Piotr Gwiazda
The Forest of Language:
Etymological Play in Leonard Schwartz’s The New Babel
Leonard Schwartz’s recent book The New Babel: Toward A Poetics of the Mid-East Crises gathers his representative work from the first several years of this century. The period was marked by a series of consequential events – the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in September 2000, the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the ensuing U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also brought a major change in Schwartz’s life – a move from New York City to Olympia, Washington where he joined the faculty of the experimental Evergreen State College. It is there that he soon began hosting the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, which features in-depth interviews with writers, artists, and thinkers from all over the world. These interviews – almost 386 episodes by the early 2018, all of them archived online at PennSound – offer a remarkable record of creative and intellectual activity in response to the era’s global catastrophes. But I suspect they also assisted Schwartz in honing something like a dialogic impulse, if not dialogic style, in his own work. His writings from that decade show a sustained commitment to the idea of encounter, even beyond the presupposed encounter between writer and reader. This is why reading Schwartz The New Babel is a deeply ethical experience.
The book is dialogic even at the level of structure. In addition to poems, composed in verse and prose, lyric and epideictic mode, The New Babel includes several essays and interviews – each genre suggesting an interactive mode of meaning-making. The mixed form is not new to Schwartz; indeed, during that period it became crucial to his poetics, reflecting his recognition that “certain genre distinctions and modes of thinking and being can no longer be productively encouraged to persist.”[1] The approach may seem experimental, even postmodern, but it has a long history, especially when linked to the tradition of the prosimetrum, a genre popular in medieval Europe. Alternating between prose and verse, the prosimetrum (the name itself is a coinage of Latin and Greek) combines lyric and narrative elements, song and philosophy.[2] Schwartz’s blend of lament and praise, discourse and address, formal constraint and improvisation, also recalls Statius’s Silvae, composed at the height of the Roman Empire in 90 CE, which gave birth to the genre of literary miscellany (the word refers to both “woods” and “material”). All these forms of encounter – poems, essays, interviews – complement one another in The New Babel.
The book’s intertextuality further enhances Schwartz’s dialogic approach. The list of writers and philosophers he quotes or pays homage to includes Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Mahmoud Darwish, Robert Duncan, Paul Eluard, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabès, Frank O’Hara, George Oppen, Octavio Paz, Rumi, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman. Schwartz’s main interlocutors are Martin Buber, important to him because of his philosophy of dialogue and his support of the idea of Israel as a bi-national state, and Emmanuel Levinas, who guides his thinking about language as responsibility to the other. The book also features reflections on the thirteenth-century Arabic poet Ibn ʿArabi, the twentieth-century Jewish scholar Gershom Sholem, and the contemporary Palestinian poets Taha Muhammed Ali and Somaya El-Sousi. In addition, Schwartz includes transcripts of Cross Cultural Poetics interviews with Aharon Shabtai, who reads his poems inspired by the Palestinian uprising, Michael Hardt, who attempts to define a political concept of love, and Amiri Baraka, who talks about his controversial poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” These intertextual moves show what Schwartz means by wanting to pursue other “modes of thinking and being.” As he implies, to think constructively about poetry and politics one must engage in dialogue with others by any means available, including the book or the telephone.
Thematically The New Babel is a study of war, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. But on a more subtle level it is also a study of peace. Schwartz understands that literature can never come close to representing the horrors of war (as Whitman wrote in his notebook after the Civil War, “the real war will never get into books”[3]). Presumably he also understands the futility of depicting a world completely free of conflict (to quote the perverse adage, “in times of peace prepare for war.”) For this reason in The New Babel he focuses on the intertwined discourses of war and peace. The representation of violence can easily lead to the violence of representation, as in the U.S. military’s use of terms like “shock and awe,” “collateral damage,” and “precision bombing” (which he finds especially repugnant) or in the neoconservative appropriation of Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilization” hypothesis to justify the push for a global American empire. At the same time, Schwartz believes that poetry can resist such unscrupulous manipulations: “Language is the source of our humanity, and endlessly fluid, but it is also the source of a purposeful confusion that there is a necessity to counter, by way of new language” (ix). Especially in the title sequence and the group of poems called “Apple Anyone” Schwartz tries to deflect propaganda by putting American English in conversation with other languages.
