Wa n j i n a , w e k n ow, is a proper name, but Ouan Jin (wen ren in contemporary
Chinese) is, as Yunte Huang has pointed out to me, nobody’s name, only a
category. The two-character phrase means “literatus” (or “literata,” depend-
ing on the context). So Pound’s lines actually say, “but Wanjina is, shall
we say, a literatus / or the man with an education.” But in calling Wanjina
“Ouan Jin” and then adding “the man with an education” (where we would
expect “a man”), Pound, as Huang observes, “makes Ouan Jin sound like
someone’s name, a character in Chinese history, a counterpart of Australia’s
Wanjina.... What is originally a category is now made a proper name. The
verbal trick is actually quite astounding.”^29
Perhaps this is why Pound, again like Duchamp, whose readymades have
remained sui generis, has proved to be so dif¤cult to imitate. Pound’s heirs
from Louis Zukofsky to Black Mountain and beyond have not quite been able
to reproduce his modes of naming. I have sometimes tried, as a classroom
experiment, to allow students to substitute for the requisite term paper a
sample Canto. It is invariably the popular choice because it seems so easy.
Ta k e X number of Greek and Latin names and phrases, then interlard the
“right” Chinese ideograms, references to Italian Renaissance history and art,
Provençal poetry, Jefferson and Adams in correspondence, contemporary
references, jokes, dialogue in different accents, and anti-Semitic slurs, and
presto—a Canto!
But what such exercises cannot reproduce, so subtle is Pound’s nominalist
technique, is the infrathin distinction that separates the singing grillo of the
Pisa prison camp from all other insects, beginning with its English counter-
part, the cricket. Such discrimination underscores the intense mobility of
the poetic construct and calls for intense reader participation: in Canto 80,
for example, still more restaurants are introduced—the wiener café (Can-
tos 526), “which died into banking” (i.e., a bank was built on its site), Florian’s
on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Claridge’s in London, the “bar of the
Follies / as Manet saw it” (the reference is to Manet’s famous mirror por-
trait of a young woman called Bar at the Follies Bergère). Each of these adds
yet another dimension or differential to Pound’s memorial: the Wiener Café,
for example, was not far from Dieudonné’s, but their respective clientele
(the former pro-German, the latter pro-French) is not to be confused. The
Wiener Café belongs with Wörgl (the Austrian village that tried the stamp-
scripp experiment), whereas Dieudonné, although in London, brings to mind
Pound’s Paris years.
“But isn’t the same at least the same?” asks Wittgenstein in the Investiga-
tions. On the same page as the “wiener café,” we ¤nd the line “(o-hon dit
queque fois au vi’age)” that we met in Canto 78 (500) as a reference to the
58 Chapter 3