Shadow language

[pynchonoid]

Shadow language 
by Eric Ormsby 

Of all the theses advanced to explain the incomparable
abundance of Shakespeare’s language, perhaps the most
audacious—and certainly the wackiest—is that
propounded some forty years ago by an Iraqi professor
at the University of Baghdad. In a massive tome, the
professor argued that the lone survivor of the
shipwreck of an Arab merchant vessel washed up on the
shores of Elizabethan England and made his way, wet,
bedraggled, and famished, to the nearest village where
he found hospitality and shelter. Establishing
himself, there our mariner quickly mastered English
and in short order was churning out remarkable poems
and dramas. Relocated to Stratford-on-Avon and London,
he rose to prominence in the theater, even winning the
favor of the Virgin Queen. His original name had been
Shaykh Zubayr, but (though there is no letter p in the
Arabic alphabet) this was soon anglicized to
Shakespeare. 

This thesis, which would have delighted Jorge Luis
Borges, rested not merely on fanciful historical
supposition but on a mad, meticulous, and painstaking
inventory of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. The Iraqi
argued, with the unassailable logic of the truly
demented, that most of Shakespeare’s language could be
traced back to Classical Arabic. How else explain the
unparalleled richness of the texts? By the fourteenth
century, after all, Arabic could boast a colossal
lexicon; one dictionary alone—the renowned Lisonga\n
al- ‘arab or “The Language of the Arabs” by Ibn
Manzongu\r—required some twenty densely printed
volumes (the size of the current OED) to encompass its
lexical profusion, and this was compiled almost two
centuries before Shaykh Zubayr’s adventitious landing.
Even more telling, our scholar detected scores, even
hundreds, of borrowings and “cognates” in the Bard’s
works. To give but one example: the Arabic adjective
nabÕøl, which means “noble,” occurs, naturally enough,
throughout the plays and poems. Other such (false)
cognates swarmed the Folios and clinched the case for
our researcher. 

This may not be the craziest treatise on Shakespeare,
but it certainly comes close. And yet, consideration
of it prompts an interesting question. Is there such a
phenomenon in poetry as a “shadow language,” that is,
a concealed or tacit foreign language which exerts a
strong and sometimes fruitful pressure on the native
tongue of a poet? 

[...] Certainly I had no intention of smuggling Kirgiz
or Malayalam accents into my own poetry; it was the
fascination of the sounds that mesmerized my ear.
Nevertheless, this relentless exposure to other
vocalic realms, this palatal globe-trotting, did, I
think, eventually work an influence on my own writing,
though not always a benign one. (I’ve never sought
confirmation of this practice, but I was pleased to
find it in the superb English poet James Fenton’s
recent book An Introduction to English Poetry where he
writes, using the example of listening to songs in
languages we don’t understand: “Genuine language, even
when we do not know what it means, sounds different
from cod language, real words from nonsense words.”)
[...] 

read it all:
<http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/apr03/ormsby.htm>

>From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 8, April 2003 
©2003 The New Criterion

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