, Fen-ling 70 Chen, Li 4, 5, 36, 53, 56–70, 83; ‘18 Touches’ 63; ‘A Prayer of Gears’ 63; ‘A War Symphony’ 5, 57–61, 63, 66, 70; ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’ 62–63; ‘Country’ 65–66, 70; ‘Dan’ 66; ‘Impression of the Sea’ 56; Light/Slow 65; ‘Love Poem’ 67; Microcosmos: 200 Modern Haiku 67; ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’ 63–64; ‘Tang Poetry Haiku’ 57, 68–69; ‘White’ 64–65, 83 Chessa, Luciano 12 Cheng, François 104–105; ‘The Lady of the Moon’ 104–105 Cheung, Luka 70 Chicago Review 5, 56, 168, 175, 183 Chopin, Henri 189, 192, 196 Chuang-Tzu 160 Cisnero, Odile 7 Circular poems 37, 161, 162 Claus, Carlfriedrich 175 Clüver, Claus 5, 95, 139, 148; ‘nascemorre’ 88 Clüver, Stefan Ferreira 76, 95 Cobbing, Bob 15, 16; ABC in Sound 16; ‘Q’ 16 Cockburn, Ken 18, 20; ‘Following Basho around Scotland’ 20; The Road North 18 Coleridge, Samuel 14 Concrete art 112, 128–130, 134, 204–205 Concrete music 71, 92–93, 112, 177 Concrete poetry 1–9, 11–20, 36–37, 39–43, 45–57, 59, 62–63, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 78, 80, 84–85, 87, 90–96, 99, 112–118, 120, 123–133, 137–139, 142, 145–151, 156, 158–159, 166, 168–199, 201, 203–216 Concrete Poetry: An Exhibition in Four Parts 181, 183, 193, 201 Confucius 21, 35, 156, 165 Constantine of Rhodes 33 Constellation 6, 15, 92, 127–129, 131–143, 145–147, 149, 180, 190, 199, 204 Content-derivative translation 14 Corbett, John 125, 148

Costa, Lúcio 205–207, 208, 210, 211; ‘Plano Piloto de Brasília’ 3, 205–207 Coyle, John 198, 201, 126 Creative Writing programs 181–182 Creeley, Robert 175, 186 Cubists 49 Cultural Revolution 45, 50–51 cummings, e.e. 5, 21, 35, 72, 73, 74, 78, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 109, 116, 150, 153, 164, 165, 172, 174, 195; 10 poemas 91, 94, 116; 40 poem(a)s 73, 94; ‘l(a’ 73–74, 95, 153 Curtius, Ernst Robert 22, 35 Cut-ups 211 Dada 63, 170, 176, 211 Dante Aligheri 97, 98, 102–103, 108, 109, 110, 151, 164; ‘Paradise’ 102–103, 110 Darmstadt Circle 175 David, Jack 182 Davy, Charles 20 Deviant form 14 Dickens, Charles 104; Oliver Twist 104 Digital 7–8, 51, 159, 202–203, 213 Doehl, Reinhard 13, 17; ‘Apfel’ 13, 17 Donguy, Jacques 78 Dorn, Ed 186 Dosiadas 21; ‘Altar’ (Doric) 21 Dou, Tao 37 Dowden, George 196 Duguay, Raoul 177 Dupont-Roc, Roselyne 27, 31, 35 Dutton, Paul 177 Dworkin, Craig 20 Eco, Umberto 111 Edinburgh University Press 199 Ego network 187, 190–191 Ehrenberg, Felipe 172 El Eco Museum 170 Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival 177, 181–182 Eliot, T.S. 33, 151, 166, 198; ‘The Waste Land’ 33 Emblem 163–164, 186 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 162–163, 165; ‘The Sphinx’ 162–163, 165 Ensamble Orquesta Negra 16 Ernst, Ulrich 131, 146 Eshleman, Clayton 162

