SOURCE: Sanders, Ed. “Path of the Glyph.” American Book Review 13, no. 4 (1991): 12-13.

In the following excerpt, Sanders discusses the role of glyphs, or symbolic characters, in The Tablets and reflects on similarities between a scholarly approach to hieroglyphics and Schwerner's poetic revelation and translation of imaginary ancient texts in his epic work.

For twenty-three years Armand Schwerner has explored his obsession with the cryptic pre-Sumerian beginnings of the pictograph, in what we could call the Path of the Glyph. The results are The Tablets, a book of fictive translations and transliterations, accompanied by commentaries, of a group of 26 glyphic tablets of a civilization 4,000 years old. In this expanded version of The Tablets, Schwerner has begun exploring computer-generated glyphs, which have important implications for a type of poetry of the future—the possible re-hieroglyphization of verse.

When he began The Tablets back in the late sixties, Schwerner rightly perceived...