Is it possible to fully separate a word’s sound from its meaning—to value words solely for their music? Some poets come close: Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath,John Ashbery. Rare phonetic metaphysicians. Surely we all do this when we hear words in a language we do not know. When I first encountered the Spanish word entonces, I thought it was the most beautiful three syllables I’d ever heard.
I still thought so, despite some disappointment, when I learned it was a commonplace adverb meaning “then,” not the rarified name of some magical being. My reverence for entonces will not impress a native Spanish speaker. Since I do not think in Spanish and struggle to find the right words when I speak it—always translating—the sound and sense of the language run on two different tracks in my mind.
An example from my native tongue: the word obdurate, which I adore, became an instant favorite for its sound the first time I said it aloud, before I’d ever used it in a sentence or parsed its meaning. It’s not a common English word, however, and maybe that makes it special. A word like always, which has a pretty sound, rarely strikes me as musical or interesting, though non-English speakers may find it so.
Every writer has favorite words. Some of those words are ordinary, some of them not so much. David Foster Wallace’s lists of favorite words consist of obscurities and archaisms unlikely to ever feature in the average conversation. “James Joyce thought cuspidor the most beautiful word in the English language,” writes the blog Futility Closet,” Arnold Bennet chose pavement. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cellar door had an especially beautiful sound.”
So, what about you, reader? What are some of your favorite words in English—or whatever your native language happens to be? And do you, can you, choose them for their sound alone? Please let us know in the comments below.
A quick heads up: For the next two weeks, you can stream a BBC Radio 4 dramatization of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Published between January 1879 and November 1880, the philosophical novel has influenced generations of readers–certainly me, maybe you, and then some other notable figures like Einstein, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud and more. The radio dramatization is truncated, just 5 hours, whereas most complete versions run 34 hours. (Find those in our collection of Free Audio Books. Or get a professionally-read version on Audible.com, by checking out Audible’s 30-day free trial program.) Below, you can find the installments of the BBC radio drama.
Episode 1: Russia, 1880: The unpredictable Fyodor Karamazov and his sons are reunited to discuss Dmitry’s inheritance. Stars Roy Marsden.
Episode 2: As Alyosha attends to dying Father Zosima, relations between Dmitry and his father turn ever more dangerous. Stars Paul Hilton.
Episode 3: Following a violent encounter at the Karamazov home, Dmitry flees the town in search of Grushenka. Stars Paul Hilton.
Episode 4: As Dmitry goes on trial for murder, Alyosha desperately seeks proof of his innocence. Stars Paul Hilton and Carl Prekopp.
Episode 5: Following Ivan’s dramatic appearance at his brother’s trial, Katerina prepares to deal Dmitry a fatal blow. Stars Paul Hilton.
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Hot dumplings! Marinated apples! A barrel of cucumbers!
Want to add some quick color to your performance or film? Slip in a quick non-narrative vendor scene. No need for character or plot development. The audience will be quite content with the hawkers’ musical recitation of their wares.
The lively market number Who Will Buy? temporarily sidelines Oliver’s orphans to showcase the talents of the adult chorus members.
When the Simpsons’ 179th episode took Homer to New York City back in 1997, he was able to purchase such exotic delicacies as Khlav Kalash and canned crab juice from a collection of pushcarts at the base of the World Trade Center.
Less well known is the above bazaar sequence from The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda(1933), a classic of Soviet animation. This short clip is the only part of directorMikhail Tsekhanovsky’s unfinished feature-length work to survive. The rest was destroyed in a fire at the LenFilm archives in World War II, the seemingly final chapter in its troubled history.
The film was based on Alexander Pushkin’s poetic retelling of a Russian folk tale about a greedy priest, who strikes an ill-advised bargain with a brawny worker. It was published posthumously, and only after censors had changed the priest into a merchant.
As he began work on the production, Tsekhanovsky invited Dimitry Shostakovich to compose the score, an innovation at a time when musical accompaniment was added to completed silent films. Shostakovich started, but was derailed by Pravda’s 1936 denunciation of his work in an article titled “Muddle Instead of Music.”
Eventually Tsekhanovskiy threw in the towel, too.
It does not end there, however.
After Shostakovich’s death, his widow got his student, Vadim Biberga, to complete work on the unfinished score. The Russian Philharmonic Orchestra released it in 2006, as part of a Shostakovich centennial.
This recent history adds an air of defiance to the grotesqueries of the surviving clip, with top honors going to the smut peddler entering at the one minute mark, to extol the virtues of “a Venus with no garments and fat thighs.”
