Toutes gens que volés savoir les deverses jenerasions des homes et les deversités des deverse region dou monde, si prennés cestui livre et le feites lire. Et qui trovererés toutes les grandismes mervoilles et the grant diversités de la grande Harminie et de Persie et des Tartars et de Inde….

Marco Polo, Chapter One

(Everyone who wants to know the diverse nations of men and the diversities of the diverse regions of the world, take this book and read it. And here you will find all of the greatest marvels and the great diversities of Greater Armenia and of Persia and of the Tartars and of India…..)

This is from the Franco-Italian version of Marco Polo, written in a non-standard mixed dialect at a time when even Court French wasn’t really very standardized: “Old French doesn’t have rules, but only tendencies” (Kibler, Introduction to Old French).

There are about seven texts of Marco Polo which are regarded as in some way “original”; all are early versions of a series of texts which have been lost. The Franco-Italian text is thought to be closest to the original, and it’s noticeably badly written. This is unsurprising, since vernacular literature in French was only a little more than a century old, Marco Polo was not a writer at all and may have been illiterate in European languages, and his co-author Rustichello was an Italian trying to write French. The dialect used was a compromise language related to the lingua franca of the crusaders and Mediterranean sailors, adapted as much as possible to the language of the literary romances. (Besides translating, Marco Polo’s translators also cleaned up the writing a bit — the Tuscan version uses the word “diverse”, in some form), only three times instead of four, and the Court French translation uses it only twice.)

Serious literature during that period was written in Latin, whereas vernacular literature of that period was secular, profane, and often rather trashy. (Unfortunately, Polo’s contemporaries Dante and Cavalcanti were already working to change this by producing tiresome vernacular work.)  Marco Polo’s book fits loosely into the era’s “Wonders of the East” genre, and Rusticello folded in as much heroic romance as he could. While these genres may seem naive, folkish, and low class to us today, they were intended for the nobility and their hangers-on.

I can’t think of another book in world history where the form-content imbalance was as great as it is in this one.

They were simple people who gave way to their feelings. We repress ours…. (p. 100)

Here, too, was the “underdevelopment of sight”.  He was content to “feel” — like his whole age (p. 454).

Who was Febvre talking about? Martin Luther, and with him, the entire Renaissance: Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Pico, Rabelais, the whole shebang. This is the Annales school’s famous histoire des mentalités. Where did it come from?

A while ago our teacher Lévy-Bruhl investigated how and why primitives reasoned differently from civilized men. Yet a good part of the latter remained primitives for a long time (p. 6).

But  Lévy-Bruhl was refuted by Lévi-Strauss, and there’s no such thing as “la mentalité primitive”!  And anyway, you’re not supposed to talk about white people that way — Luther and Erasmus were not wogs! (Paging Edward Said).

During the first half of the 20th century French rationalism and scientism were fierce and savage. Febvre was diligently refuting an even more rationalistic earlier book by Abel Lefranc which had claimed that Rabelais himself was a pure rationalist, centuries ahead of his time.

1.

The impresario Diaghilev, who played an enormous role in the development of early 20th c. music and ballet, was a talentless, unscrupulous charlatan.How do we know this?

When he was 24 Diaghilev wrote the following to his stepmother, with whom he was very close:

I am, first of all, a great charlatan, although brilliant, and secondly, a great charmer, and thirdly, very brazen, and fourthly, a man with a great amount of logic and a small amount of principles, and fifthly, I believe, without talent; however, if you like, I believe I have found my real calling – patronage of the arts. For that, I ha ve everything except money, but that will show up.

Of course, maybe he was just another “unreliable narrator” (or perhaps a Cretan liar).

2.

In 1881 Czar Alexander II was killed by nihilist assassins. Czar Alexander III knew he needed to do something to restore Russia’s confidence, so for 15,000 rubles he commissioned the world first
Fabergé egg and gave it to the Czarina on Easter.

