Quattrocento treasures

The image above is a detail from Lorenzo Monaco's 1404 Pietà. It is typical of its period—indebted to Giotto and to Sienese Gothic, it hints at perspective, although this remains rudimentary. The faces are still stock Giotto, and the hair rigid and stylized, although the bodies show reasonable modelling. This work is not typical of Lorenzo's oeuvre, but represents an experimentation with older idioms.

What interests us here is Lorenzo's approach to narrative. Although his chief subject is a Pietà—and not the representation we are used to—he has included in his work the suggestions of earlier events in the Gospels: the slicing of Malchus' ear, the payment of Judas, and so on, as well as presenting the objects of Christ's torture, such as the three nails and the pair of flails or cat-o'-sixtails. The various stories are reduced to symbols and laid out on a plane, like in a Wunderkammer. Fleeting occurrences are thus transformed into timeless types existing in space, easily recalled and devotional—an ars memoria in paint. And there is a real dryness about these objects; compare, for instance, Magritte's Sleeper. These hands are not beautiful; nor are they individuated, as Christ's hands are and must be. They are utilitarian, like punctuation, or like this pointer from a London street-sign.

This is a metaphysical approach to painting. It wants to speak, but it is not interested in the dictates of physical form, nor in problems of representation. How different is this idiom in mid-century hands, sweetened by the first spring of the Florentine Renaissance—


This is a detail from the Mocking of Christ, one of the many splendid frescoes at the convent of San Marco, painted by Lorenzo's pupil Fra Angelico in 1445, although some have attributed this and other paintings to Angelico's lively student Benozzo Gozzoli, better known for his 1460 Medici Adoration. Here we have bodiless hands assailing the Saviour, and a bodiless head to expectorate, unexpectedly. Notice the ironic rhyme between the cudgel taken to Christ's head and the articulated staff with which He rules heaven and earth; Angelico shows us a wit entirely missing in Lorenzo. There is a freshness in his colours—pea-green, white and crimson—and a softness in the rendering, nothing like the unnatural angularity of Lorenzo's Pietà. Where Lorenzo's hands were systematic and semiotic, Angelico's are impressionistic, with a freedom of movement in their space. As Berenson observes of the painter, 'The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern, and almost modern also are his means of expression'. What a difference 40 years and a Masaccio make!

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Since Vasari, the art of the Quattrocento has been almost uniformly presented as a continual progress from the vestiges of the Gothic to the supreme perfection of Leonardo and Michelangelo. This narrative has been so inculcated that it is difficult to see these works unencumbered by historical prejudice. Berenson provided the classic statement of this image: in his early Florentine Painters (1896) he argues that from Giotto to Leonardo, painting is sort of an epiphenomenon arising out of the cavalcade of individual geniuses, effortlessly solving problems as they went. In this work he is still under the spell of Burckhardt and Nietzsche; in his much later collection of essays, Aesthetics and History (1948), he calls for an history of art without artists, consisting merely of problems and how they were solved. An odd call, one might think, from a man whose professional reputation was built on his ability to sort genuine Old Masters from fakes. For Berenson, Michelangelo sounds the first note of tragedy in Florence; the prior generation still savoured the fruits of Paradise.

The universal presence of this progress-narrative is the only reason one should bother reading Clive Bell's 1913 essay Art, a manifesto for the post-Impressionists, Matisse, Cézanne and Gauguin. This work is the most singularly vapid and vacuous book about art I've ever read, consisting of little more than pronouncements of taste tricked up to look like a theory; but its virtue is that Bell's history of art is the mirror image of Berenson's. For Bell, Giotto marked the beginning of the end; incomparably poorer than the Byzantine madonnas of the 12th century, nevertheless his work starts the process of decline that leads to the scientific, merely-representational nadir of Leonardo: 'From Giotto to Leonardo is a long and, at times, almost imperceptible fall'. It is only with Cézanne et al that art has once more cast off the shackles of realist form. All this is very odd, and strangely liberating, like an art-historical version of the literary opinions offered by Aaron Haspel's favourite critic, Yvor Winters.

Reading Bell reminds us that Lorenzo Monaco is not a primitive, in the negative sense of that word. Angelico did not progress from Lorenzo; we may prefer him, or not, but there is no absolute criterion for his superiority. For some reason this lesson, so easily accepted elsewhere in the arts, appears particularly difficult to learn when looking at Renaissance painting. And there is something in Lorenzo's roughness, in his eagerness, in his semiotic inelegance, that appeals to me more than the wit of Angelico, or even the perfect finish of the later century. Perhaps it is that my aesthetic is at heart a linguistic, not a visual one; and certainly not an emotional one, which is why I find it impossible to enjoy Masaccio, the historian's hero.

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An interlude. Mantegna is the most cerebral of the painters before Leonardo, possibly excluding Uccello. His was a humanist milieu; just as Fra Angelico studied Greek with Ambrogio Traversari, and had Hebrew written into his paintings by Giannozzo Manetti, so Mantegna hobnobbed with Cristoforo Landino, Alberti and other mid-century scholars. His circle was suffused with abstruse philosophy and coterie references; we should not, then, be too surprised by this, a coded inscription at the bottom of a donor's portrait, from a 1453 illuminated manuscript now in Paris, commonly attributed to Mantegna or an assistant:


In these two lines are the whole humour of the humanist Renaissance! It is the humour of the hermetic, of the Platonic Silenus, of cracking open an egg for its golden joke. In this inscription are confounded Roman and Greek letters, including an archaic qoppa (Ϙ), Arabic numerals and other miscellaneous symbols, including a thorn-like character (þ). It turns out to be a simple substitution cipher—all the rage in mid-century Italy, Alberti inventing the polyalphabetic cipher in 1467—and has been decoded as following:

SE MIA SPERANZA NON DIXE BUGIA
NON FARAI INGRATA PATRIA COSSA MIA

One commentator takes Cossa as a name—specifically, the general of René of Anjou, the manuscript's addressee—and renders this, 'If my hope does not lie, you, Cossa, will not make my country ungrateful'. Another takes 'cossa' as things or activities, translating, 'You, my fatherland, will not do an unwelcome thing'. A little mystery goes a long way.

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Thirty years later, the Florentine generation of Botticelli, Verrocchio and Leonardo was in full bloom. Painting was now as far from Lorenzo Monaco as could be: artists had mastered anatomy, spatial composition and perspective, individuation and facial expression, tonal colour, linear rhythm and the sort of narrative structure that Alberti had called istoria. (You see how far I have digested Berenson's narrative.) For a Piccolomini wedding in 1492, the following painting (among others) was commissioned from a Sienese artist known to us only as the Griselda Master:


Depicted is Artemisia II of Caria, wife of Mausolus, whose legendary tomb is shown being built in the distance to her left. Artemisia is shown with her husband's ashes, which she is said to have consumed in her drink, like an ancient and much prettier Keith Richards, as a mark of marital devotion. Her pose is similar to a Magdalene from the 1498 San Agostino Altarpiece of Luca Signorella, an inferior artist to whom the Griselda Master is often compared; here the urn becomes Mary's traditional attribute of an ointment-box.

One writer calls the Piccolomini commission 'one of the most distinguished and admirable examples of Tuscan figurative art from this period'. I show you this work because it makes me drool; its delicacy and beauty ranks with Botticelli and Leonardo. The figure seems to predict the distortions of Mannerism: her body is distended, and her head disproportionately small, like the entasis of a classical column. But it is very much of the late Quattrocento, nonetheless; not yet preoccupied, as the next generation would be, with the heroic and with literal form. The rendition of Artemisia's white gauze, her hands charged with gentle energy, the miniature perspective-study of the urn, the soft pink of her face against the silver sky, the Babelesque Mausoleum—all display that painterly tenderness which was at its most perfect in the two decades before 1500. It is the sort of achievement that, just for a moment, dispels my fascination with mysteries and symbols, which is to say with words, and pushes me only to look, and keep looking.

What is the relation, I wonder, of the history of taste to the history of knowledge?

The rhythm of response

God. Abraham!

Abraham. Here I am. . . The night is filled with thy voice. Here am I. What dost thou demand of me?

God. Thy son. Thy only son.

Abraham. What sayst thou?

God. Take now thy son, thy only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and go into the mountains where I shall show thee, and offer him there for a burnt offering.

Abraham. Wouldst thou I do even as the Canaanites, who lay their firstborn on fires before idols? Art thou truly the Lord my God?

God. Thou knowest.

Abraham. No! NO!

Abraham marches up the hillside, cursing and shrieking. He rests on a large rock.

Abraham. Thou wilt not ask this thing of me. . .

This dialogue is from John Huston's 1966 film The Bible, which would be more accurately titled Genesis 1:1-22:19, and which stars George C. Scott as Abraham, alongside such luminaries as Peter O. Toole, Richard Harris and Ava Gardner. You'll notice that this passage, like much of the film, is written (when it is not merely quoting) in a decent pastiche of KJVese; 'even as the Canaanites', especially, has a plausible ring to it. But how unlike the telling of this story in Genesis (22:1-3)—

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah: and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

The prose style of this passage has acquired a particular fame since Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, in which he contrasts it to a paragraph from the Odyssey. The Biblical epic style, he argues, is spare, shadowy, and psychological, where the Greek epic style is descriptive, bright, and essentially superficial. An equally illuminating contrast can now be drawn between the Biblical passage and its cinematic translation.

