Alphabetical

I like Michael Rosen’s work for children (I use The Sad Book in my children’s literature course at the university) and I’m always interested in what he has to say about language and lit. So I was excited to read his book, Alphabetical.

What a fun, interesting book! You can dip in and out and you can return to it, as there’s so much to learn from it. Sometimes it’s a bit random, as though you’re getting access to what’s going on in Rosen’s brain at any given moment. As he writes about the alphabet, topics range over the Rosetta Stone, nonsense, jokes, umlauts (he jokes about “adlauts”: umlauts used unnecessarily, especially in company names), fonts, and much more.

Here’s a typical example of how he gives history about each letter: “‘A’ starts its life in around 1800 BCE. Turn our modern ‘A’ upside down and you can see something of its original shape. Can you see an ox’s head with its horns sticking up in the air? If so, you can see the remains of this letter’s original name, ‘ox’, or ‘aleph’ on the ancient Semitic languages. By the time the Phoenicians are using it in around 1000 BCE it is lying on its side and looks more like a ‘K’. Speed-writing seems to have taken the diagonals through the upright, making it more like a horizontal form of our modern ‘A’ with the point on the left-hand side.” (p. 2)

But often the chapters go beyond the letter themselves. For example, K is for Korean and Rosen discusses the singer of the popular song ‘Gangnam Style’ as a way into looking at the Korean tongue. Korean is the “earliest known successful example of a sudden, conscious, total transformation  of a country’s writing.” (p. 163) In 1446, the king of Korea created a new alphabet (rather than using Chinese characters) because he was “saddened” that the people of his country couldn’t make themselves understood in writing. Rosen notes “I cannot think of anything in the world of alphabets more humane than that.” (p. 164)

Of course I was particularly interested in references to anything Scandinavian. Rosen mentions how a runestone from 1362 was found in the US in 1898, which seemed to prove that the Vikings had been in America. (p. 337) And he gives a list of some English words from Old Norse, which entered the English language when the Vikings came: “Anger, bag, bask, birth…rotten, rugged, run, skid…window, wing, wrong.” (p. 341)

Basically, this is a book can you return to many times. There’s so much information in it and it’s all fascinating. 

Twilight of the Eastern Gods

This originally appeared in the Wales Arts Review

Twilight of the Eastern Gods

by Ismail Kadare

193 pp., Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014.

translation by David Bellos from the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

Twilight of the Eastern Gods is, at its heart, a novel about words and writing. It’s about telling stories, and the importance of literature. It is also an ominous tale about politics, history, and geography, exploring the Soviet era and its concomitant political beliefs. Since the time and place frequently are depicted as rather creepy here, writing, too, can seem to be a suspicious activity.

The main character is a young foreign writer who has gone to study in a literary institute in the Soviet Union. All the students are well-known writers from their own regions, but despite their drinking and partying, they are not typical students. “At long last, after overcoming their adversaries, having accused them of Stalinism, liberalism, bourgeois nationalism, Russophobia, petty nationalism, Zionism, modernism, folklorism, etc., having crushed their literary careers and banned the publication of their works, having hounded them into alcoholism or suicide, or, more simply, having had them deported, that is to say, after having done what had had to be done, they had been inspired to come to the Gorky Institute to complete their literary education.” (pp. 43-4) Completing their literary education, it seems, involves dedicating themselves to Socialist Realism, which doesn’t quite work for our protagonist, who sometimes thinks about and employs the folklore of his native country in his writing and his everyday life.

In other words, though the Institute and the harsh political situation seem to conspire to disenchant the students in regard to literature (and also in regard to other aspects of their lives, such as romance), the protagonist still retains his passion for the written word, even if he just barely does so.

From a translation angle, an interesting aspect of this book is that it is a relay translation, albeit one that was delayed by thirty-three years. Jusuf Vrioni translated Kadare’s novel from Albanian to French, and preeminent translator David Bellos used Vrioni’s text to make the novel available in English (rather than translating from Albanian to English, in other words).

Bellos includes a helpful introduction to the novel, explaining some of the context behind it. He notes that the work “re-creates Kadare’s experience of this strange ‘factory of the intellect’ [i.e. the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow], set up to produce new generations of socialist poets, novelists and playwrights.” (p. v) Kadare apparently wrote and rewrote chapters of Twilight of the Eastern Gods over fifteen years, and the novel wasn’t first published until 1978 (the French version by Jusuf Vrioni appearing three years later, and it included sections that Kadare felt he had to take out of the Albanian original). Some aspects of the novel would be hard, or harder, to follow without Bellos’s information, or even without larger knowledge of the historical period (for example, Antaeus the Greek’s situation, pp. 74 fwd.).

While the novel is about the general themes mentioned above, it is based on an actual event: Boris Pasternak being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, much to the displeasure of the Soviet powers-that-be. Bellos discusses how “[t]he account of the Pasternak campaign given in Twilight of the Eastern Gods has nothing fictional about it: the discovery of a part of the typescript in the Writers’ Union residence, the co-ordination of the press, radio and television campaign, the roles of specific individuals, right down to the inexplicably sudden halt – all these things really happened…it is also clear from this account of the persecution of Pasternak that Kadare could imagine finding himself in the same situation.” (p. ix) Indeed, Kadare did face similar charges and complaints to Pasternak, “but in the end his real response to the constraints of living as an international writer under a paranoid, isolationist Communist regime was the write a novel that is also a declaration of fidelity to Albania and its ancient folk culture.” (p. x) This duality – loyalty to both a place and to freedom of ideas – comes through very clearly in the novel.

In short, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a fictionalised account of Ismail Kadare’s own experiences, and it sheds light – even if only twilight – on a challenging historical, cultural, and political period, while also encouraging the reader to recognise and admire the power of literature.

The Translator Writes Back

In my last post, I mentioned scholar and Chinese-to-English translator Lucas Klein. Lucas told me about The Translator Writes Back, a new blog where translators can respond to reviews/reviewers. There isn’t yet too much action on this blog, but it looks promising and I hope more people contribute.

Town of Love

This review was originally published in Wales Arts Review. It’s worth republishing here not just because it’s about an interesting book in translation but also because the story of the book’s translation is intriguing in and of itself!