***
Written from the perspective of a New Yorker, the title sequence is one of the most powerful poetic responses to the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. A prose poem incorporating aspects of notebook and chant, it consists of seven numbered sections – eight rather, if we include the initial section “0,” from which I quote the opening portions:
Babel of course is the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.
Babble is language’s beginning, before it’s a language, while it’s still song.
As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallacized zero – let’s call it Ground Zero.
Babel is defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire:
man creates gods.
Where before stood the North and South Phallus now yawns a smoldering Cleft, smoke subject to variable breezes. (3)
The word Babel comes from Greek Babylon, derived from Hebrew Bābel and earlier from Assyrian bāb-ilu, “gate of god,” a city in the land of Shinar, part of modern Iraq. Traditionally, the story of the Tower of Babel has symbolized linguistic confusion brought about by God’s anger at the human desire to reach the heavens. The story assumes that prior to the tower’s destruction there existed only one language that was shared by the earth’s inhabitants. In the modern context, the term “babel” has been used in reference to multilingual cities and societies, mainly to signify their presumed lack of coherence. But even this negative meaning is not without ambiguity. While reflecting on the story’s significance to the concept of translation, Jacques Derrida observes that it mentions only one tribe, “the tribe of Shem,” which embarked on the construction of the tower to “proclaim its name” and thus impose its language on other tribes. “Had their enterprise succeeded,” Derrida concludes, “the universal tongue would have been a particular language imposed by violence, by force, by violent hegemony over the rest of the world.”[4] The divine intervention caused linguistic chaos – but saved the world from linguistic colonization.
The word babble derives from Icelandic babbla, Danish babbelen, and German pappelen, though it likely emerged around the same time as its equivalents; according to the OED, “[the word] is known in English as early as anywhere else.” It usually refers to imperfect or inarticulate way of talking, foolish or excited speech, or simply an incomprehensible mixture of words or sounds. It also marks a stage in the speech and language development of infants; it’s worth nothing that in another poem in The New Babel Schwartz refers to his baby daughter as “outfitted in maiden speech” (111). The word also commonly refers to the speech of the elderly, especially if it is considered meaningless or inadequate, as in this late poem by Whitman: “By broad Potomac’s shore, again, old tongue, / (Still uttering, still ejaculating, canst never cease this babble?).”[5] In all cases the word signifies speech reduced to its most basic units – what Schwartz calls “language’s beginning.”
There is no etymological link between babel and babble, but it is possible, as the OED also states, that associations with the former may have at some point influenced the meanings of the latter word. In any case, it is not unusual to think of the two words together, as both signify a failure or at least absence of communication; as Jonathan Arac notes, “the biblical term of babel also intends to invoke our ordinary language sense of babble, to pour out sound without meaning.”[6] But Schwartz chooses to relate babble to song – or some kind of rudimentary language that could potentially counter the confusion associated with babel. Perhaps he is thinking of Northrop Frye’s distinction between babble and doodle (which Arac also mentions) – two simple terms that refer to the aural and visual features of poetry. Indeed, in addition to the homophony of babel and babble Schwartz draws on a variety of sound effects, including assonance, consonance, and especially (as in the passage quoted above) alliteration. Later in the poem Babel becomes Kabul, becomes Bible, becomes Baghdad, becomes Belgrade, becomes “our backyard” – and so on.
This kind of aural and even visual patterning is common to poetry. But there is another way of pairing or arraying words that is anything but common, perhaps because it usually takes poets outside the immediate confines of their own language: etymology. Note how in his third sentence Schwartz brings together the Anglo-Saxon “ground” and the Arabic “zero.” The irony is further intensified by the fact that the expression “ground zero” was first used in the context of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guided by Wilhelm Reich’s notion that “peace can be hammered out only at a time of war” (6), Schwartz continues to hammer out his new language using the resources of etymology. In section 2 he connects “Madoo,” the Afghan village that was an unintended target of U.S. bombing campaign in December 2001, with the English “Madoo,” derived from the Scottish word meaning “my dove” (11). Earlier, he states provocatively “After Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric (Theodor Adorno)” (9). What is even more significant than the distortion of the German philosopher’s famous dictum is the fact the word “barbaric” in its Greek derivation refers to “foreign speech.” To say that writing poetry after the bombing of Madoo, during which about 55 civilians were killed, is equivalent to speaking a foreign language – in a sense, being a foreigner – is to say a great deal indeed. No less than sound effects, etymology assists Schwartz in his pursuit of dialogic poetics. As he says in an essay that first appeared in Daily News Egypt in 2008 and reappears as “After Babel” in this collection: “[w]e must permit ourselves such provocations, remain open to being provoked, and insist on saying paradoxical things” (82).