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Huston presents his scene as a conflict of forces—in other words, as a drama. This is an obvious point, but it needs nonetheless to be stated, because our notion of narrative as drama is so deeply rooted that it tends towards the status of an unrecognised assumption. When stories from the Bible are retold, they are always told as dramas. But the Bible itself is virtually without drama.

At first, this statement seems flagrantly false. Isn't the entire Old Testament full of drama? From Adam's expulsion and Abel's murder to Job and the moral conflicts of Kings—the scripture narrates one conflict after another. But each scene, examined closely, turns out to be fundamentally undramatic. Take God's rebuke of Cain, for example—instead of a conflict of forces, we read this (Gen. 4:9-10):

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

God does not answer Cain's question, but rather asks another of his own; both are rhetorical, not directed towards one another, but rather revealing inner states. God knows what has happened—for he hears the voice of Abel's blood—before asking Cain where his brother is. There is no meeting of forces, because in reality there is only one force—that of God. Cain is merely a foil, a dummy. Or take another example: the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:17-39). Here, again, Elijah stands in for the divine force; his success over Ahab's minions is so well anticipated that Elijah can nonchalantly flood his altar with water, and taunt the struggling villains:

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god, either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.

The prophets, like Cain, are a dummy, essentially one character although enumerated at 450. And what about that dramatic tour de force, the grandest and most heartfelt book of the entire Bible, not to mention the most beautiful—the Book of Job? In the Middle Ages the book was called a syllogism; but I find this account completely false. There is nothing reasonable in its resolution; the setup, in which Satan wagers God, has been forgotten by the end, and the arguments of Job's interlocutors have no role in its conclusion. Their claim that Job must have sinned is rebuffed without humility. Job is in this respect a Nietzschean hero, refusing to accept the arguments of a 'holier than thou' ressentiment. Here, perhaps alone in the Bible, there is some semblance of drama, although Job's outpourings are at right-angles to the speeches of his four visitors. God's final discourse offers no justification, and therefore no engagement with Job's plight—it asserts instead that God's majesty renders all human debate impossible. (We note, as with Cain, the introduction of this speech with a rhetorical question, 38:2: 'Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?') In dramatic terms, this is a cop-out; in the terms of the Old Testament, it is utterly sublime.

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The story of Isaac's sacrifice, especially, is without drama. The narrative reads to us like a clockwork mechanism, with each participant contentedly playing his part in the whole. Abraham offers no resistance to God's command. And one of the insights of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843) is that if Abraham had offered resistance—if, in other words, there had been real drama—then he would not have been a paragon of religious faith. Kierkegaard opens his book with several retellings of the story, introducing into each a dramatic aspect, however slight. In one version, Abraham decides to convince his son that he is a monster, lest Isaac think ill of God; in another, Isaac looks up to see 'that Abraham's left hand was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his body'. These stories show by contrast that the moral perfection of the real Abraham lies in his unquestioning obedience. This is why George C. Scott can only be a modern hero, conventionally pious, without obtaining the existentialist heights of the Biblical Abraham. It is why the Bible can never be filmed.

It is important to reiterate, however, that the Genesis narrative never states that Abraham is unquestioningly obedient; this is not an aspect played up in the text. The events just happen. Those who know the Bible stories well, but do not know the Bible itself, will be repeatedly impressed by this aspect of the scriptures. It is an aspect impossible to render on the silver screen; this is because cinema, like theatre, has moral drama—the conflict of wills—at its core. George C. Scott cannot merely do as God says, because that would not make any sense to us. He must protest; he must explicitly demonstrate the enormity of his charge. This is a question of rhythm—thesis, antithesis—a rhythm that we need to make meaning of narrative, as a reassurance.

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If the Bible does not use the dramatic thesis-antithesis rhythm, what sort of narrative rhythm does it use? Perhaps many: but for the purposes of this post I am interested in the rhythm of 'call and response', where the response echoes the call, and makes it manifest. This rhythm is often achieved by perfect (or near-perfect) verbal repetition. It is established at the very beginning—'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light'—and carried to extraordinary lengths in Exodus 25:1-39:31, where God's elaborate designs for the ark and priestly vestments are executed to the letter, his imperative words transposed almost verbatim to a narrative voice, for pages on end:

And they shall make an ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof. (25:10)

And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it. (37:1)

The same rhythm can be clearly seen in the Isaac-sacrifice passage (Gen. 22:1-3) quoted above: God tells Abraham what to do, and Abraham does it. It can even be seen in miniature within the first verse—God calls out for Abraham, and the patriarch replies, 'Here I am'. As Auerbach acknowledges, the latter's words really mean, I await your command: 'a most touching gesture expressive of obedience and readiness is suggested'.

Whereas the dramatic rhythm is dynamic, the rhythm of response is static. It underlines the relationship between God and man: God speaks, and man (if he is good) does. It also gives the Biblical narrative a timeless or eternal quality: when God and man are in accord, there is no change, because change is seen as deviation from an ideal, as in the archetype of Eden. It is characteristic that Milton uses this same rhythm in a key passage of Paradise Lost. Adam has come to understand his sin, and now repents—he assumes a voice of leadership, and action exactly follows intention. At the end of Book 10 (in the original 12-book edition):

What better can we do, than, to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent; and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg; with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

And at the beginning of Book 11:

. . . they, forthwith to the place
Repairing where he judged them, prostrate fell
Before him reverent; and both confessed
Humbly their faults, and pardon begged; with tears
Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

To make better sense of this I turn to a wonderful little book, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's The Origin of Speech, written during the Second World War but only published in 1964. Nothing in this slim volume is true. . . but sometimes we need a religious man to tell us about language, and not a linguist or a historian. For ERH, modern communication is based excessively on indicative statements, and especially on abstract, 'reflective' statements of universal truth. This he regards as a negative deviation from an earlier and more 'authentic' mode of communication. (The narrative of decline is typical of religious writing.) In authentic discourse, statements of fact can only be understood in the context of other sorts of speech—imperatives, subjunctives, optatives, and questions. An order is given, and ratified by its execution; the execution in turn is ratified by the order which instigated it. As ERH puts it, '"Break" is said because "broken" will be said. And "broken" makes sense because "break" preceded it'. He invokes a curious fact well-worn by linguistic investigators—that in many languages, the imperative is morphologically the simplest form of the verb (for instance fac from fac-ere)—concluding from this that the imperative is also the earliest and most fundamental form of the verb, and therefore the most 'authentic'. In valorising the command-execution relationship, or in other words the rhythm of response, ERH insists on the necessity of a hierarchical separation between speaker and actor, for to remove this hierarchy would be to create a mob—an ochlocracy. Language is inseparably linked to politics and society, the ills of the latter being results of linguistic shortcomings. Anarchy, he argues, is the disease of speaking when one should be listening, as to God.

Can you imagine thinking like that, dear reader? No? Perhaps, then, that is why you are reading a blog about unreligious experiences.

Mah Nishtanah

The Wide-Eyed Man, a sensitive and atheistical soul for whom I have the highest respect, has recently written,

I am the defective one. An ordered relationship to myth is the natural state of humans. Even in our bodies there are rhythms, there is day and night. Our cells know hours and years. Without Eid-el-Fitri or Lent or Pesach, without Ganesh Chaturthi or Egungun, I am adrift. I cannot believe, but I am not freed of the longing for order that belief sates. My soul tires from marking three-hundred and sixty-five holy days in a row.

I protest! There is nothing natural about this man of myth and rhythms. He has succumbed to a dishonest lie; he has become less a man than a clock, and I shall have more to say, a lot more, about the clocklike man, very soon. It is best for man to be polyrhythmic, or even a chaos without rhythm. For him to say, 'I am the defective one'—why, is this not the very marrow of cultured hypocrisy? And when he refers so casually to that 'continuous ecstasy of wonder and pain' that is his life—quid tum? And this 'longing', this rage to order? It is bad faith, a disingenuity. Sometimes, says the Wide-Eyed Man, he looks 'enviously at those who have long stretches of "ordinary" days, for whom life isn't always a raging and signifying fire'. Behold, my friend—envy me. My sublimity, I do confess, is finite. He remarks, 'My soul tires from marking three-hundred and sixty-five holy days in a row'. Might I suggest waiting for—a leap year?

*

Man cannot live by bread alone, but must also partake of the meat of good lambs, of which I have two. These should be slaughtered quickly and prepared tastily with sage.

— Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part Four, 'The Last Supper'.

The finest joke in the German language. As for me? This week I shall eat leavened and unleavened bread, and all kinds of herbs, undipped; I shall sit straight, and also reclining. Nonetheless, Seder having passed, and empty seats since filled, I trust that my friends Mr. Midshipman Easy and Simon the Apostate will at least raise a glass for me next Monday, as Pesach draws to a close. Le'chayim!

