Abstract
Western fascination for Eastern poetic diction is vastly documented, in several latitudes and languages, and has resulted in an impressive output in the field of poetry. It is known that Pound’s reinvention of Chinese poetry, largely at the origin of his proposal for a revolution in the poetic language, in the first decades of the 20th century, was actually based on a fallacy: on a misconception of the nature of Chinese (and Japanese) writing as essentially pictographic and ideogrammatic, based on expressive properties recognized in poetry that would prove to be particularly effective in the apprehension and translation of the real. Pessanha praises the writing of classical Chinese poetry in terms similar to the Poundian exaltation. We will review some inventories of the features of Chinese and Japanese poetic diction that explain why it is taken as a metonymy and metaphor of poetry, or as a goal and utopia of poetry, in order to understand what led very different authors to try their hand at haikus. Along this process, we will probe some poetic formulations in Portuguese. We also consider that this fascination with a (dreamed of) origin of poetic diction resulted in very interesting poems, when crossed with the (non-metaphorical, in this case) inhabiting of the tiny enclave of Macau, by authors who settled there. In this approach we will comment on poems by Eugénio de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner, José Tolentino Mendonça, Yao Feng, Fernanda Dias and Fernando Sales Lopes.
Keywords:
poetry; chinese poetry; haiku; Pound; fallacy; exchanging of voices; Macau