How useful can etymology be to poets? These days relatively few of them seem to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the study of words and their histories. Or at least few of them do so as explicitly and extensively as Schwartz does in The New Babel.[7] To some etymology may seem too scientific, more appropriate for philology or philosophy, an investigation of dead words in the dictionary, not an engagement with living speech. To others it may seem like a naïve pursuit for linguistic authenticity, a belief that earlier meanings are somehow truer meanings that bring us closer to the original language (the word itself combines “truth” and “study”). The conventional reading of the story of Babel clearly advances the idea of language in decline, but such idea is only partly attractive to poets. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because
for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been
once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of
animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of
their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. The expression,
or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.[8]
Schwartz is genuinely interested in the evolution of words. He is perfectly willing to entertain the fiction of a perfect common language as another of his “provocations.” Ultimately, however, he resorts to etymology as a form of artistically productive and politically efficient wordplay. Etymology reveals the palimpsestic nature of language or, as Schwartz puts it in “Language as Responsibility,” how “languages do supplement each other, even as political realities tear asunder the people that talk” (87). The point is to discover, rather than invent, the linkages between words. Such discoveries are a kind of self-generating translation. And sometimes they can produce a flash of recognition. For instance, as Schwartz casually notes in section 3, the word for “truth” derives from “tree” (12).
***
The etymological forays in “The New Babel” provide insights about hidden relationships between words. In the series of poems called “Apple Anyone” Schwartz again turns to etymology as a structuring device, but with a different purpose. He originally planned to compose a number of poems using only the English words derived from Arabic. Eventually he ended up combining those words with Shakespeare’s writings, mostly the sonnets, by doing so demonstrating what Christine Pagnoulle calls “the subtle mechanisms of rewriting.”[9] But his purpose is clearly more than literary. By splicing Arabic with the work of this most canonical of English writers, Schwartz counters the stereotyping of Arabic culture in the United States following the events of 9/11. The idea is not even to highlight the historical presence of Arabic in English, but to put the world’s two great languages in dialogue with each other. As he says his essay “Transcendental Tabby” (sounding rather like Emerson): “Poetry is language, and in poetry false dichotomies can best be dissolved, since the false dichotomies themselves are only frozen language” (42).
The constraint results in poems that are tender, playful, occasionally even funny. Schwartz freely draws on Shakespeare’s writings, both formally and thematically, and largely avoids the preoccupation with violence that guided much of “The New Babel.” The exception is his take on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which seems to be written in the early phases of the U.S. invasion of Iraq:
To go on in an ideology that is patrolled by admirals
all praised to the hilt, each awarded triple scoops of sherbet,
sugars gushing in banana and lime, or to grab up pails against
a whole Mediterranean of pain, and by opposing, drain it?
The road to Baghdad: it is an orgasm religiously sought.
To slow my brain and by night to say we stopped all that:
a saffroned vulture scuffs the dirt it lands in until every man
looks inward, acknowledging his own mulatto ground
and the thousand gauzy masks our bodies are mom to.
To slow my brain – to slow my brain!
And during that slowing to succumb to a new fantasy,
a woman with corneas like coffee beans, a coiled mortality
uncoiling, amalgam, not amalgam, that is not a jackal -
a vocabulary, a calamity, and at last, a casualty list.
admiral sherbet sugar banana lime Baghdad saffron
mulatto gauze cornea coffee amalgam (50)
As we can gather, “Shakespeare” functions as a kind of matrix to Schwartz’s recombinatory procedure.[10] As we read these texts, with the lists of Arabic (and sometimes Persian) words appended to the bottom, we are reminded that “English” is never simply “English” but a mixture of other languages, especially of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate origin. This unique blend is the chief source of Shakespeare’s linguistic energy, one of the reasons for its continuing appeal. But closer to home the language of Whitman, even more than his formal innovations, also makes him our contemporary. The author of Leaves of Grass took full advantage of the flowering of the English language in the 19th century, his poetry demonstrating what Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp call “a certain word-drunkenness”[11] – an openness to written and spoken, learned and vernacular, native and foreign language. An amateur linguist, Whitman celebrated the ability of American English to assimilate other languages, which he regarded as close to a universal language.