Die Peitsche

Or, 'Would Schopenhauer have appreciated the Varieties?' A parable:

*

I had a dream. I was a youth once more: my hair was flaxen, and my heart full of yearning. The Pessimist was my lover, and often I would see him strolling the market and town streets. I plucked geeseblooms with my fingers, singing to myself the liebeslieder he had taught me. The Grillen, who were once men, but now chirred their seed into the ground, were humming volubly overhead. I sang:

For true culture in the humanities it is absolutely necessary that a man be many-sided and take large views; for a man of learning in the higher sense of the word, an extensive acquaintance with history is essential. He, however, who wishes to be a complete philosopher, must gather into his head the remotest ends of human knowledge: for where else could they ever come together?

He loves me. I beamed, and the sun flowered me with kisses.

A man should not read too much, lest his mind become accustomed to the substitute and thereby forget the reality. Least of all should a man withdraw his gaze from reality for the mere sake of reading; as the impulse and the temper which prompt thought of one's own come far oftener from the real world than from that of books. . . The man of books lets it be seen that everything he has is second-hand; that his ideas are like the lumber and trash of an old furniture-shop, collected together from all quarters. Mentally, he is dull and pointless—a copy of a copy.

He loves me not. At this I let fall silver tears, swiftly becoming a brook, in which I saw reflected my own verlorn countenance. The Pessimist awoke me from my dream. I consider this ironical, as he is known in these parts for his exaltation of slumber, and still carries on his person that enchanted chalice with which men are led so often to dream. The Pessimist was agitated—he swatted about himself, as if covered with flies. 'Whatever is the matter?' I asked him. 'It is all the noise that bothers me so,' he said, and—

I must denounce as the most inexcusable and scandalous noise the truly infernal cracking of whips in the narrow resounding streets of towns; for it robs life of all peace and pensiveness. Nothing gives so clear an idea of the apathy, stupidity, and thoughtlessness of men as their toleration of this whip-cracking. The short sharp crack that paralyses the brain, tears and rends the thread of reflection, and murders all thoughts, must pain anyone who carries in his head anything resembling an idea.

Just then the Pessimist's truant son danced by, splashing in a marble fountain with a young flirt garlanded in exotic scents. Overhearing his father's words, he called out to his tanzliebchen: 'You shall dance and also scream to my whip-crack's brisk tempo! I did not forget the whip, did I?—No!'

The pretty girl, whose name was Life, chided him—'Please don't crack your whip so terribly! For well you know: noise murders thoughts'. What a terrible turn of events, I remarked to myself—that Life should agree with the Pessimist! Down the street, just at that very moment, a landsknecht was seen flogging his horse—and the truant son, no longer laughing but now in anguish, raced towards the beast, flinging his arms around its neck with a sob. He, too, could not bear the noise. Was it only I—I wondered—who not only could bear the noise of the whip, but—enjoyed it? Do I not, after all, take a whip to my mistress on a frequent basis? How she craves its schnalzing crack! She grows more loyal daily, and now and then she returns my blow with a comment or two. Is it true, then, that all lumber and trash is dull and pointless, a copy of a copy?

Electrelocution

In 1889, there rose a situation that showed in what threatening depths the American genius [for neologism] was floundering. Notes & Queries, in May 11, appealed to its readers: "A New Word Wanted.—Correspondents of American Notes and Queries are requested to send suggestions for a word that shall express execution by electricity." The appeal was accepted as a linguistic challenge not only by the somewhat scholarly readers of Notes & Queries, who began juggling classical roots, but also by others whose response shows a deliberate departure from traditional spontaneity. The North American Review, plunging with zest into the etymological pool, suggested electrolethe. The Saginaw Evening News introduced electricide. The Century Magazine, noting some use of electricution, termed it "recent and colloquial." In the Congressional Record of August 9, 1890, reference was made to electrical execution as the Kemmler process, dubiously honoring not its inventor but the first criminal to experience its final solution. . . Electrocute, a hybrid of Greek electro- plus Latin –cute, eventually won out. But the folk had the last word. Before long, criminals were simply sent to the chair; and everyone, in the American way, got the picture.

— Mary Helen Dohan, The Making of the American Language. Incidentally, American Notes & Queries is still operating, although it has since shortened its name to ANQ and become much more boring. More here on pain and language, surely an underdiscussed topic, anon.

Miching Mallecho

In 1979, a previously-unknown manuscript was unearthed in the library of Winchester College, one of the top-performing public schools in Britain. The school's valuable library had not been catalogued since the nineteenth century, and even then the job had been done incompetently, by Ronald Busby (a descendant of Westminster's famous headmaster), an elderly Anglican master more interested in undressed adolescent bottoms than in the serious business of putting a historic collection to order.

It was therefore left to Peter Hithersay, a jobbing Moberly's boy under the supervision of the Under Master, to discover the text one afternoon—a printed pamphlet inserted into a 1714 Works of Shakespeare (ed. Rowe), containing what appeared to be a parody or burlesque of The Merchant of Venice. The text was close to the 1600 Quarto, and yet certain passages had been transpos'd, words replac'd with bawdier equivalents, and the whole abridg'd by almost thirtie per Cent. One of the most hilarious and disturbing aspects of this version was its author's suggestion that Shylock could barely contain his sexual desire for his daughter Jessica. The most controversial passage—and the one which no doubt got Hithersay his reputation among the other lads—is the following, from Act 2 Scene 5 (I reproduce from ECCO, which to its credit finally uploaded the pamphlet last year, though it remains hard to find):


It must have been thought particularly ribald in 1714 to give Shylock over to the excesses of Yiddish! The plot, however, thickened—for the renowned scholar E. A. J. Honigmann would notice, just two years later, the similarity of this bizarre text, never found in any previous edition, to the scrappy marginalia on an edition of the Quarto, now at the British Library, in a hand he identified with the 'Hand D' of the famous MS Harley 7368 of Sir Thomas More—a hand widely attributed since 1923 to the Bard himself. The connection was quite apparent; for instance, beside the final word ('girl') in the original of the sixth line quoted here was scrawled a list of 'alternatives'—goose, coun, bitch, hare. . . and piece, which Eric Partridge (Shakespeare's Bawdy) gives as a Shakespearean abbreviation for 'piece of flesh', used pejoratively of a young woman. The marginalia also experimented with Yiddishisms, although this particular example is not among them. So what, we might ask, was the significance of this scribbled jesting?

Honigmann conjectured that the printed 1714 text was the unique surviving copy of a closet libertine publication from the late 17th century, deriving originally from humorous notes that Shakespeare and his company added to one member's Quarto. The evidence supported Honigmann's disbelief in the common conception of Shakespeare as a playwright uninterested in the printed texts of his plays. The Bard, he argued, was sufficiently concerned with the reception of his written words to circulate a coterie publication of his 'obscene' Merchant. Naturally, the established Shakespeare authorities rubbished Hithersay's discovery as a forgery, and dismissed Honigmann's conclusions, with the same contempt doled out to Don Foster for his attribution of the infamous 'Funeral Elegy'. A racy account of the controversy is, in fact, one of the many amusing anecdotes in Ron Rosenbaum's recent bestseller, The Shakespeare Wars.

But in his 2004 book, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist, Lukas Erne, who follows Honigmann in regarding Shakespeare as a canny manipulator of the printed page, provides further evidence for the history. In 1597, a year before the first performance of Merchant, Philip Henslowe recorded seeing a comedy about a pederastic Jew filled with 'straunge canting Dutch termes'. Erne speculates that in late 1599, when Merchant no longer had any staging value, it was submitted for publication; Shakespeare recalled the comedy that Henslowe had witnessed, and which had comprised a minor source for his own play, and revised his own copy as a dirty joke for his theatrical associates. Thanks to the undercurrent of Restoration humour that produced John Wilmot and Thomas Urquhart, the joke retained its currency—not an aspect of the Bard's personality that had much mainstream popularity in the centuries to follow. But as Peter Hithersay proved so recently, Charles Dodd was more right than even he knew, when in 1752 he wrote of Shakespeare that 'all humours, ages, and inclinations, jointly proclaim their approbation and esteem of him.'

Augustein

At the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations (1945-49), Wittgenstein quotes a passage from the Confessions (398) of Saint Augustine:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.

This empiricist account is remarkably similar, in fact, to how Locke described the acquisition of language in his 1690 Essay on Human Understanding. It was an influential account; Wittgenstein, however, rejects it as simplistic: 'Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. . . Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system'. It is an account suited to a conception of language consisting of concrete nouns—'apple', 'chair', and so forth—but cannot deal with more sophisticated words—from 'if' and 'but' to 'exasperation' and 'piety'. For Wittgenstein, the acquisition of language comes not from 'explanation', but rather from 'training':

An important part of the training will consist in the teacher's pointing to the objects, directing the child's attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word "slab" as he points to that shape. . . This ostensive teaching of words can be said to establish an association between the word and the thing. . . But if the ostensive teaching has this effect, —am I to say that it effects an understanding of the word? Don't you understand the call "Slab!" if you act upon it in such-and-such a way? —Doubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; but only together with a particular training. With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding.

