ambassador poets

王敖

<div id="region-print-friendly"><div class="float-right hide-from-print"><ul><li class="icon-on-left"><a class="link-666-no-underline" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3319242.ece?print=yes&amp;randnum=1202445679359#"><img height="14" alt="Close Window" src="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/img/global/icon/14x14-close.gif" width="14" border="0" /><span>Close Window</span></a> </li></ul></div><img height="25" alt="Times Online Logo 222 x 25" src="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/img/global/tol-logo-222x25.gif" width="222" border="0" /> <div class="padding-top-10"></div><div class="border-top-d9d9d9 padding-bottom-7"></div><div class="hide-from-print padding-bottom-7">&lt;script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;<ul><li class="print-page"><a class="link-666" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3319242.ece?print=yes&amp;randnum=1202445679359#">rint this page</a> </li></ul></div><div class="hide-from-print border-top-d9d9d9 padding-bottom-10"></div><div class="padding-bottom-15"></div><div class="padding-bottom-5"></div><div class="float-right text-right position-relative margin-top-minus-20"><p class="x-small color-999"></p></div><div><div class="float-left position-relative margin-top-minus-22"><span class="small">From </span><span class="byline">The Times Literary Supplement</span></div><div class="small color-666">February 6, 2008<br /></div><div class="clear-simple"></div><h1 class="heading">Claudel and Segalen: ambassador poets</h1><h2 class="sub-heading padding-top-5 padding-bottom-15">aul Claudel took French foreign policy, art and Catholicism to China; Victor Segalen sought the country’s spiritual heart</h2><div id="main-article"><div class="article-author"><span class="small"></span><span class="byline">Richard Sieburth </span><div class="clear"></div></div></div><p>aul Claudel <br />KNOWING THE EAST <br />Translated by James Lawler <br />137pp. Princeton University Press. Paperback, &pound;11.95 (US $19.95).<br />978 0 691 11902 1 </p><p>Victor Segalen <br />ST&Egrave;LES <br />Translated, edited and annotated by Timothy<br />Billings and Christopher Bush <br />415pp. Wesleyan University Press. $80 (paperback, $34.95); distributed in the UK by Eurospan. &pound;51.50 (paperback, &pound;22.50). <br />978 0 819 56833 5 </p><p></p><p>In a characteristic moment of exasperation with the state of modern culture, Paul Claudel observed, in an interview in 1925, that none of the current artistic movements in Europe had anything to offer in the way of creative innovation – “ni le dada&iuml;sme ni le surr�alisme qui ont un seul sens: p�d�rastique”. He went on to boast that although some people might be surprised that he managed to be at the same time a devout Catholic, a practising poet and a French ambassador, he personally found nothing very strange in this: as a matter of fact, during the late war, he had gone to South America to buy wheat, tinned beef and lard for the French army and had saved his country 200 million francs in the process. In their collective “Open Letter to Paul Claudel, French Ambassador to Japan”, the slandered Surrealists were quick to pick up the gauntlet: as far as their “pederasty” was concerned, it was certainly all in the eye of the beholder; and what’s more, their movement supported any revolution or colonial insurrection that promised to annihilate Western civilization and its lackeys in the Far East such as Claudel. How could one even imagine, they concluded with a jeer, that the activity of poetry was ethically compatible with ambassadorship – particularly if the latter involved the purchase of “large quantities of lard” for a “nation of dogs and pigs”? </p><p>Claudel (1868–1955) belonged to that cluster of French writer-diplomats – all prot�g�s of the Quai d’Orsay’s colourful Philippe Berthelot – which at various points included Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux, Andr� Salmon and Alexis L�ger (better known as Saint-John Perse). Before serving as ambassador to Japan (1921–7), the United States (1927–33) and Belgium (1933–5), Claudel had worked his way up the diplomatic ladder as a junior official in New York and Boston in 1893–5, followed by a thirteen-year on-and-off stint as a consul representing French commercial interests in the cities of Shanghai, Hanzhou, Fuzhou and Tianjin. Although he never bothered to learn Chinese or Japanese, Claudel turned his postings to profitable artistic account, carving out a niche for himself as one of the leading exoticists of twentieth-century French literature, with such works as Connaissance de l’Est, Cent Phrases pour �ventails, Id�ogrammes occidentaux, L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil levant, Le Vieillard sur le mont Omi, Petits Poèmes d’après le chinois, and Sous le Signe du dragon – not to mention such Noh-inspired dramatic works as La Femme et son ombre. </p><p>Of this considerable mass of Orientalia, time (as