Canary has been ruminating over this line, from Liesel Tarquini's translation of Silke Scheuermann's poem "The Sadomasochistic Grammar of Dreams":
"Lost to language we conjugate the very narrowest alphabets."
(Published in Lit, the journal of the New School MFA in Creative Writing Program, numbers 15 & 16, winter/spring 2009, pg. 93).
An alphabet of brute sensation, thus no alphabet at all...a (non)language of rage, hurt, and hunger...a separation of ourselves from thought...
Scheuermann's original German uses the compound word "Sprachfremd," which Tarquini translates deftly as "lost to language." "Fremd" also has the literal meaning "strange," "alien." Alienated from meaning, from language itself...
No conjugation but only ballistics and the trajectory of force...
Yet Scheuermann's poem is about the "grammar of dreams"...Canary wrinkles his feathers...for him the dreaming is where pure language emerges, where the Ursprache reveals itself with its infinite conjugations and branching alphabets, a thousand thousand meanings in each fleeting combination...
Wondering what others think on this?
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