DIVERSITIES

Skirmantas VALENTAS

LINGUISTIC TERMS IN POETRY

The phonetics of rain on your lips (BE 227)

A. Nyka-Niliūnas

Linguistic terms (predicate, object, noun, case, letter, etc.), when discussed in poetry, arouse readers’ surprise. To explain this usage, poems containing these terms are sometimes called l i n g u i s t i c p o e t r y. “Efforts to create so-called linguistic poetry are evident in the linguistic terms found in V. Rubavičius’s (—S. V.) poems, artificially attached to other words: it already stings through a letter; through sentences frothing with births...¹. However, linguistic poetry should not be associated with the attaching of one or another kind of term (barba non facit philosophum!) for at least two reasons. First, following this logic, verses containing mathematical or chemical terms (examples could be found—even if not in Lithuanian poetry) would have to be called ‘mathematical poetry’ or ‘chemical poetry.’ That would be absurd. Second, linguistic poetry is a phenomenon with a fairly strict structure. It includes both clear etymologies (see the explanations of the origins of the words Jotvingians, Prussians, Dubysa, etc., in S. Geda’s ‘Necklaces of Green Amber’) and the repetition of similar forms in the same or adjacent lines (cf. A. Žukauskas’s How many little stones, stonelets, stonelings, stones). This resembles attempts to create a distinctive, albeit naïve, g r a m m a r o f p o e t r y. Moreover, we see an especially close relationship between poetry and grammar when no terms at all appear in the text, when it contains a hidden analysis of language— alliteration, anagrams, disguised etymology. These latter phenomena may be called the l i n g u i s t i c c h a r a c t e r o f p o e t r y, which linguistic terms would enter only if it proved possible to find a logic behind their usage.

Thirty years ago, R. Jakobson began his famous article, in which he discussed in depth the relations between poetry and linguistics, with lines by O. Mandelstam: И глагольных окончаний колокол / Мне в дали указывает

¹ Kniūkšta P. Rasytojas ir žodis. V., 1981. P. 35.

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path, “And the bell of verb endings / Shows me the way in the distance.” Similar lines can be found both in the poetry of O. Mandelstam himself (where Greek verb aorist, augment, and so on are mentioned) and in the poems of Lithuanian poets (S. Geda, Just. Marcinkevičius, V. Rubavičius, and others). In some poets’ work, linguistic terms are rare, almost accidental; in others, they are frequent and form the core of the thought.

Why are linguistic terms more often found in poetry than, say, terms from the natural sciences? Perhaps because language has always seemed to people at once close at hand and a mysterious entity. This is already discussed in the works of Homer, which mention words belonging to the language of the gods and the language of humans (Iliad XX 72–74, Odyssey X 305–306).

In many cases, the use of linguistic terms can be explained by the readily comprehensible isomorphism of language and the world, that is, their structural identity. Language is a structure created by human beings in the course of evolution. At the same time, humans created other formations, such as settlements. There are also structures that humans have created only in part, such as a landscape. Naturally, neither a settlement nor a landscape can be directly associated with language. Only their structures can be compared. This is no fantasy: the method developed by the Copenhagen School of Linguistics (glossematics) is intended for the study of language, but is also suitable for revealing the structure of other kinds of objects—cities, and so on. This universality is easy to explain: why should humans have had to invent different structures for every formation? Thus one can speak of the grammar of a city or a landscape:

our city was dreamt up by autumn’s impersonal grammar streets tattooed with advertisements and women’s smiles and in our heart, darling, time is only an object and your tears with their misplaced accents (EI 29)

I take the grammar of pine forests, rivers, lakes (BM 182)

It seems that the use of linguistic terms in poetry does not form a discernible system, so we must consider each author’s work separately. Perhaps the earliest examples are found in the poem “Spring Grammar,” written by J. Žlabys-Žengė in 1927:

They drooped, they drooped from the head, the nouns.

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Enough! Spring declines the blossoms:—Blossoms, Blossoms, to the Blossoms,

/.../

To her, as the nouns of yellow hair streamed loose...

/.../

They drooped, a great O, a great noun, embracing half the western sky.