Town of Love

by Anne Ch. Ostby

278 pp., Victoria, Australia: Spinifex, 2013.

translation by Marie Ostby

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

Town of Love by Anne Ostby tells a story that arguably has not previously been discussed quite so openly, beautifully, and sorrowfully in literature before. It is a depressing read, yes, but it also has a welcome aura of hope, and belief in the human spirit. Human trafficking and prostitution are issues that must get more attention; while this novel is set in India, this is not just an Indian tale. Early on, the narrator notes, “Principles were a luxury that no one in Prem Nagar could afford.” (p. 23) Again, this could apply to many other locales around the world.

This is Ostby’s description of the women principles in Prem Nagar who are unable to afford: “Girls sitting on chairs in doorways, on covered wooden platforms, or on benches under the thatched roof, in the semi-dark entrance to what they called home. Dressed in dazzling, sequined saris, tight blouses in feisty red or elegant peacock blue, with their shining hair oiled and newly combed. Heavily made-up eyes fixed in a distant gaze, long earrings gleaming in the afternoon sun, aggressive, pink lipstick. Slouching shoulders over small, pointy breasts. The workforce of the Town of Love.” (p. 7)

If that doesn’t both break a reader’s heart and draw a reader in, it’s hard to know what would.

Norwegian novelist Anne Ostby became engaged in this topic by chance. As she wrote to me by email, “I lived in Iran at the time [in 2007], and my husband had an Indian colleague. I knew he was married, but his wife was not there, and I had heard something about her running an NGO back home in India. But she visited Tehran now and then, and during one of those visits I met her: Ruchira Gupta, founder and President of the anti-trafficking NGO Apne Aap, which has helped thousands of women get out of a life of prostitution and violence. She has received all sort of international honours for her work, the UK Abolitionist Award and the Clinton Global Citizen Award among them. Ruchira is an incredibly brave and inspiring woman, and I am honoured that she has written an afterword to the book. But back to Tehran: at our very first meeting, I asked Ruchira about her work. The more I listened to her, the more I wanted to know, and when all of a sudden she said, ”Why don’t you come visit me in India and see what we’re doing?”, I immediately thought, ”Yes, I want to do that.””

Anne did go visit Ruchira in India. She ended up making multiple trips, meeting women, seeing the work Apne Aap carried out, doing research, and, eventually, writing the novel. Anne notes that she was especially touched by the situation of Nat women in India; their families often had multiple generations of prostitutes, and Ostby, as the mother to three daughters, thought, “How it must be, how it must feel, to give birth to a baby daughter, and know, holding that tiny body in your arms, that this is going to be her future?”

That concern for the women (and even a concern for the men who pimp them out and live off them) comes through clearly in the novel. “Something had been shattered forever. All she could do now, all anyone could do, was to wrap gentle arms around what was left. Cradling, rocking, softly kissing the wound.” (p. 117) These women have a very hard life, but some of the do finally find a way forward.

A reader can sense the research that has gone into this book, but that doesn’t mean that Ostby is showing off, the way some writers do. Her novel feels authentic, and not as though she is simply cramming as many facts and details as she can into it. “The first puri halwa-vendor wheeled in and parked his cart, the aroma of deep-fried bread and coconut-sprinkled sweets drew in a breakfast-hungry crowd around him. Smells and sounds coloured the morning…” (p. 255) Such sentences set the scene and bring the story alive, serving as a vibrant backdrop to this sad tale of prostitution.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the production of this book, besides the research, is the translation. The translator is one of the novelist’s daughters, Marie Ostby. Anne told me by email that Marie is a PhD student in English at the University of Virginia in the US and is fully bilingual. Anne wrote me, “I knew she would "get" the book, and my language, down to the slightest nuance and detail. ..I knew no one could do it better. She has an extremely fine-tuned ear for both Norwegian and English language, and she was touched by the story and wanted to convey the exact sentiments that she felt were present in the Norwegian ms. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to cooperate as closely with any other translator as I did with Marie. During the process, which took months, we were in touch over every chapter and every paragraph, at times down to detailed discussions over a word. I think she felt no pressure to consult me like this, it was more a matter of really wishing to convey the exact same sentiment in the English text that she felt in the original Norwegian one. It was a slow and at times painstaking exercise, but I couldn't have wished for a better translation of my text.” It isn’t often that one hears about a child translating her mother’s literary work, and judging by the excellent English version here (I’ve also looked at the original Norwegian text), Marie Ostby is a skilled translator, and we will hopefully be seeing more of her translation work (perhaps she’ll translate more of her mother’s books).

In an afterword by Ruchira Gupta, she notes that this book “is an important voice in the history of slave resistance…The women of Apne Aap want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another human being, and they want to imagine an economy in which one is not forced to sell oneself. This book is about such women, and also shows that any one of us could be a Rukmini or Darya.” (p. 278). And as Anne Ostby has pointed out, “we are talking not only about a gender issue, but also about a social issue, and a poverty issue. Human trafficking is complex in its cruelty, with so many players involved, and yet it is so alarmingly simple: it’s a violation of human dignity, an unacceptable trade with human beings as merchandise.”

This is indeed an unacceptable violation of human dignity. We must bear witness to it, by reading works such as Town of Love, and we must help organisations such as Apne Aap as they attempt to ameliorate the situation for these women.

The Story of English in 100 Words

The Story of English in 100 Words by British linguist David Crystal is a fascinating and well-written book in an easy-to-read format. Each chapter deals with only one English word that Crystal thinks is very important and that explains something about the history of English and/or English-speaking countries. Crystal explores words in detail, in an almost archaeological manner.

Some of the words he discusses are roe, riddle, bone-house, pork, grammar, undeaf, bloody, billion, polite, trek, dude, schmooze, doublespeak, blurb, sudoku and chillax. As this list shows, the words come from different time periods (the 6^th century up until today), different languages (Old Norse, Latin, Yiddish, Japanese, etc.) and different aspects of life (food, politics, science, slang, etc.). The history of English is broad and interesting.

Crystals book is different from other language books because he talks about the history of the language through individual words. Most language books either just tell the story of the language through the people (i.e. the Vikings came in this year and they changed the language like this…) or through just describing the important words; Crystal does both here, at the same time. He explains, among other things, that after 1066 in England, when the Normans came, “Anglo-Saxon words could not cope with the unfamiliar domains of expression introduced by the Normans, such as law, architecture, music and literature. People had no choice but to develop new varieties of expression, adopting continental models and adapting traditional genres to cope with the French way of doing things.” (p. xv) New words included chattels and dame.