The film industry knows that moviegoers love watching geniuses at work, and they may have known it for more than a century, ever since the release of 1909’s Edgar Allan Poe above. The seven-minute silent short, made for the centenary of the titular literary figure’s birth (and subtitled, back in those days before the word biopic, “a Picture Story Founded on Events in His Career”) depicts the 19th-century pioneer of psychological horror composing his best-known work, “The Raven,” even as his wife lays dying of tuberculosis. In real life, the young Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe passed away two years after the poem’s publication, but D.W. Griffith, like a true craftsman of his medium, knew the potential for extra drama when he saw it.
Griffith, who did hundreds of such shorts in the late 1900s and early 1910s, would of course go on to direct two of the most innovative and influential works in cinema history: 1915’s The Birth of a Nation and the following year’s Intolerance. But just before that, in 1914, he further pursued his interest in Poe with a feature called The Avenging Conscience: or, Thou Shalt Not Kill, moving beyond a simple depiction of the author and his working process (or at least his working process as interpreted through the distinctive dramatic style of early silent film) to draw direct inspiration from the work itself.
Even if you’ve never actually read any of Poe’s writing, you’ll surely have absorbed enough of “The Raven” (even if just from The Simpsons) to quote it now and again, just as you’ll surely have heard enough about his 1843 story “The Tell-Tale Heart” to know the plot has something to do with a man tormented by his guilty conscience — and so you’ll probably know which story Griffith chose for this early example of adaptation even before you see its first title card. Just as the filmmaker uses striking light and shadow to evoke Poe’s inner world in the earlier film, here he, in the words of Edgar Allan Poe author Kevin J. Hayes, “brilliantly replicates Poe’s psychological tension in visual terms.”
Griffith’s second Poe film incorporates not just the stuff of his work, but more of the stuff of his life as well: “Some aspects of the plot, in which the central character is an orphan as well as an author, are also reminiscent of Poe’s life,” writes Hayes in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. “The story includes echoes of other writing including ‘Three Sundays in a Week,’ ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ and ‘Annabel Lee,’ ” all “spun together in a story of love, murder, and vengeance, which nonetheless ends happily.” Which brings us to another piece of common cinematic wisdom, apparently known as well by Griffith as by any of his Hollywood successors: everybody loves a happy ending — apparently, once they get in front of the silver screen, even readers of Edgar Allan Poe.
One outcome of the upcoming “Brexit” vote, we’re told, might free the UK to pursue its own unfettered destiny, or might plunge it into isolationist decline. The economic issues are beyond my ken, but as a reader and student of English literature, I’ve always been struck by the fact that the oldest poem in English, Beowulf, shows us an already internationalized Britain absorbing all sorts of European influences. From the Germanic roots of the poem’s Anglo-Saxon language to the Scandinavian roots of its narrative, the ancient epic reflects a Britain tied to the continent. With pagan, native traditions mingled with later Christian echoes, and local legends with those of the Danes and Swedes, Beowulf preserves many of the island nation’s polyglot, multi-national origins.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney—whose work engaged with the ironies and complications of tribalism and nationalism—had a deep respect for Beowulf; in the introduction to his translation of the poem, Heaney describes it as a tale “as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language. Its narrative elements may belong to a previous age but as a work of art it lives in its own continuous present, equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.” Though we’ve come to think of it as an essential work of English literature, Beowulf might have disappeared into the mists of history had not the only manuscript of the poem survived “more or less by chance.” The “unique copy,” writes Heaney, “(now in the British Library) barely survived a fire in the eighteenth century and was then transcribed and titled, retranscribed and edited, translated and adapted, interpreted and taught, until it has become an acknowledged classic.”
Now, the British Library’s digitization of that sole manuscript allows us to peel back the layers of canonization and see how the poem first entered a literary tradition. Originally “passed down orally over many generations, and modified by each successive bard,” writes the British Library, Beowulf took this fixed form when “the existing copy was made at an unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England.” Not only is the location unknown, but the date as well: “its age has to be calculated by analyzing the scribes’ handwriting. Some scholars have suggested that the manuscript was made at the end of the 10th century, others in the early decades of the 11th, perhaps as late as the reign of King Cnut, who ruled England from 1016 until 1035.”