“[I]n English we cannot name a piece of fruit without borrowing from Arabic,” Schwartz says (82). If this is true, we must also acknowledge – and is some ways accept – the global dominance of English as a legacy of the imperial history of Britain and its American successor. Despite his ingenious challenge to Islamophobia in the “Apple Anyone” series and his generative wordplay in “The New Babel,” English remains the dominant language of his volume. This observation may seem obvious, but I’m taking Schwartz at his word when he proposes that “saying [something] is never really obvious” (82). As a writer and interviewer, he knows very well that no meaningful conversation is possible without a shared language. Even a dialogue about how “languages are interdependent” must be conducted, as a practical matter, in a linguistic code that is familiar to all the interlocutors. For all its translingual gestures The New Babel is a book in which monolingualism asserts itself, to quote David Gramling “in the modest and far-reaching structural sense of a doxa, rather than in the provocative and politicizable sense of an orthodoxy.”[12] As a book written in English, presumably for English-language readers, it also introduces some uncomfortable questions. Are Americans a new “tribe of Sham” trying to impose its language upon other tribes? Are they also going to be punished – have been punished – by a jealous god? Like Whitman, Schwartz wants to celebrate the global babble that is English. But his enthusiasm for it is tempered by the imperial designs of “our mad extravagant metropolis” and “our republic of fear” (3).
***
In “After Babel” Schwartz describes himself as “a poet ... lost in the forest of language”; it is during those perilous yet potentially transformative moments, “in the adventure of writing,” that he recognizes the centrality of language to human experience (82). Etymology makes this centrality more tangible, making the reader travel with him across different cultures and nations, perhaps even toward some elementary truth. Taking a cue from Schwartz, let’s note that the word “forest” and “foreign” derive from the same Latin word foris, meaning “outside.” Poetry, which can alienate philosophers and puzzle scientists, helps us make sense of that “outside,” the forest that grows everywhere and within us. It helps us make sense of the presence of other people in the world – family or friends, lovers or neighbors, fellow citizens or indeed foreigners – each with their separate language.
[1] Leonard Schwartz, The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016), ix. All subsequent references to this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text. The book collects Schwartz’s writings previously published in The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House, 2003), Ear and Ethos (Talisman House, 2005), and Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Press, 2007).
[2] On the history of the prosimetrum in Europe, and the term’s relevance to contemporary lyric theory, see Ricardo Matthews’s “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory,” PMLA 132.2 (March 2018): 296-313.
[3] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1961), 112.
[4] Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 101.
[5] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 404.
[6] Jonathan Arac, “Global and Babel: Two Perspectives on Language in American Literature.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 50.1-3 (2004): 102.
[7] For an overview of how mostly sixteenth and seventeenth-century English poets “depend on etymological information,” see K.K. Ruthven, “The Poet as Etymologist,” Critical Quarterly 11.1 (March 1969): 9-37. Other recent books in which etymology serves as a structuring device include Monica Youn’s Blackacre: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016) and Jena Osman’s The Network (Fence Books, 2010). Osman credits the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña’s desire “to enter words in order to see” for sparking her interest in etymology.
[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Poems (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 457.
[9] Christine Pagnoulle, “Lament in a New Language,” Jacket 35 (2008), http://jacketmagazine.com/35/r-schwartz-rb-pagnoulle.shtml (accessed 2 October, 2019).
[10] His own analogy for it is “a mobile of words and signs, dangled over the crib of the culture, as to stimulate the mind to imagine new combinations” (43).
[11] Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp, “‘Song of Myself’: A Lexicon,” in Song of Myself. A Facsimile of the Original 1855 Edition, The American Poetry Review (2009): n.p. Whitman worked hard to integrate foreign elements into Leaves of Grass as demonstrated by a high number of loan and coin words like camerado, libertad, feuillage, eleve, allons, formules, savantism, viva, romanza, ambulanza, etc.