Auden might have said) will perhaps only pardon the Claudel of Connaissance de l’Est for writing well. James Lawler’s new translation of this collection of prose poems – the first since Teresa Frances and William Rose Ben�t’s rather feeble stab at it in 1914, under the title The East I Know – offers a welcome glimpse into what in his helpful introduction Lawler calls a “matrix work”, for the book provides a laboratory not only for Claudel’s subsequent oeuvre but also, given its impact on such writers as Victor Segalen, Perse, Charles P�guy and Francis Ponge, for much of early twentieth-century French poetry as well. First published in 1900, then expanded in 1907 and finally given its definitive form in the 1914 deluxe rice paper edition brought out by Segalen in Peking as part of his stylish “Bibliothèque cor�enne”, Connaissance de l’Est is very much a work that occupies the uncertain fault-line between French Symbolism and Modernism. </p><p>When the twenty-seven year-old Claudel set off for Shanghai in 1895, he was primarily known as a promising young playwright, author of the anarcho-symbolist dramas Tête d’or and La Ville, much admired by the young Gide and by Maeterlinck. He was also a fervent Catholic, his 1886 conversion provoked (so he later claimed) by his reading of Rimbaud’s Illuminations on their first publication in the magazine La Vogue. During this period he also occasionally frequented Mallarm�’s Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, although his newly found beliefs made him uneasy with the Master’s aesthetic nihilism. Of the Orient he knew precious little: the fashionable japonaiseries of Hokusai and Utamaro to which he had been introduced by his sister Camille, Rodin’s mistress and disciple; a visit to the French Indochinese pavilion at the Exposition of 1889; an enjoyable evening spent at the theatre in New York’s Chinatown in 1893; Judith Gautier’s translations of classical Chinese poetry in her Livre de jade; Lafcadio Hearn’s Some Chinese Ghosts. In the end, it mattered little to him where he was headed; the important thing was to test his spiritual vocation through self-imposed exile. Rimbaud had disappeared from the Parisian literary scene some twenty years earlier, choosing instead the “rugueuse r�alit�” of an adventurer and explorer in Abyssinia; Gauguin’s much publicized departure for Tahiti in search of the utopian South Seas had been celebrated by the Symbolist c�nacle four years before. Claudel would now similarly open a “fissure” between himself and the decadent secularism of the Third Republic. To fortify his Thomist world view on his journey to the East, he took two volumes of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. </p><p>The year 1895 also saw the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which marked the end of the first Sino–Japanese war and forced a humiliated Qing Empire to open its ports and rivers to Japanese trade while at the same time allowing the Triple Intervention of Russia, France and Germany to profit from China’s disarray. With the prospering of its colonial territories in Indochina, the French government saw an opportunity to expand its sphere of influence from Tonkin into southern China – hence Claudel’s various assignments to the cities of Shanghai, Hanzhou and, for nearly five years, to the port of Fuzhou. While in China, he dutifully submitted various reports to the Quai d’Orsay on matters as prosaic as French joint ventures in railway and steamship lines, investments in the local timber and metallurgy industries, currency reform, and the competition with Britain for the tea and textile trade. Meanwhile, he was also amassing the notes for a major “Livre sur la Chine”, a descriptive vade mecum designed to serve as a handbook for future French commercial enterprises in the region: portions of this manuscript (on which he worked for some ten years) later made their way into his patronizing survey of the history and culture of the Middle Kingdom, Sous le Signe du dragon, published in 1948. As Gilbert Gadoffre has shown, many of the early prose poems of Connaissance de l’Est grow out of the young diplomat’s exercises in documentary reportage. Initially published in various Parisian literary magazines under the title “Paysages de Chine”, his short texts on the city of Shanghai, or on local gardens, tombs and pagodas, often border on the postcard exoticism of a Bernardin or Chateaubriand. Or so he feared, for when he sent these “images of China” to Mallarm�, he abjectly apologized for having fallen into that most lowbrow of genres, “descriptive literature”. </p><p>Although he would later refer to Connaissance de l’Est as the most Mallarm�an of all his works, its pages nonetheless show Claudel trying to break free from the lessons of the Master. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his desire to attend to the sensual immediacies of the concrete world of things that offered itself to him in China – a material reality uninformed by a single significant human encounter with the Other over the course of the entire book. Like the post-Symbolist Rilke, who was during these very same years practising the “eye-work” he had learned from Rodin in order to achieve the visual precisions of the Dinggedicht, so Claudel turned to Renard’s Histoires naturelles and Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques on his arrival in China as models for his portraits of animal or vegetable life in such poems as “The Banyan”, “The Pig” or “The Pine Tree”. This is the Claudel who points ahead to the Parti pris des choses of Ponge (who aptly characterized the former’s voracious – and often lumbering – descriptiveness as that of “a great marine tortoise, at the other end of Asia, diving towards its Chinese salad of black mushrooms”). The reality effects produced by the Claudelian eye as it listens to the voice of things (as the title of his later L’Oeil �coute has it) are, however, always counterbalanced by a completely different order of “realism” – namely, that of Aquinas, for whom the seductive particulars of the world must always be redeemed by the vision of the universal. </p><p>But it is Rimbaud, “l’homme aux semelles de vent”, who provides the primary impetus behind the peripatetic excursions into the Chinese landscapes evoked in Connaissance de l’Est. As Claudel later observed in his preface to the 1912 edition of Rimbaud’s works, the “desport rhythmique” that typically overtook the poet’s entire being in the act of walking created a kind of “hypnose ouverte” that rendered him extraordinarily porous both to the vital energies of nature and to the deepest vibrations of language. Whether travelling on foot, by boat or by sedan chair, the Claudel of these early prose poems often falls into similar trance-like states that open on to manic moments of illumination akin to what he calls Rimbaud’s “mystique mat�rialiste”: “The air is so fresh and clear I seem to walk naked . . . . Drunk from looking, I understand all things”. Or: “I am the Inspector of Creation, the Verifier of all things present; the world’s solidity is the matter of my beatitude!”. Lawler’s translation nicely captures Claudel’s Rimbaldian impulse to regress into an infantile erotic fusion with the body of Mother Nature: “I absorb light with my eyes and ears, and my mouth and nose, and all the pores of my skin. I soak in it like a fish, I swallow it”. Or again: “I stand in the midst of the perfectly white air. I celebrate the orgy of ripeness with a shadowless body . . . . I see a dazzling white bird with a pink throat that bursts forth from this milk, this silver in which I drown, and again is lost in a glow my eyes cannot sustain”. At moments, Claudel can even sound like Whitman, as in this catalogue of ships in Shanghai harbour: </p><p>"The wide-bellied junks with their lopsided sails in the wind as stiff as shovels; those from Foochow with huge faggots of beams lashed to each side; then tricoloured sampans, the giants of Europe, the American windjammers full of kerosene, all the camels of Madian, the cargo boats of Hamburg and London, the traders of the coast and the islands. </p><p>Everything is limpid; I enter a brightness so pure it seems that neither my intimate consciousness, nor my body, offers any resistance. The weather is deliciously cold. With my mouth shut and my nostrils given to the exhilarating air, I breathe the sun." </p><p>These rapturous moments of plenitude and self-dissolution, however, often issue into panicky intimations of Nothingness. For if the Far East promises a world of theophanic presences for Claudel, it at the same time threatens him as an abyss without ground – or as a mere Mallarm�an play of signs on the Void. Meditating on a defaced imperial stele in the ruins near Suzhou, he observes that the teeming profusion of China is founded on a “constitutional vacuum” or “b�ante lacune” filled merely with “empty simulacra and their debris”. Incapable even of exploiting its natural resources in a systematic fashion (one hears the voice of the vice consul here), the tottering empire everywhere displays, like nature herself, “un caractère antique et provisoire, d�labr�, hasardeux, lacunaire” – little wonder that Claudel’s fearful vision of the castration at the heart of the symbolic order should have later drawn the interest of Lacan. In the poem “Here and There”, which recounts his visit to the Buddhist temple of Rinzaiji during his brief stay in Japan, Claudel finally gives full vent to his horror of this Asiatic void. Although he is enough of a Mallarm�an to appreciate the abstract semiotics of classical Chinese calligraphy and painting, he is nonetheless profoundly appalled by the “pagan” worship of 3,000 identical golden idols of Kwannon – which he takes to be a “monstrous” and “incestuous” fetishization of the signifier, all the more “Satanic” because Buddhism disguises its desolate and solipsistic doctrine of Nothingness behind the erotic lure of Nirvana. </p><p>Claudel later said of Connaissance de l’Est