Imperial Russia wasn’t into pragmatism and efficiency. Assassination is a poor way of achieving political goals, and nihilists basically believe that nothing is possible anyway. And similarly, Fabergé eggs are an ineffective response to social unrest.

London, May 16, 1751

My Dear Friend,

In about three months from this day, we shall probably meet. I look upon that moment as a young woman does upon her bridal night; I expect the greatest pleasure, and yet cannot help fearing some admixture of pain.….

This is Lord Chesterfield writing to his son. Where are the Freudians when you need them? I am very glad that my own father never wrote anything like this to me.

Lord Chesterfield constantly nagged his bastard about not being shallow, frivolous, and artificial enough. He recommended that he take two mistresses, one of them a high society lady to teach him the airs and graces, and the other a girl of convenience. The bastard was touring Europe, and while he was there Lord Chesterfield continually pimped fine ladies on him — and many of them sent back reports (most of them negative). The son was a serious-minded, scholarly sort and he resisted as best he could, but he didn’t have what it took to make the appropriate response to the letter above:

My dear father,

I look forward eagerly to your return. Rest assured that it is with the ultimate gentleness that I shall unveil your fair charms, and that if during the final consummation the throbbing gristle betwixt your yielding thighs should cause you even the tiniest pain, that harm will be remedied with a thousand passionate kisses.

Your obedient son, &c &c

Natalya, however , remembers Yezhov with love. She has said in an interview “He spent a lot of time with me, more even than my mother did. He made tennis rackets for me. He made skates and skis. He made everything for me himself.” And the authors of the first English-language biography of Yezhov write, “At the dacha, Yezhov taught her to play tennis, skate, and ride a bicycle. He is remembered as a gentle, loving father showering her with presents and playing with her in the evenings after returning from the Lubyanka.

–Robert Chandler, “Appendix” to Vasily Grossman, The Road.

Yezhov was the head of NKVD and presided over the Stalinist terror during 1937 and 1938; after being replaced by Beria in 1939, he was shot in 1940. He was responsible for the deaths of close to a million people, including much of the Russian intelligentsia.

Yezhov was nice to his daughter. Stalin was nice to his daughter. Adolf Eichmann was nice to his kids. Hitler was nice to children and dogs.

People! Quit being nice to children!

That’s where it all starts!

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing (Oscar Wilde). Nana’s disgustingly-portrayed death is not quite as funny as Nell’s, but it’s pretty stupid. When the ground opens up and the sinner is dragged down to the flames of hell in a medieval morality tale, it makes sense granted the premises, but when Nana dies of smallpox (as when Daisy Miller dies of malaria) this is a completely implausible diabolus ex machina : sin does not cause malaria or smallpox. The needs of the story are in conflict with realism here, and the story wins.

We shouldn’t immediately conclude  that Zola (and Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Henry James) were all sadistic misogynists just because Nana, Thérèse Raqin, Madame Bovary, Germinie Lacerteaux, and Daisy Miller all die horrible deaths. They may have been, but they all had to get past the censor, and the censor is probably partly responsible for killing off most of these women. On this score, Theodore Dreiser deserves high praise for letting Sister Carrie live. Of course, he modeled Carrie on one of his sisters, and men normally don’t hate their sisters as much as they hate the ex-lovers and ex-wives which the other authors presumably used as models. (And it should also be noted that as the brother of a whore, Dreiser was not a gentleman, whereas the other authors all were).

Nana is the domineering anti-wife with an anti-dowry. In a normal French petit-bourgeois or gentry marriage the suitor gets not only the father’s lovely and obedient daughter, but also the dowry accumulated during multiple generations of scrimping, grubbing, and businesslike  marriages. But Nana has no father and no dowry, and the money and power flow in the other direction. She represents the extravagant world of global finance, which produces unheard of amounts of money by entirely different means. Her barren and insatiable womb (sed non satiata, שאול ועצר רחם ארץ לא־שבעה מים ואש לא־אמרה הון , etc.) is a symbol of creative destruction and the counterfeit infinities of finance:  “all things solid melt in air”, etc. Nana is The Unattainable, the Ideal, the blue flower, the Grecian urn, “Excelsior!”, etc., and under high capitalism these are all we can hope for anymore. It’s a damn shame.

