At Sword Point by Victor Segalen

The Qianlong Emperor in Ceremonial Armour on Horseback, 1739 or 1758,
By Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name Lang Shining, 1688—1766).
Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk.
The Palace Museum, Beijing.1739 or 1758

We horsemen astride our horses, what do we know

about sowing? But any field that can be

plowed by horse hooves, any meadow that

can be galloped across,

We have trampled.



We do not stoop to build walls or temples,

but any town that will burn, with it temples

and walls,

We have burnt down.



We honor and cherish our women who are all of

high rank; but the others, who can

be tumbled, spread apart and possessed,

We have taken.



Our seal is a spearhead; our ceremonial dress,

armor starred with dew, our silk woven

from manes. The other kind, which is softer

and fetches a price,

We have sold.



(“At Sword Point,” from Victor Segalen, Steles, trans. Michael Taylor. San Francisco, Lapis Press, 1987, no pagination)

"With the exception of his anti-novel, René Leys (recently reissued by New York Review Books) and his studies of Chinese art (The Great Statuary of China and Paintings), most of Segalen’s writings on China – which come to some 1,000 pages in his two-volume Oeuvres complètes – remain untranslated into English. Stèles, first published privately in Peking in 1912 and then revised in 1914, has been better served in English translation, no doubt because its poetry offers a late Symbolist counterpart to Ezra Pound’s contemporaneous Cathay: previous translations include those by Nathaniel Tarn (1969), Michael Taylor (1987) and Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson (1990). But it is only with Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush’s handsomely produced new critical edition that English-speaking readers can at last get a sense of the book’s exquisite layout through their en face facsimile reproduction of its original mise en page. As a physical objet d’art, the Peking edition of Stèles is an Oriental rarity worthy of the library of Des Esseintes – fin-de-siècle aestheticism here taken to extremes by its author’s fetishistic attention to the material textures of book production and design. Segalen had the first three dozen copies of the book printed on Korean imperial tribute paper made from silk floss and mulberry bark, the better to register the bleeding of type into the page. These pages were in turn pasted together to form a single long sheet of paper which was folded, concertina-style, on to itself – a technique traditionally used for Buddhist sutras but which also alludes to the infolded hymen or “unanime pli” of Mallarmé’s ideal inviolate Book. The volume was then bound with boards of camphor wood tied up with two ribbons of yellow silk and engraved with the title in both French and Chinese (the characters Gu jin bei lu, “A Record of Steles Old and New”). Segalen restricted the initial print run to eighty-one copies (nine times nine, the number of tiles on the roof of the inner palace of the Forbidden City) and, in the second edition, included sixty-four poems (eight times eight, the number of hexagrams in the Book of Changes). The silence that greeted the volume on its initial publication in 1912 was near total: Claudel, to whom the volume was graciously dedicated, took a year and a half to reply, and then only with faint praise; the only person to have fully grasped Segalen’s bibliographical experiment in cultural cross-dressing was the ever-alert Remy de Gourmont."

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3319242.ece?token=null&offset=12