that “a threat hangs over the book like the extreme lucidity of days before typhoons”. Its title, rendered by Lawler as Knowing the East, contains an untranslatable etymological pun on birth and knowledge – “Co-naissance” – and the pangs of Claudel’s self-parturition as a poet and a Catholic are everywhere evident in the psychomachia that plays itself out over the course of the volume. During his initial years in China, he seriously considered taking holy orders, and during his ten-month leave of absence in France in 1900 – the very year the Boxer Rebellion erupted – he visited the monasteries of Solesmes and Ligug� (where Huysmans would be received as an oblate the following year), but was not accepted. On the ship back to China, Claudel fell passionately in love with Rosalie Vetch, the model for the character of Ys� in his 1906 tragedy of erotic entanglement, Partage du midi, and on his return to Fuzhou, set up house with his femme fatale, her husband and their four children. News of this irregular domestic arrangement and of Claudel’s purportedly shady business dealings with the husband, Fran&ccedil;ois Vetch, eventually reached the Quai d’Orsay and, although the matter was hushed up by Claudel’s protector, Berthelot, he was discreetly placed on administrative leave in early 1905. Back in France, he pursued the obscure object of his desire, now the mother of his illegitimate child and living with another man, to Brussels – which led to further denunciations. The following year, having decided to settle into the safety net of a conventional marriage, he was reassigned to China where he served as consul in Tianjin from 1906 to 1909 while writing the Pindaric Cinq Grandes Odes that would establish him as a major poet. </p><p>It was in Tianjin that Victor Segalen (1878–1919) first met the author of Connaissance de l’Est, a work that had been of signal importance in determining his vocation as a sinologist. Segalen had been trained as a doctor at the �cole de Sant� Navale in Bordeaux, working on a thesis on the role of synaesthesia in the writings of French Symbolism and Naturalism. In 1902 he sailed for Tahiti with the French navy; forced to spend two months in San Francisco convalescing from an acute case of typhoid, Segalen made his first discovery of Chinese culture (and, more importantly for him, of its writing implements) in the city’s Chinatown. He arrived in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, just a few months after the death of Gauguin: out of this one-and-a-half-year stay in French Polynesia would grow his later Hommage à Gauguin (1918) and the novel Les Imm�moriaux (1907), a tribute to the vanished Maori civilization, composed from the point of view of a fictional native bard – the prosopopoetic voice of the Other here serving as a pointed ethnographic reply to Pierre Loti’s colonial Tahitian exoticism. On his return to France via Ceylon (where he studied Buddhism) and Djibouti (where he tracked down traces of Rimbaud), Segalen published articles on music and poetry in the Mercure de France and became friends with Debussy, to whom he proposed the libretto “Siddhartha” and a project on the myth of Orpheus, both stillborn. In 1908 he began seriously studying Chinese at the �cole des Langues Orientales and the Collège de France, passing the exam that certified him as an official naval “�lève-interprète” of the language the following year. </p><p>When Segalen arrived in Peking in mid-1909, he lost no time in contacting Claudel in nearby Tianjin. The meeting, however, proved to be a major disappointment: having admired the latter’s paean to the Chinese written character in his celebrated prose poem “The Religion of the Sign” (a text that bears comparison to Pound’s or Michaux’s later meditations on the ideogram), Segalen was shocked to discover that his literary idol, by his own admission, knew barely a word of the language; and as for the hint of “abyssal” Taoism that he thought he glimpsed in Connaissance de l’Est, he now realized that it was all based on a second-rate French translation of Lao Tze – in short, when it came to a knowledge of the traditional culture and philosophy of the Middle Kingdom, the consul was a rank amateur, filled with contempt for the innate “mediocrity” of the Chinese. Segalen, by contrast, was in the process of reinventing himself as an expert sinologist, hoping to combine his career as a doctor with that of a scholar, explorer and literatus. In late 1909, he set off on a major journey on horseback into northern and western China in the company of his wealthy adventurer friend, Gilbert de Voisins; the two would return to Shaanxi province on an archaeological expedition five years later, discovering not only what was at that point the oldest surviving piece of Chinese sculpture (the “Horse Treads on the Hun” statue associated with the Han dynasty general Huo Qibing), but also locating the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang – the site of the buried Terracotta Army, first