While this is not rhyme in the strict sense but rather consonance (the alliteration of word-endings), as Schaberg says, in the DDJ and other texts these words frequently function as rhyme-words. Many -ng and -n words are technical terms in Daoist writing and other Chinese philosophy, and a single phonetic group provides four of the key terms of Daoism: 生 sheng “life”, 淸 qing “clear, pure”, 精 jing “germ, essence”, and 靜 jing “still, peaceful, obedient” (Karlgren 812, Schuessler 2009 #9-25). Furthermore, two words from this phonetic group which are not found in the DDJ — 性 xing “nature” and 情 qing “feelings / reality” — are central for other Chinese philosophers. Other such words in the DDJ include 常”chang constant”, 恆 heng “constant”, 強 qiang “strong”, 命 ming “fate”, 盈 ying ”full”, 正 zheng “right”, 名 ming “name”, 明 ming “bright”, 貞 zhen “firm”, 真 zhen “real” and ding 定 “established”. Likewise, in Confucianism such terms as 讓 rang “deference”, 敬 jing “reverence”, 忠 zhong “loyalty, diligence”, and 誠 cheng “sincerity” were also of central importance. Both these lists could both be extended.

Often -eng and -en words cluster in thematic groups. Two such groups appear in more than one chapter of the DDJ. Chapters 15, 37, 39, 45, and 57 all include at least two words from the group 清静正貞定; chapters 33, 52, and 55 all include at least two words from the group 常明强; and chapter 16 includes words from both groups. (The first of these groups also provides a very high proportion of the rhymes in the “Nei Ye” chapter of Guanzi, which is often thought to be closely related to the DDJ, but none of the rhymes from the second group are used there).淸 情 靜 精 性 生 名 明 命 盈 常

These words are often written in nonstandard forms or replaced by synonyms or near-synonyms, usually from the same rhyme category. This is because of, rather than despite, their cultural weight. According to Chinese custom the use of the personal names of Emperors for a period after their deaths is forbidden, and since honorific terms from the -ng and -n groups were often used as personal names, from time to time one or another of these words would be tabooed. Well-known examples of taboo avoidance in some tests of the DDJ include 常 chang for 恆 heng, “constant”; 滿 man for 盈 ying, “full”; 國 guo for 邦 bang, “state”; and 元 yuan “primal” for 玄 xuan “mysterious”.

In the Guodian and Mawangdui A texts of the DDJ the words 静 and 正 are are almost always replaced by other words or written in nonstandard forms, and it is reasonable to suppose that this is for reasons of taboo. Where the Wang Bi text has the word 静 jing “peaceful, still”, the Guodian text always has a different word. In chapter 45 you see 清 qing “clear”, in chapter 57 you see 青 qing “green”, in chapter 16 you see 中 zhong “center”, and in chapter 15 and 37 you see the mysterious (and uninterpretable by me) 朿 ci “stab, pierce” [?]. In the MWD A text you see 静 in its usual form once, in chapter 57, and in its alternative written form 靚 in chapters 45 and 61, but in chapter 26 you see 清 and in chapters 15 and 37 you see 情 qing “reality / feelings”.

The word 正 zheng “right”, frequently paired with 静, is often replaced by 定 ding “established” or zhen 貞 “firm“. Neither of these words is either a cognate or a synonym, but both are in a “good” rhyme class and both have a recognizably “good” meaning*. When I first found out that in chapter 37 of the Mawangdui text you see 正 where the standard Wang Bi text has 定, I took this to mean 正 was the correct form (since that fit my interpretation). However, later on when the much older Guodian text was discovered, 定 showed up again. Apparently 定 and 正 have been alternating (in an appropriately Daoist fashion) since the beginning of time, making it futile to try to figure out the original version, and that for the same reason, time spent pondering the differences in meaning between 定 and 正 would be time wasted. (However, based on later texts and the preponderance of evidence and in the interest of thematic consistency, I believe that 静 and 正 are the best choices).