The learning of words—the establishment of associations 'between the word and the thing'—can only operate in a pre-determined context, such that the learner understands what it is he is to learn. In this context, which Wittgenstein calls a 'language game', the child knows what it means when a teacher points to a slab and says, 'Slab'.

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Isn't it ironic, then, that Wittgenstein's great predecessor in critiquing the notion of 'ostensive definition' was, in fact, Saint Augustine? The Bishop of Hippo had already written his dialogue De Magistro nine years prior to his Confessions; it was the first work he wrote after his conversion to the faith in 387, and still in the mould of his pre-Christian works, such as Contra Academicos. For my money, Augustine's early dialogues are the most sophisticated philosophical works since Aristotle—a stylistic return to Plato, after the dialogue form had been diluted by Cicero's bland moderateness.

De Magistro concerns the role of signs in the acquisition of language and knowledge. It begins with Augustine asking his disciple Adeodatus the question, 'When we speak, what does it seem to you we want to accomplish?' The reply is 'So far as it now strikes me, either to teach or to learn'. The rest of the work is given to countering this thesis. Of things, words can only give ostensive definitions:

When a question is raised about things that aren't signs, these things can be exhibited either by doing them after the query, if they can be done, or by giving signs with which they may be brought to one's attention.

But Augustine is just as aware as Wittgenstein about the problems with this:

If anyone should ask me what it is to walk while I was resting or doing something else, and I should attempt to teach him what he asked about without a sign, by immediately walking, how shall I guard against his thinking that it's just the amount of walking I have done?

In other words, ostensive definition can only teach when the learner knows how to interpret it correctly; he needs a context for the demonstration. We notice not only a similarity of reasoning, but also of style—Augustine, like Wittgenstein, constantly returns to concrete examples and thought-experiments to demonstrate his points. Here's another:

Suppose that someone unfamiliar with how to trick birds (which is done with reeds and birdlime) should run into a birdcatcher outfitted with his tools, not birdcatching but on his way to do so. On seeing this birdcatcher, he follows closely in his footsteps, and, as it happens, he reflects and asks himself in his astonishment what exactly the man's equipment means. Now the birdcatcher, wanting to show off after seeing the attention focused on him, prepares his reeds and with his birdcall and his hawk intercepts, subdues, and captures some little bird he has noticed nearby. I ask you: wouldn't he then teach the man watching him what he wanted to know by the things itself rather than by anything that signifies?

The difference here is that the man watching already knows what birdcatching is. The demonstration only 'jogs his memory' of the craft as a whole. Signs cannot teach the knowledge of things: 'When a sign is given to me, it can teach me nothing if it finds me ignorant of the thing of which it is the sign; but if I'm not ignorant, what do I learn through the sign?' Signs can only remind us of things we already know, or teach us other signs:

Words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don't display them for us to know. . . From words, then, we learn only words.

Augustine is essentially a rationalist, like his master, Plato—the only source of knowledge is a spiritual faculty, a prior awareness, of which external evidence can only remind us:

Regarding each of the things we understand, however, we don't consult a speaker who makes sounds outside us, but the Truth that presides within over the mind itself, though perhaps words prompt us to consult Him.

Plato brought in the doctrine of anamnesis—recollection of the world of Forms, experienced by the soul before mortal birth. Augustine instead invokes God; in his account, which is much more rigorous than Plato's Meno, he anticipates the objections made by Wittgenstein to the empiricist account of learning, although he draws from them very different conclusions. If Augustine retreats to an even more internalist epistemology—the criterion of truth being in one's spirit—the Austrian philosopher advocates almost pure externalism: language as a group activity, an acquired behaviour.

Update 28/09/07: Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1984 essay 'The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past', writes: 'Augustine’s account of the place of ostensive definition in language learning points towards the divine illumination of the mind; Wittgenstein’s very similar account—that Wittgenstein erroneously took his account to be at odds with Augustine’s reinforces my central thesis—points towards the concept of a form of life.' So it's not just me.

Comedy of Errors

We were on the I-10 when the radio started advertising a performance of the Comedy of Errors. "Comedy of Errors?" I joked; "more like an error of comedy." It's not Bill's best, that's for sure. But it would have an ironic significance, for our journey to the Agua Fria National Monument turned out to be a comedy of almost total error. The first one—error, I mean—was our 'decision' to pack for a hike one small bottle of water, two bottles of Sprite, and, er, two cans of Sierra Mist. You say 'bad planning', I say 'hilarious'. My second error was to wear shorts and deck shoes. In fairness, I didn't know I'd end up climbing a 70-degree slope. But I'm getting ahead of myself!

We took Badger Springs Road to the park. I'd been told to walk east to the river, then head due south towards an ancient Indian settlement. We got to the river and wound up walking south along its banks. After two hours of dancing and diving over boulders, back and forth across the water, getting hot, but not getting there, we stopped and took stock. We had three choices: keep going, head back in defeat, or. . . climb up the sides of the valley. For reference, here is what the valley looked like, before the boulders got difficult—


Being valiant young men, D and I decided to try the slope. It was heap big steep, like I said, about 70 degrees. But D looked up at it, and decided, 'It's workable'. That was the word, dear readers. Workable. So we began our ascent, scrabbling up sharp rocks, some of which came loose in our hands, and beneath our feet. Scary! Gorse and various cacti pricked us mercilessly, and the sun pounded upon us from above. We were an hour on that slope—an hour. I was beginning to get very upset after 40 minutes, but I stuck it out through sheer determination. When we reached the top I looked around; D came up behind. Where the fucking fuck was the fucking settlement? I believe those were my exact words. My shins and fingers were dripping with blood, and my shoes were so scratched that the surface of the leather had acquired a new uniformity. D's condition was similarly woeful. I did not have my sunglasses. The factor-40 had long been sweated off, and my sunburn was gathering pace nicely.

More clumbering awaited us on the plateau. We could see nothing from horizon to horizon—nothing for fifty miles around, except brush, gorse, cactus, decaying cactus corpses, rocks, big rocks, dust, a few spiders, and the buzzards overhead, circling. By this stage our goals had changed. We no longer cared about the settlement. We just wanted to get out alive. D said, 'alive and well'. I replied that at this stage I'd be content with 'alive', and plucked a cactus-needle out of my thumb, leaving a yellow spot to swell on the skin. D gazed out over the sweeping valleys, and estimated the distance back to the car as 7 or 8 miles. By this stage the temperature was 80 degrees, and we were down to a Morbier sandwich and one fun-sized can of Sierra Mist.

Getting back down from the mesa was, if anything, worse than the ascent. The slope was shallower, but the gorse was harsher. Every step took us among endless spikes and needles—D christened one species 'the tearer', another 'the shredder'. The only handholds were cactus fronds.


When we reached the bottom we sat down on one of the white boulders that lined the river. Every inch of my skin was either burnt or scratched; I had a bad headache, and my mouth was parched. The emotional relief was so great that I started weeping, and also laughing. Perhaps it was the sunstroke kicking in.

D's back off to Blighty tomorrow. I think I'll stick to books from now on.

The E at Delphi

In the pronaos (vestibule) of the ancient Oracle of Delphi, so it is said, were three inscriptions on the walls. The first of these, and the most famous, read Gnothi seauton—'Know thyself'—while the second read Meden agan—'Nothing in excess'. The third was merely the letter E: a capital epsilon. Plutarch's essay on the meaning of the E, in which various thinkers propose different explanations, is our only literary source for the object. Not much is clear about the E; in fact, it is even suggested that there are three of them:

That this account is not beside the mark may be recognized by any one who has heard the officials of the temple naming the golden "E" as that of Livia the wife of Cæsar, the brazen one as that of the Athenians, whereas the original and oldest letter, which is of wood, is to this day called that "Of the Wise Men", as having been offered of all in common, not of any one of them.

In addition to Plutarch's essay, modern archaeologists have found a similar image on bronze coins of the period, such as this one:

The quest for the meaning of the E acquires an epic significance in Plutarch's essay: 'Our kind Apollo, in the oracles which he gives his consultants, seems to solve the problems of life and to find a remedy, while problems of the intellect he actually suggests and propounds to the born love of wisdom in the soul, thus implanting an appetite which leads to truth.' The wonder occasioned by enigmas like the Delphic E is thus for Plutarch the impetus to philosophical wisdom.

There are six solutions proposed in the dialogue. The first is offered by Lamprias, Plutarch's brother, who thinks that because E is the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet, it stands for the five original sages of Greece—Solon, Bion, Thales, Pittacus and Chilon. The second solution is proposed by an unnamed figure, who cites the opinion of a Chaldaean (Babylonian) astrologer, that the E, being the second vowel out of seven in the Greek alphabet, stands for the second planet out of seven, that is to say, the Sun, which pertains to Apollo. Nicander offers the third solution, which he claims is the local one, namely that the letter epsilon—EI in Greek—is also the word for 'if' (ei), and represents the word with which questioners address the oracle: 'If they shall conquer; If they shall marry', etc. The fourth solution, voiced by Theon, is a version of the third: the EI or 'if' represents syllogistic reasoning, which is the basis of man's intellect. The fifth solution satirises Pythagorean number-mysticism: Eustrophus claims that E, being the fifth letter, represents simply the number five, to which he attributes mystical properties—the five senses, the five divisions of the soul, Plato's five solids, Homer's five worlds, and so on. The sixth, 'correct' solution is provided by Ammonius, Plutarch's own teacher—he returns to EI, but with the meaning 'Thou art' instead of 'if'. The statement 'Thou art' is addressed to Apollo, and signifies that of all things, Apollo (taken as the Neoplatonic One, with an etymology of a-pollos, 'not many') is the only being that fully is, whereas all other beings are merely in flux.

