CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
CALLIG RAMMES GPHC DSGN PTFL CRSE LUÍSA
Pictography probably represents man’s earliest way of expression. It focuses attention on the image, but is not as a rule successful in translation abstract concepts. The Chinese writing links the phonetic sign with the meaning. This type of writing is undoubtedly pictographic in origin, but virtually no traces of pictograms have survived in the outline of signs. To other scripts, the Sumeric and the Hieroglyphic, also borrowed from pictography before becoming ideogrammatic. They also took
far longer to decipher than any other language. Compared with these ornamental scripts, the Latin alphabet with its smaller number of sounds - symbols - or phonograms. – is totally rigid. So the art of calligraphy, which is used to vary writing to such an extent that is basic forms are exaggerated, was compelled to develop, precisely because of the progress made in printing and the increasing spread of printed books. In a way, Calligrams reconcile decorative script and typography.
The first calligrams appeared three centuries before Christ, in Ancient Greece. They are known as “Figured Verses”, or as “rhopalic Verses” (from the Greek rhopalon = mace). Such names were given to these texts because of the way they were arranged and the way they increased and diminished, which meant that the overall composition conjured up the image of mace. For the same reason, they were sometimes classified as “pyramid verses”. Simmias of Rhodes, who lived during the reign of Ptolemy, is the author of these poems. He left
three pieces of figured verse: “Wings”, “Egg”, and “Axe”. Each of the “wings” consist of six feathers pictorially represented by six verses which become gradually shorter the nearer they get to the centre. The author makes the winged god, Cupid, speak though them. The “Egg” composition is rather more erudite and its meaning remained obscure until an ancient scholiast discovered that the reader was intended to travel from the first verse to the last, then from the second to the second-to-last, and
so on until he comes to the middle lines. The pþem tells of a Dorian nightingale’s egg which is dedicated to the reader. The egg is a very frequent symbol in the Greek mythology, and its culture in general. Apollo and Aphrodite were born from the same egg.
It is perfectly possible that Apollinaire also knew a collection of figured poems which are forerunners of his own calligrams and were found in 1839. It is a Carolingian version (now in the British Museum) of a poem by he greek author Aratus. It bears the title “Phenomena” and it is an “astronomical” manuscript listing many heavenly bodies, their positions, their degree in brilliance, and theirs relationship with the twelve zodiac signs. The twenty- five plates which make up the manuscript represent a succession of figures comprising characters from fables, birds, fish and various objects; among which we come across Perseus, a hydra, a dolphin, a swan, and eagle, a
ship, the planets, a lyre, the sign for delta, etc.
In the eighteenth century, figured compositions became popular, specially in France. They are often satirical. The next page displays the profile of Queen Marie Antoinette forming the last letter she wrote from the Concièrgerie, on 6 October 1793, at 4:30 in the morning just before she set off for the scaffold. Louis XVI’s last will and testament was written in a similar way; and the same is true of Napoleon’s speeches.
Stéphane Mallarmé, “the master of lay-out, master of the book”, stresses the part played by the blank space – that “pregnant silence which is no less fine to compose than the actual lines” – on the printed page; for him reading begins with the white space, which precedes the text. He was interested in the techniques of making up and laying out a newspaper or a poster, and outlined a physical structure for printed matter, taking as his starting-point the “popular magic” which is made up of main and secondary themes, where the black headings offer an interplay of tone with the grey of the text. Mallarmé didn’t compose any calligrams. Yet what would his “coup de Dés”, which after all
consists of a mere two phrases, look like if it were arranged into compact rectangular blocks. This is an example of a genuine calligram (in Latin, the same word denotes “form” and “beauty”). “I seemed to see a figure of a thought, which had been set down in our space for the first time”, reported Paul Valéry, to whom Mallarmé had showed the final the final draft of his poem. “Here, truly, space itself spoke, thought, gave birth to temporal forms.” The phrase “Un coup de dés jamais nábolira le hasard” (“chance never will never be abolished by the throw of a dice”) represent a musical score composed of words, a visual symphony and, to Valéry, the orchestration of a poetic idea.
Raymond Queneau tried to create a “never ending book”. His “Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes” is made up from ten sonnets with each line printed on a detachable slip of paper, which allows the reader to choose what he fancies from 10 different poems; this makes a hundred thousand thousand million of them. One hundred thousand thousand million of poems in the next page:
The most famous English calligram is probably in Alice in Worderland. It is a play of words about “a long and sad tale” in form of a spiral, like a mouse’s tail. In Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript the tail seemed to fit in better with the narrative because it depended on the mouse’s hatred for dogs and cats. The tail may have originated with Alfred Lord Tennyson, who told Carroll of a dream he had, in which he imagined that he had written a long poem about fairies, beginning with extremely long lines and then tapering down to lines of no more than two syllables each.
Guillaume Apollinaire was the first person to use the word “callligrammes”, as a title for a collection of his work published in 1918. Before “lês calligrammes”, e in 1914 he wrote “álbum d’ideogrammes lyriques” with the letters to “Lou”. In “Poémes à Lou”, we find a fig, a cigarette, a brandy flask, a mirror, a 75 millimetre gun, an orange, etc. Sometimes the verse will flicker like a flame or spiral downwards, sometimes it describes the curves of a pair of breasts. Sometimes the figured object is inserted in the
text, or alternatively, the pictorial composition involves the whole poem, and corresponds to the title, as in “Mandoline, carnation and bamboo” and “heart crown and Mirror”, which is displayed in the nest page. After the poet’s death many other calligrams were discovered in his correspondence. Calligrams of clocks, a Twelfth-cake, birds, Picasso’s thumb are a few examples. In “Lésprit Nouveau et Les Poètes”, a conference given in 1917, il gave the following definition to his calligrams: “Typographic gimmicks dandled with great daring have the advantage of giving rise to a visual lyricism which was virtually unknown to previous generations. These
tricks and devices can go even further and achieve a synthesis of the arts, of music, painting, and literature”. To Apollinaire it was not just evoking shapes by making poems. He wanted to give another dimension to writing. He prayed for an art of expression which would allow the reader “to read a whole poem at a single glance, just as a conductor reads the superimposed notes in a musical score, all at once, so one can see these plastic and printed elements”. “poets will have a freedom they have never known up to now: when typography had reached the least brilliant phase of it’s career, at
the down of the new methods represented by the cinema and the gramophone”. Apollinaire’s work was influenced by Cubism, and exercised in its turn an equally strong influence on the plastic art of his period, rather than on actual poetry. The only people to imitate his Calligrams were those who admire his work. “laisser à la typographie le soin de faire ressortire le mot important, le lyrisme”