weekly poetry #5
An item for the reflection of those who haven’t yet seen it: a French interpretation (rendering, semi-translation, even?) of Lewis Carroll’s ‘nonsense’ poem Jabberwocky (which, by the way, I think makes a lot of sense on a very deep level). We can ask ourselves a lot of questions about the (im)possibility of translating words without meaning in English into another language, what role the orthography and oral pronunciation of a word plays in our understanding its meaning, or if as Carroll himself argues, that a word means“what the speaker intends by it, and what the hearer understands by it, and that is all.” In attempting to render such a poem in different languages, do we assume that there is an isomorphism universally present in language-speaking humans (regardless of language) such that, through different words or phrases, the same mental abstractions or images can be arrived at? I’d love to hear thoughts on this.
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
«Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite
Le frumieux Band-à-prend!»
Son glaive vorpal en main il va-
T-à la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arrivé à l’arbre Té-Té,
Il y reste, réfléchissant.
Pendant qu’il pense, tout uffusé,
Le Jaseroque, à l’oeil flambant,
Vient siblant par le bois tullegeais,
Et burbule en venant.
Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête,
Il rentre gallomphant.
«As-tu tué le Jaseroque?
Viens à mon coeur, fils rayonnais!
Ô Jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!»
Il cortule dans sa joie.
Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux
Et le mômerade horsgrave.
- Warren, Frank L., The New Yorker, Jan 10, 1931
weekly poetry #4
Spurn not the mildest man on Earth:
Who knows but someday you may need his aid?
Cloth of soft texture is of greater worth
than rougher stuff, when robes are to be made.
لا تَطَّرِح خامل الرجال فقد تَضْطَرّ يوماً الى ارادتِهِ
فاللينُ في البُرْدِ مُحْتَقَرٌ خيرٌ منَ اليُبسِ عند حاجتِهِ
- Baha’ al-Din Zuhayr
(translation: E.H. Palmer, The Poetical Works of Baha Ed-Din Zuheir, 2 vols., Cambridge 1877, p. 34)
comments on a Libyan descriptive grammar
A Short Reference Grammar of Eastern Libyan Arabic (Jonathan Owens, Harrasowitz 1984) is lucid and thorough, giving many examples to explain grammatical constructions, and approaching Arabic grammar from a relatively unique point-of-view. In my opinion, it is an example of how to write a sensible grammar of spoken Arabic, written by a scholar who has much experience in describing lesser-used Arabic dialects. Before discussing that, however, a few criticisms about the method used to detail said grammar are in order.
Rather than being a descriptive grammar of an Arabic dialect, the book is more accurately a grammar of an Arabic ideolect, that of Mr. Salah Busafha (“a 25-year resident of Benghazi who comes from Sulug, a small town about 50km to the south”), to be precise. It is this that I primarily have a problem with. As certain locutions and vocabulary (as with any language) are unique to the speaker, one cannot know offhand whether or not they can be used in general. That is why you compile a grammar based on data collected from numerous informants, so that uncommon locutions can be tested. Thus it may be because of the book’s single informant that we get statements such as “There are passive participles with no active verbal equivalent. Mabṣūṭ ‘happy’ but no buṣaṭ” (i.e. we get a passive participle formed from a verbal root which doesn’t otherwise exist). But compare the widely used phrase baṣaṭnā bīk ‘we are happy because of you,’ which definitely does use the root b-ṣ-ṭ to form an active verb. A broader sampling of native speakers would have helped to iron this out as either a false example or show that a new development has occurred between the time of the book’s publishing and now (because indeed a grammatical study such as this is a synchronic study, but who ever based an experiment on a single data point?).
The other thing is that anyone who writes an Arabic grammar or textbook insists on listing upwards of ten or fifteen “patterns” for broken plurals. This is a dumb exercise, because a “pattern” is useless if you can’t put a word into it and get something meaningful in return. You don’t impress anybody by making up countless useless patterns. If someone gives you a singular noun in Arabic, there is no way for you to know what its irregular plural is. Would you say that ḥadīqah ‘garden’ has a plural in ḥadīqāt? You’d be wrong. What about aḥdāq, huduq? No. It’s ḥadāʾiq. In Latin, if someone gives you an a-declension noun and tells you to find the genitive plural, you can, every time. That is a pattern. Guessing twenty times isn’t.
Other than those two small points, and some minor other things, the book is an excellent model of how to go about describing Arabic syntax, grammar, and even morphology. It doesn’t use obscure terminology, and rather than using the misleading terms “perfect” and “imperfect” to describe verbal opposition, instead uses “completive” and “incompletive.” The latter two are much more accurate, because the former have Romance-language connotations in usage and temporal reference that don’t completely align with Arabic verbage. For example, you can use the so-called “perfect” in a number of non-past-tense constructions like conditionals and present factuals.