220 Index Espinosa, César 179, 182 Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta 71 Extraneous form 14 Fahlström, Öyvind 131, 146, 175, 204, 206; ‘Manifesto for Concrete Poetry’ 146, 204 Fenollosa, Ernest 2–3, 4, 5, 8, 22, 49, 53, 54, 91, 130, 140, 142, 147, 148; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 8, 130, 140 Fernbach-Flarsheim, Carl 175 Ferreira, Jesús Reyes 169 Finch, Peter 192, 193 Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia 181–182 Finlay, Alec 18, 186, 201; The Road North 18 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 48, 53, 64, 113, 178, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 195–200, 201, 211–212, 216; The Dancers Inherit the Party 186; ‘Homage to Malevich’ 64; ‘La Belle Hollandaise’ 211–212; Selections 186, 201 Fitzgerald, Edward 104, 110, 155–156, 160, 165; ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ 104, 155–156, 165 Fluxus 176 Font 11, 43–45, 78, 84, 92–93, 152–154, 157, 160, 171, 209–210 Formalism 43–44, 125 Four Horsemen, The 177 Freifeld, Larry 175–176, 181 Furnival, John 189, 192, 193, 194, 200, 211; ‘How Big was my Ben’ 211; ‘The Eiffel (Eyeful) Tower’ 211; ‘The Fall of the Tower of Babel’ 211 Futura 171, 209–210 Futurist 8, 11, 15, 19–20, 48, 88, 89, 59, 204 Galería Aristos, National University of Mexico 171 Gallery Number Ten 193 Garnier, Pierre 114, 125, 196 Gautier, Judith 104 Gauvreau, Claude 177 Gerardin, Alfred 104 Gestalt 140, 147 Gilbert, Annette 148

Ginsberg, Allen 196 Girondo, Oliverio 97 Glasgow University Library Department of Special Collections 124, 187–190, 201 Glen, Duncan 192, 193, 199 Goeritz, Mathias 169–172, 180, 182; El eco del oro 171; ‘Goldene Botschaft’ 171; ‘poema plástico’ 170; Torres de Satélite 169–170 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 99, 100, 110, 154, 165, 166 Goldsmith, Kenneth 182 Gomringer, Eugen 6, 57, 71, 76, 127–149, 170, 175, 180, 184–186, 189, 192–194, 196–197, 203–204, 206, 210, 216; ‘a e i o u’ 136, 143–144, 146; Admirador 131, 135, 146, 149; ‘avenidas’ 128, 135–136; Konkrete poesie. Deutschsprachige autore 137; Konstellationen – constellations – constelaciones 129, 132; ‘ping pong’ 6, 57; ‘silence’ (‘silencio/schweigen’) 129, 138–139, 170, 210 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 151, 164 Greaney, Patrick 177, 181, 182 Grünewald, José Lino 72, 76–77, 91, 95, 96, 107, 208; ‘forma’ 89, 91, 95, 101, 208; ‘vai e vem’ 76–77, 92, 95–96 Guimarães, Marco 78, 80, 87, 95; ‘here are the lovers’ 78, 80; ‘nascemorre’ 86–88, 95 Haiku 56–57, 66–69 Halkyard, Stella 200 Hansen, Al 175–176, 181, 183 Haynes, Jim 197 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 100 Hellion, Martha 172 Helvetica 209–210 Herbert, George 5, 206; ‘Easter Wings’ 5, 206 Herrería, Carrillo 173, 180, 182 Hesiod 26; Theogony 26 Higgins, Dick 175, 176, 186 Hilder, Jamie 72, 76, 77, 91, 95, 96, 107, 208 Hitler, Adolf 43 Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) 127 Hofstadner, Douglas 103, 111 Holden, Anthony 24–31, 35 Hölderlin, Friedrich 99, 164

