by Helen Dewitt
L: I forbid you
I can’t afford to have any followers
Mifune runs up and stares at the samurai. Kambei: Onushi—samurai ka? Mifune (drawing himself up) : [incomprehensible shout]
L: Are you a samurai?
L: Of course!
Kambei and Katsushiro walk away. A farmer runs forward and falls to his knees.
I tell L that in the autobiography Kurosawa has nothing but praise for the marvellous Mifune except possibly that he had a rather harsh way of talking which the microphones had trouble picking up. I say that it’s very charming the way the translators have translated the Japanese into Penguin.
L: What’s Penguin?
I: It’s what English translators translate into. Merely had a lot of fighting experience! Determined to follow you! As it happens most English speakers can understand Penguin even if they wouldn’t use it in daily life, but still.
L: Isn’t that what they say?
I: They may be speaking Penguin Japanese, we can only surmise. Kambei says Tada kassen ni wa zuibun deta ga, tada, just, kassen is battle or combat according to Halpern (but I wonder whether that isn’t just Penguin infiltrating the dictionary), ni in, wa topic particle, zuibun a lot, deta happened, ga another particle which we won’t go into now but which seems pretty common, it’s hard to believe it is giving the flavour of Penguin to the
L: When are you going to teach me Japanese?
I: I don’t know enough to teach you.
L: You could teach me what you know.
I: [NO NO NO NO] Well
L: Please
I: Well
L: Please
Voice of Sweet Reason: You’ve started so many other things I think you should work on them more before you start something new.
L: How much more?
I: Well
L: How much more?
The last thing I want is to be teaching a five-year-old a language I have not yet succeeded in teaching myself.
I: I’ll think about it.
I would like to strike a style to amaze. I think I am not likely to discover the brush of Cézanne; if I am to leave no other record I would like it to be a marvel. But I must write to be understood; how can formal perfection be saved? I see in my mind a page, I think of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum: across the top one Latin line, the rest English (or possibly German), identification of persons obscure after 2,000 years. Just so will this look if I explain every reference for 45th-century readers, readers who may, for all I know, know the name of a single 21st-century genius (the one now five years old). What I mean is that I see in my mind a page, across the top a line with the words Carling Black Label, the rest a solid mass of small type describing Carling Black Label the beer, Carling Black Label ads the glory of British advertising, Levi’s the jeans, stonewashed Levi’s ad parodied in classic ad for Carling Black Label, lyrics of I Heard It Through the Grapevine classic song sung by Marvin Gaye in classic jeans and classic beer ad, not to mention terrible deprivation of American audiences of the time able to export the jeans and import the beer but not to sample the glories of British advertising to which these gave rise. What I mean is that I have read books written 2,000 or even 2,500 years ago or 20 years ago and in 2,500 years they will need everything even Mozart explained and when once you start explaining there is no end to it.
HOW MUCH MORE?
HOW MUCH MORE?
HOW, MUCH, MORE?
I: Well if you read the Odyssey and Books 1–8 of the Metamorphoses and the whole Kalilah wa Dimnah and 30 of the Thousand and One Nights and I Samuel and the Book of Jonah and learn the cantillation and if you do 10 chapters in Algebra Made Easy then I will teach you as much as I can.
L: Then that’s what I’ll do.
I: All right.
L: I will.
I: Fine.
L: You’ll see.
I: I know.
L: Will you teach me the alphabet while I’m working on the rest?
I: It doesn’t have an alphabet. It has two sets of syllabaries of 46 symbols apiece, 1,945 characters of Chinese derivation in common use since the Second World War and up to 50,000 characters used before then. I know the syllabaries and 262 characters which I keep forgetting which is precisely why I am not really qualified to teach it to you.
L: Then why don’t you get a Japanese to teach me?
This is a wonderful idea. I could get a benevolent Japanese male to act as an uncle substitute for L! A benevolent Mifune lookalike to come and talk about stamp collecting or football or his car in a language which would conceal the diabolical tedium of the subject. But he would probably want some money.
I: I don’t think we can afford it.
