Learning the Language 215part of their own writing. Many other Asian cultures later
added alphabetic overlays over their use of the character
system, but still use the characters to some degree. And so
it is that, for instance, a Chinese person, a Japanese person,
and a Korean, who do not to any degree speak each other’s
languages (which fall in their spoken forms into wholly
different linguistic systems), can struggle through reading
each other’s historical texts, and even today can hold at least
a basic conversation in writing.
Thus, those frustratingly difficult, intriguingly mysterious
Chinese characters serve to give Chinese people broad
connections across time and space to their own history, and
to the past and present lives of their neighbours.
Pound’s Interpretation
The famous English poet Ezra Pound famously loved the ‘mystery’ of
Chinese characters. He declared them to be word-signs, pictographs
like the Egyptian hieroglyphs were then still widely understood
to be, not so much words to be read as suggestive imagery to be
‘deciphered’. He developed a theory of ‘visual interpretation of
Chinese poetry’, based in part on the quasi-linguistic theories of
Ernest Fenellosa, and made his own ‘translations’ (other have called
them ‘translucences’) of many classical Chinese poems, even of the
entire Analects of the philosopher Confucius.
Pound was a brilliant poet and his ‘translucences’ are brilliant
poetry, well worth reading in their own right. But he was no scholar of
Chinese. His versions of Chinese poetry were inspired by the classical
texts, but often depart widely from them (and in his later work, make
no pretext of even being connected to them). A fine analysis by George
A Kennedy of Pound’s use of Chinese characters as springboard for
his own poetry, originally published in the Yale Literary Magazine in
1958, is now available online at: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/
texts/ezra_pound_chinese.html, and is also well worth reading. The
bottom line is that in terms of his understanding of how written
Chinese works, Pound was more wrong than he was right.Making Written Chinese Simpler
As noted above, Chinese writing has evolved somewhat over
the centuries, although far less than the spoken language.
There were however two major breaks in the Chinese writing
system in the 20th century worth being aware of. The first,
leading into the 1911 revolution that toppled the last Qing