[12] David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (New York: Bloomsbury 2016), 93. Gramling also notes: “Monolingualism’s underlying principle has never quite been that other languages are bad or inferior, but that they are contextually unnecessary. Monolingualism manages other languages; it does not oppose them” (ibid. 11).
The book is dialogic even at the level of structure. In addition to poems, composed in verse and prose, lyric and epideictic mode, The New Babel includes several essays and interviews – each genre suggesting an interactive mode of meaning-making. The mixed form is not new to Schwartz; indeed, during that period it became crucial to his poetics, reflecting his recognition that “certain genre distinctions and modes of thinking and being can no longer be productively encouraged to persist.”[1] The approach may seem experimental, even postmodern, but it has a long history, especially when linked to the tradition of the prosimetrum, a genre popular in medieval Europe. Alternating between prose and verse, the prosimetrum (the name itself is a coinage of Latin and Greek) combines lyric and narrative elements, song and philosophy.[2] Schwartz’s blend of lament and praise, discourse and address, formal constraint and improvisation, also recalls Statius’s Silvae, composed at the height of the Roman Empire in 90 CE, which gave birth to the genre of literary miscellany (the word refers to both “woods” and “material”). All these forms of encounter – poems, essays, interviews – complement one another in The New Babel.
The book’s intertextuality further enhances Schwartz’s dialogic approach. The list of writers and philosophers he quotes or pays homage to includes Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Mahmoud Darwish, Robert Duncan, Paul Eluard, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabès, Frank O’Hara, George Oppen, Octavio Paz, Rumi, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman. Schwartz’s main interlocutors are Martin Buber, important to him because of his philosophy of dialogue and his support of the idea of Israel as a bi-national state, and Emmanuel Levinas, who guides his thinking about language as responsibility to the other. The book also features reflections on the thirteenth-century Arabic poet Ibn ʿArabi, the twentieth-century Jewish scholar Gershom Sholem, and the contemporary Palestinian poets Taha Muhammed Ali and Somaya El-Sousi. In addition, Schwartz includes transcripts of Cross Cultural Poetics interviews with Aharon Shabtai, who reads his poems inspired by the Palestinian uprising, Michael Hardt, who attempts to define a political concept of love, and Amiri Baraka, who talks about his controversial poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” These intertextual moves show what Schwartz means by wanting to pursue other “modes of thinking and being.” As he implies, to think constructively about poetry and politics one must engage in dialogue with others by any means available, including the book or the telephone.
Thematically The New Babel is a study of war, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. But on a more subtle level it is also a study of peace. Schwartz understands that literature can never come close to representing the horrors of war (as Whitman wrote in his notebook after the Civil War, “the real war will never get into books”[3]). Presumably he also understands the futility of depicting a world completely free of conflict (to quote the perverse adage, “in times of peace prepare for war.”) For this reason in The New Babel he focuses on the intertwined discourses of war and peace. The representation of violence can easily lead to the violence of representation, as in the U.S. military’s use of terms like “shock and awe,” “collateral damage,” and “precision bombing” (which he finds especially repugnant) or in the neoconservative appropriation of Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilization” hypothesis to justify the push for a global American empire. At the same time, Schwartz believes that poetry can resist such unscrupulous manipulations: “Language is the source of our humanity, and endlessly fluid, but it is also the source of a purposeful confusion that there is a necessity to counter, by way of new language” (ix). Especially in the title sequence and the group of poems called “Apple Anyone” Schwartz tries to deflect propaganda by putting American English in conversation with other languages.
***
Written from the perspective of a New Yorker, the title sequence is one of the most powerful poetic responses to the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. A prose poem incorporating aspects of notebook and chant, it consists of seven numbered sections – eight rather, if we include the initial section “0,” from which I quote the opening portions:
Babel of course is the fall of a Tower, followed by a vast, manipulated confusion of words.
Babble is language’s beginning, before it’s a language, while it’s still song.
As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallacized zero – let’s call it Ground Zero.
Babel is defiance of the demiurge and hubris of the heart, ziggurat aimed at suns yet unborn, inside the mouth the mouth as desire:
man creates gods.
