Now I love inkhornisms as much as the next and certainly enjoy sesquipedalian narratives, but this phrase in a review of Anna Burns books in the New York Review of Books (March 21, 2019) had me scratching my cerebellum. "The novel is carried by the extraordinary dynamism of middle sister’s voice, full of syntactically vertiginous constructions and new coinages such as “numbance” (for what happens to you when you are threatened sexually) or “earbashings” (of McSomebody’s verbal onslaughts)." I mean, WTF, does "syntactically vertiginous"? I suppose literally dizzyingly grammatical, but what does that mean? Fustian, perhaps?
So I threw on my librarian's smock and perused Google. Interestingly, that phrase was not unique. The first instance that showed up was, appropriately enough, from a paper in Dada/Surrealism, a translator's note about Dada/Surrealism ( No. 20 , 2015) "A Profession of Faith for the Alge Group" by Geo Bogza, a paper I will not read in this lifetime. The translator (from the Romanian) remarked,
The "Profession of Faith" may appear to be as grammatically and syntactically "vertiginous," to use Bogza's own description, as his theses. His vocabulary and rhetorical organization, however, are typical of learned Romanian in general and anything but the radical medium his "young wolves" ought to be feeding on. Bogza's uses strings of elegant variation (antiphrasis, litotes, antonomasia) and periphrases: "Ființe" (beings) for people, a poet's "prezență" (presence) for his role in public life, "adolescență" (adolescence) for youth or youthfulness and "apariție" (apparition, appearance) for a debut in print.1
That must have been hell to translate. No help there. (BTW, "litotes" means "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary (as in "not a bad singer" or "not unhappy". )
Moving along, the next occurrence was from another book review, back in 1993:
The story is positively swollen with complexities, already difficult ideas expressed in syntactically vertiginous sentences.2
I'm beginning to get the picture at least. Not to belabor the point, another example was from a comment on a blog post in VQR: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion April 20, 2010).
You have an uncanny ability to render life’s little absurdities in crystalline prose, which is both supple and syntactically vertiginous at once.3
Now, aside from crystalline prose seemingly the antithesis of syntactically vertiginous being oxymoronic....
But enough, I am beginning to become a bit vertiginous, myself.
1. https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1308&context=dadasur
2. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-dial-guatemala-for-murder-eva-salzman-on-an-ambitious-novel-about-a-poor-little-orphan-1471129.html
3. https://www.vqronline.org/awp/strangeness-awp-postmortem#comments
No comments:
Post a Comment