The book is organized logically as well, moving from chapters on “Nouns,” “Pronouns, Thematization, and Relativization” to “Interrogation,” “The Verb,” “Verbal Complements,” “Verb Meaning,” “Negation,” “Coordination,” and so forth, while addressing each topic thoroughly and illustratively. It includes an appendix of verbal paradigms. Sadly, it is the only complete grammar of any type of Libyan Arabic which exists in English, but is an excellent resource for those wanting to compare with other dialects or get started on learning Libyan Arabic as a spoken language.
on mohammedans and conversion
Sometimes, when you photocopy a journal article or book chapter, particularly when you’re scanning two facing pages of a book at once, you get the final page of the preceding article. This can’t be helped, but every now and then results in a lonely concluding paragraph of interesting material.
Yesterday, I photocopied a short article from the 1933 volume of a now defunct journal entitled The Moslem World (‘a Christian publication on the doings, political, social, and literary, of the Mohammedans’). As it happened, the isolated half page of the preceding article was more noteworthy than the article I intended to read. It so well encapsulated stereotypes of early 1900s American Southerners that it had to be posted. I have no idea what main body of the article was about, but the final page began:
“In envisaging this possibility of Mohammedanism becoming a black spot upon the American horizon it should not be forgotten that Islam today is making more converts in the world at large than any other religion.”
And continued:
“And now here are these American Negroes in the Near East, getting into their blood this conception of a triumphant faith which stands for social equality and which countenances polygamy. If these blacks remain in the Levant and grow in numbers, their presence foreshadows, sooner or later, first petty annoyances, and then disconcerting trouble for American diplomats and Consular officers. If these converts return to the United States, the ardent spirit of the neophyte and the sermons which they will preach make me shudder at the consequences which I see in store for America and particularly for the Southern States, not that I do not have the highest respect for the many Mohammedan friends whom I have made during these last twenty years [of travel in the Middle East], but because I am convinced that principles which are so admirably suited to the Levant would work incalculable mischief in my country.”
The author also provides us with a nice syllogism:
Major premise: “the Moslem faith is particularly strong among backward peoples.”
Minor premise (as implied above): the ‘Moslem’ faith is strong among the Levantines.
Conclusion: the Levantines are backward peoples.
Further circular reasoning: the Levantines and the Mohammedan religion are suited to each other.
He does get two things right, curiously, that Islam was (and still is, kinda) the fastest growing world religion, and that new converts are often the most extreme in philosophy and interpretation.
weekly poetry #3
Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un tenebreuse orage
Traversé ça et là par de brillants soleils
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage
Qu’il reste dans mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils
Voile que j’ai touché l’automne des idées
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf des terres inondées
Où l’eau creuse des trous grandes commes des tombeaux
Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme un grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigeur
O douleur O douleur, le temps mange la vie
Et l’obscur ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!
- Charles Baudelaire
(I’ve written it from memory at the moment, I’ll find the year and volume it’s published in later.)
weekly poetry #2
Abu al-Fadl Baha’ al-Din Zuhayr (1186-1258), was an Egyptian poet born in Mecca. He become famous for his ghazals (short, metered, rhyming couplets) and panegyrics (most of which failed to gain him political standing), often used colloquial spoken forms (referred to as Middle Arabic), and was also a calligrapher of note. He was once referred to as the “grand master of peculiar lovers,” owing, perhaps, to his ghazals on odd love topics, for example, the below:
السُمْرُ لا البِيضُ هُمُ اَولَى بِعِشْقٍ و احَقُّ
و اِنْ تَدَبَرْتَ مقا لِى مُنْصِفاً قُلْتَ صَدَقْ
السُمْرُ في لَونِ اللَّمَا البِيضُ في لَونِ البَهَقُ
“O ne’er despise the sweet brunette!
Such dusky charms my heart engage.
I care not for your blondes; I hate
The sickly tint of hoary age.”
Or, upon receiving a tasty gift:
يا حَدَرَا الموزُ الذى اَرْسلته و لقد اتانا طيباً من طَيِّبِ
في رِيحِهِ او لَونِهِ او طعمِهِ كالمِسْكِ او كالتبْرِ او كالضَرَبِ
و افَتْ بِهِ اطْبَاقُهُ مُنَضَّداً كانَّهُ مَكَاحِلٌ من ذَهَبِ
“The bananas you sent were delicious, in short,
like the sender they seem of the very best sort:
of their perfume and color and flavor you’d say
that like musk or gold or like honey were they.
While the dishes as full as they ever could hold,
seemed piled with collyrium-boxes of gold!”
( Translated with better rhyme and wit than I am capable of by E.H. Palmer, in The Poetical Works of Baha Ed-Din Zuheir, 2 vols., Cambridge 1877, p. 42/175 and p. 8/7 )
weekly poetry #1
Partly taking inspiration from my reading of Robert Irwin’s brilliant compilation Night & Horses & Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature and partly taking the idea from 3QuarksDaily and JEH Smith (with the added benefit of keeping me updating regularly), I’ve decided to start a weekly poetry post. The poetry (and not necessarily only a single poem!) that I choose will come from all different languages, cultures, and periods, and will mostly be in English/translation (whether my own or someone else’s). When I have time or am motivated enough, I’ll include commentary/explanation/biographic details. So for the first post, who better to start off with than one of the most famous of classical Arabic poets?
Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-Mutanabbi (915-965 CE), was a panegyrist for the famous emir Sayf al-Dawla for a time, and was also known for writing fakhr, or poetry with a self-vaunting or boasting attitude. His laqab (nickname) is from the 7th form of the verb نبى “to be a prophet” and means “the would-be prophet” or “the one who gives himself out as a prophet.” Arrogant, perhaps, but a huge baller:
I have tasted the bitter and the sweet of affairs
And walked over the rough and smooth path of days
I have come to know all about time. It cannot produce
Any extraordinary word or new action.
(Translation: Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam, Leiden 1970, p. 277)
Another one:
Live where you will
acquire virtue and knowledge
for the fuller man is he who says:
This is what I am,
not, ‘my father was so-and-so’.
(Translation: Omar Pound, Arabic and Persian Poems, Washington 1970, p. 64-65)
Lastly, a story about his wit and subtlety, my translation from the Kitāb Tasliyyit al-Khawāṭr fi Muntakhbāt al-Malḥ wa al-Nawādr by Shākr al-Batlūnī:
One of the subtle of signs is that the famous poet al-Mutanabbi once praised a certain enemy of his king. The king then became angry, and had it in mind to assassinate him. al-Mutanabbi fled. Then after a period of time, the king ordered his secretary to address al-Mutanabbi amiably, that he would return; then the king would deceive him and kill him. But though the secretary loved al-Mutanabbi disobedience was not possible for him. So he wrote at the end of the letter “[the king] has forgiven you, God willing” and put a shadda on the nūn (of the word inna). Then when al-Mutanabbi understood it, he set out and dispatched a letter to the secretary, after having added an alif after the nūn with a shadda. And this is one of the subtlest of signs: the scribe meant by the inna, the speech of God be exalted, “the notables conspire against you, in order to kill you; leave! I am one of your sincere advisors.” And al-Mutanabbi meant by the addition of alif, the speech of God be exalted, “we will never enter [that kingdom], as long as they continue to be in it.”
Go here to listen to a recitation of one of his panegyrics.
dym sassenach!
Reading Confessions of an Opium-Eater, I came across this hilarious passage describing a portion of the author’s stay in Welsh country as an adolescent. In it we see that the author (and probably other British folk of his educated class) considered Welsh to be a funny and unpronounceable language (on that matter, see the comedy of Rhod Gilbert) and that one could expect English to be a minority language in that region, even among young people (and not the other way around, like today).
And, that English is referred to as “Saxonese” (sassenach), apparently, in Welsh. I like that term much better, because, though we always refer to white people as Anglo-Saxon, we never call their language anything but Angle-ish (English). The term sassenach would make sense in Welsh if, when the Germanic tribes invaded Britain, there were more Saxons in the West intermingling with Welsh people, and the Welsh thus used Saxon as a blanket term for all Germans.
Once in particular, near the village of Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a sequestered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained for upwards of three days by a family of young people with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left an impression upon my heart not yet impaired.
… They spoke English, an accomplishment not often met with in so many members of one family, especially in villages remote from the high road. Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about prize-money, for one of the brothers, who had served on board an English man-of-war; and, more privately, two love-letters for two of the sisters. They were both interesting-looking girls, and one of uncommon loveliness. In the midst of their confusion and blushes, whilst dictating, or rather giving me general instructions, it did not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maidenly pride.
… Thus I lived with them for three days and great part of a fourth; and, from the undiminished kindness which they continued to show me, I believe I might have stayed with them up to this time, if their power had corresponded with their wishes. On the last morning, however, I perceived upon their countenances, as they sate at breakfast, the expression of some unpleasant communication which was at hand; and soon after, one of the brothers explained to me that their parents had gone, the day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and were that day expected to return; “and if they should not be so civil as they ought to be,” he begged, on the part of all the young people, that I would not take it amiss. The parents returned with churlish faces, and “Dym Sassenach” (no English) in answer to all my addresses. I saw how matters stood; and so, taking an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way; for, though they spoke warmly to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the manner of the old people by saying it was “only their way,” yet I easily understood that my talent for writing love-letters would do as little to recommend me with two grave sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek sapphics or alcaics; and what had been hospitality when offered to me with the gracious courtesy of my young friends, would become charity when connected with the harsh demeanour of these old people.
Check out the whole work at Project Gutenberg. Thomas De Quincey writes singingly eloquent phrases that are often quite humorous.
17th century egyptian curses
Returning again to the annals of the erudite Yusuf al-Maghribi’s cleverly-titled Dafʿ al-iṣr ʿan kalām ahl miṣr, we find recorded various curses and swear words used by Egyptians in the 17th century. There isn’t much analysis, just observation. Though al-Maghribi must have had an opinion on using swears/curses, he seems to have been mainly interested in them as linguistic curiosities. It is fascinating to see a linguist at work during this period in Egypt. His book could have been supplemented, though, by a transcribed, voweled passage of someone speaking the Egyptian dialect (because sources for “Middle Arabic” are so scarce).