Where before stood the North and South Phallus now yawns a smoldering Cleft, smoke subject to variable breezes. (3)
The word Babel comes from Greek Babylon, derived from Hebrew Bābel and earlier from Assyrian bāb-ilu, “gate of god,” a city in the land of Shinar, part of modern Iraq. Traditionally, the story of the Tower of Babel has symbolized linguistic confusion brought about by God’s anger at the human desire to reach the heavens. The story assumes that prior to the tower’s destruction there existed only one language that was shared by the earth’s inhabitants. In the modern context, the term “babel” has been used in reference to multilingual cities and societies, mainly to signify their presumed lack of coherence. But even this negative meaning is not without ambiguity. While reflecting on the story’s significance to the concept of translation, Jacques Derrida observes that it mentions only one tribe, “the tribe of Shem,” which embarked on the construction of the tower to “proclaim its name” and thus impose its language on other tribes. “Had their enterprise succeeded,” Derrida concludes, “the universal tongue would have been a particular language imposed by violence, by force, by violent hegemony over the rest of the world.”[4] The divine intervention caused linguistic chaos – but saved the world from linguistic colonization.
The word babble derives from Icelandic babbla, Danish babbelen, and German pappelen, though it likely emerged around the same time as its equivalents; according to the OED, “[the word] is known in English as early as anywhere else.” It usually refers to imperfect or inarticulate way of talking, foolish or excited speech, or simply an incomprehensible mixture of words or sounds. It also marks a stage in the speech and language development of infants; it’s worth nothing that in another poem in The New Babel Schwartz refers to his baby daughter as “outfitted in maiden speech” (111). The word also commonly refers to the speech of the elderly, especially if it is considered meaningless or inadequate, as in this late poem by Whitman: “By broad Potomac’s shore, again, old tongue, / (Still uttering, still ejaculating, canst never cease this babble?).”[5] In all cases the word signifies speech reduced to its most basic units – what Schwartz calls “language’s beginning.”
There is no etymological link between babel and babble, but it is possible, as the OED also states, that associations with the former may have at some point influenced the meanings of the latter word. In any case, it is not unusual to think of the two words together, as both signify a failure or at least absence of communication; as Jonathan Arac notes, “the biblical term of babel also intends to invoke our ordinary language sense of babble, to pour out sound without meaning.”[6] But Schwartz chooses to relate babble to song – or some kind of rudimentary language that could potentially counter the confusion associated with babel. Perhaps he is thinking of Northrop Frye’s distinction between babble and doodle (which Arac also mentions) – two simple terms that refer to the aural and visual features of poetry. Indeed, in addition to the homophony of babel and babble Schwartz draws on a variety of sound effects, including assonance, consonance, and especially (as in the passage quoted above) alliteration. Later in the poem Babel becomes Kabul, becomes Bible, becomes Baghdad, becomes Belgrade, becomes “our backyard” – and so on.
This kind of aural and even visual patterning is common to poetry. But there is another way of pairing or arraying words that is anything but common, perhaps because it usually takes poets outside the immediate confines of their own language: etymology. Note how in his third sentence Schwartz brings together the Anglo-Saxon “ground” and the Arabic “zero.” The irony is further intensified by the fact that the expression “ground zero” was first used in the context of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guided by Wilhelm Reich’s notion that “peace can be hammered out only at a time of war” (6), Schwartz continues to hammer out his new language using the resources of etymology. In section 2 he connects “Madoo,” the Afghan village that was an unintended target of U.S. bombing campaign in December 2001, with the English “Madoo,” derived from the Scottish word meaning “my dove” (11). Earlier, he states provocatively “After Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric (Theodor Adorno)” (9). What is even more significant than the distortion of the German philosopher’s famous dictum is the fact the word “barbaric” in its Greek derivation refers to “foreign speech.” To say that writing poetry after the bombing of Madoo, during which about 55 civilians were killed, is equivalent to speaking a foreign language – in a sense, being a foreigner – is to say a great deal indeed. No less than sound effects, etymology assists Schwartz in his pursuit of dialogic poetics. As he says in an essay that first appeared in Daily News Egypt in 2008 and reappears as “After Babel” in this collection: “[w]e must permit ourselves such provocations, remain open to being provoked, and insist on saying paradoxical things” (82).
