In this essay I explore the influence of Chinese poetic language and techniques on four Latin American writers, and also consider the Eurocentric distortion or underestimation of this influence. The Mexican poet Tablada, influenced more by Chinese language than by Apollinaire’s typographic experimentations, employed an “ideogrammic” technique and introduced Haiku to Latin American poetry. The Nicaraguan Dario was not (as in the Eurocentric view) a poet of superficial, exotic chinoiserie; rather, he has a profoundly synthetic world-view fusing Hindu, Buddhist, Greek and Christian philosophies. While the Cuban Casal’s orientalism was also not taken seriously, his poems display a deep understanding of Japanese and oriental culture. And the Mexican Octavio Paz believes in the Asiatic origin of the native American, which explains his deeply rooted orientalism, the fundamental “opposition and affinity” in his imagery between two elements, Chinese and American. Although Western ignorance of oriental culture has driven us to diminish the importance of oriental elements in our poetry, a period of greater sensitivity to these elements is now beginning.

Orientalism, distortion, Eurocentric, synthetic, typographic, chinoiserie, ideogrammic, Haiku, affinity, reincarnation