Because curses and swears are usually based on what cultural mores or religious morals deem bad (which changes over time), such words and phrases can be quite humorous out of context.
Some insults and swears:
زِبْل مُفَرَّك zibl mufarrak “crumpled dung”
وَغْل waghl “parasite”
نِغِف nighif “dry snot”
تِرّل tirril “oaf”
مَهْبول mahbūl “simpleton”
بَهْلول bahlūl “silly, foolish”
هَبيل habīl “stupid”
عِكْفِش ʿikfish “stupid”
Some curses:
سُخام و لُطام sukhām wa luṭām“filth and slaps!”
رَغَم الله انْفُه ragham allah anfu “may god rub his nose in the sand”
نمّلت اِسْتُه nammilet istu “may his ass tingle”
في رقبة العدوّ سِلْعة fi raqabet alʿuduw silʿah “a cyst on the enemy’s neck!”
على قَلْبِهم دَبْلة ʿalā qalbihum dablah “may there be a lump on their hearts”
للعدا الَحكّة l-lʿada l-ḥakka “may the enemy get the itch!”
For those interested in vulgar expressions used in contemporary Arabic, the website mo3jam.com, a user-generated compendium of slang in the different Arabic dialects, is highly useful.
Reference: Egyptian Arabic in the seventeenth century: a study and edition of Yusuf al-Magribi’s Daf’ al-isr ‘an kalam ahl Misr, Ph.D dissertation, Liesbeth Zack, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics 2009. View the original Arabic text.
the ill-considered release of Abd al-Baset Ali al-Megrahi
Ali al-Megrahi, the lone person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombings, has been released early from a 27-year prison sentence and returned to Libya. Not only that, but he was given a celebration and accompanied by Saif al-Islam Qaddafi (the dictator’s own son). This has drawn criticism from both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, who reportedly tried to ask Muammar Qaddafi to be sensitive about receiving al-Megrahi, as the British and American governments as well as relatives of the Lockerbie victims have received news of his release by Scottish officials with frustration and anger. In fact, various leaders have referred to the whole situation as “deeply disturbing” and “outrageous and disgusting.”
To put the situation in context; in 1988, Pan-Am flight 103 exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board as well as 11 people on the ground below. The Libyan government was quickly blamed for the terrorist attack, resulting in all sorts of economic and diplomatic sanctions against Libya (which were only lifted years later when Qaddafi agreed to accept responsibility for the incident and pay reparations to victims’ families). Eventually only one person was convicted, Ali al-Megrahi, and he was put in prison in 2001.
This event played right into Qaddafi’s hands: he had been preaching about how the West was out to get him for years (Reagan’s virulent comments had given him material), and now he had something tangible that he could bring home to his beleaguered people. 7 years later, upon al-Megrahi’s release, Qaddafi, to his mind, has another diplomatic triumph: he has defeated the evil West and brought home the maligned and wrongly imprisoned al-Megrahi. His dubious guilt being out of the picture for a moment, his release was a diplomatically poor move. Qaddafi now has a sequence of events that he can use to back up his power and influence. Supporting that argument is the fact that most Libyans I’ve talked to do see him as a scapegoat. And why not? Libya was blockaded and sanctioned for so many years, that why wouldn’t “the West” pick a Libyan at random in order to seemingly seal the issue of Libya’s agency in the attacks?
But from another angle, appeasing the Libyan dictator in this matter means that he is less likely to deny access to his country’s oil reserves. Gordon Brown is not likely to want to get in the way of British Petroleum’s huge contract for Libyan oil, for example. Both the US and the UK have been working toward improved relations with Libya ever since Qaddafi renounced state-sponsored terrorism, and so this has the looks of a sly diplomatic move. It is neither unexpected nor implausible that either government would be driven by business interests. Though Qaddafi may have wrinkled the situation a little by welcoming al-Megrahi back home in a celebratory manner, in his mind he came out ahead.
I think, though, that the anger at al-Megrahi’s release is somewhat misplaced. It is horrible to have to suffer through a terrorist attack of Lockerbie’s caliber, and it is no good thing to have a known murderer or terrorist released from any prison (though al-Megrahi isn’t necessarily that). It is even less of a good thing, however, to not be angry that the leaders of our countries are fraternizing with, appeasing, and even patronizing a dictator, one with cited human rights violations. On September 1, Qaddafi will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the military coup that brought him to power. During those four decades his people have experienced no civil rights and liberties and have not felt the economic benefits of the world’s 9th-largest oil reserves. Indeed, Qaddafi reserves the freedoms of speech and travel for himself and his family just as he does his country’s oil income.