Another good example of an interesting history is the word “hello”. Crystal writes, “It’s such a natural expression, used every day as a greeting. Surely this is one of those words which has been in the language for ever? In fact, its first recorded use is less than 200 years old.” (p. 163) During the 14^th century, people said hal/hail, which meant be healthy. Then they started to say hallo, hella, hillo, hollo and hullo, but now it’s most often hello and sometimes hallo. But why? “The word was around in the early 1800s, but used very informally, often as part of street slang. The more formal usage seems to have emerged when the telephone was invented. People had to have a way of starting a conversation or letting the other person know they were there, especially if they were using a line where the connection was always open…Thomas Edison, the inventor of the telephone, evidently preferred Hello. This was the word he shouted into the mouthpiece of his device when he discovered a way of recording sound in 1877.” (p. 165) Technology has influenced the development of language in many ways.

Crystal has written many books on language, including about texting language, the Bible and language, Shakespeare’s language, and dialects, and his books are always fun and interesting. You can dip into The Story of English in 100 Words as you like and learn something new about English. It’s an enjoyable read.

In Translation

Can translators be superstars? A very few do seem to have celebrity status, at least in the world of literature. One thinks of people such as Maureen Freely, Eliot Weinberger, David Bellos, Clare Cavanagh, and Lawrence Venuti, among a few others.

And it is these people who have contributed short articles to a collection edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, In Translation. To read how great translators think about their work is enough reason to get the book. But it’s also an interesting and thought-provoking collection of essays, mostly about translating into English.

In their introduction, Allen and Bernofsky talk about the importance of translation, especially into English. They write, “translators into English can be said to labor in the service of monolingualism, as translation consolidates the global domination of English by increasing the degree to which the culture of the entire globe is available through English. At the same time, translation works to strengthen the pluralism of world languages and cultures by giving writers in all languages the opportunity to reach English’s global audience while still writing in their native languages.” (p. xv)

They also note that a “paradigm shift in the translator’s role is under way…[t]here is a generational move toward an image of the translator as an intellectual figure empowered with agency and sensibility who produces knowledge by curating cultural encounters.” (p. xix) This helps to explain why we see books such as In Translation now.

There is a good range of topics explored here. For example, Peter Cole, a poet and translator from Hebrew and Arabic to English, writes about ethical issues and about what is required of a translator. He implies that translation can be an uncomfortable job, and that making decisions isn’t easy. “To remain in bilingual or even polyglot mysteries is to enjoy the full resonance of literary possibility—to be tortured by its pleasures, if not always to be pleased by the torture; to decide is to find oneself—for a while—blessedly free of those doubts, but also hemmed in by one’s choices, possibly forever.” (p. 4) Cole feels that translation is “a matter of life and death—of reprieve (extended life for the work and possible its translator) or of execution (Again, of the work and possibly its translator). And when that work is from an earlier era, it leads to either profanation or resurrection of the dead.” (p. 13) One can add that it’s about the author’s life or death too.

Meanwhile, Catherine Porter, a professor emerita of French and translator of academic texts from French, makes a case for translation being taken seriously as a scholarly activity. She writes, “If we agree that our institutions should meet the demand for educated translators and interpreters, we must make room for translation studies in our curricula and develop a more capacious understanding of translation as a scholarly pursuit. It is my belief that scholarly and literary translations should be accepted and evaluated on the same basis as scholarly monographs in decisions about hiring, promotion, and tenure.” (p. 58) That is an idea that will surely challenge many people within academia.

In other pieces, Maureen Freely talks about Turkish and translating Orhan Pamuk; Jose Manuel Prieto writes about translating Osip Mandelstam from Russian to Spanish (and Prieto’s essay is translated to English from Spanish by Esther Allen); Christi A. Merrill offers a riddle and the idea that translators and authors should be called “storywriters”; and Ted Goossen suggests that for English readers “books need to be dubbed, not subtitled” (p. 186) because of the audience and publishers’ demands for invisibility.

In short, the essays in this book are varied and fascinating, and the superstar authors/translators included raise many points to consider.

Monsieur le Commandant

This review was originally published in the Wales Art Review.

Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe, translated by Jesse Browner

190 pp., London: Gallic, 2013.

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

We’ve surely all read many World War 2 novels. So one might be forgiven for asking what yet another such book could possibly add to the already existent heaps. But it is worth reading Monsieur le Commandant anyway, because it tells the reader about the war from a rather different perspective, and the ending, though what is to come is hinted at, is still shocking. This novel is horrifying and yet it is nonetheless hard to put down.

Monsieur le Commandant is about Paul-Jean Husson, a veteran of World War 1, novelist, and member of the French Academy. He writes a letter – which is the length of the book – to the Nazi officer in charge of his hometown in France, telling him about his life, discussing his political views (all in favour of Nazi policies), and making a special request.

The letter initially lulls the reader. Yes, Husson is clearly a Nazi sympathiser who would like to rid his homeland of unworthy, foreign elements, and yes, he regularly writes extremely anti-Semitic articles, but he is also a successful author with a creative mind, and he is a family man, devoted to his wife, although he cheats on her regularly, and to his two children. But Husson then becomes obsessed with his son’s wife, and it is this unhealthy obsession that drives the plot into more terrifying, and also ironic, territory.

As Husson points out, “I have never indulged in the romantic delusion that writers ought to be saints or heroes to be worshipped at the altar; on the contrary, I Believe that the cultivation of such subversive faculties as the imagination and sensibility carries a clear moral risk. That is why so few writers have led exemplary lives.” (p. 10) Indeed, Husson does not lead an exemplary life.

The protagonist has no fondness for Jews: “Jews pose a national and social threat to every country in which they are found. National, because the Jews are a homeless nation and assimilate only superficially into the civilisation of the country that has nonetheless honoured them with its welcome. Social, because the Jewish mind is critical and subversive to the highest degree; its seditious tendencies, being in no way mitigated by patriotic loyalty, lead it to criticise the institutions of the country to which it has attached itself, sometimes undermining and even destroying them.” (p. 43, italics original)

Beyond his proudly anti-Semitic views, Husson is apparently nothing less than honest in his letter to the Nazi officer (openly discussing his masturbatory fantasies about his daughter-in-law, for example (p. 50), or his attempt to protect a Jew (p. 98)). Nevertheless, this honesty about who he is, what he believes, and how he behaves does not prepare the reader for the choice he makes at the end.

A reader might hope that someone who holds such prejudiced views would change by the end of the book, but perhaps that is not too realistic a wish, given what we know about what actually happened during the Holocaust. The ending will not be given away here, however.