The 青 qing phonetic group is of special interest for an additional reason. The words of this group are not just phonetically cognate, their meanings are also related, or are thought to be. Furthermore, and none of them are neutral terms – all have moral, aesthetic, or political weight, and usually all three. Life is nature, life is green, nature is essence, essence is alive, essence is nature, feelings are nature, and life is (or should be) clear and still. In his etymological dictionary (2007, pp. 431-2, 459, 532) Schuessler finds cognates of many of these words in several Tibeto-Burman language related to Chinese (albeit rather distantly), and he even finds some of the same semantic associations as in Chinese between Tibeto-Burman words in this family. (Which is perhaps not terribly surprising: in French and English “green / vert” also can mean “fresh, new, young, full of vigor”).

The reader may have noticed that I have been giving the contemporary Chinese pronunciations of these words. This is only possible because these rhymes have all survived into modern Chinese, making it unnecessary to use the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations. In Chinese linguistic history this is not at all typical – many or most of the traditional written phonetics have been rendered useless by phonetic evolution. For example, in Old Chinese the characters 殆, 怡, 始, 治, and 笞were respectively pronounced ləʔ, lǝ, lhǝʔ, r-lǝ, and r-lhǝ, all sharing the 台 phonetic and the lǝ sound (Schuessler 4-30) , but in Modern Chinese there is no phonetic relationship between them at all: dai, yi, shi, zhi, and chi. This is an extreme case, but only a minority of the Old Chinese phonetics are helpful for someone learning modern Chinese.

If you allow speculation free rein, you find yourself wondering whether the central cultural importance of so many of the -ng and -n words might be one of the reasons why words in these rhyme categories remained stable while other phonetic groups were fragmenting into dissimilar groups. For example, it is said that the reason why English has two different -th- sounds (now written identically, though they were distinguished in Old English) is that the few words still written with the initial consonant of “the, this, that, then, they” (rather than the initial consonant of “thing, theory, thank, through”) are used so often and have such central importance that their pronunciation hasn’t evolved according to the normal pattern, which would have led to the eventual disappearance of the phoneme. Perhaps these words and their associations are deeply buried in the linguistic subconscious, not just in the ancient (but still living) language of Chinese high culture but all the way back to proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Finally, a second speculation. Our English-language literate culture is written in a Germanic language, but to trace it to its earliest roots you have to pass through French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Egyptian, and Sumerian. At each cultural transition some of the linguistic particulars and poeticisms of the earlier language were stripped away and lost, eventually producing a lexically- and phonetically-mixed language and culture which has forgetten most of the archaic poeticisms and word-associations of the earliest time. By contrast, when you trace Chinese literate culture back to its beginnings you will always be dealing with some version of Chinese – influenced but never replaced by Buddhist languages and by the neighboring non-Chinese languages. Thus, 3000 years of Chinese writing have continuity not only in written form and in content, but even in phonetics and poetics. Tsheng is qing, dzengʔ is jing, sengh is xing and sreng is sheng, all of them still cognates, and it’s 青清情靜精性生正 all the way down.

FOOTNOTE

It would seem that a word group as big as GSR 976 would have a few negative words in it, but very few of the qing jing xing sheng words have a fundamentally bad meaning or even an imaginable bad meaning. The best slurs I could come up from this lexicon are 腥 狌 xingsheng “rotten weasel“ and 悻 猩 xingxing “enraged chimp” (and thelatter sound exactly the same as the actual name of that animal). Perhaps better examples could be found in Arthur Smith’s Proverbs and Sayings.

