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Book
Reviews
Harmony in Babel wears its ethos on its sleeve. In the Bible story, the diversification of languages at Babel is the emblem of human discord; however, the title of Paul Friedrich’s selected poems and translations suggests that linguistic multiplicity yields a pleasing accord. Perhaps, for Friedrich, professor emeritus in anthropology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, as well as poet and translator, the corollary is that Paradise, with its unitary language, would be hell. One can trace an intellectual line of descent from Edward Sapir (1884-1939), also an anthropologist, poet, and linguist, to Friedrich. In Language, his introduction to the discipline of linguistics published in 1921, Sapir asserted that "[s]ingle Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems." Friedrich’s influential studies of the words for trees in Proto Indo-European, kinship terms, shape categories in grammar, and Tarascan suffixes of space, while solid linguistic work, also convey the poetic qualities of grammar. Friedrich even goes so far as to assert that language is, "among other things, rough drafts for poetry" (a perhaps knowing inversion of Emerson’s characterization of language as fossil poetry). This is more than a fine figure. In many of the poems he has written over the years—and in the most outstanding poems in this volume—Friedrich draws on the systemic features of languages, even, on occasion, making them the subjects of song. The volume under review includes a generous selection of Friedrich’s translations from a diverse array of languages, literatures, and eras. There are two brief selections from the Bhagvad Gita, poems by Hesiod and Sappho (ancient Greek), Wang Wei and Tu Fu (8th century Chinese), and by Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and other 20th century Russian poets. Friedrich’s take on Tsvetaeva’s "To Boris Pasternak" (43) makes for interesting comparison with the version he published in Tongue’s Palette, a volume of poetry by linguists that Donna Jo Napoli and I edited in 2004 (Atlantis-Centaur). In the Tongue’s Palette (TP) version, the series of abuses to which the narrator and interlocutor are subjected (ones that have to do with breaking, separating, and so forth) are all united by verbs beginning with the prefixes de- or dis-. This mirrors a key feature of Tsvetaeva’s poem—the repetition of the prefix ras-/raz-, meaning ‘un-’approximately. The effort to translate this structure is impressive, but at times yields unnatural effects, e.g., "decemented" (where the Harmony in Babel (HB) version has "unglued"). Arguably, by giving up the desire to translate Tsvetaeva’s sound-and-sense motif into the English text, Friedrich has achieved, in the HB version, a tighter, more precise poem, measuring this by the vividness and naturalness of the language and the internal texture of the poem independent of its source. There is a vast difference in effect between "detached our strata" (TP) and "cracked our strata" (HB), between "dislocated us like eagles" and "relocated us like eagles" (HB), "they divvied us like a pack of cards" (TP) and "They broke us like a pack of cards!" (HB). All that said, I am grateful for Friedrich’s several translations of this poem because each directs our attention to a different vein of poetic ore in the source text. Friedrich is not an armchair polyglot: his engagement with language is rooted in his experiences of the world through his extensive travels. Many of his poems suggest that to versify is to verify: to verify memories of places and of persons, and experiences of the natural world—that is, to make mere memory and experience true. Several poems are set in Mexico, where he did much of his field work (Zamora, Acapulco, Janitzio), others in Paris, New York, Russia, and Germany, not to mention Chicago, where he teaches. Among the strongest of these "travel" poems is "On the Interstates" (pp. 51-54). It is a long poem consisting of a series of brief tableaux, reminiscent of haiku, in each of which something seen from the window of his car or at a stop along the way is keenly observed. The shifts in setting made by changes of place, season, and time of day give the piece a kaleidoscopic quality without breaking faith with nature, the whole encompassing the parts. My favorite poem in the volume is "The suffix a in Tarascan words" (p. 69). The subject of the poem is one of the suffixes of space in Tarascan (an indigenous Mexican language), about which Friedrich wrote in the late 1960s. The images flit by as though lit for an instant by a flash, then followed at the next flash by something radically different: a pot, distended bellies, bounded fields, a cob of maize enclosed in leaves, a loner or bachelor. What links them to one another under the sign of the Tarascan suffix a? Without denying logic its due here, I’m inclined to think it takes an act of the imagination to apprehend the fundamental similarity between this heterogeneous series of percepts. In short, there is poetry in the fiber of grammar. The poetic organization of the natural world in "a chevron of northern geese" (p. 13) is reminisicent of the Tarascan suffix poem. Here the contour of a river resembles the school of fish within it, the outline of a horse, a swan’s neck, a woman’s hair, her lips, the lips of her vagina, a flock of swallows, the ocean’s shore, auroras. Verbal alchemy: The preposition "down" (in line 5) when juxtaposed to the swan (and cascading hair) can’t help but evoke feathers. Similarly (line 11) when "swallows skimming fields" appear after kissing lips and labia (lines 9, 10), I could not help thinking of the verb swallow. These synonyms, which traverse grammatical categories, reinforce the poetic myth that there is in nature a code of elementary morphology. Even the v at the very center of the word "chevron" is evidence of this. A chevron, moreover, is not just an abstract shape, it is a shape suggested by the rafters of a building; so, perhaps there is an implicit analogy between a roof and the sky in which the geese fly. I will have done Friedrich’s poems a disservice if these remarks suggest he is devoted to mere word games, since I think the contrary is true. If anything, the poems in this volume, varied as they are in theme and shape, evince a poetic mythology in which there is no breach between world and word, in which the structure of language corresponds to the structure of the reality, in which, therefore, the word is not merely an arbitrary cultural convention, but of a piece with nature. This Edenic idea makes for an interesting and perhaps irresoluble tension with the post-Babelian proliferation of languages in whose particularities Friedrich so much delights. Read an excerpt from this book opens in new window About the Author Paul Friedrich is
professor emeritus (active) in anthropology and linguistics and serves
in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was
educated at Williams College, Harvard University, and Yale University,
and has done five years of fieldwork among the Taráscan
Indians of Mexico, the Nayars of South India, and Russian dissidents.
His works include Agrarian
Revolt in a Mexican Village, The Taráscan Suffixes
of Locative Space, Proto-Indo-European
Syntax, Proto-Indo-European
Trees, The
Meaning of Aphrodite, The
Language Parallax, and Music in Russian Poetry.
He is also author of Bastard
Moons and From
Root to Flower: Selected Poems, among other volumes of
poetry.
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