“A language reconstructed on
the basis of meager inscriptions does not acquire substance until one proves
that, on the basis of those inscriptions, that language and only that language could
be reconstructed. But in our case, on the basis of so fragile a collection of
data, it might be possible to construct or reconstruct not one but a hundred
languages. Thus one would be confronted by the amusing case of a piece of
poetry which could have been written in any one of a hundred languages, each dissimilar
from the others and from the first…”
“Of course, an artist is
free to put together his words even before attributing a meaning to them, free
even to expect from those words, or from a single word, the whole significance
and meaning of his composition. Provided that this composition is art. That is
what matters. On the other hand I
wouldn't want you to forget that significance and meaning are not at all
indispensable. A poem, gentlemen, can also not have meaning. It must only, I repeat,
be a work of art.”
- Translated by Raymond Rosenthal
Sypnosis of the story:
- Translated by Raymond Rosenthal
Sypnosis of the story:
In "Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies," published in 1937, an unsettled student and poet, Y., tells the narrator how he was taught Persian by an English sea captain. After studying the language and composing three poems in it, Y. realizes he's been conned: the "Persian" he has painstakingly learned is nothing but an imaginary language. Worse still, when confronted, the sailor cannot remember having instructed him. Y. hastily torches his notes and, desperate to discover whether his verses have any artistic worth, goes with the narrator to visit a "great" critic. Their dialogue quickly turns to a deconstruction of creative identity: to the critic, art is relative to the whims of the artist; the narrator and Y. argue that it is an anthropological confluence of history, scholarship, and geography. "Do you mean to say," Y. asks, "that a poem can be a work of art even if there is only one person in the world, only its author, competent to judge it?"
"Precisely," the great critic replies.
—Michael Peck
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