Sometimes the reliance on phonetic associations becomes excessive. I have seen 明 ming “bright” glossed with 冥 ming “dim”, and 名 ming “name” glossed with 鳴 ming “call, cry”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, Stockholm, 1952.

Christopher Lupke, ed., The Magnitude of Ming, Hawai’i, 2005.

David Schaberg, “Command and the Content of Tradition”, in Lupke, pp. 23-48 (especially “Sound Patterning”, pp. 37-41).

Axel Schuessler, Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese, Hawai’i, 2009.

Axel Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, Hawai’i, 2007. pp. 24, 431-2, 459, 532.

In chapter 16 the speaker sat alone, quietly observing the teeming forms of heaven and their return.  Here the speaker walks unnoticed through the crowd, nameless and alone. What we are shown, in both cases, is apartness amid transience.

Who is speaking? Not the Sage, who was not part of early Dao. Not Laozi, a legendary figure never mentioned in the DDJ. These chapters might describe actual experiences of whoever it was that first wrote or spoke them, but the chapter is not about one person’s experience. These speakers function as instances of the Daoist-in-the-world and show what it is to be a Daoist –detached from the world of names,  identities, and biographies and as unknowable as Dao itself:

我獨泊焉未兆；

如嬰兒之未孩；

儽兮若無所歸。

Only I am quiet and showing nothing,

like an infant who has not yet smiled —

forlorn, as if with no home to go to.

At the beginning the tone is unremittingly dismal. Yi 遺 describes something lost, rejected, discarded, given away, or left behind — a remarkably vivid image of abjection. Like chapter 51, this chapter is also linked to an orphan’s despairing lament from the Shijing (蓼莪, Ode 202). The DDJ’s

儽兮若無所歸。衆人皆有餘，

Forlorn, as if with no home to go to,

The crowd all have plenty, only I am lost

echoes the ode’s

出則銜恤、入則靡至。….

When I go abroad, I carry my grief with me;

When I come home, I have no one to go to….

民莫不穀、我獨何害。

People all are happy; -
Why am I alone miserable?

 After fifteen lines describing the speaker’s aloneness and (seeming) misery, the chapter sums it up in two vivid images of desolation (though the variants here make these lines a sort of Rorschach test for readers and translators since “peaceful” and “stormy” are two possible readings of the first word of the first line) :

澹兮其若晦.  飂兮若無所止.

Dim, like the dark of the moon!

Windblown, with nowhere to stop.

And then the first seventeen lines become ironic when the last four lines turn things around. The Daoist lives without the normal supports others have because he does not need them, and  honors his true mother: Dao.

Bill Porter (following Tu Erwei) thinks that the DDJ is organized around the lunar cycle of dark and bright, fullness and emptiness, and so on. The chapter is set at a spring festival, perhaps the solstice. In the MWD text the first line begins with 朢, which can mean the full moon festival, rather than with 荒 one of the other huang  words meaning “vast”, “wild”, “empty”, “confused”, etc. usually seen here. 央 in 未央 not yet at the limit  (seen in #182 of the Shijing) means a turning point, sometimes a middle and sometimes an ending (which can be the same thing in a repeating cycle). 央 and 朢 both have a sense of waiting and anticipation (for example, 央 in #182 of the Shijing), so we can suppose that the happy crowd is awaiting some lunar transition. On the other hand,  the variant I have chosen for the final word of the first line (晦 *hməʔ) can mean either “dim and dark” or (as I have translated) “the dark of the moon”. (The most commonly-translated variant, 海 *hməʔ,  gives “Calm/stormy like the sea”). Obviously the festival could not have been both a full moon festival and a dark-of-the-moon festival, but perhaps the clustering of lunar and calendric vocabulary here has literary significance.