These scholarly debates may not interest the average reader much. The poem survived long enough to be written down, then became known as great literature these many centuries later, because the rich poetic language and the compelling story it tells captivate us still. Nonetheless, though we may all know the general outlines of its hero’s contest with the monster Grendel and his mother, many of the cultural concepts from the world of Beowulf strike modern readers as totally alien. Likewise the poem’s language, Old English, resembles no form of English we’ve encountered before. Scholars like J.R.R. Tolkien and poets like Heaney have done much to shape our appreciation for the ancient work, and we might say that without their interventions, it would not live, as Heaney writes, “in its own continuous present” but in a distant, unrecognizable past.
As a young college student, I spent hours wandering through my university’s library, looking in a state of awe at the number of books contained therein by writers whose names I knew or who seemed vaguely familiar, and by hundreds, thousands, more I’d never heard of. Always content to immerse myself in secluded corners for days on end with a good book, I couldn’t have felt more at home.
The internet was in its infancy, and my online life at the time consisted of awkward, plain-text emails sent once or twice a week and the occasional clunky, slow-loading website, promising much but delivering little. Excitable futurists made extravagant predictions about how hypertext and interactivity would revolutionize the book. These seemed like intriguing but unnecessary solutions in search of a problem.
To the bookish, the book is a perfected technology that cannot be improved upon except by the publishing of more books. While interactive texts—with linked annotations, biographies, historical precis, critical essays, and the like—have much enhanced life for students, they have not in any way improved upon the simple act of reading for pleasure and edification—an activity, wrote Virginia Woolf, requiring nothing more than “the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment.”
Though Woolf would likely have been unimpressed with all that talk of hypertextual innovation, I imagine she would have marveled at the online world for offering something to the reader we have never had until the past couple decades: free and instant access to thousands of books, from literary classics to biographies to histories to poetry—all genres upon which Woolf offered advice about how to read on their own terms. Without the anxious admissions process and costly tuition, anyone with a computer now has access to a significant portion of the average college library.
And now anyone with a computer has access to a significant portion of the British Library’s rare collections as well, thanks to the venerable institution’s new online collection: “Discovering Literature: 20th Century.”
The online library offers a paradise for readers, certainly. And also a heaven for scholars. Included among the rare first editions and critical essays and interviews on the site’s main page are “online for the first time… literary drafts… notebooks, letters, diaries, newspapers and photographs from Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes, Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi among others.”
“Until now,” says Anna Lobbenberg, the Library’s Digital Programmes Manager, “these treasures could only be viewed in the British Library Reading Rooms or on display in exhibitions—now Discovery Literature: 20th Century will bring these items to anyone in the world with an internet connection.” It truly is, for the lover of books, a brave new world (a book whose 1932 original dust jacket you can see here).
“You know how earlier we were talking about Dostoyevsky?” asks David Brent, Ricky Gervais’ iconically insecure paper-company middle-manager central to the BBC’s original The Office. “Oh, yeah?” replies Ricky, the junior employee who had earlier that day demonstrated a knowledge of the influential Russian novelist apparently intimidating to his boss. “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. Born 1821. Died 1881,” recites Brent. “Just interested in him being exiled in Siberia for four years.” Ricky admits to not knowing much about that period of the writer’s life. “All it is is that he was a member of a secret political party,” Brent continues, drawing upon research clearly performed moments previous, “and they put him in a Siberian labour camp for four years, so, you know…”
We here at Open Culture know that you wouldn’t stoop to such tactics in an attempt to establish intellectual supremacy over your co-workers — nor would you feel any shame in not having yet plunged into the work of that same Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, born 1821, died 1881, and the author of such much-taught novels as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov (as well as a prolific doodler). “His first major work,” in the posturing words of David Brent, “was Notes from the Underground, which he wrote in St Petersburg in 1859. Of course, my favorite is The Raw Youth. It’s basically where Dostoyevsky goes on to explain how science can’t really find answers for the deeper human need.”
An intriguing position! To hear it explained with deeper comprehension (but just as entertainingly, and also in an English-accented voice), watch this 14-minute, Monty Python-style animated primer from Alain de Botton’s School of Life and read the accompanying article from The Book of Life. Even apart from those years in Siberia, the man “had a very hard life, but he succeeded in conveying an idea which perhaps he understood more clearly than anyone: in a world that’s very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures,” an attitude “needed more than ever in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea – which this great Russian loathed – that science can save us all and that we may yet be made perfect through technology.”
