Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Transformation of man into beast, in folktales often a curse or unhappy spell, is in modern stories more likely to be enlarging and educational, and even, as in the Wart’s last great journey, to offer a glimpse of mystical participation, of an ultimate and eternal communion.

  The yearning for a Lost Wilderness which runs through so many animal tales is a lament for the endless landscapes and creatures and species that we have wasted and destroyed. These laments grow urgent now. We come ever closer to isolating ourselves, a solitary species swarming on a desert world. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

  We go crazy in solitude. We are social primates, sociable beings. Human beings need to belong. To belong to one another, first, of course; but because we can see so far and think so cleverly and imagine so much, we aren’t satisfied by membership in a family, a tribe, people just like us. Fearful and suspicious as it is, yet the human mind yearns towards a greater belonging, a vaster identification. Wilderness scares us because it is unknown, indifferent, dangerous, yet it is an absolute need to us; it is that animal otherness, that strangeness, older and greater than ourselves, that we must join, or rejoin, if we want to stay sane and stay alive.

  The child is our closest link to it. The storytellers know that. Mowgli and young Wart reach out their hands, the right hand to us and the left hand to the jungle, to the wild beast in the wilderness, to the hawk and the owl and the panther and the wolf; they join us together. The six-year-old spelling out Peter Rabbit, the twelve-year-old weeping over Black Beauty—they have accepted what so much of their culture denies, and they too reach out their hands to rejoin us to the greater creation, keeping us where we belong.

  Inventing Languages

  Published as the foreword to The Encyclopedia of Fictional and

  Fantastic Languages, ed. Conley and Cain, Greenwood Publishing,

  2006, and revised in 2014.

  Most invented languages begin with invented names. Those who write fiction with an entirely imaginary setting—fantasy, or far-future or alien-world science fiction—must play Adam: they need names for the characters, creatures, and places of their fictive world.

  Invented names are a quite good index of writers’ interest in their instrument, language, and their ability to play it. In a crude stage of such naming, back in the pulp days of science fiction, invention was largely by convention. Heroes resisted invention entirely: whizzing through distant galaxies in the thirtieth century, they were still Buck and Rick and Jack. Aliens were Xbfgg and Psglqkjvk, unless they were princesses named Laweena or LaZolla.

  If you’re creating a world out of words and there are speaking creatures in it, you suggest a great deal—whether you mean to or not—by naming them. The old pulp-science-fiction naming conventions implied the permanent hegemony of manly, English-speaking men, the risible grotesqueness of non-English languages, and the inviolable rule that pretty princesses (the only women worth naming) have musical names ending in a. And the conventions dragged on endlessly in movie sci-fi, with a hero named Luke, an alien named Chewbacca, and a princess named Leia.

  A more thoughtful and inventive approach to naming may offer less naïvely unexamined social and moral implications. Take Swift’s horses in Gulliver’s Travels, the Houyhnhnms. The best guide to how to say the name is provided by the Professor and Maria in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose; according to them it involves not moving your tongue while squealing through the back of your nose. I find that tossing your head and shaking it at the same time helps. It isn’t easy. But Houyhnhnm isn’t a contemptuously meaningless and unpronounceable clump of letters: on the contrary, it’s a conscious attempt to spell how a horse might say who it is, and a deliberate challenge to the English speaker. If you’re willing to learn to say that one word of the horses’ language, you may be that much more able to think like a horse. Swift is not dismissing the nonhuman, but inviting us into to it.

  Many, many children draw maps of strange countries and name them: Islandia, Angria. . . . With the name comes a hint of the color of the hills, the weather, the temper of the people there. Some children explore these lands, sometimes returning to them in imagination all their lives.

  To make up a name of a person or a place is to open the way to the world of the language the name belongs to. It’s a gate to Elsewhere. How do they talk in Elsewhere? How do we find out how they talk?

  The best thing ever written on the subject is J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “A Secret Vice.” It is a splendid and often very funny description, explanation, and defense of the creation of fictive languages. It discusses how such languages, when carried through to any extent, are mythopoeic: they bear in them an intrinsic mythology, a view of the world—even, as with Swift’s horses, a new morality. Tolkien addresses the aesthetic motivation of such creations with characteristic vigor and insight. He says:

  The instinct for ‘linguistic invention’—the fitting of notion to oral symbol, and pleasure in contemplating the new relation established, is rational, and not perverted. . . . . Certainly it is the contemplation of the relation between sound and notion which is the main source of pleasure. We see it in an alloyed form in the peculiar keenness of the delight scholars have in poetry or fine prose in a foreign language, almost before they have mastered that language.

  What such scholars (and I would add poets, and any readers of a certain bent) find in reading a language new to them, he says, is the pleasure roused by “a great freshness of perception of the word-form.”

  Many critics and teachers of fiction are so deaf or indifferent to the sound of prose that they, and their students, may find this statement puzzling or trivial, or fail to see how it applies to their own language. I can only say that to me it holds an invaluable suggestion of how I come at my invention of fictions as a writer, and my appreciation of fiction as a reader. I seek the appropriateness of sound to sense.

