Widdy-Widdy-Wurkey

The Highest Cauldron

by Anita Sullivan

Editor’s Note: This essay, by Anita Sullivan, is the winner of the December 2011 “Boleman-Herring Prize for [Hubristic] Nonfiction,” granted twice a year by www.WeeklyHubris.com. Ms. Sullivan receives a cash prize of $100., and publication in WeeklyHubris as a Guest Columnist. Our next contest deadline (see https://weeklyhubris.com/contest/) is February 1, 2012, for the award . . . and publication in June 2012. Congratulations, Anita, for this strong, original piece of writing.

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—12/26/11—When I was 18 I had my first grown-up summer job in Washington, DC, which involved a daily commute on the bus. I found that reading made me slightly queasy so, out of desperation, I resorted to translating, since the physical demands on the eyes are more varied.

Soon I was hooked into a habit that lasted me for the next 40 years, and has only recently trailed off a bit. Sadly, I’ve never learned to speak anything other than English fluently, but I’ve dabbled vigorously in German, French, Spanish and Modern Greek. I’ve always begun a new language by translating poetry, even before I know any grammar (thus drastically reducing the usefulness of the dictionary). But this allows for an immediate intuitive “hit” of the full personhood of the new language and, in the long run, actually serves as a short cut to better understanding. (Now that I’ve completely undermined one argument, let’s move right along. . . .)

Translating became a kind of “forked path” that shaped my life in a variety of ways, some of them quite powerful; even heartbreaking. Yes, translating can be a specialized career skill but, for anyone who works with words on a regular basis, it can also become a useful language-fitness workout.

Here, for example, is a partial list of “Insights I Have Derived about Language” (from years of translating):

1)    Language is a natural human sense like smell, taste, hearing, touching, seeing.

2)    But language is also a tool, something we invented. How can it be both?

3)    Originally, (see #1) language was a kind of conceptual data center that didn’t involve words, but was a way of organizing the masses of instinctively-garnered information in our environment. It imposed limits, shapes—for us to bump into as we wiggled our way into the possibility of thriving rather than just surviving.

4)    Eventually we fashioned speech out of the language-sense. We really needed something else but, like a temporary repair, speech is all we’ve ever been able to manage.

5)    It may have seemed for a very long time that speaking had nothing to do with language in its “original” sense, which probably didn’t involve words. Eventually, we stopped thinking about language as anything but a fundamental way of controlling, organizing, and knowing our world.

6)    Early languages tended to be very complicated in vocabulary and structure, with a long-term trend towards simplification (fewer declensions, accent markings, cases, genders, etc.). If a Law of Conservation is at work for language-as-a-whole, then this historic shift from complexity to simplicity (as well as the loss in sheer number of languages) must be compensated for in some other way. Could this other way involve a deepening of silence?

7)    Are languages simpler now because we are moving back into an Original Silence? And, if so, are we retreating to the silence of deeper (more subtle, wiser) knowledge—like the re-awakening of our atrophied language-sense—or is it the silence of stupidity?

8)    If we assume earlier people, who spoke a huge variety of mutually-unintelligible, complicated languages, were equally as intelligent as we are, then the complexity of their speech means they knew stuff we don’t know any more. And though this might also work in reverse, it’s hard not to believe that the gradual disappearance of languages and their complexities from the face of the planet—will cause an entry into a different silence than any previously known.

9)    But the human technique of thriving by inventing speech happens because words allow questions to come up. In that magical moment when humans started speaking, they immediately started using different words for the same thing (how could it be otherwise?) That means if a turkey can have many different names, then what is he? If I say “widdy-widdy-wurkey,” and learn that this is not his true name, suddenly a huge lightning-crack occurs, and I’m out on a blasted heath weeping uncontrollably because I have created a different kind of Other than the one I have always known.