Overview
In Dark Tongues, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom that will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Secret languages may be playful or serious, as apparently impenetrable as a foreign tongue, or only slightly different from the languages from which they spring.
The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance in Europe. A varied cast of characters—lawyers, grammarians, and theologians—denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they served a single and illegitimate end: crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before this, in epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome, medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech, not to defraud but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to know.
Dark Tongues moves among these hermetic artificial tongues, exploring phenomena as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech, Saussure’s and Tristan Tzara’s work of anagrams, Jakobson’s theory of subliminal poetic patterning, and the secret writing systems of the Biblical copyists and Druids. In its eleven succinct chapters, Dark Tongues advances a single thesis: that such willfully obscure languages all rest on poetic techniques, which work to play sound and sense against each other.
About the Author
Daniel Heller-Roazen is Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, and The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, all published by Zone Books.
Reviews
“In his fascinating Dark Tongues—which might be construed as either a highly episodic history or a collection of case studies ranging across eras and cultures—Heller-Roazen investigates this tendency, paying particular attention to those instances when secret language becomes intertwined, if not interchangeable, with poetry.”—Elizabeth Schambelan, Bookforum
Endorsements
“Daniel Heller-Roazen’s brilliance and originality, the depth and range of his scholarship, are inspiring: if you loved (as I did) Heller-Roazen’s archaeology of the vanished in Echolalias, you will love this book too. Dark Tongues is aimed at readers fascinated by the ways of words, language, and its users. Here is God’s post-Babel plenty. Dark Tongues is a rare and delectable treat.”
—Roberta Frank, Marie Borroff Professor of English, Yale University
“I am one of many poets who have considered Daniel Heller-Roazen’s books essential reading ever since Echolalias. Once again, in Dark Tongues, he evinces his accustomed depth and range of intelligence and scholarship. His aphoristic prose style, with its sense of mischief and wit, reaches its apogee in this meditation on rogues, riddlers, linguists and poets. Heller-Roazen continues his exploration into almost buried tongues, illuminated by his belief in the power and mystery of poetry. He is the Joycean juggler of words and letters constantly in motion, shifting with twists and turns that yield to, yet resist even the most erudite of interpretations.”
—Susan Howe, author of Sorting Facts, That This, and Souls of the Labadie Tract
“In this brilliant book, Heller-Roazen descends into the half-world of literary history to which rogue and riddling poets have been exiled. His archeology of “dark tongues” reveals the consummate mastery of language displayed by rogue poets. No one plumbs the arcane depths of poetry better than Heller-Roazen, and never more so than in Dark Tongues.”
—Stephen G. Nichols, James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University