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Just as with Atlantis, modern interest in the E, despite the scanty evidence for it, has not abated. Several scholarly articles have been devoted to interpretations of its meaning, none accepting any of Plutarch's solutions. William Nickerson Bates ('The E of the Temple at Delphi', American Journal of Archaeology, 1925) notes that Plutarch clearly has no idea of the E's true meaning, and that furthermore, given that Plutarch was a priest at Delphi around 100 AD, the E must have been very old, and its meaning long lost, even to the initiated. Bates mentions the discovery of an omphalos-stone at Delphi, dated to the 7th century BC, with the following inscription:


This, he claims, following F. Courby, reads E ΓA (E GA), or E ΓAΣ (E GAS)—the latter syllables being an archaic form of Greek ge, 'earth'. It is implied that before the cult of Apollo, the Earth herself was worshipped at Delphi. This suggestion is supported by Parke and Wormell's classic 1956 history of the oracle, which adduces the various myths about Apollo's invasion of Delphi. Bates traces the cult at Delphi back further, to the cult of the mother goddess at Crete, and goes on to compare the E to a similar figure from a Minoan coin of great antiquity. In Bates' view, the Minoan character was misinterpreted as an Attic E, the enigma ensuring its survival:

The historic Greeks had lost all knowledge of its origin or significance. To them it was Apollo's holy letter. The E of the temple of Delphi is thus an inheritance from prehistoric times, and another example of the conservatism in religious matters common in all ages.

A. Trevor Hodge ('The Mystery of Apollo's E at Delphi', American Journal of Archaeology, 1981) has a different view. By Hodge's time, Bates' theory has been 'exploded' by Bousquet's proof that the omphalos-stone is modern, and that the Delphic E thus has no relation to the inscription, E GA[S]. Hodge, however, still associates the E with the word GE, only he argues that the G was originally there, and later fell off accidentally:

Of an original ΓE at some very early period the Γ fell off the wall, soon to be forgotten and never to be replaced, reducing the inscription to unintelligibility and succeeding ages to bewilderment. . . it would not be surprising if the surviving but incomprehensible E was still cherished and indeed replaced in a spirit of faithful, if blind, piety.

The constant in these explanations, and others, is that the E was once a communicating sign, but then ceased to be. It became rather a fetish, something left over from before and venerated out of context. It acquired new meaning as a sign purely because the old meaning was no longer there—semotics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. This notion of the remnant object keeps cropping up in my thought and reading—it is the essence, for example, of the 'unknown' winnowing oar—and I intend to return to it again soon. For now, though, I leave you with Nicolas Poussin's 1647 Ordination, which shows Christ handing Peter the keys to heaven, and in which, according to Anthony Blunt, can be discerned the very figure of Plutarch's E (indicated by a red arrow on this image). The significance of this association I leave to your judgement.

Banamelolololo

Overheard today: "Caffeine's a stimulator? I thought it was just the carbonation!" Gentlemen—the ASU undergraduate. There's a rich palette of confusion for you.

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protinus alter amat, fugit altera nomen amantis

Forthwith the one loves, while the other flees the very word, 'love'.

— Metamorphoses I.474

My, a linguification—someone call Geoff Pullum!

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Corinthiorum amator iste verborum,
iste, iste rhetor, namque quatenus totus
Thucydides, tyrannus Atticae febris,
tau Gallicum, min et sphin ut male illisit,
ita omnia ista verba miscuit fratri.

— Pseudo-Vergil, Catalepton, II

He's a lover of Corinthian words,
that one, that rhetor—for, being an utter
Thucydides, a lord of the Attic fever,
he evilly ground up his Gallic tau, min and sphin,
mixing all these words for his brother.

Loeb tells us, 'This enigmatic epigram attacks Titus Annius Cimber, a rhetorician who affected the style of Thucydides and is said to have murdered his brother'. It also notes that verba can be translated as both 'words' and 'spells'; for more on language and sorcery, see here. Compare Ausonius on poisoning.

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New English words for me this month: beest, 'The first milk drawn from a mammal, especially a cow, after parturition', and guillemet, which refers to these Continental beasts: « »

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Perhaps now would be a good time to alert you to Zenoli.

An innocent stratagem

But were all the particular miracles, actions, and discourses of Jesus to be minutely and circumstantially recorded, for there were a great many more than those that have been published, the consequence would be, I am persuaded, that the world would never receive and embrace a religion, whose history was contained in such a vast number of large volumes as the life of Christ would then necessarily compose.

— John 21:25, in Edward Harwood's translation.

The last verse of the Gospels is essentially a statement of human finitude in the face of the divine infinite. The text cannot be a mystical microcosm of God, as the Tanakh would become for the Jews—it can only be an epitome or a crude likeness composed for the sake of persuasive evangelism. This passage is in the tradition of Greek practical rationalism. It is also, more broadly, an expression of the limits of translation, for it makes clear that the Biblical text is merely a 'translation' into words of the divinity of Christ, or if you prefer, of the Word:

Before the origin of this world existed the LOGOS—who was then with the Supreme God—and was himself a divine person.

The New Testament is a translation in more ways than one. On a literal level, it is likely to be a translation of Aramaic documents, and Semitic idioms can be detected in the Greek. It is a translation of Jewish messianism into the urbane philosophical culture of the Hellenic Mediterranean. And as John 21:25 shows, it is a translation of the infinite into a finite medium.

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A translation, like the conversion of energy, can never be ideal: something is always lost in the process. Most translations choose to gloss over this energy differential, by pretending that they are not translations. Thus an English renderer of Tolstoy, say, will traditionally attempt to make Tolstoy sound as if he wrote in English. But for a contrary fellow like myself—as I have indicated here and there with my own efforts on this site—a translation is more interesting and appealing if it exploits that differential as an opportunity for a new language. This sort of rendering will draw attention to its translated status: it will retain elements of the original, as difficulties not swept aside. It will be, in other words, consciously problematic. This aesthetic stems from the belief that translation is not a necessary evil, but rather a primary basis of language and literature. It is a Romantic outlook—compare Schlegel's notion of the Mischung, which I discussed here, and more specifically Schleiermacher on translation:

Consider, for example, a translator facing the challenge of translating Homer's word aretê into English. The translator will recognize that nothing in existing English exactly expresses this concept. He will therefore judge that the best way to convey it in English is to modify existing English usage in a systematic way for the course of the translation in order thereby to mimic Greek usage and hence meaning. He will begin by taking the word from existing English which comes closest to aretê in meaning, say the word virtue. . . for the duration of his translation he will modify the rule which governs the word virtue in order to make this rule conform (or at least more closely conform) to that which governs Homer's word aretê. . . He will thereby succeed in expressing—or at least come close to expressing—in English the meaning of Homer's word aretê.

Here, the word virtue will not be used as the English virtue, but as the Greek aretê—it could be applied to a habitual liar, but not to a weak saint. It will stand out for its discrepancy, as a mark of the alterity of the original concept. The reader of this translation will suspend his normal understanding of the English language, and instead come to inhabit the semantics of Homeric Greek. A similar reasoning lay behind Burgess' futile stipulation that A Clockwork Orange should lack a glossary.

The earliest instance of this logic, as far as I know, is found in the Celestial Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius, early 6th century:

Thus all those who are wise in divine matters, and are interpreters of the mystical revelations, set apart in purity the Holy of Holies from the uninitiated and unpurified, and prefer incongruous symbols for holy things, so that divine things may not be easily accessible to the unworthy, nor may those who earnestly contemplate the divine symbols dwell upon the forms themselves as the final truth.

It is better to represent the 'Deific Principles' by such lowly images as the worm or the corner-stone, than by lofty images like 'Light shining forth unclouded and intelligibly' (John 1:5)—because the latter are more likely to be mistaken for the truth than the former. It is essential for the religious man to understand that the textual and pictorial symbols of the divine are merely symbolic, just as it is important for any reader to remember that a translation is a translation. The sign must not dissimulate its nature. Furthermore, for the Pseudo-Dionysius, it is the ugliness of angelic symbols that prompts us to make the Platonic ascent towards God, just as for Schleiermacher it is the incongruity of semantic usage that prompts us to appreciate the alterity of the original language.

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John 21:25 tells us that our understanding of Christ must necessarily be imperfect. This verse turns out to be a culmination of the themes running through the final chapter, usually referred to as the 'appendix', and considered to be later than the rest of the book. In 21:11 the gathered disciples, under Christ's governance, catch 153 fish—the number is incongruous, and has been subjected to the most fantastical reaches of exegesis. It seems to betoken the ineffable mystery of the Word. 21:22-23 succinctly shows us a failure of communication:

Jesus said to him [Peter]—Suppose it is my desire he [the 'beloved disciple'] should continue in life 'till the time of my coming, how doth it concern you?—Do you follow me. The words which Jesus now spoke relative to this disciple, gave rise to an opinion, which the other apostles maintained—That this disciple would never die—Tho' Jesus never asserted any such thing—He only said, "If it was his desire that this apostle should continue in being 'till the time of his coming, what concern was it to Peter."

