Late or early coming from Sam-pa,
Before you come, write me a letter:
To welcome you, don’t talk of distance,
I’ll go as far as the Long Wind Sands!
(Kern 199)Both Cooper and Yip follow Fenollosa in rendering the Yangtse port Chofusa
as “Long Wind Sand[s].”^3 But Pound, here and frequently in Cathay, insists
on retaining the Chinese name, even if he often has to make it up, as is the
case in the poem “Separation on the River Kiang,” where the phrase ko jin
(“old acquaintance”) is turned into a proper name, “Ko-jin” (“Ko jin goes
west from Ko-kaku-ro”).^4 The “river Kiang” is a related example of what we
might call Pound’s hyper-naming project. In colloquial Chinese, as Yunte
Huang observes, Kiang (“river”) usually refers to a particular Kiang—the
Yangtse—just as suburbanites in the New York area will talk of going “into
the city” when they mean “New York City.”^5 Thus, when Pound’s river mer-
chant’s wife suggests to her husband, “If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,” she is, so to speak, repeating herself.
Such overdetermination of nouns and noun phrases is typically Poun-
dian. In Cathay, as in “Near Perigord,” “Provincia Deserta,” and especially
in The Cantos, Pound’s is a poetry studded with proper names, whether
of ¤ctional or real persons and places: the names of Greek deities, Chi-
nese emperors, or Roman poets, or of actual persons and places from his
own acquaintance, ranging from local restaurants in the Tyrol to London
acquaintances—all of these rendered by formal names, nicknames, pet names,
and names in various American or foreign dialects. The later Cantos embed
such proper names in a structure of Chinese ideograms (which themselves
function as names) as well as passages of found text, so that citation, used
sparingly by Pound’s fellow modernist poets, becomes the preferred poetic
material. But the question is why. Why this longing to turn words that have
speci¤c meanings into proper names—names that designate a particular per-
son or place and hence restrict the possibilities of reference? Why is “Cho-
fu-sa” preferable to “Long Wind Sands”?
The usual answer is that the proper name is a form of concrete image,
that the title “Separation on the River Kiang” has a speci¤city that would
be missing if the title were merely “Separation on the River.” Proper names,
by this account, are part and parcel of Pound’s Imagist, and later Vorti-
cist, doctrine, with its call for “direct treatment of the thing” and the “new
method” of “luminous detail.”^6 The Image, we read in Gaudier-Brzeska, is
“the point of maximum energy,” the “primary pigment”; it is “a radiant node
Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 41