I once read a book about an Australian girl who was given an English bulldog; a big truck was sent into town to collect the (as they thought) large animal, and brought back a baby bulldog that could be held in the palm of a hand. At the time I thought I would like a tiny bulldog of my own. Little did I know. L has read Ali Baba and Moses in the Bullrushes and Cicero’s De Amicitia and the Iliad which I started him on by accident, & he can play Straight No Chaser which he learned by listening to the tape & trying to copy it about 500 times—it is wonderful that he was able to do it and yet if you are trying to type 62 years of Crewelwork Digest onto computer in the same room it can sometimes be hard to feel a proper
For who was Mozart? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer of genius, taught music by his father Leopold from the age of five, and displayed in the courts of Europe playing the harpsichord blindfold and performing other tricks. He composed string quartets, symphonies, piano sonatas, a concerto for the glass organ and several operas including Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. His sister Nannerl received identical training and was not a musical genius. I have heard it argued, and by a clever man too, that this proves that women are not capable of musical genius. How is it possible to argue this, you say, AND to know that a brother and sister may have no genes in common, without being committed to the unlikely theory that any man could be a Mozart with similar training? You say it, and I thought it; but the fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think
What’s a syllabary?
A syllabary is a set of phonetic symbols each representing a syllable
he gets out of the habit.
What’s a syllable?
You know what a syllable is
No I don’t
A syllable is a phonetic element of a word containing a vowel, take the word ‘containing’ you could break it down to ‘con-tain-ing’ and have a symbol for each part. In Chinese each word is just one syllable long, a monosyllable. What would polysyllabic be?
With many syllables?
Exactement.
And oligosyllabic would be with few syllables
It would be, but it’s not used much, people seem to work in terms of an opposition between the one and the many
Duosyllabic
It would be better to say word of two syllables on grounds of euphony. In general if you are going to make up a word you should use the adverbial form of the number, which would give disyllabic except people often seem to use bi after mono, monogamy bigamy monoplane biplane. Usually Latin numbers go with words of Latin derivation, so unilateral bilateral multilateral bicameral multinational, and Greek numbers with words of Greek derivation, tetrahedron, tetralogy, pentagon
Trisyllabic
Yes
Tetrasyllabic
Yes
Pentasyllabic hexasyllabic heptasyllabic oktasyllabic enasyllabic dekasyllabic hendekasyllabic dodekasyllabic
Exactly
Treiskaidekasyllabic tessareskaidekasyllabic pentekaidekasyllabic hekkaidekasyllabic heptakaidekasyllabic
And who was Bernini? Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was ‘the greatest genius of the Italian Baroque’, who moved to Rome at the age of seven and was taught by his father
EIKOSASYLLABIC
Pietro, a sculptor. Rudolf Wittkower (German art historian, refugee from th
e Nazis [where to begin?], author of Art & Architecture in Italy 1600–1750) compares him to Michelangelo ([1475–1564]),
enneakaieikosasyllabic
TRIAKONTASYLLABIC
painter, poet, sculptor of genius …) in his capacity for superhuman
oktokaitriakontasyllabic enneakaitriakontasyllabic
TESSARAKONTASYLLABIC
concentration. ‘But unlike the terrible and lonely giant of the sixteenth century, he was a man of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of conviviality, aristocratic in demeanour, a good husband and father, a first-rate
enneakaitessarakontasyllabic PENTEKONTASYLLABIC
heiskaipentekontasyllabic
organiser, endowed with an unparalleled talent for creating rapidly and with ease.’
And Cézanne? Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter of genius, associated with the Impressionist
treiskaihexekontasyllabic
school of painting. He was inarticulate: people called him the Bear. He worked very slowly and with
oktokaihexekontasyllabic enneakaihexekontasyllabic
HEBDOMEKONTASYLLABIC
difficulty. He is most famous for his landscapes and still lifes. His method was to apply blocks of paint to the canvas, often with a palette knife rather than a brush. He worked so
heptakaihebdomekontasyllabic
slowly that even fruit could not
OGDOEKONTASYLLABIC
stand still enough: it rotted
What’s the longest word in the world?
I don’t know. I don’t know all the words in the world.
What’s the longest word you know?
I don’t know.
How can you not know?
I think it’s the name of a polymer. I can’t remember how it goes.
duokaiogdoekontasyllabic
Wait a minute. Here’s a good one. di(2-ethylhexyl)hexa-hydrophthalate.
Is that the polymer?
No.
What does it mean?
I once knew.
My dad would know.
The hell he would (think I)—I would like to say this but I don’t KNOW that he doesn’t, there is only an (in my opinion) overwhelming likelihood, & I think I should not blacken his name to L without good hard evidence.
He MAY know. It didn’t come up in the conversation.
What did you talk about?
I talked about the Rosetta Stone. He talked about his car and about a writer he admired.
What kind of car does he have?
He didn’t say. Diethyl-dimethyl methane. Diethyl-diethyl malonate. Diethyl-methyl-ethyl malonate.
treiskaiogdoekontasyllabic tessareskaiogdoekontasyllabic pentekaiogdoekontasyllabic
before he was done. He used
oktokaiogdoekontasyllabic enneakaiogdoekontasyllabic
ENENEKONTASYLLABIC
wax fruit instead.
