¡Bemsha SWING!

5 oct 2006

Inspired by a discussion at The Valve: A Literary Organ:

Here's a question: if I would rather live in a world with 6,000 language than a world with 3,000 languages, does that make me a Whorfian by default?

Language doesn't line up exactly with culture. A language is not a culture. But the amount of linguistic diversity is some index of the amount of cultural diversity on the global scale.

Some, like Walter Benn Michaels, are arguing that if the world loses a few thousand languages, there is no essential harm done, because, after all, no language is better than another! That seems to be a perverse argument, to me, though I cannot quite explain why. It doesn't depend, for me, on the particular value of this or that language. I don't believe that you should have to go to bat for each language separately. Logocide is always a bad thing.

It's a difficult question because there is no absolute number of languages a planet should have. Maybe we're lucky to have 6,000 even if some think we should have 12,000. There's no handy utilitarian standard either. It's not like the extinct beetle that could have cured cancer with its secretions.

I'm really puzzled by this question, but in the meantime I'm going to conclude that language loss is a horrible thing unless I come across a convincing argument to the contrary.

1 comentario:

Steve Halle dijo...: Think of the removal of languages from the planet in terms of removing stars from the universe. Would anyone notice the stars were gone? In all likelihood, they would not. At least, not if the stars were in some distant quadrant of the universe, and no scientist ever looked to measure these stars or even cared if they were still there. The argument changes, though, if one of the stars to be removed were, say, the sun. We all would notice that. Thus it is with languages. One can argue losing a language in some far away place neither diminishes the possibility for communication on earth nor affects me directly. This stance would change, however, if my idiom was the one in jeopardy.; 8:48 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

5 oct 2006

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