International leaders have rarely criticized Qaddafi’s grip on power or his human rights abuses; they have only questioned his eccentric behavior and politicking while accepting his legitimacy as a world leader, rewarding him with a seat on the UN Security Council and the chairmanship of the African Union. Though far be it from me to believe that our leaders act on discernible and upright principle, I think it is high time we demand that they refuse both to cooperate with an oppressive dictator and to accept him as a responsible and legitimate world leader. Since our ideology of spreading democracy only applies to countries whose oil we want, it is perfectly logical that the Libyan dictatorship be opposed from the angle of international diplomacy.
some found libyan proverbs
When I was a student at AUC in 2008, I whiled away the hours between buses browsing through old books in their new library. The library’s collection as a whole wasn’t great, but it did have a number of books on obscurish (and even extinct) Arabic dialects (Sicilian, Cypriot). To my excitement, I found several old Italian books on Libyan Arabic. One of them was a descriptive grammar of the Arabic spoken in Cyrenaica, or eastern Libya. The book was titled L’arabo parlato in Cyrenaica, and was published in 1933, during the time when the Italians occupied Libya. Perhaps the only fortunate result of the Italian colonization was that much of older Libyan culture and language was recorded – albeit in out-of-print Italian books – but recorded, nonetheless. Since I couldn’t keep this book and bring it home, I checked it out and, had a complete photocopy made.
Skimming past the grammar and syntax section – since I don’t know much Italian, I didn’t get too much from these parts – I came upon section entitled Proverbi Beduini, “Bedouin Proverbs.” This was the most exciting – 84 eastern Libyan proverbs, at least 70 years old, with accompanying Italian translations.
Since the book transliterated Arabic for Italians pronouncing the Latin alphabet, I just transliterated the Latin letters back into Arabic, using the appropriate tashkīl to preserve exact pronunciation (as exact as the Italian who recorded this got, that is) in case certain vowels have changed since the 1930s. Then I translated them into English, asking my father for help with interpretation. He was familiar with nearly all of them, which I take as proof that their use wasn’t just limited to non-urban Libyans (my father wasn’t no desert-wanderer!).
Here are the first 10:
الزَمّار يموت و صُبْعه يرِفّ
“The flute player dies with his finger shaking,” meaning that strong habits stay with you your whole life, even until death.
كل حدّ يجِرّ النار لخُبزه
“Each one brings the fire (closest) to his bread”
لو قُوّسَت في العشيِ دَوِّر لك شجَرة تقية
“If the sun starts to move west, find a shady tree.” Problems don’t get solved and disappear, life involves continuous problem-solving (I imagine).
من يقول للصيد فَمَّك ابخر
“Who would tell the lion that his breath stinks?” For fear of retaliation, nobody wants to confront a tyrant. If this isn’t poignant in contemporary Libya, I don’t know what is.
رقيق الغرَض ياكِل عشاه مَرّتين
“The person with no dignity eats his dinner twice.” This may be because, food being scarce in times past, eating more than one’s share would have been considered not only gluttonous, but a sign of lacking shame or concern for one’s fellows or host. [Thanks, Abdurahman!]
طول الخيط يوَدِّر لابرة
“The needle will be lost if the thread is too long.” Meaning, use enough to do the job, and do not extend the matter (whether it’s conversation or a project).
ما يحَكّ للحَيّ لَذّ مِن يده
“Only you can scratch your itch.” No one will do your job or look after your interests.
جَت تجْري و الحَمَتها حادورة
“It came running and was met by a slope.” Similar idea as the English “to add fuel to the fire…”
طويلة القَرْن تحَكّ وين تِستلذّ
“The one with big horns scratches itself where it pleases.” Interpretation unsure…I’m thinking something along the lines of ‘those who have the means can do what they please.’
سوق الغلا جلّاب
“The high priced brings customers.” Unobtainable things are attractive.
These kind of proverbs provide an interesting look at folk wisdom, though it is debatable how much insight they give into the kinds of things that Libyan Bedouin found important to think and educate their young about. It’s also neat to see that a lot of these proverbs have equivalents in English (and no doubt in other languages as well), which indicates to me that there is at least some similarity in human experience around the globe.
gods and religion in Dan Simmons’ Ilium/Olympos
Dan Simmons’ Homeric pair of science fiction novels, Ilium and Olympos, are – in every sense of the Greek bard’s work – EPIC. They span some 5,000 years of human civilizations both pre- and post-literate, both historical and post-historical, and have for setting nothing less than the entire solar system and its parallel-universe iterations. To even categorize them requires the invention of a whole new genre; some kind of intertextually literate, poetically epic, hard sci-fi-fantasy ingot melted down from the Iliad and Odyssey, Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, mixed with a thorough knowledge of Hesiod, Virgil, Ovid, incidental works on Greek myth, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Browning’s Caliban Upon Setebos, and modern string theory and quantum mechanics. They are an absolute adventure of a read.
As far as any formal or institutionalized religion goes in this illiterate, eloi civilization (as one character refers to it) with no knowledge of history or science… well, there is none, at least in the form that we’d expect. Revealed-text-based moral codes similar to what we know in our own societies do not exist; there are few restrictions, for example, on sexual behavior. But there is a very ubiquitous, blind belief in both technological devices and the afterlife; blind because technology is never inquired into or questioned, and observation on any post-death happenings are never sought.
