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AN ESSAY ON THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER
Narration Jules Laforgue Tristan Corbière Arthur Rimbaud Remy de Gourmont De Régnier Emile Verhaeren Vielé-Griffin Stuart Merril Laurent Tailhade Francis Jammes Moréas Spire Vildrac Jules Romains Unanimisme De Bosschère's study of Elskamp Albert Mockel and "La Wallonie"
III. REMY DE GOURMONT, a Distinction followed by notes
Eliot Joyce Lewis An Historical Essayist The New Poetry Breviora
V. OUR TETRARCHAL PRECIEUSE A divagation from Jules Laforgue
VI. GENESIS, or the first book in the Bible
IX. An essay on THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER by the late ERNEST FENOLLOSA, edited by Ezra Pound
The time when the intellectual affairs of America could be conducted on a monolingual basis is over. It has been irksome for long. The intellectual life of London is dependent on people who understand the French language about as well as their own. America's part in contemporary culture is based chiefly upon two men familiar with Paris: Whistler and Henry James. It is something in the nature of a national disgrace that a New Zealand paper, "The Triad," should be more alert to, and have better regular criticism of, contemporary French publications than any American periodical has yet had.
I had wished to give but a brief anthology[1] of French poems, interposing no comment of my own between author and reader; confining my criticism to selection. But that plan was not feasible. I was indebted to MM. Davray and Valette for cordial semi-permissions to quote the "Mercure" publications.
Certain delicate wines will not travel; they are not always the best wines. Foreign criticism may sometimes correct the criticism _du cru_. I cannot pretend to give the reader a summary of contemporary French opinion, but certain French poets have qualities strong enough to be perceptible to me, that is, to at least one alien reader; certain things are translatable from one language to another, a tale or an image will "translate"; music will, practically, never translate; and if a work be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain properties seem to become less apparent, or less important. Fancy styles, questions of local "taste," lose importance. Even though I know the overwhelming importance of technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have for me the importance they have to a man writing in that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a foreigner is the presentation of content as free as possible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian a la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmanship. This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the only _mæstria_.