Footnote on Luan Family Rapids

A friend suggested to me that it is the coherence of the text that allows us access to its feeling at such a remove. Rather than starting from the tone and building on that, the reader — at least, the reader who is obliged by cultural distance to read philologically — works down through the internal logic of the poem to its foundations in actual sound and sensation, whether of lived experience or living language. A shopping list would be much harder to read in this way. I am reminded of a post I wrote some time ago about “getting the jokes” in ancient tongues chiselled or wedged in cuneiform: continue immersion until you do. One can’t help feeling that some of those ancient near eastern peoples (or at least, those individuals in a position to employ scribes) were lacking in sense of humour, but perhaps that was just the impression they wanted to create; so we should look for the Spitting Image of the pyramids, the Monty Python of the Assyrians.

Advertisement