  I first discovered the particular pleasure of a “new relation established” between the two when I was eight or so. The kindly Swiss lady who was trying to teach me French picked up a little china whale from my desk and said, smiling, “Ah! Le Moby-Dick!” Lemobeedeek? Slowly the mysterious, senseless, charming noise revealed the whale: a revelation. Leviathan! Leviathan made new!

  A few years later, when I first read Lord Dunsany’s fantasies, the fine, playful relation of sound and sense in his made-up names gave me joy—the evil gnoles, for instance, or the doomed city Perdóndaris, through which flows the great river Yann. . . . Equally strong was the magic of half-guessed meaning in a language whose mystery was merely that I didn’t know it.

  Muy más clara que la luna

  sola una

  en el mundo tu nacistes . . .

  When I was thirteen that song in Hudson’s Green Mansions held all romance in it, all the moon, all love and yearning . . . more than it could possibly have held if I had known Spanish. This, says Tolkien, is the advantage of seeing things at a distance. It is the great gift of hearing words as music.

  Language is “for” communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song. The writer has to listen. The reader has to hear. Pleasure in articulate sound, and in the symbolic use of it, is what moves the maker of a poem, and also the maker of a fictional language, even if her tongue is the only one that will ever speak it and her ear alone is tuned to it.

  The undertaking of this book is, as its makers confess, ambitious: to gather all the imaginary languages into one Tower of Babel. So widespread and so public is the Secret Vice these days that the authors have had to omit from detailed consideration not only languages such as Esperanto, which though utopian are not fictional, but also the “constructed languages” that fill whole websites, and the “alien languages” presented in comics and video and role-playing games. A lot of people are busy making up new ways to speak. This encyclopedia comes in th
e nick of time to guide us into the myriad worlds thus suggested.

  Rightly, it concentrates on languages that belong to an imagined race of speakers, a society, a world—genuinely fictive languages, not exclusive codes, and not games, even though some of them are immensely playful.

  In the beginning is the word: one may imagine a language before imagining who speaks it. This is how it was, evidently, with Tolkien. A linguist playing with language for the joy of it, he found his invented languages bringing to life the mythology of a people, and thence an anthropology, a history, a topography, and all the vast epic of Middle Earth . It can also happen the other way round: the development of an imagined world beyond a certain point demands the development of a language to suit it. This was the case with my Always Coming Home. I thought a few dozen words of the language of the Kesh people would suffice to suggest their key concepts, and had already blithely written that “the difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it.” But when the composer Todd Barton began to write the music of the Valley for the book, he needed a Kesh text for the songs. I had to be an honest woman, sit down, and invent Kesh—at least enough of the grammar and syntax and vocabulary to get me through writing the poems which I had pretended to translate into English before they existed in Kesh. The difficulty of that process needs no exaggeration.

  Usually it’s not so convoluted. A few mysterious words can give the impression of a language, the flavor of it, which is all most novels need to do; all the inventor has to do is make the words linguistically plausible.

  An incoherent language is a contradiction in terms. A language is, in a sense, its rules. It is a symbolic pact, a convention, a social contract. Whether it’s the limited choice of sounds used (the phoneme pool), the combination of those sounds to make words, or the combination of those words in syntax, every aspect of any language is largely arbitrary, intensely regular, and perfectly characteristic. In English you never pronounce u the way the French do, and in French you never say th the way the English do. Mandarin would perish rather than agglutinate. The rules are so pervasive that you can identify a language by a single word—“Achtung!”

  This self-consistence is convenient to the novelist. If she only needs a few words or names for local color, all she has to do is make up some that don’t sound like the language she’s writing in. Her inventions may have a strong lurking flavor of her native tongue, but probably only readers who come to it from other languages will taste it. Then she merely needs to ask herself: is this humanly sayable? This is where Xbfgg and Psglqkjvk fail the test, though Houyhnhmn passes it. And she should consider whether the invented words and names seem to come from the same language. For if one character is named Krzgokhbazthwokh and another Lia-tua-liuli, readers will reasonably assume that the two come from different parts of Elsewhere.

  Noam Chomsky, as quoted in the introduction to this encyclopedia, appears to assume that the nefarious purpose of a made-up language is “to violate universal grammar.” I doubt that many inventors of language have had any desire to violate universal grammar, if they have ever heard of it. Those who are serious about making their invention plausible and even usable naturally avoid any attempt to violate universal grammar—if in fact it’s possible to do so. If a deep grammar is innate in us, supplying the fundamental structure of all human languages, to ignore or violate it would result not in an invented language but in mere unintelligibility. As far as I can see, the rules we make up for our imaginary languages are all mere variations on the rules of the languages we know. Any appearance of linguistic terrorism turns out to be inept rule-making, or mere ignorance that there are rules. Professor Chomsky may sleep sound; fictional barbarians are not battering at the gates of his universal grammar.