Even Christ's apostles do not understand his words, and the transmission of his original statement through the group brings inevitable confusion. We are witnessing a translation of the infinite into the finite medium of man. And immediately before this passage come three famous verses (21:15-17), an exchange between Peter and Christ:

After they had finished their repast, Jesus turned to Peter and said to him—Simon! do you love me with a more strong and intense affection than any of this company?—Peter replied—You are conscious, Sir! of the sincerity of my love to you—Jesus said to him, Feed my lambs.

Jesus said to him a second time—Simon! do you love me with an affection superiour to any of these?—You know, Sir! he answered, the fervency of my love for you—Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.

Jesus said to him a third time—Simon! is your love for me more fervent than theirs?—Peter by his repeating the same question three times, thinking he questioned the sincerity of his regards for him, was greatly affected and said—I can appeal, Sir! to your consciousness of the human heart for the ardour of my love—Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.

Here, the English translation—I quote Harwood, but the same is true of the KJV—loses an important semantic difference in the Greek. Christ's first and second questions to Peter are, agapas me? Each time, Peter replies, philo se. Finally, Christ asks, phileis me?, and Peter again replies, philo se. Christ's initial verb, agapein, does not have the same connotations as philein, although both are translated as 'to love'. Agapein is the verb Christ uses (Matt. 22:37, 39) for the two Christian commandments, 'Love the Lord thy God', and 'Love thy neighbour'. The implication is that Christ wants Peter to show agape, but instead Peter shows only philia. The problem of translation is not merely Greek to English, but within the Greek itself—Peter cannot even comprehend the simple language of his divine interlocutor. Again and again in Chapter 21, John demonstrates the difficulties of communication: the error inherent in translation becomes a model for all linguistic interaction.

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So who is this Harwood fellow I've been quoting, and why have I been quoting him? David Norton, in his classic History of the English Bible As Literature, refers to him as a 'much-mocked dissenting minister, classicist and biblical critic'. He was born in 1729, and died in 1794. His Liberal Translation of the New Testament was published by subscription in 1768 (having been advertised since 1765), and in the same year the poet William Julius Mickle published his critique, A letter to Mr. Harwood, wherein some of his evasive glosses, false translations, and blundering criticism, in support of the Arian heresy, contained in his Liberal Translation of the New Testament, are pointed out and confuted. Ever since, Harwood's translation has been a laughing-stock, not for its theological heterodoxy but for its ludicrous prose style.

By 1768 the KJV was almost sacrosanct, and the Geneva Bible, which had remained popular throughout the preceding century, was forgotten. In 1769 the KJV would be re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, putting the text into the form we read today. Its strength was the poetic economy of its prose, an accurate reflection of the original, but not of standard 1611 English. Stephen Prickett, in the early chapters of Origins of Narrative, defends the KJV's heavy use of calqued idioms against the criticisms of Eugene Nida, whose line on Biblical translation has become standard in the missionary community. By using words and phrases according to the Hebrew and Greek, the KJV created a new English—see for example its uses of 'host' and 'word'—thus putting into practice the Romantic theory of translation avant la lettre.

Harwood found this style unacceptable: 'the bald and barbarous language of the old vulgar version hath acquired a venerable sacredness from the length of time and custom'. It is barbarous because 'the idioms and structure of the antient are so essentially different from the modern languages, that a literal and servile version of any Greek and Latin author must necessarily be barbarous and unintelligible'. What Harwood wanted, rather, was the old ideal of translation: 'to cloathe the genuine ideas and doctrines of the Apostles with that propriety and perspecuity, in which they themselves, I apprehend, would have exhibited them had they now lived and written in our language'. Propriety and perspecuity, incidentally, are two of the three classical principles of translation according to Frederick Rener, the third being purity.

The result clashed badly with prevailing conceptions of what the Bible should sound like, which by 1768 was equivalent to the KJV. Harwood's prose was elegant in a manner befitting his models—including Hume and Johnson—but hardly suited to the abbreviated beauty of the New Testament. One could hardly attribute poetic economy to the Liberal Translation. Take, for instance, John 21:15-17, quoted above—in the original it is 88 words long, in the KJV it is 124 words, and in Harwood it is 156. Christ's second question in the Greek is simply, Do you love [agapas] me? Harwood renders it as 'Do you love me with an affection superiour to any of these?' The added words serve as a gloss on agapein, and serve also to 'diffuse over the sacred page the elegance of modern English'. Harwood's ultimate reason for his new translation should now be familiar—

[The author] flattered himself that such a Translation of the New Testament might induce persons of a liberal education and polite taste to peruse the sacred volume, and that such a version might prove of signal service to the cause of truth, liberty, and Christianity, if men of cultivated and improved minds, especially YOUTH, could be allured by the innocent stratagem of a modern style, to read a book, which is now, alas! too generally neglected and disregarded by the young and gay, as a volume containing little to amuse and delight, and furnishing a study congenial only to the gloom of old age, or to the melancholy mind of a desponding visionary.

Which innocent stratagem reads a little like John 21:25, circa 1768.

Arizona hi-jinks

What a world we live in—a blog can become the measure of one's existence. I fail to post for a week and my folks think I'm dead. Well, I'm not dead. I just took a little trip is all. D wanted to see Arizona, and see Arizona we did.

We took a wave-rider (terrifying) and then a kayak (wearying) out on Lake Havasu, just around the corner from the remains of John Rennie's 1831 London Bridge, purchased in 1968. En route to the resort we passed the podunk 'town' Quartzsite, with its nudist bookstore (heavy turquoise necklace, cowboy-hat) and the tomb of the legendary camel-driver 'Hi Jolly'.


On the way back we detoured 30 odd miles to the abandoned mining settlement Swansea, deep in the desert. Signs alerted us to the 'primitive' roads, strewn with loose stones and throwing up dust-trails in our wake. We munched fresh buffalo-jerky and swigged bottles of water growing steadily less chilled; on the radio was Rush, Led Zeppelin and REO Speedwagon, which seemed vaguely appropriate. Swansea turned out to be the quietest damn place I'd ever been. Out there you can hear neither the wind, nor the birds, nor the roar of rocky roads—not even the dust whispers with lizards. As far as the eye wanders, you can make out only the distant buttes. This picture, a close-up of a slag-heap, rather resembles one of John Ruskin's geological sketches:


I dug into the ground with my fingers, making out the edge of an old wooden beam buried in the sand, and coruscant dust stained my shirt. 'By 1909, with a population of about 500 people'—reads the brochure—'the town blossomed to include saloons, a general store, post office and even a moving picture house. The first train arrived at the adobe depot on the new Swansea Railroad in 1910. By May of that same year, the furnaces began producing the first copper at a rate of 50 tons a day. Unfortunately, Mitchell, who invested heavily above ground and not enough in the mines, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1911. . . The mine fell victim to the Great Depression and a declining copper market, and never boomed again. The last milling was reported in 1944.' All that remain are fragments of houses, blocked-off adits, and scraps of metal quite brown in the 90-degree heat. In the desert, there you feel free.


At Vicksburg a nice old woman came out of her little shack of a store, from which she sold beaded jewellery and bits of old junk, to talk to us about cacti and packrats, snowbirds, chrysocolla and swapmeets. By this point, D had heatstroke and I was sweating suntan-lotion with a sore jaw from chewing dried buffaloflesh. So we called it a day.

More intellectual adventures soon.

Foos won't moos

In his 1943 book Intertraffic, E. S. Bates argues that translation 'is still in its infancy. Most of it is subject to taste and temperament rather than to knowledge. Nobody is entitled to be authoritative or final about it.' What he wanted, like his friend and reviewer, the classicist C. M. Bowra, was a science of translation, one that took into account all the relevant difficulties and grappled with them in a systematic manner, one with an intuitive grasp of the music of words in both languages. Not that he thought the practice technical:

In practice, typographers' and haberdashers' definitions of verse-forms, and a public which lingers alongside them, handicap the translator. The technically-minded man is evil in all his ways. Unemployment amongst grammarians needs to be raised to 101 per cent: what they prescribe matters no more to the translator than the anatomy of a dog to a dog-lover. Grammarians and Academics, in fact, know no more about language than economists about economics. All three get busy in vacuums; and the truth-proof lining of each vacuum is its vocabulary.

This condemnation of the technical and the pedantic has very strong roots—it is an expression of an aristocratic humanism centuries old, almost utterly lost in the English departments of today. In many respects, the 1940s marked the height of this attitude among British intellectuals—in the coming decades, literature and language would be under increasing siege from the sciences. But of course, humanism did not vanish, and the field of translation remained an old fortress for decades; only in the 1980s did it come under serious attack from the avant-garde. In June 1957, the prelate and critic Ronald Knox gave a public address on 'The Demands of a Good Translation'. This was two months before his death, and so he 'was obliged for reasons of health to deliver his lecture sitting down'. As the Times reported:

The ideal approach, he considered, was to represent the original in a graceful, genuine, solid form; the rendering, like the original, needed to be a literary production. . . The translator must in fact get inside somebody else's skin before he undertook the rendering of a single sentence.

