…in the course of the years the study of foreign languages had become almost a mania with Chwostik, indeed a sort of collector’s mania (as exemplified by his acquiring Armenian as a particularly exquisite ‘piece’)…
– Heimito von Doderer
(The Waterfalls of Slunj, p. 144)
This is how we spent our morning: sitting on the floor next to the heater, poring canonically through our grammar books, finding here a rule and there an exception, and in yet another place something as yet incomprehensible. Of late, I have been particularly enjoying Armenian verbs1. For one thing, they are relatively simple to form, and for the most part extremely regular, with two conjugations and a few oddities. For another, they have these infixes that seem so minute (a letter or two) and yet change the meaning entirely, making this intransitive verb transitive, or that other one reflexive or passive; this seems to me, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, an economical and elegant way of putting together a language.
Take, for instance, the verb ‘to learn’: սովորել(soverel); add the causative infix -ցն (tsn) and you have ‘to teach’: սովորեցնել (soveretsnel).2 The way the infix creates associates between actions which one may or may not think of as connected is quite pleasing. To remember հիշել (hishel) can become to remind հիշեցնել (hishetsnel), to be happy ուրախանալ (urakhanal), to make happy ուրախացբել (urakhatsnel). That’s one thing.
Then there’s the reflexive or passive or medio-passive or the whatever you want to call it -վ (v) infix.3 So one has ‘to write’ գրել (grel) and ‘to be written’ գրվել (grvel), to read կարդալ (kardal) and ‘to be read’ կարդացվել (kardatsvel); ‘to shave’ սափրել (sap’rel), ‘to shave oneself’ սափրվել (sap’rvel). For -el conjugation verbs, one can also combine the causative and -v infixes for even more amusement and confusion.4 So ‘to make someone shave’ սափրեցնել (sap’retsnel) and ‘to make someone shave themselves’ սափրեցվել (sap’retsvel). I should here mention that this last is, although grammatically possible, not something that I’ve actually heard, and so one might say that it is not actually Armenian, but if it’s not Armenian, then what is it? I don’t know.
You reach a point in learning a language – usually sometime shortly after you can successfully ask and understand the way to the lavatory – when one word, usually a little word, will trip you up in supposed subtleties, tumble you into an ecstasy of confusion out of all proportion to its importance in actual use.1 The mention of this word in conversation, the delicate proportions of its appearance on the page, you greet with perturbation mingled with inexpressible2 delight. Oh these little words, of clear and unclear meaning, these adverbs, these prepositions, these postpositions, these nebulous, numinous specks upon the (in)certitude of syntax!
The current irritating particle is the Armenian էլի (eli), which one dictionary helpfully glosses as ‘adv. 1) again. 2) more.’3 A more helpful dictionary observed that eli also means ‘again, anew, more, some more, still, now, well’.4 This is not the half of it. For instance, when someone asks you what you’re eating, you can say: կաբտռֆիլ էլի (kartofil eli) which doesn’t mean just ‘more potatoes’ or ‘potatoes again’, but seems to mean something more like, ‘potatoes of course, as you can see by looking at my plate, numbskull’. գնում ես էլի (gnûm es eli) which isn’t ‘you’re going again’ but is rather ‘you’re going aren’t you’ or ‘so you’re going, huh’. One speaker seemed to use eli in every sentence, much as an English speaker might say ‘like’, ‘well’ or ‘y’know’. Between the dictionary and what I was hearing I became a bit confused, so I looked in our textbook and found the following:
The ‘colloquial հա էլի (ha eli)expression is translated into English as Oh, yes, that’s right. The particle էլի softens the tone of the speech especially in the imperative sentences and could be translated with the word please. It has some other meanings, too. The expression լավ էլի makes a request stronger.5
This was a step in the right direction. I also checked A.V. Gevorkian’s East Armenian Course, but as it has no index and my Armenian browsing skills aren’t particularly good, I couldn’t find an entry on eli, though I did find several pages on էլ (el), which set me to thinking about the stress of eli. Most Armenian words (or all, depending on who you ask or what dialect you’re dealing with) are stressed on the ultima (unless the final syllable is a written or unwritten schwa), but eli is stressed on the penult. This might mean nothing at all, but it could also mean that eli was formed from el i, with the friendly modal word el meaning ‘also, too, as well’ and i being an archaic form of ‘to be’. It’s a comfort to speculate, anyhow.
Frankly I don’t know anything at all about eli and do not have sufficient language to ask the question and understand the answer even if I did know someone who would be able to answer.6 Someday I am sure I shall understand it, and be able to use it correctly and instinctively. For now, though, the Armenian I speak will sound a little odd, eli.
Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
Robert Musil, ‘The Paintspreader’,
in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, p. 67
When reading, I don’t always look up the words I don’t know the meaning of – usually because context is enough, but often just because of laziness. This habitual sloth set me on a false scent with the following passage:
Nobody, probably not even Kathy, need ever be aware of his spiritual child Katherine Volkov; unless some tittuping archivist picked up a scent on a scholarly ramble and thought to enliven scholarship with muck.
‘Tittuping’ is the word in question, and I assumed a meaning of uppity or impertinent or trespassing. Fear of error hounded me, nagged at my conscience for twenty minutes or more until at last I turned to the dictionary:
tittuping, ppl. a. That tittups*; bouncing, cantering, prancing; transf., rollicking, lively; also, unsteady, rickety.