How useful can etymology be to poets? These days relatively few of them seem to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the study of words and their histories. Or at least few of them do so as explicitly and extensively as Schwartz does in The New Babel.[7] To some etymology may seem too scientific, more appropriate for philology or philosophy, an investigation of dead words in the dictionary, not an engagement with living speech. To others it may seem like a naïve pursuit for linguistic authenticity, a belief that earlier meanings are somehow truer meanings that bring us closer to the original language (the word itself combines “truth” and “study”). The conventional reading of the story of Babel clearly advances the idea of language in decline, but such idea is only partly attractive to poets. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because
for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been
once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of
animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of
their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. The expression,
or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.[8]
Schwartz is genuinely interested in the evolution of words. He is perfectly willing to entertain the fiction of a perfect common language as another of his “provocations.” Ultimately, however, he resorts to etymology as a form of artistically productive and politically efficient wordplay. Etymology reveals the palimpsestic nature of language or, as Schwartz puts it in “Language as Responsibility,” how “languages do supplement each other, even as political realities tear asunder the people that talk” (87). The point is to discover, rather than invent, the linkages between words. Such discoveries are a kind of self-generating translation. And sometimes they can produce a flash of recognition. For instance, as Schwartz casually notes in section 3, the word for “truth” derives from “tree” (12).
***
The etymological forays in “The New Babel” provide insights about hidden relationships between words. In the series of poems called “Apple Anyone” Schwartz again turns to etymology as a structuring device, but with a different purpose. He originally planned to compose a number of poems using only the English words derived from Arabic. Eventually he ended up combining those words with Shakespeare’s writings, mostly the sonnets, by doing so demonstrating what Christine Pagnoulle calls “the subtle mechanisms of rewriting.”[9] But his purpose is clearly more than literary. By splicing Arabic with the work of this most canonical of English writers, Schwartz counters the stereotyping of Arabic culture in the United States following the events of 9/11. The idea is not even to highlight the historical presence of Arabic in English, but to put the world’s two great languages in dialogue with each other. As he says his essay “Transcendental Tabby” (sounding rather like Emerson): “Poetry is language, and in poetry false dichotomies can best be dissolved, since the false dichotomies themselves are only frozen language” (42).
The constraint results in poems that are tender, playful, occasionally even funny. Schwartz freely draws on Shakespeare’s writings, both formally and thematically, and largely avoids the preoccupation with violence that guided much of “The New Babel.” The exception is his take on Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which seems to be written in the early phases of the U.S. invasion of Iraq:
To go on in an ideology that is patrolled by admirals
all praised to the hilt, each awarded triple scoops of sherbet,
sugars gushing in banana and lime, or to grab up pails against
a whole Mediterranean of pain, and by opposing, drain it?
The road to Baghdad: it is an orgasm religiously sought.
To slow my brain and by night to say we stopped all that:
a saffroned vulture scuffs the dirt it lands in until every man
looks inward, acknowledging his own mulatto ground
and the thousand gauzy masks our bodies are mom to.
To slow my brain – to slow my brain!
And during that slowing to succumb to a new fantasy,
a woman with corneas like coffee beans, a coiled mortality
uncoiling, amalgam, not amalgam, that is not a jackal -
a vocabulary, a calamity, and at last, a casualty list.
admiral sherbet sugar banana lime Baghdad saffron
mulatto gauze cornea coffee amalgam (50)
As we can gather, “Shakespeare” functions as a kind of matrix to Schwartz’s recombinatory procedure.[10] As we read these texts, with the lists of Arabic (and sometimes Persian) words appended to the bottom, we are reminded that “English” is never simply “English” but a mixture of other languages, especially of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate origin. This unique blend is the chief source of Shakespeare’s linguistic energy, one of the reasons for its continuing appeal. But closer to home the language of Whitman, even more than his formal innovations, also makes him our contemporary. The author of Leaves of Grass took full advantage of the flowering of the English language in the 19th century, his poetry demonstrating what Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp call “a certain word-drunkenness”[11] – an openness to written and spoken, learned and vernacular, native and foreign language. An amateur linguist, Whitman celebrated the ability of American English to assimilate other languages, which he regarded as close to a universal language.