Index  221 Hollo, Anselm 194 Holmes, James 20; ‘Forms of Verse Translation and the Translation of Verse Form’ 20 Holz, Arno 81, 100, 131, 164 Holzer, Jenny 213; Truisms 213; ‘Xenon for Berlin’ 213 Homem de Mello, Simone 7, 17, 90, 97, 100, 110, 148 Homer 10, 24–25, 100, 151; ‘Hymn No.19’, 24; Iliad 10, 100; The Odyssey 26 Houédard, Dom Sylvester (dsh) 186, 189, 192, 193, 200, 211; ‘Trip Trap’ 211 Hu, Mingfu 41 Hu, Shih 41 Huang, Ting 6, 17, 32, 70, 89, 147, 148, 186, 187, 194, 200 Huiwen poems 37, 40, 41, 45 Iconicity 73–74, 99, 116 Ideogram 2–6, 36, 46, 49–50, 56, 65, 71–72, 74–78, 90–91, 127–129, 131, 133, 135, 137–143, 145, 147, 149, 156, 165, 203 Ideogrammic method 2, 5, 22 Ideograph 2, 22, 50, 128, 140, 166 Imagist 14, 216 Index Translationum 10 Institut für Konstruktive Kunst und Konkrete Poesie 127 Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), London 192 International Concrete Poetry Movement 96, 124, 127, 179–180, 182, 184–186, 189, 193, 205, 216 International Writers’ Conference, Intraduções 114, 125 Invenção 89, 93, 95, 99, 117, 172, 195 Isomorphism 74–75, 115 Jackson, Kenneth David 5, 17, 32, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 116, 125, 126, 140, 146, 148, 149, 151 Jakobson, Roman 100 Jandl, Ernst 186, 189, 192, 193 Johnson, Ronald 175, 176, 181, 182, 186; ARK 177, 181, 182 Jordheim, Cecilie Bjørgås 213–214; ‘We Built this City’ 213–214 Josten, Jennifer 170, 171, 180, 182

Joyce, James 22, 99, 132, 150; Finnegans Wake 22, 31, 72, 78, 91, 94, 107, 112, 150; Ulysses 132, 136 Jueju stanza 39 Jukelevics, Nicette 178, 181, 182; A Bibliography of Canadian Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry 1965–1972 178, 181, 182 Katué, Kitasono 110, 175 Kaváfis, Konstantinos 103–104, 108, 110; ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ 103–104 Kavanagh, Patrick 9–10, 20; ‘Epic’ 9–10, 20 Khlebnikov, Velimir 160, 165, 166; ‘I, A Butterfly that has Flown’ 160 Kline, Anthony S. 162, 166 Kopfermann, Thomas 12 Kwapisz, Jan 26, 27, 35 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets 179 Lallot, Jean 21, 31, 35 Lane, Brian 192, 193 Lax, Ronald 186 Le Corbusier 209, 216; The City of Tomorrow 209, 216 Lee, Tong-King 54, 57, 70 Lefevere, André 49, 53, 54 Lehmann, John 199 Leite, Marli Siqueira 142, 147, 149 Li, Li 4, 5, 8, 63 Li, Po 68; ‘Still Night Thoughts’ 68 Li, Zongda 52 Liang, Xiaohua 46 Lindsay, Maurice 199 Ling, Yu 54 Linghu, Chu 38 Little Review 140 Little Sparta 48, 53 Logopoeia 14, 159 Lycophron of Chalcis 22 McAulay, John 177–178; Hazardous Renaissance 177–178; Poetry Toronto Books’ International Anthology of Concrete Poetry 177–178 McCabe, Chris 3, 7, 8, 124, 139, 170; ‘form’ 208; The New Concrete 51, 53, 203, 213, 214, 216 McCaffery, Steve 182; ‘Introduction’ Sound Poetry Catalogue 182