Gallic Press has been publishing “the best of French in English” for six years, and the company is a wonderful resource for anyone who appreciates French literature and/or literature in translation. Monsieur le Commandant was translated by Jesse Browner, an American novelist, food historian, and translator.

And Monsieur le Commandant is a great read that angers and educates in turns, letting readers have access to the perspective of collaborators during World War 2, which is not often depicted in literature.

Multiples

This review was originally published in the Wales Art Review.

Multiples

edited by Adam Thirlwell

378 pp., London: Portobello, 2013.

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

The list of contributors to Multiples reads like a veritable who’s who of contemporary literary superstars (well, as close to superstars as literature ever gets, anyway): Colm Tóibín, Nathan Englander, David Mitchell, Cees Nooteboom, J.M. Coetzee, Aleksander Hemon, Sjón, A.S. Byatt (one of the few women involved), and Jeffrey Eugenides, among around 50 others. Important note, though: they’re all writers and, except for Lydia Davis, few are translators, or appear to have even thought much about translation. Some scarcely know more than their native language.

And yet Multiples is a collection of translations. Odd, isn’t it? So what’s the story?

Editor Adam Thirlwell speaks (as at the recent British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, where I heard him) and writes (as in the introduction to this book) engagingly about why he chose to edit a book of translations by non-translators and what he was hoping to achieve. His hypothesis, he writes, is: “The art of the novel is an international art. Its history is international, and the mechanics of this history is translation—which means that the art of fiction, having survived this history must be tougher than it looks.” (p. 2) He then turned this rather obvious idea into an experiment: “What would happen if a story were successively translated by a series of novelists, each one working only from the version immediately prior to their own—the aim being to preserve that story’s style?” (p. 3)

Already the experiment seems rather strange – why would novelists be better able to preserve style than practising, experienced translators? At least that seems to be Thirlwell’s implication, as though translators couldn’t possibly preserve or comment on style.

So how does it all work in Multiples? As an example, Clancy Martin translated Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard’s story “Skrift-Prøver” to English. This is then translated to Dutch by Cees Nooteboom, and that is translated back to English by J.M. Coetzee. Jean-Christophe Valtat translated Coetzee’s work to French, Sheila Heti (who mentions that she barely knows French though her skills are good enough to “arrange a threesome” (p. 51)) translated his to English, and finally Jonas Hassen Khemiri translated Heti’s text to Swedish. And what did we learn from it? Well, the final product ended up rather different from the original and yet had some things in common with it. Hmm.

Many of the writers add a few notes about their experience of translation. Some are more interesting than others, while many comment on their desperate need to “customize”, as Jean-Christophe Valtat put it (p. 51), the text they were working on. Jonas Hassen Khemiri too describes the text as a “straitjacket” (p. 52) and indeed, this is a common feeling. In other words, writers want to make stuff up and change things around, not translate the texts they are given. Okay. Let the translators at the texts then.

So what is actually to be gained from this intricate game of “Operator” (or “Chinese Whispers”, as the less politically correct call it)?

It seems to be, in part, to suggest that style crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries, and also that there is no one style, so writers should feel free to use whatever suits their topics, needs, and abilities. Again, this isn’t news. Thirlwell also adds that “Maybe in some hypothetical future, literature will become the pure international—oblivious to the problems of time and space—and somehow the language in which you write or read your literature will be less important than the singular, multiple structures those languages happen to form…” (p. 14) One might ask how trapped readers and writers actually are by time and space anyway. Readers are arguably more trapped, by not knowing all the languages of the world, but that’s what translators are for, of course.

Yes, well, I suppose this is all interesting enough. For me, it sounds and reads like postmodern shtick:  clever writers trying to show off their cleverness. I’m not sure if they’ve proven anything with this book other than that good translators are great craftspeople and should be valued higher. Writers might want to stick to their writing, while translators can stick to theirs.

The Song of King Gesar

This review was originally published in the Wales Art Review.

The Song of King Gesar

by Alai, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin

436 pp., Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013.

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

What’s in your heart? Is it a demon? Or a treasure? Or perhaps a bit of both?

Tibetan writer Alai’s novel The Song of Gesar, translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin, explores what’s in the hearts of both humans and deities. It’s an epic story from Tibet, told by generations of bards, and now in written format by Alai, the author of a number of novels and collections of poetry and short stories (besides Gesar, only his novel Red Poppies seems available in English).

The novel starts off quite gently, lulling the reader into believing this might be an easy read about the far-off land of Tibet. But soon the reader is hit with paragraphs such as this: “Meanwhile, the demons howled with laughter as they feasted at a banquet of human flesh. First to be eaten were those who had spread rumours. Their tongues were cut out, then their blood was poured into jars and placed on the altar as an offering to evil deities. The demons consumed some of these poor souls, but there were more than they could eat, so the rest were left without their tongues, weeping in remorse and pain. Their wailing streamed past people’s hearts, like a dark river of grief.” (p. 11)

Such passages make the reader (and the characters) wonder whether the gods actually care about humans. Will they help humans or do they expect humans to sort things out on their own? What actually would be best for people? And what are the deities up to anyway? As this might show, The Song of Gesar is part of Canongate’s brilliant Myths series (which also includes work by Ali Smith, Klas Östergren, and Margaret Atwood, among many other important writers), and it’s a vital addition, as this is the first time the Tibetan story has appeared in English.

Alai considers these questions of gods and humans, good and evil, in beautifully written (and beautifully translated) turns of phrases: “The next day the sky shone bright and clear, when the old steward stood on a dais in front of the fortress. The snowdrifts were silently collapsing under the heat of the sun, with water gurgling beneath the white blanket. It was nearly noon, but not a single person could be seen on the roads that led to the tribal lands. The old steward sent soldiers to find them, while he sat on the top tier of the fortress, neither drinking tea nor touching the cheese that was brought to him. Eyes closed, he could hear the snow melting, and when he opened his eyes, he saw steam rising in the sun’s rays. Still no one came. The heat from the sun weakened and, battered by an icy western wind, the steamy vapours turned to grey mist and fog. He sank into gloom. Perhaps he had outlived his usefulness; perhaps he deserved to be abandoned by the people.” (p. 89)

Gesar, the cultural hero of Tibet, the lord of Gling, has fascinating experiences, and at last anglopone readers have access to his story.

Medieval Hebrew Poetry Translated into English

I originally published this review in the Wales Arts Review.

