Meaningful melodies…

In the introduction to his brilliant translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney talks of letting “the natural ‘sound of sense’ prevail” over strict metrical rules. So that the melody of the words takes precedence and is rooted in the meaning, rather than being slapped on later like lipstick on a gorilla or churned out by an unthinking algorithm. When the music comes from the message, the words don’t just sound good, they make sense. They ring true and in turn, stay with you.

At a time when we are surrounded by so much slop signifying nothing, meaningful melodies made by a real human being with a deep love of words are more valuable than ever before.

Looking for a last minute festive gift? I heartily recommend “the first native epic”.

Words are songs…

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson shares Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s observation: ‘words do not look like the things they designate’. They might not look like them, but they can sound like them.

Boom, crash, bang, miaow, toot toot – onomatopoeic words are the most familiar examples. But as the FT’s Anjana Ahuja underlines in her review of Steven Mithen’s The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age, the association runs wider and deeper: “In 1929, the American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir told a group of unwitting study participants that the made-up words mil and mal referred to different-sized tables, then asked them to guess which referred to the bigger table. Whether the volunteers were English or Chinese, child or adult, about 80 per cent intuitively chose mal. That same year, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler pulled a similar trick with maluma and takete, asking people to identify which meant “round” and which meant “spiky”. Maluma was overwhelmingly linked to a round shape; the sharp movements of the tongue required to utter takete led volunteers to associate it with a spiky shape.” So the sound of a word sets off a sense in our heads, and at times a non-sense – there is no rational reason why the bigger table could not have been the mil. But our ears instinctively tend to tell us otherwise.

Words are songs, not signs. So it pays to pay close attention not just to their definition but also to their sound. Their meaning and their melody.