And who was Rilke and who was Zweig and who was Musil? Who was Newton and who was Einstein? Rilke
Why don’t you teach me the syllabaries?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
Well
Are they hard?
Not very
Please
Well
Please
I told you the deal
Heiskaienenekontasyllabic duokaienenekontasyllabic
Glenn Gould (eccentric, brilliant mid-20th-century Canadian pianist and specialist in the works of J. S. Bach [18th-century German
HEPTAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
composer of genius]) said of The Well-Tempered Clavier [forget it], that the preludes
OKTOKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
were merely prefatory
ENNEAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC
and of no
HEKATONTASYLLABIC
real musical interest. The
You could teach me ONE syllabary
I told you the deal
Is there a language with only one syllabary?
I think Tamil makes do with one
So Tamil would be a monosyllabaric language
Yes
And Japanese is a disyllabaric language but most people would call it bisyllabaric
Yes
trisyllabaric tetrasyllabaric pentasyllabaric hexasyllabaric
reader
heptasyllabaric
may
oktasyllabaric
take comfort
enasyllabaric
in a plain
dekasyllabaric hendekasyllabaric dodekasyllabaric
preface.
hekkaidekasyllabaric
I will hope to do no worse by
heptakaidekasyllabaric
OKTOKAIDEKASYLLABARIC
ENNEAKAIDEKASYLLABARIC
EIKOSASYLLABARIC
heiskai
You’re missing a masterpiece of modern cinema. Finish the Odyssey and I’ll teach you the hiragana, yes?
Done.
Emma offered me a work permit & a job.
I said: Done.
Odyssey 1.
Odyssey 2.
Odyssey 3.
Odyssey 4.
I never meant this to happen. (L is reading Odyssey 5. He has read four books in four days. I would carry on from where I left off but I have misplaced my notes.) What I meant was to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), who I read somewhere started teaching Yo Yo when he was 2.
Coupez la difficulté en quatre was his motto, which meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. He used the same procedure with Chinese characters, the child learning a character a day—by my reckoning that makes two simple tasks but you get the picture. I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself, & when he was 2 I started him on flashcards.
I think that the first simple task was supposed to be cat. No sooner had he mastered this simple task than he wanted to go on, he wanted every single word in his vocabulary on a card, he sobbed PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE when I tried to stop before writing it down. The next day he started his first book, Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, no sooner had he started than he started to cry because he did not know Hop and Pop. I saw in a flash that the time required to teach a two-year-old workaholic by the look-and-say method would leave perhaps 6 minutes a day for typing, & so (doubting my ability to make ends meet on 55p a day) I hastily went over a few principles of the phonics system. He learned to say huh when he saw an h and puh when he saw a p and by the end of the week he could read as follows: Hop. On. Pop. The. Cat. in. the. Hat.
I thought: It worked! It worked!
He would sit on the floor and when he found something interesting he would bring it over to show me.
Thunder of tiny feet. He had unearthed a treasure. Yes? I would say
And he would produce from the page—O Joy!—a thing of glory
The
Wonderful!
And here was another find! What could it be? Could it—No—Yes—Yes—It was a
Cat
And he would pluck from the page one marvel after another, until at last he could nonchalantly draw now a rabbit, now a dove, now a string of coloured scarves from an ordinary empty black top hat.
Wonderful marvellous wonderful marvellous cool
I was not getting as much work done as I had hoped.
One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves.
He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.
The face on the gutta percha inkstand has a tale to tell
I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale
it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850.
& I said NO.
I said You know a lot of these words don’t you, and he
said Yes, and I said Why don’t you practise reading the words you know and you can pick FIVE WORDS that you don’t know and I will explain them.
I don’t know how much of this deal he understood. He asked for Neptune, moulded, commemorate, successful, material, insulate and submarine. I explained them in a manner which I leave to the imagination. He read a few words that he knew and put the book on the floor. Then he went back for another book. What a delightful surprise! In, And, To and our old friend The in Truth and Other Enigmas! Sadly, however, no sign of gutta percha or Neptune.
He put the book on the floor and went back to the shelf.
20 books later I thought: This is not going to work.
I said: Put the book back on the shelf
& he took it down with a cry of glee
so I put it back and I put him in his playpen and he started to sob.
I said: Look, why don’t you look at all the nice pictures in Classic Plastics, and whenever you know a word you can read the word, look at this lovely yellow radio
and he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOO
I said: Well look, here’s Truth and Other Enigmas, that’s got lots and lots and lots of words, let’s see if you know a word on this page
& he sobbed NOOOOOOOOOOO and tore the page from the book and hurled the book away.