excavated in 1974 and now one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world. </p><p>As Segalen later observed in a letter, the China that fired his imagination was radically different from Claudel’s: whereas the latter had only superficially peeled off the southern coastal rind of the great orange, Segalen instead wanted to squeeze out its full continental juices, especially the archaic pungencies of its half-forgotten dynasties. Like the Central Asia of Saint-John Perse (whose 1925 poem “Anabase”, composed while on diplomatic assignment to Peking, grew out of his travels in Outer Mongolia and the Gobi desert region), Segalen’s China is a place of vast expanses traversed by the traces of nomadic cultures, a gateway to Turkestan or Tibet, a portal on to an ever-mysterious, ever-elusive “arrière-monde” – certainly not the cloying sweet-and-sour sauce served up by what he derisively referred to as Claudel’s Cantonese cuisine. But as Briques et tuiles and �quip�e, his posthumously published travelogues of these 1909 and 1914 expeditions show, what sets off Segalen’s China from Claudel’s is not merely the spatio-temporal opposition between North and South or between proud imperial past and degraded colonized present; rather, two distinct epistemologies are at work. Whereas the poet of Connaissance de l’Est never managed to escape from an egotistical sublime founded on the ecstatic fusion – or apocalyptic “co-birth” – of subject and object, Segalen’s exposure to the Idealism of Kant instead encouraged him to develop what in his “Essay on Exoticism” he defined as an “aesthetics of the diverse”, that is, a sceptical and relativistic acknowledgement that the beauty of the Other as a Ding an sich resides precisely in its refusal to be understood (or, for that matter, colonially appropriated) by the Same. </p><p>Segalen’s deepest quarrel with Claudel, however, revolved around the latter’s aggressively proselytizing brand of Catholicism (even Benedetto Croce, his Italian translator, called Claudel a “guerrilla for Christ”). Segalen’s strict religious upbringing in Brittany had rendered him violently allergic to the Church, and indeed to all forms of institutionalized religion. In 1913, for example, he sketched out an antinomian drama entitled Combat pour le sol, a fiercely sarcastic rewriting of Claudel’s 1901 mystery play, Le Repos du septième jour, which had illustrated the traditional Jesuit argument that Chinese religion (such as it was) merely prefigured the more genuine and universal revelation of Christianity to come and that the figure of Son of Heaven (that is, the Chinese Emperor) served only to announce the arrival of the true Son of God before being historically fated to disappear. As for the inevitable demise of the Chinese Emperor, even though this seemed to be borne out by the recent revolution of 1911, Segalen’s pro-Manchu novel, Le Fils du ciel (a French translation of an imaginary Chinese text by a make-believe court chronicler of the last days of the Qing Dynasty), held on to the obstinate belief that, without the “admirable fiction” of the Son of Heaven, the entire symbolic edifice of the Middle Kingdom would collapse – hence his enthusiastic support for China’s new Napoleon, the generalissimo Yuan Shikai, to whose son he served as personal physician in 1912–13. Segalen’s notion of “fiction”, formulated to counter the damnable “lie” of organized religion, was inspired by his readings of Nietzsche (or at least the Nietzsche of his turn-of-the-century French popularizer, Jules de Gaultier). In a series of letters written to Claudel in 1915 in response to the latter’s missionary attempts to save his soul, Segalen outlined a credo based on “la doctrine spectaculaire et l’esth�tique essentielle”. Refusing the idea of a personal God and the possibility of redemption by anyone other than oneself, he instead insisted on “le grand illusionnisme du monde, la prestidigitation des apparences sur lesquelles on a souffl� et qui s’en vont”. This Nietzschean view of the world as a theatre of beautiful and fleeting illusion, he remarked, was close to that of Taoism – “cette vision ivre de l’univers: d’une part, la p�n�tration à travers les choses lourdes, et la facult� d’en voir à la fois l’avers et le revers; d’autre part, la d�gustation ineffable de la beaut� dans les apparences fuyantes”. </p><p>With the exception of his anti-novel, Ren� Leys (recently reissued by New York Review Books) and his studies of Chinese art (The Great Statuary of China and Paintings), most of Segalen’s writings on China – which come to some 1,000 pages in his two-volume Oeuvres complètes – remain untranslated into English. Stèles, first published privately in Peking in 1912 and then revised in 1914, has been better served in English translation, no doubt because its poetry offers a late Symbolist counterpart to Ezra Pound’s contemporaneous Cathay: previous translations include those by Nathaniel Tarn (1969), Michael Taylor (1987) and Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (1990). But