Bird dreams

Falconry in the Codex Manesse

Last night I took Catherine Hanley’s recent book about Philip Augustus and the Plantagenets Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy down from the shelf for (possibly) my next read. While leafing through it again, I paused over the epigraph Hanley chose, a passage from Gerald of Wales:

A certain monk, lying in his bed, was thinking a great deal about the sons of King Henry, three such outstanding knights and the fourth and younger likewise, and how there was no ruler on earth who enjoyed such offspring, and what would be their future. Eventually he slept, and it seemed to him that he saw on the bank of the river four birds sitting, namely males of the ducks who the common people call mallards. And although those birds are by nature very beautiful, a voice said to him: ‘Do you see those birds? They are the sons of King Henry, whom you were thinking about. And do you want to see their future? Look up for a moment.’

When he did this, he saw the bird called the falcon above in the sky flying on swift wings, and immediately those four birds, one after the other, suddenly submerged themselves in the water of the river as if in fear of that bird, and afterwards appeared no more. And at once the voice added: ‘Do you wish to know who is that bird flying overhead? Assuredly, it is Philip, son of the king of France.’

Dreams are, of course, a constant in my life and a preoccupation of mine, so I found this an interesting choice to open the book. The nature of the dream also struck me. Likely thanks to Donald and Daffy ducks don’t seem portentous animals to us, but they feature quite dramatically as prey here. A further curiosity: in modern stories dreams are often left uninterpreted for maximum mystery and foreboding. Here the dreamer gets an interpretation before he’s even woken up.

Compare the Nibelungenlied, stanzas 13-14 in the opening “Adventure” or canto, which works as a kind of prologue introducing the beautiful Krimhild and foreshadowing her tragic life, here translated by Burton Raffel:

Living surrounded by splendor Krimhild dreamed a dream:
she had trained a falcon, glorious, strong-winged, fierce, and wild,
and a pair of eagles tore it apart in front of her eyes.
No pain, no sorrow in all the world could be worse than what she’d seen.

She went to Lady Otta and told her mother the dream.
Otta could only find a single truthful meaning:
“The falcon you train must be some noble heroic man,
but if God will not protect him, you will be sure to lose him soon.”

Here you get raptor-on-raptor violence and again, even if it is not in-dream like Gerald’s story, an immediate interpretation.

An interesting parallel, and I’m sure I know at least one other dream about birds that I can’t recall now (likely in Dante). Their largely vanished cultural significance—falconry being a favorite pastime for medieval nobility—also strikes me. Birds as both predator and prey crop up in medieval poetry a lot, but I can’t think of the last time I had a dream about birds.

Borges on the two registers of English

An interesting clip of Jorge Luis Borges talking about the English language and some of its peculiar strengths has been going around lately. In the clip, excerpted from Borges’s 1977 interview with William F Buckley Jr on “Firing Line,” Borges talks about why he regards English as a “finer” language than his native Spanish. After describing how he grew up reading English books in his father’s library (“When I think of the Bible, I think of the King James Bible”) and how even having forgotten Latin is better than never having known it, Borges continues:

Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

William F Buckley: Why?

Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

WFB: The most what?

Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

WFB: “Asomó?”*

Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

You can watch the whole discussion here, with the above beginning at approximately 17:20.

I speak no Spanish and so can’t vouch for Borges’s perspective on his native tongue—though I’d seriously hesitate to call his perspective into question, as some internet commenters on this clip seem unduly confident in doing—but I think he perceptively draws attention to two useful and beautiful features of English.

First, the interplay of verbs and adverbs. Immediately after the examples he gives of “live down,” “laugh off,” “dream away,” and “live up to,” Borges offhandedly suggests, “I suppose they can be said in German.” Any German speaker will be familiar with the separable prefix verb, a verb-preposition pair with a distinct (sometimes dramatically different) meaning from the root verb. I’ve always thought this feature had a grammatically more flexible cognate in the English use of prepositions in the way Borges describes. The physicality of these idioms, many of which give a subtle spatial quality to an abstract action, is worth considering.

This extends to rhythm as well. Here’s Borges on English adverbs slightly later in the interview:

Borges: Of course, in Spanish words are far too cumbersome, they’re far too long. Well, I go to one of my hobbies: For example, if you take an English adverb, or two English adverbs, you say for instance “quickly,” “slowly,” the stress falls on the significant part of the word. Quick-ly. Slow-ly. But if you say it in Spanish, you say “lentamente,” “rapidamente,” then the stress falls, let’s say, on the non-significant part, on the gadget.

The capacity of English for onomatopoeia is an often overlooked and underexploited quality. English isn’t limited to being spoken or written—it can be played.

But what I really love is Borges’s talk of the “two registers” of English, which seems to me exactly the right metaphor for the way English meaning and especially connotation work. (Another metaphor I’m accustomed to use: texture.) Depending on which words you choose to say something, you can pitch it high, low, or anywhere in between, with subtle variations in meaning in each. The good speaker or writer will choose carefully and precisely.

Consideration of the registers of the language—direct versus vague, concrete versus abstract, blunt versus diplomatic, coarse versus tactful—lies behind what many writers have written about the relative merit of Germanic and Latinate vocabulary. It is not precisely correct to say, as Borges does, that English is both Germanic and Latinate. It is Germanic. But it does have an enormous hoard of loanwords from Latin and other Romance languages. These borrowings were often heavily contextual—the jargon of medicine, theology, government, and even military ranks are often Latin, Greek, or French—and brought with them not only synonyms but finely differentiated shades of meaning.

And that’s what both features Borges discusses have in common. The availability of many shades of meaning is one of the things I love most about English, allowing incredibly fine precision. (Note that in the explanation of separable prefix verbs I linked to above, one of the purposes of such a grammatical feature is to be “more precise.”) To use another musical metaphor, English has a range of many, many octaves. Reading widely—especially in poetry—can strengthen your command of them.

A really interesting discussion. I’m watching the rest of the interview in fits and starts today. You can find the whole thing on the “Firing Line” YouTube channel here. It’s worth your while.

*A fascinating bit of trivia: Buckley is quick to suggest a possible Spanish equivalent for to loom over because Spanish was actually his first language. Largely raised by Spanish-speaking nannies, he purportedly didn’t learn English until entering school at age seven.