In the novels, people travel around Earth by “faxing,” a type of teleportation similar to that of Star Trek, in which a person’s constituent atoms are broken down, stored, and reconstituted at the intended location. In Ilium and Olympos, this is done by way of a network of “faxnodes,” which rely on supercomputers and massive memory banks in orbit around Earth to store an individual’s quantum data and transfer it from faxnode to faxnode. Humans are not aware of any of that, however. To them, the faxnodes have always worked and will always work, transporting them around the globe seemingly by magic. Indeed, they receive quite a lifestyle shock when the faxnodes do stop working and they must hike for the first time.
These “old-style” humans, having been genetically modified by the mysterious and technologically advanced post-humans, are allotted 100 total years of life, divided into periods of five “Twenties.” At each “Twenty,” humans are faxed to a place known as the Firmary, located in Earth orbit, where they are healed, fixed, updated, generally kept young, and faxed back down to Earth. This has always been the case. When one’s Fifth Twenty rolls around, a Final Fax occurs, in which the human is faxed away to join the post-humans in their orbital ring cities in a life of eternal beauty. Or so humans believe, not ever having seen evidence to the contrary.
Sound familiar? I think that a subtle commentary on human religion is woven into the novels. All of the old-style humans possess a faith that they never question: faith in the magic of their technology, faith in what happens to them after death, and faith in their world as having always been the way it is now. This kind of faith has analogs in our contemporary monotheistic religions, and is deconstructed over the course of the novels. First, the main old-style human characters meet Savi, called the Wandering Jew (though humans have forgotten what a Jew was), who enlightens their understanding of their world, mostly by explaining various technologies and replacing their myths with observed facts. Soon, the humans find out that no post-humans exist, at least not in the orbital rings where they were believed to be. They then learn that they were never faxed up to join the post-humans, but simply were faxed to the Firmary so that the creature Caliban could feed on dead humans. By the end of the novel, nearly all of the old-styles beliefs have been eroded, and the characters realize that they have to come to terms with such things as aging, injury, and permanent death.
The deconstruction of accepted beliefs is not limited to those of the old-style Earth humans, though. In Ilium (and on Mars), it turns out that the Greek gods are not actual gods, but post-humans enhanced with ridiculously cool technology, like the ability to quantum teleport. Obviously this has ramifications for both the Greeks and the Trojans, whose worship turns into a massive war against the gods fueled by their rage at deception and manipulation (herein may lie another jab at the control over people exercised by organized religion).
So if we try to sort out all the god plot points, we uncover some sort of power relationship between all of the novel’s god-like beings:
- Sycorax (who, it turns out, is the same as Circe) and Setebos (known as Briareous or Aigaion) are near equal to Prospero. Sycorax’ name is a portmanteau of the Latin sus ‘pig’ and corax ‘raven.’ In Greek mythology, Setebos is born of Gaia and Uranus, and superior to even the Titans.
- it was Prospero, we find out eventually, who raised the post-humans to their positions as Titans and Greek gods, giving them their (technological) powers. He isn’t really a god, though, but the “self-aware avatar of the Earth’s logosphere.”
- Zeus is, naturally, the most powerful of the novels’ Greek pantheon, and imported Setebos to help in his war with the Titans. Zeus’ power can be negated by the Demogorgon (who does not seem to have any relation to post-humans or Prospero), as well as the Fates (who seem to stay out of everything, though). When prompted by the scholic Hockenberry, Zeus says “remaining lord of the gods and ruler of the universe…[is a fulltime job]…just ask Setebos or Prospero or the Quiet if you doubt me,” which seemingly implies that they too have sort of near-omnipotence.
- the Demogorgon serves a god described as the “maker of the living world, almighty, merciful,” “single, supreme God of the entire universe,” and also known as the Quiet. Notably, Achilles, Hephaestus, and others think that concept to be absurd and dismiss the Demogorgon as insane. But, it is the Demogorgon who puts Zeus back into his place for trying to usurp the power of the Quiet.
- the Quiet and his servant the Demogorgon, apparently, “eat Seteboses for snacks,” while Prospero is referred to as “silent servant of the Quiet.”
It must be, then, that the novels’ theo-scape (I most certainly did just coin that word) involves one, superior-universal-omnipotent god, and the rest are just really powerful beings that fit into some sort of hierarchy dictated by the compendium of classical literature relating to Hellenic mythology.
Thus, we see that when Zeus tries (and fails) to claim (usurp) universal power, he proclaims to the other Greek gods that he will “become God Ascendant, the single God to thee, the one and true omnipotent God, Almight God, true Lord of all Eternity.” These epithets are very reminiscent of judeo-christian-muslim monotheism. In Zeus’ failing, as well as in the earlier deaths of the novels’ Greek gods at the hands of mortal warriors, we see that “false” gods – that is, post-humans pretending to be gods – ultimately get destroyed. And destroyed bloodily, in Zeus’ case. It’s quite a nice scene, somewhat more climactic than the death of Philip Pullman’s tired, geriatric God in His Dark Materials.