it is only with Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush’s handsomely produced new critical edition that English-speaking readers can at last get a sense of the book’s exquisite layout through their en face facsimile reproduction of its original mise en page. As a physical objet d’art, the Peking edition of Stèles is an Oriental rarity worthy of the library of Des Esseintes – fin-de-siècle aestheticism here taken to extremes by its author’s fetishistic attention to the material textures of book production and design. Segalen had the first three dozen copies of the book printed on Korean imperial tribute paper made from silk floss and mulberry bark, the better to register the bleeding of type into the page. These pages were in turn pasted together to form a single long sheet of paper which was folded, concertina-style, on to itself – a technique traditionally used for Buddhist sutras but which also alludes to the infolded hymen or “unanime pli” of Mallarm�’s ideal inviolate Book. The volume was then bound with boards of camphor wood tied up with two ribbons of yellow silk and engraved with the title in both French and Chinese (the characters Gu jin bei lu, “A Record of Steles Old and New”). Segalen restricted the initial print run to eighty-one copies (nine times nine, the number of tiles on the roof of the inner palace of the Forbidden City) and, in the second edition, included sixty-four poems (eight times eight, the number of hexagrams in the Book of Changes). The silence that greeted the volume on its initial publication in 1912 was near total: Claudel, to whom the volume was graciously dedicated, took a year and a half to reply, and then only with faint praise; the only person to have fully grasped Segalen’s bibliographical experiment in cultural cross-dressing was the ever-alert Remy de Gourmont. </p><p>The sixty-four steles displayed in Victor Segalen’s imaginary museum, each poem-tablet lineated into short prose paragraphs and framed by a rectangular rule, are thematically divided according to the spatial coordinates of traditional Chinese cosmography. The initial “Steles Facing South”, spoken in the persona of an emperor of the fictional Kingdom of the Self, mock the various foreign religions that had implanted themselves in China – Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Buddhism – in world-weary tones that recall the ironic fatalism of Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The subsequent section, “Steles Facing North”, explores the opaque relation between Self and Other on a more personal level – the vagaries of male friendship, unrequited desires. “Oriented Steles”, perhaps the weakest section of the book, in turn moves into lyrical poems of praise of the beloved, with fragments lifted from the Confucian Books of Odes and Li Po, here recomposed into the sensual, anaphoric cadences of the Song of Songs. In “Occidented Steles”, the devotion the poet feels for his Sovereign Lady is translated into the loyalty the soldier shows to his Prince even in the face of death: the fundamental conflict between Subject and Object is here dramatized in epic fashion as the battle between Warrior and Foe. The following “Steles by the Wayside”, many of which are spoken by the stone tablets themselves, apostrophize various passers-by in celebration of spirits of the place, while the final section, “Steles of the Middle”, leaves two-dimensional space altogether in order to delve into the netherworld of the innermost (and most ineffable) Empire of the Self – the domain of the Hidden Name, a secret realm beyond all representation and (in an obvious slap at Claudel’s Connaissance de l’Est) inaccessible to all forms of knowledge. </p><p>The various cultural and epistemological impasses explored in Stèles – the Self’s inability to comprehend the Other or, obversely, its narcissistic misrecognition of itself as a doppelg�nger instance of the Same – are in the end only resolved at the purely aesthetic level of the text. Indeed, when asked to define the purport of these poems, Segalen inevitably characterized them as experiments in sheer form. Writing to his mentor Jules de Gaultier in 1913, he observed: </p><p>"The Chinese stone steles contain the most tiresome of literature: the praise of official virtues, a Buddhist ex-voto, the pronouncement of a decree, an exhortation to good conduct. It is therefore neither the spirit nor the letter, but simply the “Stele”-form itself that I have borrowed. I deliberately seek in China, not ideas, not subjects, but forms. I thought the “Stele”- form might lend itself to a new literary genre, which I’ve tried to establish with a few examples: a short text, bordered by a kind a rectangular frame in the mind and presenting itself to the reader in frontal fashion." </p><p>Above all conceived as a “mould” into which he might pour his thoughts, a “Stele” for Segalen is therefore an empty rectangular surface (or blank face, as it were) awaiting inscription, a