'Graceful, genuine, solid form'—this is the voice of tradition speaking. As Frederick Rener observes, the classical criteria for good language-use, cited by translators of all ages, are proprietas (aptness) and puritas (elegance). As for 'get inside somebody else's skin', this is nothing but the standard Romantic line since Schleiermacher, who wrote that 'in interpretation it is essential that one be able to step out of one's own frame of mind into that of the author'. Knox wished for a 'timeless English', fearing that his choice of words would become dated—'no one could possibly tell what [English] would be like in the year 2007'.

This Times article, and Bowra's review of Intertraffic, were two of several cuttings (all on translation) generously inserted into my copy of Bates' book, which I acquired in a small bookshop off Edgware Road for a mere 3 quid. On the inside rear-flap of this wartime volume I find propaganda for British radio: 'FROM LONDON COMES THE VOICE OF BRITAIN. . . THE VOICE OF FREEDOM'. On the back of another cutting, 'MR. ATKINS said that if the overcrowding on parts of the southern section of the Northern Line underground had been imposed on British prisoners of war they would have aroused howls of protest.' Plus ça change, eh?

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The most curious of all the cuttings, however, was this, again from the Times, over a decade later, 28 December, 1957:

TRANSLATOR'S BOLD EFFORT
from our Paris correspondent

This month's issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française contains an attempt at a translation into French of some passages from Finnegans Wake by M. André du Bouchet, together with an essay on Joyce's language by M. Butor. . .

The article goes on to quote a few bits of the translation; I find it difficult to imagine today's broadsheets being so bold. It so happens that I own a lovely 1962 copy of Bouchet's translation, bound with fragments of Anna Livia Plurabelle translated by 'Samuel Beckett, Alfred Perron, Ivan Goll, Eugène Jolas, Paul-L. Léon, Adrienne Monnier, Philippe Soupault, with the author'. It's a rare volume now, and I snapped it up at a PBFA fair a few years ago, an early jewel in my collection. If the Wake is a limiting case of literature, then it must also be a limiting case of difficulties in translation. Can the translator get inside Joyce's skin? Can he fall back on aptness and elegance, on graceful, genuine and solid form, or is something else required?

Let's have a look at what is perhaps the most famous passage of the book—with the exception of its Ovidian opening—namely, the conclusion of ALP, in which two washerwomen airing dirty laundry at the Liffey slowly metamorphosise into a tree and a rock in the gathering dusk.

Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, field-mice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

This is language aspiring to the condition of music—Joyce has played the words as a fugue of themes, as he did in the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses, only now with a much greater assurance. Shem and Shaun, the two boys of the book, are melded in the rush of the waters with the stem (elm) and the stone—and this pair stands for a whole series of dichotomies: time / space, music / painting, good / bad, and so on. Here's how Joyce and his friends render it:

N'entends pas cause les ondes de. Le bébé babil des ondes de. Souris chauve, trottinette cause pause. Hein! Tu n'es pas rentré? Quel père André? N'entends pas cause les fuisouris, les liffeyantes ondes de. Eh! Bruit nous aide! Mon pied à pied se lie lierré. Je me sens vieille comme mon orme même. Un conte conté de Shaun ou Shem? De Livie tous les fillefils. Sombres faucons écoutent l'ombre. Nuit. Nuit. Ma taute tête tombe. Je me sens lourde comme ma pierrestone. Conte moi de John ou Shaun. Qui furent Shem et Shaun en vie les fils ou filles de. Là-dessus nuit. Dis-mor, dis-mor, dis-mor, orme. Nuit, nuit! Contemoiconte soit tronc ou pierre. Tant rivièrantes ondes de, couretcourantes ondes de. Nuit.

In a concerted effort to retain the musical impetus, the collaborators have managed to avoid too many changes to the semantics, but there are a few; 'yonder elm' and 'yonder stone' become 'my elm' ('mon orme') and 'my stone' ('ma pierrestone'). On the other hand, 'dark hawks hear us' becomes 'dark hawks hear the shade' ('écoutent l'ombre'). Thus in the French the narrators have become recentred; but there is a remarkable fidelity to the rhythm. Marked for ictus:

Besíde the rívering wáters of / hítherandthíthering wáters of.
Tánt rivierántes óndes de / courétcourántes óndes de.

The leading syllable in the English is a short i, in the French, a nasal a [ã]—the latter sound better suited, I think, to the elegiac pace at which Joyce read the passage in English aloud.

As if to prove his polyglot genius, in 1938, with the help of Nino Frank, Joyce translated ALP into Italian; the text is online here.

Non odo più per le acqui di. Le chiacchiericcianti acque di. Nottole qua, topi là fan pian. Oh! Non sei andata a casa? Che Renata la Masa? Non odo più il nottolio, le liffeyanti acque di. Rio ci scampi! Al mio piè ledra v'è. Mi sento vecchia come l'elmo tasso. Fiaba detta di Gionni e Giace? D'Anna Livia i figlifiglie. Corvo scuro ode. Notte! Notte! Il mio cupo capo cade. Mi sento pesa come quel sasso. Dimmi di Giaco e Giaso! Chi fur Giac e Gion i vivi figli e figlie di? Notte addenso! Dimmi, dimmi, dimmi, olm! Nottenot! Dimmifiaba d'alberoccia. Presso le frusciacque di, le quinciequindi acque di. Not!

We can contrast this to another Italian translation published recently by Luigi Schenoni, a copy of which I bought in Siena three years ago:

Non riesco a sentire con l'acque bisbiglie di. Le mormoricchianti acque di. Pipistrelli volicchianti, il parlottare dei topi campagnoli. Ho! Non sei tonnat'a pedone? Chi è Thom Malone? Non riesco a sentire con il parlottare dei pipistrelli, con tutte le liffeggianti acque di. Ho, parla salvaci! I miei oossuti piedi non si mooseòvono. Mi sento vecchia come quel'elmlontano olmo. Una storia spifferata di Shaun o di Shem? Tutt'i figliefigli di Livia. Scuri sparvieri ci sentono. Notte! Notte! La mia tozza testa tentenna. Mi sento greve come quel sasso laggiù. Mi dici di John o di Shaun? Chi erano Shem e Shaun i vivi figli o figlie di? Notte nera! Dimmel, dimmel, dimmel olmo! Notte notte! Dimmi il ditto stelo e sasso. Accanto alle fiumeggianti acque di, alle quaelavaganti acque di. Notte!

The difference is worth noting. Joyce has allowed himself a greater creativity, not as afraid of his original as Schenoni is. Hence, Joyce alters the name 'Thom Malone' so as better to fit the previous sentence, whereas Schenoni alters the sense of going home to fit the English name. Schenoni, in other words, treats the name as a sort of token of the original, something that must be preserved in the transition to show the true nature of the text. The same goes for the names Shem and Shaun, which Schenoni, unlike Joyce, keeps English.

But Schenoni is insensitive to Joyce's music, and is unwilling to compress the syntax for sonic effects. Notice, for instance, how the rhyming spondee 'bawk talk' has been preserved in 'cause pause' and 'fan pian', whereas Schenoni offers the grossly flaccid 'il parlottare dei topi campagnoli'. Similarly, his rendition of the penultimate line has no feeling for the rhythm, the syllables tripping over each other in their haste:

Joyce: Présso le frusciácque di / le quínciequínde ácque di.
Schenoni: Accánto alle fiumeggiánti ácque di / alle quaelavagánti ácque di.

If Joyce could bend the shape of his English for musical and other effects, it seems churlish to refuse the same to a target language; 'olm' for elm is therefore better than 'olmo', as it contains more.

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But the oddest translation of all is not into French or Italian—nor into German, or Japanese or Russian, or Swahili, or Tagalog or Etruscan. It is into English, or rather, I should say, Basic English. This was the simplified grammar and vocabulary devised by C. K. Ogden around 1930, allegedly learnable in 7 weeks, to be used in international communications. It was savaged by B. L. Whorf as misguided, and would later be the satirical target of Orwell's Newspeak.

Now, you might wonder why on earth anyone would want to translate Finnegans Wake—the most complicated book in the language—into Basic English, with its 850-word lexicon. Well, you and me, buddy, as M would say. When I mentioned it to Steve Languagehat he admitted that his 'mind is now officially blown'. Still, it was published with Joyce's blessing in the March 1932 issue of transition, the very magazine that serialised the early Wake. The piece can now be found in Noel Riley Fitch, ed. In Transition: A Paris Anthology:

No sound but the waters of. The dancing waters of. Winged things in flight, field-rats louder than talk. Ho! Are you not gone, ho! What Tom Malone? No sound but the noise of these things, the Liffey and all its waters of. Ho, talk safe keep us! There's no moving this my foot. I seem as old as that tree over there. A story of Shaun or Shem but where? All Livia's daughters and sons. Dark birds and hearing. Night! Night! My old head's bent. My weight is like that stone you see. What may the John Shaun story be? Or who were Shem and Shaun the living sons and daughters of? Night now! Say it, say it, tree! Night night! The story say of stem or stone. By the side of the river waters of, this way and that way waters of. Night!