Into the Light: The Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich

introduction by Keiron Pim, translated by Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth

“Exalted Lord, cherub-borne on high,/in your created heavens/you inspire awe.//My Lord is mighty to uphold./It befits us to serve him/for he is a holy God.” (p. 50)

So wrote Meir ben Eliahu in the late thirteenth century in his long poem “Who Is Like You?” And indeed Meir “serve[s]” this “holy God” through his poetry. He closes the poem by asking “Who is like you among the gods?” (p. 84)

One might ask who is like Meir among the poets.

Not much is known about Meir. He was a Jew in Norwich (or Norgitz, as the Jews called the city) during the Middle Ages, and lived through the expulsion of the Jews from  his town and from England at the behest of King Edward I in 1290. As Keiron Pim, a writer who put in motion the translation and publication of Meir’s long unknown poetry, puts it in his introduction to this bilingual edition of poems, in his work, “Meir captures the Norwich Jews’ psychological tumult: the oscillation between hope and despair, devotion and doubt, pride and humiliation; the infighting, the confusion, the terror. He catalogues his people’s predicament in ‘the land of the heavy-hearted and exhausted’, where they are scorned and labour under an ever-heavier yoke.” (p. 13)

You can forgive Meir for sounding angry and defiant in turns in his poems (as in “His foe will meet him in his filth/with the rod of his oppressor,/only evil lurking, in warp or woof.” (p. 38)). But despite his justified pain, he still “steadfastly/ declare[s] the kindness of the Lord./We, his beloved, trust in Yahweh/and in his holy servant, Moses.” (p. 84)

This work is important both because of the quality of the writing itself and also for what it can tell us about a period in time that is quite distant from today and about which not much is known. As Pim writes, “Meir’s is the only confirmed Anglo-Jewish poetic voice known from the far side of that lengthy hiatus [i.e. from 1290 until 1656, when Jews were readmitted to England] to describe the social conditions of the time. It is of considerable historical and cultural value.” (p. 10)

This publication includes 16 short poems and four long ones. The original Hebrew – complete with vowels – is printed alongside the English translations by Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth (the former has worked on Walt Whitman and the latter has written textbooks on Danish and also translated poet Michael Strunge from Danish to English). The book might appear scholarly, given the historical context, the detailed introduction by Pim, the note from the translators, and the other paratexts, such as explanations of some of the poems and the poetic features, but in fact it is a work that is for any audience.

In many ways, the poetry feels fairly modern. For example, Meir writes, “Afire with longing for the rains of Love,/here I am, thirsty in my inner heart;/with dew drops of desire the folk are fed,/I too, perhaps, will sip a lover’s cup.//My true Love threatens; faith shrivels in drought,/withers, like reeds, from want of water./O sprinkle upon it healing balm/that impure man may be made clean.” (p. 90) Although Meir often refers to his god an dhis faith in his work, the romantic overtones might remind a reader of Rumi, and surely these sentiments are ones that many can relate to.

The final lines of Meir’s poetry are “Take pleasure in my precious meditations,/these songs of exultation and of awe.” (p. 118) A reader doubtlessly does take pleasure from Meir’s writing. 

Event Factory

I don’t quite know how to describe Renee Gladman’s novel Event Factory, but it is fascinating, especially for those of us interested in language. The protagonist travels to Ravicka, a city-state (that I somehow imagined looking a bit like San Marino) where the language is a combination of words and movements. For example, at one point she wants to apologize, but has trouble “recalling the “turns” I needed to perform my apology…I went through pareis several times, but always tripped up on the same move and had to start over again. You cannot skip ahead, or you’ll be saying something entirely different. I wanted to say, “When you are a visitor to a place, especially one such as Ravicka, it is difficult to remain stationary. The landmarks call out.” But I could not get my body to say “landmark” versus the “shipyard” it kept performing.” (p. 29) Her inability at times to communicate echoes the confusion many travelers feel when in a new place, where a different language is spoken and a different culture is the background. As the main character says, “If only travelling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing or dancing—I think I would be absolutely global by now. In Ravicka, I was barely urban.” (p. 42) I think many of us forget that language does involve a certain amount of facial expressions and movements and we tend to focus on the meaning of words, although obviously Ravicka is an extreme (and made-up) example. It is worth reading Gladman’s novel not only for her poetic turns of phrase but also for her philosophical ideas about communication.

Croatia via Iraq

I had never read a Croatian novel, though I’ve been to Croatia, until a few months ago. Here’s my review of that Croatian novel in English translation. The review was published in Wales Arts Review.

Our Man in Iraq

Robert Perisic, translated by Will Firth

202 pp., New York: Black Balloon Publishing, 2013.

Reviewer: B.J. Epstein

I must confess: as far as I can recall, Our Man in Iraq was the first book I’ve read that is set in Croatia. And what an introduction to the country it is.

Robert Perisic’s Our Man in Iraq is about Toni, a journalist who grew up in a rural village and now lives in Zagreb, the capital city, with his girlfriend, an actress whose fame is steadily growing. Besides dealing with his feelings of insecurity due both to being a country mouse as well as to having a partner who is suddenly more successful than he is, Toni makes the mistake of sneakily getting his boss to hire his Arabic-speaking cousin to be their newspaper’s reporter in Iraq. Unfortunately, Toni’s cousin Boris doesn’t seem terribly mentally stable, so Toni ends up ghost-writing Boris’s articles for him. Understandably, this eventually leads to Toni getting in trouble, especially when Boris stops communicating with his family and they fear that he’s been lost and go to the media about it.  Meanwhile, the war in Iraq rages and reminds the former Yugoslavians of the terrible war that they lived through, and the current war between the generations that they seem to be experiencing as well. Apparently Perisic is known as an anti-war writer in Croatia, and that comes through very clearly in this novel.

While this plot might sound like a strange combination of seriousness and slapstick, it actually works quite well. The subjects and styles shift, and you just have to give yourself over to the story. Our Man in Iraq explores topics ranging from journalism to good versus evil, from relationships to the effects of war. And in Firth’s translation, Perisic’s prose is often lovely and thought-provoking.

When Toni and his friend have returned to university after serving in the war, he finds that people’s attitudes towards them have changed, and their own attitudes have changed as well. “During this period the world fell apart. Nothing was permanent, authorities faded and people flinched before us. We realized that we belonged to a generation that had a moral advantage because it was defending all those old folks accustomed to the molds and models of socialism. Lost as they were, they patted us on the shoulder as if they were thanking us for something. We vocally despised socialism and they agreed with us on that. We despised their life’s experiences and they agreed with us on that too. We disdained all they’d done and stood for, and again they agreed with us. To leave no doubt that the future belonged to us, we rejected everything that until yesterday had been of any worth. They agreed with us on all that.” (p. 27) As one might expect, Toni too is later forced to confront the things he thought he stood for, and the choices he made, or thought he had.

