From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri Mar 25 2005 - 22:45:37 CST
On the subject of the costs of language death. While in London recently I bought a copy of
John Burnside's collection of poetry _The good neighbour_, primarily because it contains
this poem, which I read in the London Review of Books when it was first published there a
couple of years ago.
_____
The last man to speak Ubykh
by John Burnside
[The linguist Ole Stig Anderson was keen to seek out the last remaining traces of a West
Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker, he set
out to find the man and arrived at his village on October 8, 1992. Unfortunately, the man,
Tevfik Esenc, had died a few hours earlier.]
At times, in those last few months,
he would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog,
that sound denoted:
the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind
and not the equivalent word in another language,
the speech that had taken his sons and the mountain light;
the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs.
While years of silence gathered in the heat,
he stood in his yard
and whispered the name of a bird
in his mother tongue,
while memories of snow and market days,
his father's hands, the smell of tamarind
receded in the names no longer used:
the blue of childhood folded like a sheet
and tucked away.
Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square;
yet later they would memorise the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died:
a name for death, perhaps,
or meadow grass,
or swimming to the surface of his mind,
another word they had, when he was young,
a word they rarely spoke, though it was there
for all they knew that nobody remembered.
_____
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: A century of philosophy, by Hans Georg Gadamer David Jones: artist and poet, ed. Paul Hills
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