The Painful Nowning Process

English is a fabulous language. Its enormous vocabulary, gathered from any number of other languages, makes it the most flexible medium of communication on earth. Poetry famously uses onomatopoeia–words that sound like the sounds they represent, e.g. “buzz,” or “murmur.” Joseph Bottum has been meditating on the way some words sound like what they mean, even abstract meanings:

They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness.

More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe. Pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon–sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning. They’re perfect, in their way. They’re what all language wants to be when it grows up.

In the absence of any formal linguistic term for such words, he decides to call them “agenbites.” Why?:

That’s a word Michael of Northgate cobbled up for his 1340 Remorse of Conscience–or Agenbite of Inwit, as he actually titled the book. English would later settle on the French-born word “remorse” to carry the sense of the Latin re-mordere, “to bite again.” But Michael didn’t know that at the time, and so he simply translated the word’s parts: again-bite or (in the muddle of early English spelling) agenbite.

Anyway, these words that sound true need some kind of name. And since they do bite back on themselves, like a snake swallowing its tail, Michael’s term will do as well as any other. Ethereal is an agenbite, isn’t it? All ethereal and airy. Rapier, swashbuckler, erstwhile, obfuscate, spume–agenbites, every one.

The conversation about “agenbites” continues on the First Things blog:

Another writer observes that some, though not all, of this phenomenon is created by what linguists call a “phonestheme.” Coined back in the 1930s by J.R. Firth, the term names the fact that, for unknown reasons, certain sounds are associated with a particular genus of objects or actions. So, for instance, the phonestheme “gl-” appears in a surprising number of words about light: glitter, glisten, glow, gleam, glare, glint, etc.

And then things get really serious and, of course, not so much fun. But I felt that I must include the link in the interest of fairness and scholarly completeness.

“Translation is interpretation.” I’m pretty sure someone else said that first, but I can’t recall who. In any case, I say it to my students in almost every class, especially “world literature” and medieval lit, in which they often read (or want to read) translations from Old or Middle English.

A few months ago I posted about the controversy over the translation of the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” This week the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews and updates the whole story, and the four scholars most involved with translating and publicizing the ancient text: Bart Ehrman, Marvin Meyer, Elaine Pagels, who contracted with the owner of the manuscript fragments, National Geographic, to translate it and participate in a highly publicized documentary about the text, and April D. DeConick, who questioned the results:

These discoveries filled her with dread. “I was like, this is bad, and these are my friends,” she says. It’s worth noting that it didn’t take DeConick months of painstaking research to reach her conclusions. Within minutes, she thought something was wrong. Within a day, she was convinced that significant mistakes had been made. Why, if it was so obvious to her, had these other scholars missed it? Why had they seen a good Judas where, according to DeConick, none exists?

Maybe because they were looking for him. The first reference to the Gospel of Judas was made by St. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in Against Heresies, written around 180. Irenaeus was not a fan of the Gospel of Judas, which he deemed a heretical text (though it’s not known whether he actually read the gospel or had only heard rumors about it). Until the Coptic manuscript surfaced in the 1970s, Irenaeus’ mention of the gospel was the only known reference. Irenaeus wrote that the gospel portrayed Judas as “knowing the truth as no others did.” It was an intriguing statement and suggestive of a more positive Judas.

DeConick thinks the translators were overly influenced by Irenaeus and read the gospel with his interpretation in mind. If you come to the gospel free of preconceptions, she argues, then it’s clear that Judas is evil and cursed, not holy and chosen.

Last week, the Chronicle reviewed a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the first by a woman (a second will be published later this year), and also discussed the interpretive slants of other popular translations:

Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil’s tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.

“Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned,” says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. “This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?”

He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors “who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet.” That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on [Stanley] Lombardo’s 2005 version is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone.

. . .

Richard Thomas . . . points to a phrase in Lombardo’s edition . . . “Without very much justification on the level of Virgil’s Latin but a great deal of justification from what’s going on in the poem,” he says, “Lombardo writes ’shock and awe,’ which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?”

Seamus Heaney’s popular translation of Beowulf is now embedded in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and although I and many other critics have praised its readability and poetic style, they’ve also noted that it’s not always very accurate. Heaney’s introduction to the translation discusses the many parallels he found to ancient Irish culture, which some think lead to a somewhat odd result. Tom Shippey critiques the pros and cons very even-handedly.

ABC News story about the rising generation of India’s bright young things:

At age 21, [Nisha] Mehta has five people — all older than she is — working under her. And her boss says the sky’s the limit.

This is a seismic change in a country where women have, until recently, been restricted to traditional family roles. And it’s a change that has transpired within one generation in one household.

…

The changes going on in India right now — the breaking down of old barriers of gender, religion and caste — are incredibly exciting. But it’s important to realize that these changes — as of right now, at least — are only affecting a minority.