After The School of Life gets you up to speed on Dostoyevsky, you’ll no doubt find yourself able to more than hold your own in any water-cooler discussion of the man whom James Joyce credited with shattering the Victorian novel, “with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces,” whom Virginia Woolf regarded as the most exciting writer other that Shakespeare, and whose work Hermann Hesse tantalizingly described as “a glimpse into the havoc.” You may well also find yourself moved even to open one of Dostoyevsky’s intimidatingly important books themselves, whose assessments of the human condition remain as devastatingly clear-eyed as, well, The Office’s.
It is widely accepted among scholars that the first few books of the Bible—including, of course, Genesis, with its creation myths and flood story—are a patchwork of several different sources, pieced together by so-called redactors. This “documentary hypothesis” identifies the literary characteristics of each source, and attempts to reconstruct their different theological and political contexts. Primarily refined by German scholars in the late nineteenth century, the theory is very persuasive, but can also seem pretty schematic and dry, robbing the original texts of much of their liveliness, rhetorical power, and ancient strangeness.
Another German scholar, Hermann Gunkel, approached Genesis a little differently. “Everyone knows”—write the editors of a scholarly collection on the foundational Biblical text—Gunkel’s “motto”: “Genesis ist eine Sammlung von Sagen”—“Genesis is a collection of popular tales.” Rather than reading the various stories contained within as historical narratives or theological treatises, Gunkel saw them as redacted legends, myths, and folk tales—as ancient literature. “Legends are not lies,” he writes in The Legends of Genesis, “on the contrary, they are a particular form of poetry.”
Such was the approach of cartoonist and illustrator Robert Crumb, who took on illustrating the entire book of Genesis, “a text so great and so strange,” he says, “that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions.” In the short video above, Crumb describes the creation narrative in the ancient Hebrew book as “an archetypal story of our culture, such a strong story with all kinds of metaphorical meaning.” He also talks about his genuine respect and admiration for the stories of Genesis and their origins. “You study ancient Mesopotamian writings,” says Crumb, “and there’s all of these references in the oldest Sumerian legends about the tree of knowledge” and other elements that appear in Genesis, mixed up and redacted: “That’s how folk legends and all that shit evolve over centuries.”
The Biblical book first struck Crumb as “something to satirize,” and his initial approach leans on the irreverent, scatological tropes we know so well in his work. But he instead decided to produce a faithful visual interpretation of the text just as it is, illustrating each chapter, all 50, word for word. The result, writes Colin Smith at Sequart, is “idiosyncratic, tender-hearted and ultimately inspiring.” It is also a critical visual commentary on the text’s central character: Crumb’s God “is regularly, if not exclusively, portrayed as an unambiguously self-obsessed and bloodthirsty despot, terrifying in his demands, terrifying in his brutality.” Arguably, these traits emerge from the stories unaided, yet when we’re told, for example, that “The Lord regretted having made man on Earth and it grieved him in his heart,” Crumb “shows us nothing of regret and grief, but rather a furious old dictator apparently tottering on the edge of madness.”
“It’s not the evil of men that Crumb’s concerned with,” writes Smith, “so much as the psychology of a creature who’d slaughter an entire world.” In that interpretation, he echoes critics of the Bible’s theology since the Enlightenment, from Voltaire to Christopher Hitchens. But he doesn’t shy away from graphic depictions of human brutality, either. Crumb’s move away from satire and decision to “do it straight,” as he told NPR, came from his sense that the sweeping, violent mythology and “soap opera” relationships already lend themselves “to lurid illustration”—his forté. Originally intending to do just the first couple chapters “as a comic story,” he soon found he had a market for all 50 and “stupidly said, ‘okay, I’ll do it.’” The work—undertaken over four years—proved so exhausting, he says he “earned every penny.”
Does Crumb himself identify with the religious traditions in Genesis? Raised a Catholic, he left the church at 16: “I have my own little spiritual quest,” Crumb says, “but I don’t associate it with any particular traditional religion. I think that the traditional Western religions all are very problematic in my view.” That said, like many nonreligious people who read and respect religious texts, he knows the Bible well—better, it turned out, than his editor, a self-described expert. “I just illustrate it as it’s written,” said Crumb, “and the contradictions stand.”
When I first illustrated that part, the creation, where there’s basically two different creation stories that do contradict each other, and I sent it to the editor at Norton, the publisher, who told me he was a Bible scholar. And he read it, and he said wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense. This contradicts itself. Can we rewrite this so it makes sense? And I said that’s the way it’s written. He said, that’s the way it’s written? I said, yeah, you’re a Bible scholar. Check it out.
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