The GD text includes only the opening passages of chapter 20. I divide the chapter at the same place, but have included here only the part not found in the Guodian text – the conclusion. The  three statements from the beginning of the chapter seen in the Guodian text seem unrelated either to each another or to the conclusion of the chapter. The first passage, 絕學無憂, will be put at the end of chapter 48, a placement justified both by the GD text and by the sense of the passage.  The second passage, 唯之與阿，相去幾何？善之與惡，相去若何？, will be put before the parallel statement which opens chapter 2.  The final passage, 人之所畏，不可不畏。, is identical to the ending of chapter 23 and similar in form to a line in chapter 17, but it would seem to fit best at the end of chapter 74.

泊 bo and 澹 dan in this chapter, 淡 dan  in chapters 31 and 35) and  氾 / 汎 / 泛 fan in chapter 34  are frequently combined with one another or defined in terms of one another, and definitions of these words often refer back to the DDJ passages they are found in. 泊, 氾, 汎, and 泛 all mean “floating”, 泊, 澹 and 淡 all mean “peaceful”, and 氾, 汎, and 泛 all mean “flooding”. Other water metaphors in early Dao cluster around “deep” (淵 and 湛 in chapter 4, 深 in chapter 15) around the polarity between “pure”  (清. Chapter 15) and “murky” (濁 in chapter 15, 混 in chapters 14, 15, 20, and 25) or can just mean “flowing” (混 and 敦 in chapters 15 and 20).

Dan 澹 is a tricky case. In modern times it has essentially been absorbed as a synonym by 淡 dan  “bland, calm, mild”, and most translators translate it that way, but in the past it also had the opposite meaning, “turbulent”, and Wagner interprets it that way in this chapter (though he footnotes an old variant text which simply reads 淡 dan).

…..

朢兮其未央哉！荒

衆人熙熙，

如享太牢，

如春登臺。

我獨泊焉未兆；

如嬰兒之未孩；

衆人皆有餘，

我獨若遺.

我愚人之心也！

沌沌兮!

俗人昭昭，我獨若昏。

俗人察察，我獨悶悶。

儽兮若無所歸。

澹兮其若晦.

飂兮若無所止.

衆人皆有以，

而我獨頑似鄙。

我欲異於人，

而貴食母。

20

…..

 Vast! – and not yet at the limit!

 The crowd is cheerful, as if attending a feast
or ascending a terrace in springtime.
Only I am quiet and show nothing,
like an infant who has not yet smiled;
forlorn, like a dog with no home to go to.

The crowd all have plenty,
only I am lost.
I have the mind of a fool – so confused!

Normal people are radiant,
only I am dim.
Normal people are penetrating,
only I am slack.

Hurried! like the dark of the moon!
Vast! as if with no home to return to.

The crowd all have their angles –
Only I am stubborn and crude.
I want to be uniquely different from others
and to honor the nurturing mother.

…..

知足者富。
強行者有志。
不失其所者久。
死而不忘者壽。

If you know others you are smart;
If you know yourself you are wise.
If you conquer others you are tough;
If you conquer yourself you are strong.

If you know what is enough you are rich.
If you act forcefully you are strong-willed
If you accept your place you are secure.
If you die and are not forgotten you are long-lived.

Nothing is right about chapter 33. The rhyme scheme is AB CB CC CD, which suggests that either the first and last line or the last four lines were tacked on. The parallelism is weak, with lines of 4, 4, 5, 4, 4, 5, 6, and 6 syllables in that order. The first two couplets are parallel (or almost) and lines 1 and 2 and lines 3 and 4 contrast with one another, but the next two couplets are neither parallel nor contrastive. Much of the chapter consists of truisms which have no real connection to the rest of the DDJ and may be antithetical to it. I salvaged what I could from the chapter and ended up with what is probably a fragment, since it lacks a rhyme for 知足者富:

自知者明。
自勝者強。
知足者富.

So I added a line:

自知者明。*ng
自勝者強。*ng
知止者得。*tək.
知足者富。*pəkh

If you know yourself you are wise.
If you conquer yourself you are strong.
If you know when to stop you gain.
If you know what is enough you are rich.

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