![]() It’d be the first edition, released in 1985, and he’d march his, say, chaotic evil wu jen – a lawlessly eccentric spellcaster– across the exoticizing fever dream of Kara-Tur. In a hypothetical spin-off called Dungeons & Dragons & Poets, I can picture Pound playing Oriental Adventures. For most of the major critical theorists, I stooped to Wikipedia. Acting on FOMO, I assigned myself some extra reading: a little bit of Aristotle – in Chinese translation, so it felt virtuous. When I was trying to get my Mandarin up to speed, they were mainlining canonical texts – the white people kind, from Plato to Foucault. I started reading it because, in undergrad, a lot of my friends were people who all met in a Great Books program, without me. My favorite cheat sheet for the western canon was this webcomic called Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers: Simone de Beauvoir running a game for Foucault, Derrida, Kant, and her real-life partner Jean-Paul Sartre. We all have our guilty pleasures, I guess. Despite my blood and all my historical training, I can’t help but be moved when white, Anglophone poets write about Confucius. I’ve got this sense of unease that I’m really just an Orientalist of the old school, given to flights of irresponsible lyricism over the Middle Kingdom. ![]() Maybe more reasonably, since I was born in China – though I’ve spent far less of my life there than De Mailla, who read better classical Chinese, I’m sure. I’m a historian of China, a PhD candidate trying to ink over with citations and cleverness all the blanks of what I still don’t know. It’s this automatic sparking of feeling, like an electric current – so easy it feels cheap. The lines act on me like the mechanical dip of a switch, that makes the circuitry in my nerves and muscles dance just right. I don’t know why this bit of poetry always gets me, but the fact that they do feels overdetermined. The poem’s speaker, who remembers historians leaving blanks? That was Confucius. There are blanks in the narrative – presumably for the things they didn’t know: both Pound and his source, the Jesuit scholar Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla, whose name was as long as the 12-volume history he wrote from the mission field in Beijing. They offer the famously Sinophile poet’s fractured, free versey take on imperial Chinese history, from the mythical, deep-BC sage-emperors to a century into the final dynasty. ![]() These four lines come from Canto XIII, from a poem cycle usually called the China Cantos. They go like this:Ī day when the historians left blanks in their writings But there’s this handful of lines from Ezra Pound that always make me feel like there’s a fist beneath my breastplate, pressing into the wet pink walls of my chest. I’m not the kind of person who gets sappy over poetry.
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