As he puts it, “I’d fled to Zagreb and become a city boy; here I went to a thousand concerts, lived with an actress who played avant-garde dramas, I acted cool, and did everything right. The fear of someone thinking I was a redneck made me read totally unintelligible postmodernist books, watch unbearable avant-garde films, and listen to progressive music even when I wasn’t in the mood. I was terrified of everything superficial and populist. If something became too popular, I rejected it. Even in moments of major inebriation when I felt like singing a popular peasant song I stopped myself. I maintained discipline. But in vain. All at once they were breathing down my neck again. I thought I’d given them the slip, but now they’d encircled me, having used Boris as bait, and were closing in for the kill.” (p. 104)

You’ll have to read Our Man in Iraq to see if Toni breaks free or if he ends up trapped, or both.

I’m so pleased that more publishers are publishing literary translations, and that more of these translations are from languages other than French or German. It’s essential that we learn about other people, other cultures, and other “life’s experiences”, and fiction is one of the best ways to do this. Think of each translation as an Our Man in… book, so Our Man in Iraq serves as an Our Man in Croatia, letting us know a little bit about what is going on in Croatia. But of course we must remember that each translated text is only one story. We need many more translations so that we can get access to more stories. One can only hope that publishers such as Black Balloon will continue this important work.

Our Man in Iraq is in a sense about trying to control what is actually uncontrollable. “We try to make sure things don’t get out of control. There’s always that danger here on the slippery edge of the Balkans. Here we always squabble about what we’re allowed to enjoy and what not.” (p. 115-6) Whether those in the Balkans are allowed to enjoy Our Man in Iraq or not I can’t say, but those of us in English-speaking countries certainly can, and should.

Språktidningen

On my last trip to Sweden, I finally discovered Språktidningen, a fascinating magazine on language. I promptly bought and/or borrowed all the issues I could find.

In one issue, there was an article about the Romani language and how there are many words in it that are derived from Sanskrit, and most of them have to do with the basics of life, such as bread, yellow, water, wheels, and more. The article, which was by Per Westergård, also talks about the different names of the ethnic group. The big question when it comes Romani is whether it is “one language with different varieties or if it really is many different languages.” This is the same topic sometimes discussed regarding Swedish/Norwegian/Danish, among other languages.

In the same issue, I read an article by Nils Svensson on “uncreative writing”, or using the words of others. For example, Caroline Bergvall made a “compilation of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno from the 47 English translations.”

In another issue, I read an article by Karin Westin Tikkanen about people who get tattoos with Latin phrases such as “memento mori” and “amor vincit Omnia”, and an article by Fatima Grönblad on code-switching, where people use two or more languages ​​in the same call. It was also interesting to read that research has shown that more Iranian mothers in Sweden speak Swedish with their children than Iranian fathers do, and it seems that “the benefits of using Swedish in everyday life - to integrate and achieve gender equality – take precedence for the women over their feelings about their mother tongue.”

In each issue, there are short reviews, news, discoveries, games, and questions and answers about language - both English and Swedish, interestingly enough. Then there is a column about people who work with language, such as a language consultant, a tweeter, a speechwriter and, yes, even a translator - in the issues that I got hold of, there were articles by Anders Bodegård, who translates from French and Polish to Swedish, and by Jan Stolpe, who translates from French and Greek to Swedish.

I really enjoyed this magazine and look forward to catching up on it on my next visit to Sweden. I recommend it to those of you who can read Swedish.

Verbs, Verbs, Verbs

Last month, I published a review of a fun book all about verbs, and I thought I’d post it here too.

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch

Constance Hale

Gosh.

A book-reviewer.

Alas, no.

The proceeding sentences are all missing something, and for that reason, they’re not terribly informative or interesting. So what is it that is absent?

Yes, that’s right.

The verb.

Now you might be yawning at this stage, filled with half-forgotten and not very pleasant memories of English class and bewildering discussions about parts of speech. But hold on a moment. As Constance Hale points out in her enjoyable new book, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch,  verbs are the “pivot point of every sentence” (p. 10). They “put action in scenes, show eccentricity in characters, and convey drama in plots. They give poetry its urgency. They make quotes memorable and ads convincing.” (p. 10)

The way each chapter in Hale’s book works is that she takes on a topic (voice or tense, for example), explains what is challenging about it (this is the “vex” of the title), demolishes a common belief about verbs (“hex”), encourages readers to get rid of a bad habit (“smash”), and educates readers about new things to try (“smooch”). She offers activities (“Try, Do, Write, Play”)  and uses quotations from both literary and popular writing to exemplify her ideas.

For example, in one vex, she explicates verbals, which “don’t change with time…don’t express voice…have no moods. They are bona fide verbs: they can be modified by adverbs and they can take objects and complements. But in sentences they don’t act like verbs.” (pp. 224-5) To demonstrate participles, she quotes Dickens’ depiction of Scrooge as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” (p. 227)

In a hex, she tells us to “reject the rule “Always use Standard English”” (p. 117), and she speaks up for the use of dialect, as in Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I a Woman”. In another, she dismisses the idea that we shouldn’t use double negatives (pp. 96-7). In other words, don’t don’t. Got it?

One smash she offers suggests that long words can be too “pompous, highfalutin, and abstract” and she recommends avoiding “bequeath, commence, conjoin, interrogate, and remunerate” (p. 80). I personally don’t agree, because I think there are texts and situations where such words are needed – they presumably wouldn’t exist if they weren’t useful – but I do take her point that people sometimes try to write or speak in an unnecessarily complex way. In another smash, she discusses the challenges inherent in phrasal verbs, such as differ from and differ with (pp. 254-8).

Hale recommends the imperative – in other words, order such as “Just do it!” – in one smooch (p. 194), and nuance in another, by which she means in part understanding the difference between commonly interchanged words, such as careen, career and carom (p. 286-8).

The book comes with a number of appendices, such as recommendations for dictionaries, a list of irregular verbs (did you remember that the past tense of abide is abode, and did you know that tread becomes trod, which then becomes have trodden?), information on challenging words (what’s the difference between raise, raze, and rear, and when do you use behove?), and an analysis of the history of language. I would have appreciated an index, though.