1796 Campaigns 1793-4 II. vii. 44 My pen glances off into titupping strains. 1809 Theo. Jones Hist. Breckn. II. 542 The poem concludes in such galloping tittuping rhymes as almost compel the reader to forget the merits the author certainly possesses. 1824 Scott St. Ronan’s xiii, The ‘Dear me’s’ and ‘O laa’s’ titupping misses, and the oaths of the pantalooned or buckskinned beaux. 1833 New Monthly Mag. XXXVIII. 300 The appropriateness of the harmony itself sinks before the tittuping of an arpeggio bass. 1868 Morn. Star 30 Jan., For such poetic cantering, such tit-tupping of Pegasus in a rhythmic Rotten Row. 1895 Mrs. B. M. Croker Village Tales (1896) 76 They kept up a steady tittuping canter, raising a cloud of dust.
I mention this only because the equine/hunting overtones make the sentence from White that much richer than it might otherwise have been – the scholar a huntsman pursuing a quarry rather than a nosy rambler peeping through hedges.
‘Tittuping’ is also (just by the way) a participle favored by arts reviewers in UK dailies; see, e.g. The Guardian:
She has a wonderful habit, while trying to hide the escaped prisoner, of hitching up her skirt and tittuping across the stage in high heels.
and Telegraph:
Fragmented and episodic, it starts arrestingly with ghostly shushing sounds and moving searchlights picking out a lone dancer in black tittuping nervily on the balls of her feet.
Such usage defies comment.
* tittup, Chiefly dial. [app. echoic, from the sound of the horse’s feet.]
At the end of March there was a puff piece about Anne Carson in the NY Times, occasioned by a staged reading of her translation of, I think, Euripides’ Hekabe.1 One short passage attracted my attention:
For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. ‘Homer’s a poet,’ she said. ‘I would say I make things.’
This could pass as modesty, if Aristotle had never been done into English. Why? In his treatise on poetry, our favorite peripatetic refers to poetic composition with the word ποίησις from the verb ποιέω, which is commonly translated as ‘to make, create or produce’. From this vantage, Carson’s seeming distinction between poetic composition and ‘making things’ sounds false, or at least preciously sly. I must admit, though, that the bleak light it casts on the character and future of ‘the poet’ is amusing, for she obliquely implies that a ‘poet’ is perfected, completed, dead,2 though the making of things – the poiesis – continues. Is the NYTimes journalist meant to grasp this? If not, then for whom is such cleverness displayed? On whom is the joke perpetrated? Call it wit, call it arrogance, I call it unnecessary. But only a pedant would say every utterance must be dictated by ἀνάγκη.
Perhaps I would be willing to forgive this sort of opacity if I actually liked her poems, but I find I must agree with one reviewer (of The Autobiography of Red) who finds that ‘in spite of its surface of high intellectualism, it is an easy read, the same sort of psychological baring that one finds in much confessional poetry, the “literary” equivalent of a beach towel novel.’ To complain about the facility of her poetry immediately after lamenting the ‘difficulty’ of her manner might seem the sign of an addled mind, if both complaints did not spring from the same source: irritation with (an apparent) lack of substance beneath the surface cleverness. But mere generalizations won’t forward my point – best to look at a poem.3
1. Dinitia Smith, ‘A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion’, 27 March 2004; one has to pay to access it online, which is why there is no link.
2. Or, depending on how you feel about the historicity of Homer, non-existant.
3. I would call it a text, but that word annoys me; please consider the word ‘poem’ to be a shorthand for ‘words arranged on a page in a decidedly un-proselike fashion’. Also, I apologize for using the words ‘poetry’ and ‘verse’ interchangeably.
postation · postpositive · postprandial · post-haste · dumb as a post · postage · postulate · postilion · postalize · imposture · postliminy · by post · ‘ oh, omne animal triste!’ · postless · post-mortem · posthumous · posterity · post factum · ergo propter hoc
Post scriptum: postreme.
‘As is’
he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir
· anodyne · bask · charming · destitution · emperish · fret · grapple · hebetude · incendiary · jest · kairos · lassitude · Mephistopheles · notoriety · omphalos · presume · quiff · restraint · sumptuous · tergiversate · unctuous · vertiginous · waffle · xiphoid · yare · zealous ·
meme (ex machina):*
Intrigue me?1 The impression is that the lay-out of the whole area resembled that of the Seraglio in Constantinople, with palaces, barracks, and other royal buildings set in an area of parkland.2 A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and it is like those countries far in the North, where it is as clear at mid-night as at mid-day.3 It can infuse vehemence and passion into spoken words in many ways, and when combined with argumentative passages it not only persuades the auditor but actually enslaves him.4 Wheresoever a thinker appeared, there in the thing he thought-of was a contribution, accession, a change or revolution made.5 The duke himself only rarely paid a visit north of the rivers and, when he did, stayed only briefly.6
* Take the nearest six to ten books from your shelf; open them to page 23, and find the fifth sentence: write down those sentences and arrange them to form a short story; post the text in your journal along with these instructions.
The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
fragment of a dialogue
Is there a reason you haven’t bathed in almost a week?
Is there a reason you consider my personal hygiene to be of general interest?
Answer the question.
Yes. There is a reason.
Would you care to elaborate?
When have I ever cared to elaborate?
Let me rephrase: please share your reasons…
…for not bathing?
Quite.
I’m not sure I can be brief about about it…
I have as much time as you can spare.
I see. I am, as you know, attempting to work; by which I mean I am in the midst of intellection — not a sweaty business, though strenuous. Carefully I build up collections of thoughts, precariously balanced until mortared together with words. Through long days and longer nights I sort these thoughts. I cannot be swayed from my labor. I must work. Without distraction — which even you will have realized bathing must be.
· · · · ·
The act of bathing then becomes the ultimate act of poesis — until the process begins again.
Do you actually believe any of that?
Not really.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.