  Although it is possible that Borges, with his perverse, subversive, marvelous daring, at least knocked politely at those gates. The primordial languages of Tlön, he tells us, have no nouns; in one the noun is replaced by a cluster of adjectives, in another “there is no word corresponding to the word ‘moon,’ but there is a verb which in English would be ‘to moon’ or ‘to moonate.’” And thus “The moon rose above the river” becomes “upward behind the onstreaming mooned”: Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö. But we must remember that the Ur-languages of Tlön, like Indo-European, are theoretical reconstructions of the early source of a whole family of languages. It may by now be necessary also to remember that none of the languages of Tlön, in fact, exist, because Tlön does not exist; unless, of course, as the end of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” suggests, we are now living there.

  Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö is a particularly fine example of linguistic invention—of the mad variety of imaginary words and grammars gathered in this book, their proliferation into jungles of exuberant glossolalia—the laborious delight with which sane people translate utter, deliberate nonsense into English, and vice versa—the touching spectacle of poets blissfully writing poems in languages nobody ever heard or heard of. This is a side of humanity I like very much. These are people doing what only people can do, a peculiarly human and peculiar thing. They do it without malice, and without any gain or profit in sight except the increase of pleasure. If the pleasure can be shared—as it is, liberally, here—so much the better; but the thing is done, like most good things and all art, for the doing of it.

  How to Read a Poem: “Gray Goose and Gander”

  This piece appeared in Poetry Northwest, in response to editor David Biespiel’s call for contributions on the subject of how to read a poem. I revised it somewhat for publication here. I cannot retrieve the original date of publication from my files or any online source, but I place it here as a best guess, or perhaps on a whim.

  How to read a poem is aloud. There are eye-poems, of course—I’m fond of e. e. cummings—but to me they are all offshoots, technologically enabled derivatives of the heard poem. The words the eyes see are a notation, a score; the mind can only fully understand them through the ear. But, being words, they say the meaning of their music. Words sung to a tune make a song; when the words are the tune, you have a poem.

  This can be a big deal, like the Aeneid or the Canterbury Tales, or a very small one, like this:

  Gray goose and gander

  Waft your wings together

  And carry the good king’s daughter

  Over the one-strand river.

  I read it first in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, by Iona and Peter Opie, a source of endless joy to myself and the people who at various times have sat on my lap.

  I’ll try to describe the music and the meaning as I hear them, hoping to clarify my idea of how they work together, or rather are aspects of one thing.

  The “tune” of the little poem is most obvious in its repeated sounds: the alliterations of the first letter of stressed syllables (g – g – g / w – w – g / k – g – k in the first three lines); and, instead of full end-rhyme, four slant-rhymed words ending in unstressed er—a syllable pronounced variously in different regions, from ah to uh to (in my dialect) the sound of the r itself, a dull purr which can be extended indefinitely, like a vowel. However pronounced, it is a mild syllable, fading off into open silence. All the vowels and consonants of the poem tend toward softness, giving an effect, to my ear, of silvery hush and spaciousness.

  As you might expect in an oral form like a nursery rhyme, the beat is strong, reinforced by alliterations. Using S for a stressed syllable and u for unstressed, I read the meter as:

  S S u S u

  S u S u S u

  u S u u S S S u

  S u u S S S u

  You could call it trochaic trimeter with a lot of latitude, but I don’t know that that gets us much of anywhere. There are lots of trochees in nursery rhymes—rocking rhythms—but it may be more useful to look at the line as the metric unit, or even the stanza, rather than the foot. In these poems worn down by generations of voices, like river stones by water, to the smoothest and most
irreducible shape, each has arrived at its own essential rhythmic logic.

  The abruptness of a trochaic opening suits the suddenness of the address, “Gray goose and gander” summoned out of nothing. And no sooner invoked than commanded, “Waft your wings together.” The old word “waft” for “wave” needs no explanation to the youngest child; sound and context are enough.

  Now the birds are aloft, and the rhythm changes: a pair of unstressed syllables lightens each line before it delivers the weight of three stressed syllables in a row, a trick you don’t often meet in formal poems. The rocking-chair beat makes me want to put less stress on “king’s” and “strand”—good king’s daughter, one-strand river. But the complexity of both the meaning and the sound of the words keeps me from unstressing them, forcing me to say all three words slowly, with a mysterious, lingering weightiness.

  And they are mysterious words. Who is the good king? Who is his daughter? From what folktale or cloudy history did they arrive? And why is the princess to be carried “over the one-strand river”—the river that has only one shore? Is it the ocean, or is it death?

  No answer. Event is all. The glimpse is given. We can spend the rest of our life enriched by that brief music with its inexhaustible suggestion of flight above vast landscapes and a story we will never be told.

  On David Hensel’s Submission to the Royal Academy of Art

  A top art gallery in Britain displayed a block of slate topped by a small piece of wood as a work of art, unaware that it was merely the plinth for a missing sculpture. The Royal Academy in London later admitted that it was confused because the plinth and sculpture—a human head by artist David Hensel—were sent to the museum separately. “Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently,” museum officials said. “The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted.”