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Zusatztext "On this learned itinerary, Daniel Heller-Roazen deciphers the most obscure of poems and jargons, touching upon the truth of language…Part rogue, part riddler: here the wise Comparative Literature professor may have painted his self-portrait." ---Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Le Monde Informationen zum Autor Daniel Heller-Roazen Klappentext Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom that will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Secret languages may be playful or serious, as apparently impenetrable as a foreign tongue, or only slightly different from the languages from which they spring. Dark Tongues moves among these hermetic artificial tongues, exploring phenomena as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech, Saussure¿s and Tristan Tzara¿s work of anagrams, Jakobson¿s theory of subliminal poetic patterning, and the secret writing systems of the Biblical copyists and Druids. In its eleven succinct chapters, Dark Tongues advances a single thesis: that such willfully obscure languages all rest on poetic techniques, which work to play sound and sense against each other In his fascinating Dark Tongues -- which might be construed as either a highly episodic history or a collection of case studies ranging across eras and cultures -- Heller-Roazen investigates this tendency, paying particular attention to those instances when secret language becomes intertwined, if not interchangeable, with poetry. -- Elizabeth Schambelan Bookforum Zusammenfassung Dark Tongues constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from the grammar that they know, which will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Such hidden languages come in many shapes. They may be playful or serious, children’s games or adults’ work. They may be as impenetrable as foreign tongues, or slightly different from the idioms from which they spring, or barely perceptible, their existence being the subject of uncertain, even unlikely, suppositions. It was in the Renaissance that writers across Europe first noted that willfully obscure languages had come into use. A varied cast of characters — lawyers, grammarians, and theologians — denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they were tools of crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before the emergence of these modern jargons, however, the artificial twisting of languages served a different purpose. In epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome and medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech. They did so not to defraud, but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to master. Dark Tongues moves among these various artificial and hermetic tongues. From criminal jargons to sacred idioms, from Saussure’s work on anagrams to Jakobson’s theory of subliminal patterns in poetry, from the arcane arts of the Druids and Biblical copyists to the secret procedure that Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, believed he had uncovered in Villon’s songs and ballads, Dark Tongues explores the common crafts of rogues and riddlers, which play sound and sense against each other. ...