222 Index McCarthy, Cavan 189, 192, 193, 194, 200 McClure, Michael 177 MacDiarmid, Hugh 114, 198, 199 McGonigal, James 126, 188, 198, 201 McLow, Jackson 175, 177 Malevich, Kazimir 64, 83, 93 Malmkjaer, Kirsten 12, 16, 19, 20 Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 71, 78, 91, 94, 99, 107, 109, 115, 128, 129, 151, 158, 165, 166, 167; ‘Crise de Vers’ 158, 166–167; ‘Un coup de dés’ 71, 91 Mandelstam, Osip 161, 162, 164, 165, 166 Marinetti, Filippo 11–14, 18, 19, 20, 49, 204; ‘Après la Marne, Joffre Visite le Front en Auto’ 11–12; ‘Carso=A Rat’s Nest: ‘The Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (Futurist Manifesto) 11, 20, 204; A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love’ 12, 19 Marino, Giambattista 150 Marti, Kurt 149 Matta-Clarke, Gordon 209 Mavignier, Almir 129 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 49, 109, 124, 151, 156, 159, 161; ‘Homeward’ 159 Mayer, Hansjörg 171, 178, 181, 182, 192 Mayer, Peter 14–16, 20; Alphabetical and Letter Poems. A Chrestomathy 14–16, 20 Mayor, David 172 Mazières, Gastón 16 Mediator 123, 125–126, 199 Mei, Yiqi 41 Melo e Castro, Ernesto Manuel Geraldes de 113, 187 Melopoeia 13, 19, 159, 161 Meredith, William 162 Metafaithfulness 116, 120, 122 Metaphyical poets 150, 163 Metzger, Gustav 186 Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus 183 Milton, John 8 Mimetic form 14 Modernism 5, 97, 125, 203–204 Modern Art Museum, Mexico City 172 Mon, Franz 143

Mondrian, Piet 83, 93, 113 Monroe, Harriet 204 Moretti, Franco 201 Morgan, Edwin 6–8, 15, 20, 84, 89–90, 93, 95, 112–126, 184–201, 210–211, 216; ‘ALEA I’ 89. 93, 95; Beowulf 124; ‘Chinese Cat’ 123; ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ 15, 123; ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’ 6, 15; Rites of Passage 124; A Second Life 199; ‘Seven Decades’ 124, 186–187, 200; ‘Siesta of a Hungarian Snake’ 15, 123; ‘Spacepoem 1’, 194; ‘Starryveldt 123; ‘Transient Servitude’ 6, 117, 119–121 Morgenstern, Christian 97, 100, 111, 164 Morris, Ken 177 Morris, Michael 177 Morse code 161 Mund, Hugo 192 Museum of Modern Art (MAM), Sao Paulo 99, 113, 128, 129 Musset, Alfred de 160; ‘Ballade à la lune’ 160 Nabuco, Joaquim 106; My Formative Years 106 National Congress Hall, Brasilia 207 Netdraw 190 New Culture Movement 50 New Writing 199 New York School 175 Nichol, Barrie Phillip (bpNichol) 177–178, 181, 183; ‘love’ 177 Niedecker, Lorine 186 Niemeyer, Oscar 207 Niikuni, Seiichi 57, 70; ‘rain’ 57; ‘river shore’ 57 Noigandres 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 92, 94, 95, 99, 107, 129, 130 Noigandres poets 6–8, 49, 71–96, 112, 124, 127–130, 139–141, 146, 150–152, 154, 158–160, 166, 171–172, 175, 180, 185, 196, 203–207, 210, 213–214; ‘Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry’ 3, 72, 129, 159, 205; Teoria da Poesia Concreta 91, 92, 94, 107, 128, 148, 164, 166, 179, 182 Non-translation 3, 73, 154