Though the novels leave much unsaid in describing this single God and its powers, the fact that it is mentioned and plays a role where the machinations of powerful beings are concerned is interesting. Dan Simmons, in interviews, has said that he doesn’t adhere to any religion, but that he finds organized religion to be interesting and fun. Organized religions are all over the place in his Hyperion Cantos, but here, anything resembling them falls apart. What remains as the one unchanged force in the Ilium universe is the lone god described to be omnipotent.
In addition to the above theological structure of the novels, which is what I’m concerned with here, I should mention that Dan Simmons, almost disappointingly, can’t stay away from perpetuating the pseudo-historico-universal theme of Jews vs. Muslims. In the novels, this takes the form of a thread presented as background to a certain plot point: sometime in the distant past, the “Global Islamic Caliphate” developed a virus designed to kill all Jews, which, as a result of Jews only marrying other Jews and keeping a fairly constant genetic pool, failed. After some kind of war, everyone died anyway, including some Muslims who killed themselves. The character of Savi is the only “Jew” left, and she describes Jews as a “hypothetical race construct.” The Judaism-Islam eternal conflict idea is depressing and unnecessary; it’s my only complaint about any of Dan Simmons’ writing.
resources for the study of classical arabic
If I’m going to criticize the teaching of Arabic, I ought to point the way to the few helpful resources that exist in English. As far as I’m concerned, you’re out of luck when it comes to spoken Arabic, sans something in situ, so here are my approved and highly regarded resources for the study of Classical Arabic:
The thick, redoubtable Hans Wehr dictionary, the best-organized and thorough collection of modern standard words. It’s fine for Classical Arabic, though some words are different. Many are the hours I’ve spent exploring Arabic roots and their permutations in this longtime friend.
The two best lesson books that I’ve encountered are Wheeler Thackston’s Koranic & Classical Arabic and Alan Jones’ Arabic Through the Qur’an. Both provide excellent exercises, answer keys, and lucid explanations of grammatical concepts. Jones’ book includes a well-rendered Arabic typeface (which makes the reading much easier, believe me) and proper voweling of words, though his exercies only come from phrases found in the Qur’an. If you’re going to study Classical grammar though, why not do it by working through the heavy and obscure Qur’anic grammar? I dislike Thackston’s transliteration and root system (he should just stick to the things that Arab grammarians used for centuries).
As important as a good dictionary is a good grammar. The best one of Classical Arabic available in English is William Wright’s A Grammar of Classical Arabic. First published over 100 years ago, this book is so thorough that no one has published another grammar in English since then. Because everyone learns language differently, I’d say that the best method might be to get some texts, have this book and the Hans Wehr by your side, and just dive right in. This is THE key to learning anything about Classical Arabic structure, replete with excellent examples and lengthy, clear explanations in the best classical philological style.
Last thing to have is some Arabic texts, and not just sentence-long exercises. Some real millenium-old Arabic prose, and the best thing is that there exist a hundred thousand-odd Arabic manuscripts for you to peruse. Depending on your interests, you can start with anything from geography to history to religious writings to music or love-treatises. You could get a book that includes some varied sample texts and a glossary, such as MC Lyons’ Elementary Classical Arabic. Note that a book like this has no grammar explanations, it’s just a reader.
Once you get good enough, of course, you will be able to stop relying on English-language resources and make use of the works of the famous Arab grammarians like Sibaweh and Arabic language dictionaries.
Excellent web resources include the Classical Arabic blog, the Hans Wehr’s Disciples blog, and the al-ghazali website of Classical Arabic texts, grammars, and dictionaries.
on not learning arabic
Some years ago, Georgetown University Press came out with a new 3-volume Standard Arabic textbook pretentiously titled Al-Kitāb fi taʿallum al-’arabiyya [The Book concerning the learning of Arabic]. On one hand, people probably thought this to be a good thing, as no one had published a new and extensive Standard Arabic textbook since the days of the large and orange Elementary Modern Standard Arabic (a first edition of which, dated 1975, I happen to own), and everyone was scrambling to learn Arabic at the time in order to communicate with the terrorist world.
Soon, Al-Kitab became the standard Arabic text…at every institution in the United States. I request evidence of an American Standard Arabic course which does not use it. Unfortunately for everyone studying at those places, and the lofty name of the book, it has absolutely no merits when it comes to acquiring a utile and realistic knowledge of a language.
How so? In place of actually delineating arguments, I’ll just say that it fails outright or is substandard (not that there is a standard in Arabic instruction, anyway) in teaching modern standard grammar, proper voweling, a breadth of vocabulary, anything of use in conversation, or any useful dialect phrases (of course it doesn’t explain that there exist different Arabic dialects or that no one actually speaks in Standard Arabic). It does not even make the distinction that Modern Standard Arabic and the various dialects are different languages, and that (apologies) learning MSA is not going to help you actually talk to anybody in the Middle East. I’ve met countless dozens who studied al-kitab for years only to show up in the Middle East with the speaking capability of a blender. It also completely ignores the vast and beautiful body of classical Arabic literature in its text examples.