…

Mehta says she’s concerned about these inequities, but still believes there’s no place on Earth she’d rather live. In fact, she was — to my mind, at least — shockingly ambivalent about the United States…. She has no desire to live [in the US] and only lukewarm desire to even visit.

This story pins an awful lot on one young woman as a representative example. Nevertheless, it should give  overly self-satisfied US readers food for thought.

Who’s your hero? Of course, the “right” answer is “my mother!” or “my father!” or some historical figure, or a saint. But if you grew up reading books and/or watching movies and television, fictional heroes may have inspired you as much or more. And why not? Sir Philip Sidney famously argued in The Defense of Poesy that imaginative literature could be superior to both philosophy and history at teaching virtue:

Now therein of all sciences—I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit—is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness. But he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue

Put that in 21st century language by checking out NPR’s In Character series and its

profiles of some influential but imaginary characters — fictional figures who have had a deep and lasting impact on Americans’ lives.

Among the characters: The Lone Ranger, Charlie Brown, Holden Caulfield, Nancy Drew, Virgil Tibbs (the detective played by Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night), and today, my own fictional hero, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who helped a journalist keep things together while she was reporting from Iraq.

More stories of how BtVS influenced various people–some more than others–are archived here.

But I think this movie Son of Rambow (yes, that’s the spelling) might be worthwhile:

Here are some reviews. You’ll probably have to look hard to find it locally, so might have to wait for the DVD.

In the south, it’s “lhude singe mockingbird,” even though we have “cuccu”s, they aren’t nearly as remarkable as the English ones. So, exams and final papers are done, grades are filed, graduation and its celebrations have passed. We said farewell to several of our finest English majors, as we do every year. Some have plans, some–are still planning, but we expect they’ll do well whatever they do.

I’ll be cleaning up my office (or at least organizing the clutter a bit), preparing the courses I’ll be teaching this coming fall, and writing a paper for a conference in June. Not necessarily in that order.

What are you doing this summer?

That is, write stuff people might actually want to read, as opposed to that highfalutin lit’rary stuff and po’try that nobody can understand, not even you. Okay, I’m sort of kidding about that, but you can make a living writing. Unfortunately, the days when Alexander Pope could live very comfortably off the proceeds of his best-selling translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are long gone. Instead, you might have to try writing without inspiration.

Does this mean you’ll never be inspired? No. Inspiration will still come, but the problem with inspiration is … none of us can predict when it will hit. So cherish inspiration, but instead of waiting for it to produce writing, strive to produce without being inspired.

I’m not negating inspiration; I’m simply trying to guide you around it. You’ll still need inspiration to complete good writing. And it can come from a variety of places.

This is good advice for anyone who has to write, whether you hope to earn a living at it or simply produce a paper for a grade.

You can also write popular fiction. English majors galore have taken this road-more-traveled and proven that popular doesn’t have to mean trashy or poorly-written. English majors seem to enjoy reading mystery novels, and some have become very well-known as mystery novelists, including: Dorothy L. Sayers, Thomas Perry. Robert B. Parker. Amanda Cross (Carolyn G. Heilbrun), and James Lee Burke. Charles Ardai writes neo-noir “hardboiled” mysteries under the pen-name Richard Aleas, drawing on his background as a literature major. Then he and a partner launched a publishing enterprise devoted to “pulp fiction,” Hard Case Crime. Oh, and before that, Ardai was the founder and CEO of Juno.

However, if you really want to make money in the pop-fiction world, romance is the game.

The ancients had it right after all—the planets do “sing” in their orbits—well, sort of:

Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery.

. . .

In the past, the oscillations that researchers found made up this hum were “spheroidal” — they basically involved patches of rock moving up and down, albeit near undetectably.

Now oscillations have been discovered making up the hum that, oddly, are shaped roughly like rings

As Joseph Addison put it (paraphrasing Ps. 19):

The spacious firmament on high,
with all the blue ethereal sky,
and spangled heavens, a shining frame,
their great Original proclaim.
The unwearied sun from day to day
does his Creator’s power display;
and publishes to every land
the work of an almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,
the moon takes up the wondrous tale,
and nightly to the listening earth
repeats the story of her birth:
whilst all the stars that round her burn,
and all the planets in their turn,
confirm the tidings, as they roll
and spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
amid their radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
and utter forth a glorious voice;
for ever singing as they shine,
“The hand that made us is divine.”

I love that.

We’re wrapping up our semester and the seniors will be commencing out into the dreaded Real World. I turned my calendar over to May and found these words of advice for those entering new cultures (such as high school, college, or full-time employment) from Buffy’s sister Dawn:

People may say something to you you don’t understand. Just don’t be afraid to keep your mouth shut and pretend like you know what they’re saying. . . . People may say something like “My protein window closes in an hour.” Just smile and nod. Mm-hmm. (”Selfless” BtVS 7.5)

As a Third Culture Kid, I must say that this approach has brought me success in many, many situations. Sometimes, of course, you do have to ask questions.