Index  223 Oisteanu, Valery 176, 181, 183 Olson, Charles 174; Projective Verse 174 Openings Press 193 Oseki-Déprés, Inês 90, 93, 95 Other Books and So (OBAS) 172 Ou, Waiou 5, 42–45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54; ‘Auction by Taking Advantage of Others’ 42; ‘Brush your Names with Paste’ 42–43; ‘Butter of National defence of the Third Reich’ 42–43; Collection of Poems by Ou Waiou 42, 51; ‘Feelings about being a Father’ 42; ‘Infectious Disease Took a Fast Train’ 42, 44; ‘Love Took a Bus’ 42–43; ‘The Reclaimed Virgin Land’ 42–45; ‘The Second Obituary for the World’ 42–44; ‘The Spiritually Mixed’ 42; ‘Those Who Became Fat by Eating Paper Notes’ 42–44; ‘Walls of the Naval Port of Singapore’ 42–43 Oulipo 33, 35 Outradução 151 Ovid 101; Metamorphoses 101 Padget, Ron 162 Paes, José Paulo 24–31 Pagoda 4, 37–41, 45–46, 50, 63 Paideuma 98 Palindrome 21, 33, 70, 137 Participatory leap 117 Pattern poetry 4, 37, 39, 41–42 Paz, Octavio 97, 108, 171–172, 180, 183; ‘Blanco’ 171; ‘Discos visuales’ 171; Topoemas 171 Perec, Georges 33 Perloff, Marjorie 11, 12, 19, 20, 131, 146, 149 Perloff, Nancy 8 Pessoa, Fernando 159 Phanopoeia 13 Phillips, Rachel 183 Piasecki, Bohdan 57, 59, 60 Pictogram 40, 137, 172 Pignatari, Décio 8, 71, 74–75, 81, 84–85, 91–94, 96, 99, 107, 112, 117, 125–129, 140–142, 146–148, 150–152, 160, 166, 179, 182, 185, 203–204; ‘A Situação Atual da Poesia no Brasil’ 117, 125–126; ‘beba coca cola’ 84–85, 96, 148;

‘hombre’ 74, 77, 96; ‘LIFE’ 72, 96, 140–142, 147–148; ‘um movimento’ 81–82, 91, 96 Plato 133 Poe, Edgar Allan 100–101; ‘The Raven’ 100–101 Poetry Scotland 199 Polyck-O’Neil, Julia 178, 181, 183 Pondian, Juliana di Fiori 4, 8, 162 Ponge, Francis 102; ‘L’Araignée’ 102 Poor.Old.Tired.Horse 200 Pope, Alexander 14 Pound, Ezra 2–5, 8, 13–14, 18–22, 33, 35, 49, 71–72, 78, 91, 94, 97–99, 103, 107, 109, 129–132, 139–140, 142, 146, 148, 150–151, 156–161, 164–167, 174, 195, 204; ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ 2; The Cantos 71, 72, 132, 150, 157, 158, 164, 167, 204; Cathay 129; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 8, 130, 140; Confucius to Cummings 21, 35; ‘How to Read’ 13 Prampolini, Ida Rodríguez 170–171 Praxis group 196 Provençal troubadours 150, 164 Punk 211 Queiroz, Maria José de 84–85; ‘drink coca cola’ 84–85 Queneau, Raymond 33 Reichardt, Jasia 191–192, 193 Reinhardt, Ad 186 Revista de Novíssimos 150 Riddell, Alan 197 Rilke, Rainer Maria 109, 160, 164, 165, 166; Dinggedichte 160 Rivera, Rafael-Barreto 177 Rodchenko, Alexander 159 Rosa, Guimarães 132; Grande Sertão: Vereda 132 Roth, Dieter (Diter Rot) 129, 175 Rothenberg, Jerome 186 Rothko, Mark 64 Ruptura Group 128, 146 Rylands Library 200 Santiago, Silviano 106 Sao Paulo Biennial 129 Saper, Craig 183 Saroyan, Aram 175

224 Index Schnaiderman, Boris 107, 150 Schoenberg, Arnold 78, 112 Schwitters, Kurt 15, 164, 176 Scobie, Stephen 183 Scottish Arts Council 197, 199 Scots Makar 184 Second Brazilian Conference of Literary Criticism and History 117 Serviço de Documentação do Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Rio de Janeiro 150 Sharkey, John J. 125, 192, 193; Mindplay: An Anthology of British Concrete Poetry 193 Shattuck, Roger 162 Shen, Ci-Shu 54 Sidney, Sir Philip 9–10; ‘Astrophel and Stella’ 9 Silverstein, Shel 10; ‘The Slithagadee’ 10, 19 Simmias of Rhodes 21; ‘Axe’ 21; ‘Egg’ 21; ‘Wings of Eros’ 21 Sina website 51 Social network analysis (SNA) 185 Solt, Mary Ellen 47, 52, 53, 54, 78, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 127, 139, 145, 149, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 191, 192, 216; Concrete Poetry: A World View 54, 80, 92, 96, 127, 149, 168, 174, 179, 183, 216; ‘drink coca cola’ 148; ‘here are the lovers’ 78, 80; ‘nascemorre’ 85 Something Else Press 175, 181, 183 Sorensen, Diana 8, 184, 201, 202 Sound poetry 1, 20, 177–178, 181–182, 189 Sousa, Octávio Tarquinio de 104, 110 spirale 129 Spoerri, Daniel 175 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 112 Stramm, August 100, 109, 164 Su, Hui 37; ‘Xuanji Tu (Picture of the Turning Sphere)’ 37 Surrealism 174