site ready to receive the lapidary traces of the (Chinese) Other and reflect them back at the (Western) reader, who in turn will supply the shifting mental frames for their beholding. At their most modernist (and most conceptual), Segalen’s Stèles can be seen as a kind of combinatoire – serial variations on a pre-established matrix or grid whose abstract signs (as he notes in his preface) “do not express; they signify; they are”. At their most traditional, their “new” genre rejoins the ancient practice of epigram – whether this harks back to the incised compactions of Martial or Maurice Scève or to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sense of the sonnet as “a moment’s monument”, carved in time. </p><p>But as this new and handsomely annotated edition of Stèles eloquently demonstrates, the “form” in which Segalen is most fundamentally working is in fact that of translation – Walter Benjamin around this period was among the first to speak of translation as a (neo-Kantian) “form”. Segalen had initially thought of presenting the volume as a collection of (pseudo-)translations along the lines of Pierre Lou&yuml;s’s “Sapphic” Chansons de Bilitis or Prosper M�rim�e’s “Illyrian” La Guzla, but decided in the end that he would rather leave the status of Stèles “equivocal”: it would ultimately be up to the reader to decide whether these were translations or original compositions. One of the great merits of this edition is to underscore just how pervasively these poems deconstruct the hierarchical distinctions between original and copy through their elaborate intertextual play of quotation, adaptation, plagiarism, pastiche and, of course, translation. Billings and Bush have surpassed all previous editors of the book in sleuthing out all its Chinese sources, as well as the various French or Latin translations of the dynastic texts the poet was working from: sinologists will discover the Borgesian archive of Segalen’s vast readings in Volume Two of this edition, conveniently available online. What emerges out of all this is the radically bilingual nature of Segalen’s poetics, for this edition asks that we read his Chinese seriously and not just decoratively (particularly the idiogrammic epigraphs that flank the titles of each poem and the various calligraphic punctuations of the text) while at the same time attending to his thereby deterritorialized French. </p><p>Yeats once commented that in some of Pound’s Imagist lyrics it seemed as if the poet “were translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece”. The same uncanny impression is frequently created by many of Segalen’s Stèles, as Haun Saussy points out in his brilliant foreword to this edition, subtitled “How to Translate from a Nonexistent Original”. For just as Segalen spoke of transferring “the Empire of China into the Empire of the Self”, that is, of derealizing China into a purely imaginative, purely allegorical topos of his own transplanted identity, so in Stèles he manages to produce poems that hover somewhere between actual and virtual translation, producing what Saussy calls a “parallax or interlanguage” through the unstable encounter of two semiotic – and cultural – systems. This, as Benjamin argued, was the highest and most messianic mission of translation – to release that “reine Sprache”, or “sheer language”, that lies in the space in between (and beyond) the mutual estrangements of all human utterance. To the extent that Segalen’s Stèles are already engaged in this task of translation at every point within the reticulated inscriptions (or in Chinese, wen) of their own stone tablets, the en face English versions by Billings and Bush can only look on helplessly from a distance, obviously overawed by the enigmatic aura of the Sino-French originals. </p><p></p><p><br /><br /><b>Richard Sieburth</b>’s editions of Ezra Pound’s Poems and Translations and Pisan Cantos appeared in 2003. His new translation of Georg B�chner’s Lenz was published in 2005. </p><br /><div class="clear"></div><div class="padding-top-5"></div></div><div class="bg-666"><div class="padding-top-2"></div></div><div class="padding-bottom-10"></div><div class="width-100-percent padding-bottom-10"><div class="bg-fff"><p class="small"></p><p class="x-small color-666"><a class="color-06c" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/tools_and_services/services/advertising/">Contact our advertising team</a> for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. Search <a class="color-06c" href="http://globrix.com/">globrix.com</a> to buy or rent UK property.</p><p class="x-small color-666">&copy; Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.</p><p class="x-small color-666">This service is provided on Times Newspapers' <a class="color-06c" href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/tools_and_services/services/terms_and_conditions/">standard Terms and Conditions</a>. 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曾园

Paul Claudel的《认识东方》也刚刚出版。我好像是上个月拿到的。很有意思的书。 <br />