/.../

Do you still remember, when once there were stars in the Noun? (PG 89--91)

The poetry of this Four-Winds poet was undoubtedly influenced by the stance of the “Four Winds” rebels that poetry and linguistics are inseparable (this claim is repeated constantly in every issue of the publication mentioned above). As if confirming this stance, lines written several decades later by A. Nyka-Niliūnas draw a visible parallel between grammar and the world:

Mighty Grammar, Empire of the Dictionary, where reign the Noble Verb, the corpulent Adjective, and the naked Noun, Where all our Pain has room <...> <...> the phonetics of April Rain on your lips, the Syntax of wind and the alphabet of snow,—The only being before Time’s Flood <...> (BE 227)

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These connections between the world and grammar, as described by A. Nyka-Niliūnas, are often so close that a poem gives rise to a poetic division of words into parts of speech. As a special case, we may cite Just. Marcinkevičius’s poem “The House of Language.” Let us single out these lines:

The roof of nouns, the doors of verbs, the windows of adjectives. (BP 43)

Are these merely metaphors? And if they are metaphors (after all, metaphor is a component of the process of cognition), does some kind of reality lie behind them?

From the equation noun = roof, verb = door, adjective = window, we can derive the correlation noun: roof = verb: door = adjective: window. Looking more closely, we see that these equations are well-founded: the roof (noun) is what is solid and immobile; the door (verb) is what is constantly moving (since it is opened and closed); the window shows what the world is like, and is therefore an adjective. Literary scholars who believe that “the model of the world expressed is dependent on language” (V. Daujotytė) would presumably have little difficulty agreeing with this interpretation. This interpretation is widely known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although B. Spinoza had already advanced similar ideas in the 17th century, discerning a distinctive world reflected in grammar. Therefore, the idea that the concept “door” should be expressed by a verb cannot be dismissed as mere poetic fancy. Several decades ago, B. Lee Whorf raised a bold question about the imperfect classification of parts of speech in European languages: why is the word lightning a noun if it denotes a process rather than an object?

The classification proposed by Just. Marcinkevičius is also borne out by the psycholinguistic experiment conducted by the author of this article. In the experiment, 100 students (only those who had never read or heard this poem) were asked to determine which part of speech (noun, adjective, or verb) the following words belonged to: roof, door, window. The participants were given two conditions: when classifying the words, they were to pay attention only to the meaning of the things (not to grammatical indicators or syntactic positions), and each part of speech could contain only one word. Once the results had been tallied, it emerged that more than two-thirds of the participants thought that roof was a noun, window an adjective, and door a verb. Thus the participants in the experiment independently synthesized the same text as the one found in the poem mentioned above. In this case, poetic fancy coincides with semantic analysis.

6—880

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A similar juxtaposition of the world and grammar is found in the humorous poetry of J. Erlickas:

And the moon—a half-participle—rises, And the stars’ points converse, For the well-behaved circumstances Have left me forever. /…/ Only that silly little particle Sings at the participles’ feast... (R 152)

For a time, the abundance of linguistic terms in V. Rubavičius’s poetry attracted the attention not only of readers but also of literary critics and linguists. P. Žemgulytė describes this feature of the poet’s work as follows: “In V. Rubavičius’s poetry, letters, sentences, grammar, metaphor, and other concepts—whose boundaries are very clearly defined in our consciousness—are often used. The poet tries to expand them by using a word in a new form or in an unusual combination (‘with my letterless eyes’ and so on.”² The critic raises an interesting question and attempts to answer it: “Why is V. Rubavičius so fixated on matters of language? Perhaps because he is not a philologist, and is only now encountering what we were taught at university?”³ One would like to object: in V. Rubavičius’s work we find no linguistic terms that would not be familiar from the secondary-school curriculum and therefore comprehensible to everyone. Thus, such use of terminology most likely stems from the poet’s intention to depict the world of language, rather than from a desire to make poetry “scientific.” What is the logic behind the use of these terms? Let us try to answer this question on the basis of the collections “Tension of Time” (1981) and “An Ordinary Story” (1985).

The most frequent and successful attempts occur when one tries to connect the grammar of language with the structure of the visible world—that is, when one seeks to suggest that the world, too, has a grammar:

This hour—a swallow of eternity the city silently chews a sleeping pill of moonlight and does not fall asleep—its unruly bands of streets, having betrayed grammatical norms, surge into loving brains like images that arrived too late (LĮ 61)

² Žemgulytė P. Ant sėkmės — nesėkmės svarstyklių // Literatūra ir menas. 1986 spalio 11. P. 6—7.

³ Ten pat.

