John Cayley

Reading and Giving Voice and Language

In an earlier essay, I began to develop a theoretical concept, which was that of ‘mediaconstituted diegesis’ (Cayley 2010). I was concerned with the inscription of language in other media, by which...

Hallucination and Coherence

After finishing and considering his reading of Huang Yunte’s recently published translation of The Pisan Cantos into Chinese, Yang Lian commented that, for him, Ezra Pound’s poetic project seemed to have been realized—he goes so far as to say that it is “completed” (wancheng)—in the language of the translation, that is, in Chinese.1 Clearly, this is a claim that cannot be understood in any literal sense. It must be placed in some context, and Yang Lian duly provides a good deal. The claim emerges, at least in part, from ideas that had already become crucial to Yang Lian’s own poetic projects, from his engagements with contemporary Chinese poetics that have been influenced by Pound and anticipated in his work and that arguably share a number of concerns with The Cantos. However, there is also a nonexclusive possibility that Yang Lian’s stated view is the product of a hallucinated vision of Pound’s poem, one that is inescapably modulated by the position—in another language and culture—from which Yang Lian reads. One thing is