Buggeryville

In which I provide some end-rhymes, so you can work them into doggerel.

...Barack Obama
...an Oxford comma

I'm reading Ad Infinitum, a biography of Latin (in a history sense, more than a linguistic sense), and it includes a bit of an eleventh century erotic "Cambridge song" (the full poem is available in Latin here). The following lines struck me:

Quid iuvat differre, electa,
que sunt tamen post facienda!

"What good is it to put off, O my chosen one, what will have to be done later!" That's more or less a typical gloss. But that "que" threw me for a second -- that's a relative pronoun ("quae" in Classical Latin), and because of its placement it first seems to refer to the "electa", the chosen one, but it turns out it's referring to the things that need to be done.

Latin has a quirk where singular feminine nouns and adjectives can sometimes look like plural neuters. This (to oversimplify things) is why Romance languages only have masculine and feminine nouns, even though Latin also had neuter ones -- the neuter nouns were either eventually read as masculine (a typical neuter -um ending is not too far from a typical masculine -us ending, especially once you start leaving off that last syllable) or, if they were usually plural, then they were read as feminine (a typical neuter plural -a ending looks very much like a typical feminine ending -a!). And, as I mentioned, the relative pronouns are the same. So this allows for some occasional ambiguity.

The "que sunt ... facienda", "what must be done", can't be feminine singular, however, because "sunt" is plural. If it were "que est ... facienda", it would be "O my chosen one, who must be done". (I'm pretty sure that naughty sense of "doing" someone translates, but I don't own a copy of The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, alas. Not yet.) Still, that misreading echoed for me.

And it made me rethink "electa". Earlier in the poem the narrator refers to the woman he's wooing as "soror electa", "chosen sister", and so of course when "electa" recurs a few lines later, it first seems as thought it's being used the same way. And of course it's set off by commas, to indicate that speaker is addressing the person he's speaking to. You, dear Reader, understand how that works. Except I suspect there weren't commas in the original manuscript! They are usually added by later editors trying to make a more readable version. So, perhaps the "electa" is not the singular feminine chosen woman, but the neuter plural things that must be done, that it doesn't help to delay! Something like this:

Quid iuvat differre electa
que sunt tamen post facienda!

"What good is it to put off the things which have been chosen which will have to be done later!" There is some grammatical slippage here between the woman that the narrator has chosen and the deeds that they "have to" do together; has he chosen the woman, or the acts? There is no clear way to decide (although the contemporary use of commas forced the editor to decide, to disambiguate the text); it's not even clear that, ultimately, it matters to the narrator. She is being grammatically objectified.

This sort of play, which takes advantage of the multiple meanings available through use of certain grammatical features of a language, is something that occurs far less frequently than I'd expect in Latin poetry. It seems to happen more the further you get away from the "pinnacles" of poetry -- Vergil seems to avoid ambiguity on principle rather than embrace what it can express. And I'm not sure whether the ambiguity here is intentional or not (I haven't looked at the rest of the poem that closely, to see if the poet makes a habit of it). But I sure do get excited when I find an example of productive ambiguity!

These are old.

This is the oldest manuscript of mine that I'd bother with. These are based on old poems. The Constellated Sonnets is a series of 150 poems in which all the words in each line but one are erased from Shakespeare's sonnets. The punctuation, as you'll see, is left behind. The words were randomly left behind; there was a second sequence that I started, The Collected Sonnets, which was going to feature words that I intentionally selected, but those were so much more boring that I abandoned the process after about a dozen poems.

Then, a few years later, I found out (by stumbling upon his book in the Strand) that Stephen Ratcliffe had done something remarkably similar a few years before I had. Then, a few more years later, Jen Bervin did something remarkably similar, and received a fair amount of acclaim for it. Perhaps there are a few other such projects floating about. Perhaps it is a hopelessly obvious thing to write.

Well, there are some differences between all three texts. Mine is the most rigorous, but also I think mine is the only one that uses a random method on the text; Bervin's prints the "unused" portions of the text greyed out, which allows more interplay between the original and her erased version. None of us, unless I misremember, did all 154 sonnets, but I came closest.

Nevertheless, I believe mine is the only manuscript that you can download in its entirety: The Constellated Sonnets.

Narración

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(¿del mismo qué?)
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(!!!)

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Narrazione

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(di quale stesso?)
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Berättelse

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(av vad?)
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(!!)

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敘事

<什么东西?>

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Spanish. Italian. Swedish. Chinese. More info.

Narration

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Et qu'a t il donc fait ? Eh bien !
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Нарратив

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(чего?)
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French. Translator: M. J. Roy. Russian. Translator: unclear. More details.

Narrative

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(!?)
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(what same?)
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Erzählung

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(?!)
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(wesselbigen?)
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(!!!)

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Taken from the parenthetical comments of Karl Marx quoting Wilhelm Roscher in Das Kapital, vol 1. Translated into English by Ben Fowkes (Penguin, p.314, n3).