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Of all grammatical units, the greatest burden in V. Rubavičius’s poetry falls on the c a s e:

She fell into it, declining your fate all the way to emptiness (LĮ 20)

your life is painful my imprisoned dream be steadfast damn the mastery of sentences and the rhythm of ordinary days that decline suffering like a glass of wine (LĮ 46)

the world trains us in the rules of a blood-stained formation, solves us and declines us (EI 28)

The term case here apparently means “all possible forms of some object.” Interestingly, in the classical tradition this term (Greek ptōsis = Latin casus “fall”) was understood very broadly; for example, all tenses except the present were also called c a s e s.

V. Rubavičius devotes a great deal of attention to the graphic (visible) aspect of language:

the birds’ dots and commas separate us the bluishly distant seagull as an exclamation mark pierces your parted lips (EI 32)

the sharp exclamation marks of the streets leave our bodies in peace (LĮ 90)

hills singed by spring rain — an ironically painful punctuation error (LĮ 52)

In those examples that address the graphic aspect of language, the term letter is the most striking:

the wind around us lettered harshly and illegibly (EI 49)

their death is needed by the letter (LĮ 70)

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like spiders who weave a web between the sky and music—emptiness falls into it—the vowels and consonants will be born (LĮ 69)

The term letter is used very broadly. Its range extends from a clear metaphor

a few letters of a bird in the snow (LĮ 107)

we will be cut off when they forget us as soon as they forget us we will flutter away letter by letter (LĮ 78)

to complete absurdity a dog soon and quietly runs by, possessed by letters (LĮ 75)

The term letter (cf. letter by letter, vowel, consonant) proved to be the most enduring. Over time, the poet’s interest in linguistics gradually faded. In the book “The Sky and Other Forces of Nature” we find only:

and a trace of a letter brought back so that memory might be easier and safer (D 14)

a sip of letterless smiles (D 41)

a tin can rolled away letter by letter (D 48)

unexpectedly, with roots, tears the first vowel from the throat (D 58)

It may be concluded that the poet apparently ended his experiment with linguistic terms that had shocked the reader. The attempt was interesting,

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but unsuccessful. The reason for the failure is simple: terms belong to scientific style (the metalinguistic function), whereas a poem relies on the poetic function. The metalinguistic and poetic functions are opposing poles: hence, at least in our time, grammars are not written in verse, and scientific terms are rarely found in poems.

In conclusion, it is worth pausing over two poems by S. Geda. In this poet’s work, linguistic thought is often expressed very clearly, while the linguistic analysis, though interwoven with poetic ingenuity and imagination, is intriguing and readily “lends itself” to structural generalization. Such are the poems “Simonas Daukantas, writing ‘The Character of the Ancient Lithuanians and Samogitians’:

Daukantas was most troubled that, according to his knowledge, the Samogitians, upon seeing the Baltic Sea, would always be astonished and begin to turn to stone

their only recourse in the face of emanation was to freeze, to become nouns; the adjective says nothing, torments itself somewhere between to go and will be going (ŽGV 42)

and “Note 1985”:

Vytautas Bložė forgot: in Skomantas’s ancient Yotvingian state

there was not a single noun, only verbs (ŽGV 43)

Juxtaposing the two poems, we see a clearly expressed opposition: Samogitians turning into nouns and Yotvingians, who have no

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of nouns. This opposition will be even easier to understand if we remember that the Samogitians are eastern Balts, while the Yotvingians are western Balts. Thus, as in Just. Marcinkevičius’s “The House of Language,” we have a poetic classification. In the latter case, however, it can no longer be supported by any linguistic evidence—it is merely a charming poetic invention.

These few observations lead to the conclusion that, although linguistic terms in poems do not in themselves create linguistic poetry, they often make it possible to reflect on the linguistic space surrounding human beings.

A b b r e v i a t i o n s

BE — Nyka-Niliūnas A. Būties erozija. V., 1989.

BM — Žukauskas A. Benamė meilė. V., 1983.

BP — Marcinkevičius Just. Būk ir palaimink. V., 1980.

D — Rubavičius V. Dangus ir kitos gamtos jėgos. V., 1988.

EI — Rubavičius V. Eilinė istorija. V., 1985.

LĮ — Rubavičius V. Laiko įtampa. V., 1981.

PG — Žlabys-Žengė J. Pavasarių gramatikos. V., 1992.

R — Erlickas J. Raštai ir kt. V., 1987.

ŽGV — S. Geda. Žalio gintaro vėriniai. V., 1988.

The numbers following an abbreviation indicate the page from which the quotation is taken.

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