In a sense, English, more than any other language of which I'm aware, is
one giant pot of macaronics.  Aside from grammar, this is the most
defining characteristic of English.  A German who needs a word for that
doesn't already exist  for something will make a compound of two German
words.  An American will say, "Automobile", or just adopt a word that
another language already uses for the object.

English is multilingual.

Both Pound and Joyce revealed this flexibility and adaptability in their
writings. Pounds incorporation of  the words of another language
directly (e.g. tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon etc.

or

"                                    Ou Tis,
I am noman, my name is noman " but Wanjina
 is, shall we say, Ouan Jin or the man with an
education)

is more directly related to the perceived or imagined object (Fujiyama
at Gardone), and takes the languages directly to the resemblances of
apparently dissimilar things, using the linguistic interplay of the
natural object as the symbol.

Joyce, esp. in Finnegan, takes it to an extreme of polymorphism (I don't
here use the word "extreme" pejoratively).   Each word is a multifaceted
building block, and the relationships among the words is continually
shifting -- one is even tempted to create permutation charts of each
line for explication, but is defeated in the enterprise by the
difficulty of determining what even constitutes a line as well as by the
ever expanding possible permutations.

In Pound, the multilingual is a reflection of the "one trunk" perceived
in the "objective" world.  In Joyce, it's the continuously shifting
interior of the "subjective" world.

It's not just a fetish, and neither is just strutting his stuff.

Antony Adolf wrote:

>Dear Mr. Korg and Mr. Nikiforov,
>
>Rather than speculate who had better access to or beter knowledge of one specific language, duly noting both that Latin played a major role in the works of both Joyce and Pound, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how their respective use of macaronics are different/similar, and to what end either writer uses multilingualism, if any.
>
>Was it just a 'fetish'? Were they just 'strutting their stuff'? Or, as I'd like to think, did they have something more 'serious', more 'profound' to say about the weaving of languages, and if so, what?
>
>tony.
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>
>
>
>>Date: Wed Jan 29 21:22:35 PST 2003
>>From: Jacob Korg <[log in to unmask]>
>>Subject: Re: Politics & Macaronics
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>dear Nikolay:
>>        Please note that I did not say he had NO knowledge of Latin,
>>but that he did not have POUND'S "acess" to Latin.
>>I have no doubt that he knew some Latin, but I'm sure Pound had a
>>superior knowledge of it, as suggested by Canto I,  his Propertius,
>>translations, allusions to  Catullus, etc.
>>        I expressed myself carefullly, and hope to be read that way.
>>                                Jacob Korgn
>>
>>On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Nikolay Nikiforov wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>JK> -- and he did not have Pound's access to Greek, Latin, or, of course,
>>>JK> Chinese.
>>>???
>>>No access to Latin? Was he not Catholic?
>>>Oh my terrible ignorance. Please tell us the truth: that Joyce was a
>>>methodist Yankee, who wrote cowboy pulp fiction.
>>>Literary studies are definitely _interesting_
>>>
>>>Nikolay
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
>

--

Dirk Johnson
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