This is definitely not the grammar book you might remember from your school days. Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch is easy to dip into at will, and it offers useful information, activities, and suggestions that will help any writer. Hale is an opinionated and witty guide to the weird and wonderful world of verbs.

Just buy it! Or don’t don’t.

Translation and Sex

Not long ago, I reviewed Tom Cutler’s book Slap and Tickle. Translation, as we well know by now, appears everywhere, including in relation to sex.

As Cutler points out, the bible has many sexual prohibitions and other discussions with sexual words. However, the “English translators of the Bible were a bit squeamish about some things”, as Cutler writes. In a section in Genesis, the original text said, “If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my penis, and deal kindly and truly with me”, but the English translators replaced “penis” with “thigh”. 

Cutler writes, the “ideal then being that if you were making a solemn oath your testicles would be in jeopardy if you bore witness. When your lawyer next uses the words ‘testament’, and ‘testify’, remember that he or she is using words with the same root as, ‘testicle’.” (all quotes from p. 32)

What Cutler is getting at here is that translators have a lot of power and can substantially change our ideas about a text (and laws), as well as make us forget etymology and connections between words.

Next time you think about or get near testicles or thighs, think about translation. Or, on second thought, maybe not…

Peirene Press

(This was originally published in the Wales Arts Review, but I think the publishing company is doing such interesting work that I wanted to post about it here too.)

For anyone who loves literature, Peirene Press is a publishing company you need to know about. Peirene, run by Meike Zeirvogel, focuses on contemporary European literature in translation, and all of its books are short enough to be read in just a few hours, although they will stay with you for much longer than that.

The first book I read that Peirene had published was Asko Sahlberg’s The Brothers, translated by the daughter -and-mother team of Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. The first sentence drew me in: “I have barely caught the crunch of snow and I know who is coming.” (p. 7) As a reader, I immediately wanted to know where this was set and who was coming. We quickly learn that the setting is Finland and it is Henrik, the prodigal son of a rural family, who is returning to his mother and brother’s home. Henrik is not welcome or wanted, but this does not bother him. His return sets in motion a series of changes at the farm, and the person who vanquishes at the end of the book is not who we expect, plus there are startling revelations along the way about this somewhat odd, tight-lipped family.

The novella is told from many different points of view, which allows the reader to get insight into the different characters and to get varying perspectives on what is happening. In a way, this is ideal in such a short book, because it helps to get true thoughts and feelings and voices across quite quickly, although I didn’t always feel that the women’s voices were as authentic as the men’s.  The language is sparse here, with no one – whether character or author – saying more than is strictly necessary, creating a solemn formality that suits the book’s plot. There is a distinctly religious undertone to the story, which helps situate it in a cold, Protestant country. As Peirene puts it, “[t]hese books lend themselves to comparison and give insight into trends from the European literary scene.” I think The Brothers definitely invites that.

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, translated by Jamie Bulloch, is quite different. A monologue by an unnamed female character, The Mussel Feast seems at first to be a simple enough tale: a mother and her two children prepare mussels to celebrate the man in the family’s promotion. However, over the course of their preparations, and as they wait for their husband/father to return home for this feast, many other stories come to light, and slowly the characters and their supposedly “proper” family are revealed to the reader. The absent person – the husband/father – is the heavy presence, the tyrant who is both unlovable and unable to love.

Vanderbeke’s book is breathless but unrushed, sad and moving and funny all at once. It questions what makes a family, and discusses how we are all different people in different situations. The mother and the children in this novella “switch modes”, “letting their hair down” when their husband/father is away, and trying to go into “wifey mode” or good-child mode when he is home (pp. 18-22), but they do not always succeed. And this forces readers to question their own mode-switching, and their own attempts at being something other than what they truly are. The ending of Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast is just right, leaving a mystery for readers to ponder.

These two examples show the variety of Peirene’s publications in regard to style and subject, and they also reveal what they have in common: an interest in what it means to be human. Although I don’t know Finnish or German, I can say that these two books worked well in English while simultaneously seeming to retain the tone and feel of the source culture.

The way Peirene works is that there is a theme each year and then three short books that fit in that theme – whether it is “the small epic” or “the female voice” or “the turning point” – are published during the course of that year. Peirene only chooses authors who are “award-winners and/or bestsellers in their own country,” which lets English-speakers experience the best that literary worlds in other cultures have to offer. The publisher also follows the current literary trend of allowing subscriptions, which is a lovely idea, and is also quite affordable with prices starting at £25 for a one-year subscription.

Peirene/Pirene is the name of a fountain in Greek mythology where poets would go to get inspired. The press likewise offers inspiration in the form of compact, enjoyable works that make you think. I couldn’t put down either of the books until I had finished them; the stories urged me on while opening new worlds to me. What could be better than that?

Go ahead: drink from the Peirene fountain.

On Fonts

I originally published this review in Wales Arts Review, a publication I regularly review for. But I thought it was worth posting it here too.

Just My Type by Simon Garfield

Why does font matter? How does the choice of font affect the way people read text or what impression they get of a website or a film? Who creates fonts, and how, and why? Simon Garfield explores all this and more in his new book, Just My Type.

You might think that this sounds dull. In fact, this book about fonts is highly entertaining. It gives short histories (“font breaks”, as Garfield phrases it) about various fonts and the people who shaped them, while also exploring the history of print and the importance of fonts in general. Garfield manages to impart information while also giving juicy titbits of information about the often eccentric people and/or circumstances involved in the development of new fonts.

The author ranges all over the field in this book. Garfield discusses why legibility/accessibility/readability are such essential concepts in the field of fonts, how they have been understood in different ways over time, and how some appear more honest than others (such as Gotham, as discussed on p. 209). And he explores why particular fonts have become successful and now appear all over the place (such as Helvetica, which he says is everywhere in urban settings (p. 132)). Then he moves easily into giving background about some of the people behind the fonts, such as Margaret Calvert, who developed many road signs (p. 149), or sixteenth-century Frenchman Claude Garamond, who offered “the first real flight of fancy” in text (p. 96). Sometimes, Garfield even offers gossip about others, such as Eric Gill, the creator of Gill Sans, who was also known for his “dramatically outré [sexual] meanderings with his daughters, sister and dog” (p. 48). Gill was influential in the way he created typefaces without serifs (i.e. sans serif, hence the sans in Gill Sans). Since Garfield has already explained what serifs are and how bracketed versus unbracketed serifs differ, and what x-height is (as on p. 45), the reader feels part of the world of the typographer and understands the lingo. This is the case even if the average reader is unlikely to become obsessed by identifying particular fonts, which Garfield says is a problem for font designers that is “far worse than trying to identify a song from a snippet of lyric or melody.” (p. 174)

Garfield also explores the influence of font on particular types of text. For example, he talks about the fonts used in comics and how the typographer of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns “achieved that near-sublime melding of visuals and text, where one didn’t swamp the other, and both could be absorbed simultaneously” (p. 21). Staying with the theme of media, he explores how anachronistic some historical films are, because they show signs in fonts that didn’t exist at the time when the film is set (an example is Ed Wood, which is set in the 1950s but uses a font developed in the 1980s (p. 72)). But in a rather more serious and dramatic section, Garfield analyses fonts in Nazi Germany, and how Gothic was “outlawed by decree”, because it was viewed as Jewish and also was hard to read, especially by foreigners, which was a problem as Germany wanted to invade other countries and expected the people there to read any signs and materials they published (pp. 191-2). Instead, the regime switched to a roman type.