In addition to my complaints on substance, al-kitab’s illogical and inconsistent transliteration scheme and ugly Arabic typography commend it even less.
But this book is symbolic of the fact that Arabic instruction in the United States has not advanced in recent years, despite enrollment in Arabic courses increasing drastically and large amounts of money being put into its “teaching,” despite government folks fervently trying to shore up our understanding of them damn terrorists, despite nearly every major university having a sizeable Arabic program.
Below, I’m just setting out some links relating to a discussion of al-Kitab’s de-merits that was kicked off by a Washington Post op-ed in June 2008. Some of the ensuing writing is ridiculously over-reactive. But yes, I belatedly discovered the controversy and wasn’t even able to comment on related blog posts since their comments had been closed for a year.
Matthew Yglesias’ “al-kitab revisited”
a response to “the cosmopolitan tongue”
8 November 2009 at 5:58 pm (asides and comments, language) (article responses, language, language elitism)
John McWhorter’s article “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English” in World Affairs is a clear, cleverly written piece considering what the simultaneous growth of a global language and the death of many endangered languages imply, and what value preserving the vitality of such languages has. Nevertheless, in respect to the latter question, he leaves out some important points, while bringing up other ones for no clear purpose.
In – I think – support of his thesis that learning a new language is difficult, McWhorter points to Arabic, many varied dialects of which exist, as evidence that one cannot learn a a simple, standard ‘Arabic’ and then expect to be able to speak to any nationality of Arab. This presents a problem to those who are trying to be able to communicate with the Arab world. It’s a good point, and one that needs to be realized more often, but isn’t evidence that learning new languages is complicated, simply because ‘Arabic’ has been falsely constructed to be a single language when it simply is not.
McWhorter also seems to be a supporter of the argument that attempt to learn a new language as an adult is nigh-impossible. He states “Even with good instruction, it is fiendishly difficult to learn any new language well, at least after about the age of 15.” I detest this way of thinking, because it is wrong and cynical. It first of all depends on one’s goal in learning a new language: reading, speaking, etc., but this is unstated. In that one cannot become a fluent speaker of Russian at the age of 28 and call himself a native speaker, this is true, but in no way is it impossible to become fluent in a new language at an older age. I myself didn’t begin study of a second language until after the age of 15, and have, since then, studied 9 and attained various levels of proficiency. The attempt being “fiendishly difficult” depends on a number of things, among them the quality of instruction, time devoted, and ability to use/practice the target language. It is detrimental to the study of language when people are cynical about it.
Another problem, which to my thinking is the more grave, is that McWhorter seems to treat – almost trivially and sarcastically – the complex grammatical constructions and syntax of many endangered languages. He cites two endangered languages as examples:
He goes on to say that “Learning small indigenous languages tends to be a tough business for people raised in European languages: they tend to be more like Berik than like French,” which, while perhaps true, misses the most important point about the documentation of endangered languages. Indeed, it is because different languages have different vocabularies and grammars that they are interesting, from the point of view of their preservation. It is vastly interesting to find out why light conditions matter to Berik-speakers, or why the Piraha language may or may not be recursive; how language is used reveals how groups of human beings, like us, perceive, process, and relay information about the world through speech, organize time and space, and interact with their environment. McWhorter fails completely to address this point, instead discussing how language death doesn’t imply cultural death, and so on.
Additionally, those who support attempts to preserve endangered languages as spoken and living are not, for example, trying to implement Berik as the language of France; they want the Berik people to continue speaking their own language rather than a global language such as English. Those who want to keep 6,000 different languages alive don’t want to have Central Pomo supplant English as the world’s lingua franca. For French schoolchildren, this isn’t a problem of learning an unrelated and different language, because no one is trying to make them do that.
But, English makes a great global, or even universal, language, McWhorter points out. Its grammar is easier than those Romance languages, its orthography easier than that of Chinese, with its “daunting writing system,” and no ridiculous, silly, difficult sounds like “the notorious trilly rˇ sound in Czech,” and, I imagine McWhorter would add, the Arabic ‘ayn, and the tones and clicks of Xhosa. One needs to be on guard here against making value judgments about languages, and about being one who thinks that English is a superior language (a position that I am strongly against). Having expressed these views, I fail to understand how McWhorter can describe himself as “someone who has taught himself languages as a hobby since childhood…”
As an afterthought, I should point out that English isn’t completely genderless: it retains gendered pronouns and vestigial gender marking for inanimate objects. On another end-note, Latin didn’t undergo language death, in the way McWhorter describes it in analogy to reading Vergil in Latin the way we could possibly in the future read Tolstoy in (dead) Russian. Namely that Latin didn’t undergo language death by being supplanted by other languages, strictly speaking, in all places, but that Latin speakers evolved into first regional Latin-dialect-speakers, and then medieval and modern Romance language-speakers.
Permalink 6 Comments