Two unusual characters appear in the closing lines of Ezra Pound’s
Canto CXII (from his “Drafts and Fragments”) characters that may offer up the
most complete example of Pound’s much - discussed “ideogrammic method”. The
characters discussed in this paper belong to the Naxi dongba script, the logographic
writing system of a tribe in China’s south-western province of Yunnan Pound’s
sources are analysed and a new theory of the origin of the two characters—from
Joseph Rock’s translation of a Naxi ritual text—is put forward The two Naxi
dongba characters in Canto CXII unlock the meaning of the canto within which they
appear, and echo themes that run through the Cantos when taken as a whole But we
can also see Pound using both pictorial and phonetic elements of the script to create
a “cumulative ideogram”, and through this comparative Poundian lens we can
update our historically limited understanding of the Naxi writing system.

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• Beyond the pictogram: echoes of the Naxi in Ezra Pound’s Cantos