In short, this book is packed full of detail about a topic that should fascinate just about anyone. After all, whenever we read, we are being subconsciously influenced by the font the text is printed in, and we get ideas about the author, the content, and the context from it. This review is printed in Century Gothic. What do you think that’s doing to you as you read it? For one thing, I hope it encourages you to go out and get Garfield’s book.

Chambers Thesaurus, 4th Edition

I just got a copy of the new fourth edition of the Chambers Thesaurus and I can say that this is definitely a keeper. It has over 1100 pages of fantastic information and it is the kind of reference book that you just want to spend time skimming. Here are some of the things I like about this thesaurus.

It explains synonym nuances, so you understand the difference between, well, “difference” and “dissimilarity”, “diversity”, “variety”, “distinction”, “unlikeness”, “contrast”, “discrepancy”, and “divergence”. This will be especially helpful to people who are learning English as a foreign language, I think. When I taught English as a foreign language, I noticed how common it was for people to simply use synonyms they found in a thesaurus without actually understanding these nuances. But of course even native speakers need this sort of information.

The book also includes idioms, so you can find ways of varying them (“once in a while” or “sail through” or “a sticky situation”). People tend to overuse clichés, so being able to look them up in a thesaurus is really helpful.

The Chambers thesaurus also says if a term is technical, old-fashioned, formal, or colloquial, which is essential information when writing or translating. I have found that university students often get confused about formal versus informal language, so I will recommend that they check this thesaurus to get advice.

Another helpful feature is that the thesaurus gives extra information. “Carriage” doesn’t just give synonyms but also offers a list of forty different types of carriage, which can be especially helpful for writers or translators who need just the right kind of carriage in their text. Similarly, “zodiac” also gives the signs of the zodiac and their symbols, and you can learn which “rhetorical devices” exist.

The thesaurus also has quotations. For example, Harper Lee’s “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” illustrates “conscience” very well, but it is also a quotation worth knowing.

One of the most entertaining parts is the “word lover’s gallimaufry”, which has over 50 pages of lists and explanations. What’s the difference between a flexitarian and a pescatarian? How can you express disbelief (“what a load of cobblers!” or “pull the other one!”)? What terms might an estate agent or a gamer use? What are some global English words you can use to spice up your language usage (“bergie” or “pom”)? What do you call someone who collects cigar bands and who is a “vecturist”? What are some types of extreme sports (“tombstoning” and “zorbing” are among them)? This section is fascinating and amusing.

Since the Chambers thesaurus is so big, it covers a lot of territory. That means the book takes up quite a bit of space on the shelf, but I think it’s worth it.

In short, this thesaurus (or “lexicon”, “dictionary”, “wordbook”, “vocabulary”, “repository”, or “wordfinder”) is really practical (and “valuable” and “worthwhile”). It is definitely the thesaurus I’ll be using from now on, and the one I’ll recommend to my students and my fellow writers, editors, and translators.

Alpha Beta by John Man

John Man’s book Alpha Beta is on the history of the Roman alphabet, as you might be able to guess from the title. He covers a range of related topics, such as non-alphabet systems, symbols, rebus, archaeology, orality, and history, and his book is imaginative and exciting. He includes many interesting titbits of information, such as how some of what we think is Roman is actually Etruscan and how Cyrillic is named after Cyril but wasn’t created by him. He refers to languages as diverse as Chinese, Egyptian, Sumerian, and Korean and he explains “why Czechs and Slovaks today look to the West, and use the Latin alphabet.” (299)

One of the major points Man makes in this enjoyable work is that what alphabet is used where and how is often about power. “Script, status, power, identity: the four were indissoluble.” (100) He analyses hieroglyphics and the Greek alphabet to explore their importance to their own societies as well as to later ones. “With this new-fangled intellectual device [writing], the Greeks could aware their own though processes, become self-aware, refine ideas, exchange them, build upon them, create systems of ethics, philosophy and science, evolve new forms of poetry, pioneer history. In brief, it was the alphabet that allowed the ancient Greeks to lay the foundations of civilized discourse as Europe and its descendant cultures came to know it.” (21)

He also explores why alphabets change, or don’t. “Change, it seems, does not arise spontaneously from within. Something has to happen to release a new creative impulse.” (81)

He has what he terms three Working Theories of Script Evolution:
“1 In a writing system, complexity knows no bounds and imposes none.
2 A writing system will last as long as its culture, unless changed by force.
3 New writing systems emerge only in new, young, ambitious cultures.” (82)
In other words, much is required before a language will change.

Another interesting section in this book is where Man discusses four assumptions about literacy and culture and explains how they are false. The assumptions are:
“that alphabetic literacy must have spread from the top levels of society downwards;
that the alphabet would immediately be considered a superior achievement, and be instantly taken up by anyone with a claim to intelligence and culture;
that non-literate cultures are necessarily simple and inferior;
that poetry is more refined than prose and must therefore come later.” (231) Man demolishes these ideas.

While some people might think that one alphabet is better or more sensible than others and while Man does comment that Korean is perhaps one of the most sophisticated and successful of all alphabets, he also writes, “the alphabet is an intellectual device with which to symbolize speech, and it is a mistake to equate it exactly with anything in the real world. Since it exists in minds, any physical representation is only one of an infinite variety. There is no Absolute Alphabet.” (114) There are many possible alphabets, with no single right one.

Wales Arts Review

In a bit of shameless self-promotion, I can point out that I’ve been publishing some book reviews in Wales Arts Review lately. There are plenty of other good articles there, so do check out the magazine.