the closest I come to a PROSPECTUS pt. 1

This little ditty goes out to Sharon, who is probably more than a little pissed at me for disappearing from AA without much of a trace and who, to her credit, is the only person to have yet to recommend me a read I haven't enjoyed.

To my mind the most interesting thing ever said of a poem of Emily Dickinson’s is actually quite prosaic; Franklin, from the Variorum edition, of the poem sometimes called “Sic transit gloria mundi” but also sometimes (unfortunately) just 2:

MANUSCRIPTS: Two or more (lost), possibly variant, about 1852. Eudocia Converse, a first cousin of ED’s mother, living in Monson, copied the poem into her 1848-53 commonplace book (lost; Jones) with the notation “Valentine by Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst” (transcript by Jay Leyda, Harvard). An error in the Latin of line 3, unemended here, may have been Converse’s, Leyda’s, or ED’s. It is unknown to whom the manuscript had been sent.

The Latin in question is “dum vivamus vivamus,” which, if it is in fact supposed to be the Epicurean motto, should read “dum vivimus vivamus” or “while we live let us live.” The original, if in fact intentional, does not make much sense as Latin, but could mean something to the effect of “while we may live let us live,” which is, fittingly, not good English. Two things strike me and strike me because they are related: 1) that the initial claim of two manuscripts, which Franklin almost whispers in parentheses, are lost (incidentally copied into another lost text) and 2) that the error in the Latin may have been Converse’s, Leyda’s, or ED’s (or to the paranoid Franklin’s). Certainly Emily Dickinson’s is not the only corpse riddled with such difficulties of manuscript transmission and not the only one whose condition raises real questions as to how we as readers and editors compose texts. She is not the first, not the last, and I in no way mean to argue hers is paradigmatic or important (because she is an important poet[ess]). It’s there, it’s something to deal with, and I will deal with it, because a conspiracy of coincidence and interest has taken me to a place where I can. I leave the issue of significance to those who actually give a crap about such things.

This poem, longish, certainly long by Dickinsonian standards, I read with keen interest not because I like it[1] but because its condition concerns me, and by it I wonder what precisely it is a poetic reader does and what other readers have wrought before me. Reading, because human language developed in a preliterate environment, interestingly is always affixed to some older verb, some much more ancient act. Normally this is where the quodam classicist informs everyone of how the Latin lectio comes from the verb lego, which, though commonly used to mean “read,” in its oldest sense meant “choose,” or, if one is even snootier, something about Greek in which the verb anagignosko is likely to make an appearance. But, as we are talking about English, let’s presume to speak in English for a bit.

The earliest sense of the verb read is to govern, to rule, and in affinity to its Teutonic cognates to control. This is what rædan means in the Beowulf. As a result it comes to mean “to advise” or “to give counsel,” a sense which is preserved in the archaic spelling rede. The temptation, upon first glance with no knowledge of the word’s history, is to see them as distinct, a mere homophonic coincidence, when in fact they are one and the same separated at some time in childhood with little memory of each other. With this knowledge, I’m tempted to see the poetic reader as the one who controls the text, advises it, tells it what to do.

I was a little hard on the classicists. I was only recently defrocked myself and, because of a lingering bitterness that my name will never been seen in the context of Wolf’s or Housman’s, tend to paint them all with the same brush. But if you are willing to indulge their arbitrary flights to other languages, indulge mine as well.

to be continued...

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[1] An irony to be sure, as it contains one of my favorite lines in all of English literature, “Mortality is fatal.” (an aside: I, in my dyslexic inability to type with any degree of accuracy, initially quoted the line as “morality is fatal” before noticing the mistake and emending it.)