Well, there’s little for me to add to Will’s keen, tactful comments except affirmative emphasis, and I think Eliot should get the last word.
And now, looking ahead to Othello’s acoustics in two weeks, I had to send you all this. Below is a link to an English translation of Glossolalia, a pamphlet-length text on sound and sense published in Russian in 1922. It’s by Andrei Bely, novelist, language theorist, and icon of Symbolism, best known among English readers for Petersburg (1913). It’s subtitled “A Poem about Sound.” And it’s really wild. You’re in for cosmological mysticism, the physics of phonetics, the physiology of language – pretty zany pseudo-science if you take a look (which I’m not actually endorsing). Suffice it to quote from Bely’s introductory note: “To criticize me from a scholarly point of view is – absolutely ridiculous.” And to give you a visual taste:
Enjoy. http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/gl/glossenglish/glosseng.html.
Jessica