Winged things in flight? The noise of these things? Dark birds and hearing? This is a piece that passeth all understanding! Of course the music is shot, but you could hardly expect different. When the original gets more twisted, Ogden's rendering is even more helpless:

Joyce: And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we're all their gangsters.

Ogden: And Dear Dirty Dublin, he, on my word, was a strange fat old father to his Danes light and dark, the female and male. Old girl and old boy, their servants are we.

Joyce: He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves.

Ogden: His markets were married, the cheap with the bad, like Etrurian Catholics of hated religion in their light reds, light oranges, light yellows, light greens, and the rest of the seven the rain gives.

Joyce: He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord!

Ogden: He was kind as a she-goat, to young without mothers. O, Laws!

And so on. It's a good folly-project; rather reminiscent of Mary Godolphin's 1867 Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable:

But I had worse luck this time than the last, for when we were far out at sea, some Turks in a small ship came on our track in full chase. We set as much sail as our yards would bear, so as to get clear from them. But in spite of this, we saw our foes gain on us, and we felt sure that they would come up with our ship in a few hours' time.

(The full text is available on Gutenberg if you're interested.) These works remain a monument to their authors' literary ingenuity, some more fun than others. Thus, the prehistory of the OuLiPo. Ogden seemed pretty happy with his results, even though they read more like a curiosity than as a serious product of translating expertise. Others had related ideas with the Wake—abridgments (Anthony Burgess, A Shorter FW), epic poems (Norman O. Brown, Closing Time), and dramas (er, some bird whose name I forget Mary Manning, Passages from FW: a Free Adaptation for the Theater—this, and several other adaptations, I owe to the comments of that inimitable internet savant, MMcM).

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What are we to learn from this—is the only person capable of getting under Joyce's skin Joyce himself? The translators never seemed to have a chance with this one, and the further away we get from 1939, the less modernism we have in our hearts and pens. Hence, Schenoni has nothing on Joyce's own efforts. Perhaps for translators other than Joyce, the technical and pedantic might have some merit. Aptness and elegance, in this instance, do not seem so far apart as goals. But then, nobody is entitled to be authoritative or final about it.

Update: the auxiliary section of RobotWisdom, which is among other things the great Joyce website and run by the man who coined the term 'weblog', kindly links. An honour!

Roth's cabinet of curiosities

Since childhood, I've been a collector. At first it was costume jewellery, which delighted my magpie little eyes, then bits of junk metal and fragments of porcelain found in skips and in the road. When I was a bit older, it was paperknives and pocket dictionaries. Then I got into rocks, by which I mean semi-precious stones. That was my first serious collecting passion, and I acquired quite a wealth of them. My grandfather Tex, who had been a US ambassador, would bring back coins and ceremonial weaponry from around the world. In my prep-school days I started collecting fountain pens, and then art postcards, amassing several hundred of the latter, with a particular focus on Picasso. During adolescence I collected CDs; then, just before I lost my virginity, I stopped buying music and diverted all spare (and non-spare) funds towards the acquisition of books, from which I have not looked back. I never got into stamps, for whatever reason, though my parents own an album which might prove moderately valuable one day.

The upshot of all this is that I have a fair amount of odd stuff stored away in the parental home. While I'm back here I thought I'd give you a little tour of the early highlights—coins, rocks and weapons. The junk, pens and paperknives, sadly, I no longer have. (As for the books, well, what else are the Varieties?)

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The coins are as follows, except where I cannot follow the script: 1. France, 2 centimes (1856); 2. and 3. Nepal, 1 rupee, date unknown; 4. Austria, 25 schilling (1967); 5. Ireland, 1 penny (1964); 6. Australia, 20 cents (1966); 7. Italy, 100 lire (1969); 8. Australia, 50 cents (1966); 9. Mexico, 20 centavos (1968); 10. France, 5 francs (1945); 11. Tunisia, denomination unknown (1960); 12. Norway, 10 kroner (1985); 13. Bahamas, 10 cents (1975); 14. unknown (Arabic script); 15. Hong Kong, 2 dollars (1993); 16. Mauritius, 5 rupees (1987); 17. Ghana, 1 cedi (1979); 18. Kenya, 5 shllings (1985); 19. Denmark, 25 øre (1969); 20. unknown (Chinese); 21. Belgium, 25 centimes (1942); 22. Spain, 50 pesetas (1957); 23. Hungary, 2 forint (1948); 24. Morocco (?), denomination and date unknown; 25. Hungary, 20 forint (1982); 26. France, 10 francs (1948); 27. Iraq, 50 fils (1931); 28. Saudi Arabia, 50 hallalahs, date unknown; 29. Portugal, 50 centavos (1943); 30. Israel, 5 shekels, date unknown.

As you might have guessed, I've selected partly for the pleasure of some of my known foreign readers, who may well recognise some of these old duffers. (Update: indeed they have done, and some have kindly made identifications.) Mostly, however, I've chosen by aesthetics. My particular favourites are the Australian 50 cent piece, which has a lovely heft and sheen, and the hexagonal Arabic coin, which I've tentatively attributed to Morocco on the basis of the fez. By far the most valuable, I suspect, is the very first, from 1856, unfortunately a bit dark in the photograph. It makes one's hands filthy to rifle through these bits of metal—but it brings back memories of sitting at old Tex's knees and watching him pour out little velvet bags into the box.



If the coins were really my grandfather's collection, the rocks are unquestionably mine. I assembled them piece by piece over the years, though I have not acquired any new for over a decade. These are the most interesting and most beautiful specimens I own. The largest item is a stunning unpolished malachite that I picked up in New York; next to it on the right, haematite; in the centre, slivers of pink tourmaline set in a white slab of unknown material, bought in Florence; centre right, a large desert rose acquired in Paris (I believe); bottom right, an unusually handsome agate geode; bottom centre, lapis lazuli; bottom left, marcasite; as for the three smaller stones above it, the lowest is an opal, bought at a fair in London, above it an uncut ruby, given me by a friend of my grandfather's, and the top one I have no idea about, but it's a charming little thing nonetheless.



These, again, are all from my grandfather, who received them as gifts from various local ambassadors. I have left them unpolished, though someday I hope to buff them up and hang them on a wall. The spear and boomerang need no explanation. Unfortunately I have forgotten what the middle one is; perhaps someone can enlighten me. The top item is a kukri, or gurkha knife, from Nepal; I was told that the notch on the blade near the handle—called a kaura—was used to draw one's own blood in pre-combat ritual, but this is probably untrue. The fourth is a kris or serpentine dagger from Malaysia; its hilt is formed from what look like two dogs or other animals, and on the pommel is a mediaeval helmet. On one side of the blade is etched a scene of a man with a rifle hunting a rabbit; on the other the legend, Ay chivas que tienen padre pero esta ni madre tuvo, which my limited Spanish translates as: Oh, kids that have a father but this one had no mother. That sounds wrong, no doubt someone will help me here too.

Regular readers will have no trouble understanding that untotal comprehension is half the appeal of these myriad objects. The darkness more than makes up for the light.

Paradise enow

I'm in London for a few days. An interview at the Warburg Institute, and a test of my Latin—one hour in a room with Jean Bodin and a dictionary, the Droz suite, with a daubed Eugénie peering elegantly down at me. Waiting for me at home were books I'd ordered online—heavy, impressive volumes, like a Taschen facsimile of the Nuremberg Chronicle, and John Wilkins' Real Character. I could swim in an ocean of books forever, I think, never even needing to read.

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My father and I take in a show, Beckett's Happy Days, starring Fiona Shaw. (I relish applying the expression 'take in a show' to a Beckett play.) It was the closing night, and the cream of London's intelligentsia, glittering and chattering, was out in full force. Saffron Burrows—Shaw's girlfriend—sat behind us.

In the interval we run into a friend of my father's. Pa expostulates on the idiocy of the audience, how they laughed at every possible moment, without a whit of comedy. I argue, and his friend agrees, that it was nervous laughter. 'They don't feel comfortable with long periods of silence', he says; 'they have to fill it with laughter. . . or coughing'. Nonetheless, he doesn't think Shaw 'had the rhythm of it at all'. My father is more convinced by her performance, full of discomforting grins and sudden, jittery postures. Later he asks me if she had made me understand the play any better. How to answer that sort of question? This is how people who like drama think; it is also the way music lovers think—'I find Gould's reading of the Goldberg Variations so terribly enlightening'. But it is not the way I think. Art for me is essentially a closed system. This is why I don't much like drama, and why I like Beckett. I'm uninterested in the performance. It's the words I want; all the rest might be stripped away, in pursuit of Essence. I think I'd probably be just as happy with Gordon Brown mumbling the script from a print-out. In fact, come to think of it, such a rendition would only heighten the pathos of Beckett's drama.

At Languagehat, meanwhile, the best comment-thread of all time.