“[I]n English we cannot name a piece of fruit without borrowing from Arabic,” Schwartz says (82). If this is true, we must also acknowledge – and is some ways accept – the global dominance of English as a legacy of the imperial history of Britain and its American successor. Despite his ingenious challenge to Islamophobia in the “Apple Anyone” series and his generative wordplay in “The New Babel,” English remains the dominant language of his volume. This observation may seem obvious, but I’m taking Schwartz at his word when he proposes that “saying [something] is never really obvious” (82). As a writer and interviewer, he knows very well that no meaningful conversation is possible without a shared language. Even a dialogue about how “languages are interdependent” must be conducted, as a practical matter, in a linguistic code that is familiar to all the interlocutors. For all its translingual gestures The New Babel is a book in which monolingualism asserts itself, to quote David Gramling “in the modest and far-reaching structural sense of a doxa, rather than in the provocative and politicizable sense of an orthodoxy.”[12] As a book written in English, presumably for English-language readers, it also introduces some uncomfortable questions. Are Americans a new “tribe of Sham” trying to impose its language upon other tribes? Are they also going to be punished – have been punished – by a jealous god? Like Whitman, Schwartz wants to celebrate the global babble that is English. But his enthusiasm for it is tempered by the imperial designs of “our mad extravagant metropolis” and “our republic of fear” (3).
***
In “After Babel” Schwartz describes himself as “a poet ... lost in the forest of language”; it is during those perilous yet potentially transformative moments, “in the adventure of writing,” that he recognizes the centrality of language to human experience (82). Etymology makes this centrality more tangible, making the reader travel with him across different cultures and nations, perhaps even toward some elementary truth. Taking a cue from Schwartz, let’s note that the word “forest” and “foreign” derive from the same Latin word foris, meaning “outside.” Poetry, which can alienate philosophers and puzzle scientists, helps us make sense of that “outside,” the forest that grows everywhere and within us. It helps us make sense of the presence of other people in the world – family or friends, lovers or neighbors, fellow citizens or indeed foreigners – each with their separate language.
[1] Leonard Schwartz, The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016), ix. All subsequent references to this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text. The book collects Schwartz’s writings previously published in The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House, 2003), Ear and Ethos (Talisman House, 2005), and Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Press, 2007).
[2] On the history of the prosimetrum in Europe, and the term’s relevance to contemporary lyric theory, see Ricardo Matthews’s “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory,” PMLA 132.2 (March 2018): 296-313.
[3] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1961), 112.
[4] Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 101.
[5] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 404.
[6] Jonathan Arac, “Global and Babel: Two Perspectives on Language in American Literature.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 50.1-3 (2004): 102.
[7] For an overview of how mostly sixteenth and seventeenth-century English poets “depend on etymological information,” see K.K. Ruthven, “The Poet as Etymologist,” Critical Quarterly 11.1 (March 1969): 9-37. Other recent books in which etymology serves as a structuring device include Monica Youn’s Blackacre: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016) and Jena Osman’s The Network (Fence Books, 2010). Osman credits the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña’s desire “to enter words in order to see” for sparking her interest in etymology.
[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Poems (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 457.
[9] Christine Pagnoulle, “Lament in a New Language,” Jacket 35 (2008), http://jacketmagazine.com/35/r-schwartz-rb-pagnoulle.shtml (accessed 2 October, 2019).
[10] His own analogy for it is “a mobile of words and signs, dangled over the crib of the culture, as to stimulate the mind to imagine new combinations” (43).
[11] Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp, “‘Song of Myself’: A Lexicon,” in Song of Myself. A Facsimile of the Original 1855 Edition, The American Poetry Review (2009): n.p. Whitman worked hard to integrate foreign elements into Leaves of Grass as demonstrated by a high number of loan and coin words like camerado, libertad, feuillage, eleve, allons, formules, savantism, viva, romanza, ambulanza, etc.
[12] David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (New York: Bloomsbury 2016), 93. Gramling also notes: “Monolingualism’s underlying principle has never quite been that other languages are bad or inferior, but that they are contextually unnecessary. Monolingualism manages other languages; it does not oppose them” (ibid. 11).