Terza rima 103 Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum 1 Theocritus 4, 21–22, 24–27; ‘Syrinx’ 4, 6–8, 21–35 Tianma, Changsi 54 Tlaloc 193, 194 Tlatelolco massacre 171 Tortoise poems 37, 38–40, 45 Toussaint, Franz 104 Trajano, Vieira 22, 34, 35, 108, 110 Transcreation 3, 5–8, 32, 60, 72, 74–75, 83–84, 90, 93, 97–103, 105–109, 111, 116, 120–126, 129, 140, 151 Transficcionalization 97 Transluciferation 97 Transparadization 97 Transtextualization 17, 97 Tu, Meng 54 Typewriter 210–211 Typogram 137

Tablada, José Juan 172 Tang poems 68 Tanka 56 Technopaegnia 4, 21–22, 25 Teixeira, Virna 6, 8; ‘A Canção Do Monstro Do Lago Ness’ 6; Na Estação Central 8

Wang, Wei 100 Wang, Yiran 39 Webern, Anton von 71, 78, 93, 95, 112; Klangfarbenmelodie 71, 78, 92, 95; Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone and Piano, op. 22, 78

UbuWeb 179, 182 UCINET 190, 192 Universal language 6, 132, 211 University of Kansas Library Special Collections 200 University of Indiana, Lilly Library 200 Untranslation 73, 82 Valery, Paul 19, 109, 164 Vehicule Poets 177, 181, 183 Veja, Lope de 172; El arte nuevo de hacer comedias 172 Ventadorn, Bernart de 157, 165 Verbivocovisual 7, 27, 72, 112, 130, 156, 158 Verey, Charles 192 Vestinus, Julius 21; ‘Altar’ (Ionian) 21 Vieira, Brunno 101, 110, 111 Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires 17, 20 Virgili, Martin 16 Visual poetry 8, 21, 25, 36, 53–54, 62, 109, 114–115, 128, 131, 137, 139, 177, 179, 193, 203, 206, 208, 212–214, 216

Index  225 Whitechapel Gallery 214 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 20 Wild Hawthorn Press 211 Wildman, Eugene 183 Williams, Emmett 5, 56, 78, 84, 94–96, 117, 137, 146–147, 175, 178, 181–183; Anthology of Concrete Poetry 78, 84, 94–96, 117, 137, 146–147, 175, 178, 181–183 Williams, Jonathan 175, 184, 186, 192, 195 Williams, William Carlos 102, 131, 174; ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ 102 Wolff, María Tai 17, 20, 109 Wu, Xiu-jing 57 Wu, Yi-Ping 60–62 Wugui (tortoise) poems 37, 38–40, 45

Xie, Wanying 41 Yao, Jingming 149 Yin, Caigan 5, 45–50; ‘A Lad Picking Oranges’ 48; ‘Train’ 46–47; ‘Unable to Walk out of the Feeling of Disappearance’ 48 Younis, Eman 8 Young, Douglas 114 Yuan, Zhen 38; ‘Tea’ 38 Zárate, Armando 24–31, 35 Zhan, Bing 36 Zhang, Kui 38–39 Zukofsky, Louis 175, 186 Zúñiga, Araceli 179 Zurbrugg, Nicholas 189