And they called it macaronic
I’m away this week, so while my inbox runneth over with your coinages for last time’s challenge, how about we dip our toes in the silly end of the pool of macaronic literature?
The word macaronic, for reasons that aren’t that interesting, has nothing to do with macaroni as we know it today — though, oddly, it does describe the song that sparked a craze for the dance the macarena. The song “Macarena” is partly in English and partly in Spanish, and macaronic means “employing a mixture of languages.”
My introduction to this unusual sort of literature came indirectly, by way of a college roommate who had learned by heart the full text of a story called “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” and recited snippets of it every chance she got.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the language the story is written in is named Anguish, and Howard L. Chace invented it in the 1950s entirely out of English words.
He did so by ignoring everything about them except their sound. He explained: “An unbelievable number of English words, regardless of their usual meanings, can be substituted quite satisfactorily for others.
“When all the words in a given passage of English have been so replaced, the passage keeps its original meaning, but all the words have acquired new ones. A word that has received a new meaning has become a wart, and when all the words in the passage have become warts, the passage is no longer English; it’s Anguish.”
Got that? Thus “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” is a translation, as it were, of “Little Red Riding Hood.” The tale begins “Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist.”
“Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” is the first of about two dozen “furry tells” (fairy tales) and “noisier rams” (nursery rhymes) — including “Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers” (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) and “Marry Hatter Ladle Limb” (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) — anthologized in Chace’s 1956 book “Anguish Language.”
Now that we’re acquainted with Anguish writing, let’s get to know its more cosmopolitan cousin: silly macaronic literature. Instead of mangling English to retell a familiar tale or poem or saying, this variety mangles some other language to the same effect.
Take this lovely line from John Keats’s epic poem “Endymion”: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The French polymath François Le Lionnais took it and reflagged it as “Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l’hiver.” Pronounce that in a French-ish way or get someone who knows French to read it aloud — and voilà! you’ve got Keats’s line with a silly French accent. In actual French, the sentence means “A monkey of beauty is a toy for the winter,” but that’s beside the point. As long as it means something in the originating language, as opposed to being total gibberish, it’s good to go.
There are whole books of this stuff, the best known of which is “Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames.” (Say that aloud with a French accent — “modeur goose rams.” Its literal meaning is “Words of Hours: Pods, Paddles.”) The guy who “discovered, edited, and annotated” this manuscript was Luis d’Antin van Rooten, whose very name is a sort of macaronism, Luis being a common Spanish forename, d’Antin being typically French, and van Rooten being typically Dutch.
Van Rooten added footnotes to his verses to explain away the weirdness of the wording in French. For instance, the opening line of the poem with which the book opens, “Un petit d’un petit” (a child of a child), is said to be “the inevitable result of a child marriage.” As for the pronunciation, it’s, roughly, “ump-tee dump-tee.” Wait — Is that “Humpty Dumpty”? How silly!
“N’Heures Souris Rames” (are you catching on?), by Ormonde de Kay, followed, and “Mörder Guss Reims,” written by John Hulme in mangled German, followed that. Hulme, too, had his way with “Humpty Dumpty,” and his version begins like this: “Um die
Dumm’ die Saturn Aval.”
I’ve been emphasizing that this material is silly for two reasons. One, because it is, and two, because serious writers like Lord Byron, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound have also employed macaronisms — which are, as you now know, mixtures of languages — in serious works. But a discussion of that kind of macaronic literature will have to wait for a future column and someone else to write it.
Now, the challenge last time was to come up with a word meaning the opposite of déjà vu — “a word that would describe the feeling of learning something a hundred times but never being able to remember it.” And if you missed the deadline to submit, please enjoy extra time — until noon on Friday, March 29 — to send your coinages to me at Barbara.Wallraff@globe.com, and kindly tell me where you live.
Responses may be edited.
And please keep in mind that I am always looking for meanings in search of words.