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On Incomprehensibility
Nicholas Romanos
synnefiasmenikyriakimiazeismetinkardiamoupouechipantasynnefiachristekepanagiamou…
συννεσφιασμενηκυριακημοιαζειςμετηνκαρδιαμουπουεχειπαντασυννεφιαχριστεκαιπαναγιαμου…
There is nothing quite like hearing a piece of music sung in a language you don’t understand, over and over again, from a young age. The concatenations printed above are the first few lines of a song by the famous Greek composer Vassilis Tsitsanis, called “Συννεφιασμένη Κυριακή” (“Cloudy Sunday”); I first heard it sung by Vassilikos at the small ancient theater in old Epidaurus, and at that time, knowing no Greek, I could not even divide up what I heard into words. And yet, as I later listened to the piece again and again or sung it to myself, the sounds and syllables became fixed in my memory, to the extent that sometimes, looking back many years later, the “words” of this song and others like it, rooted in childhood memories, feel strangely more familiar than the English words I use every day. And yet their sense recedes into the distance—really, it was never there, came only much later with hard study, and disappears or is forgotten all too easily. Sounds like these, heard and internalized but scarcely understood, are both fuller and emptier, more familiar and more foreign, than the tones of a mother tongue.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously analyzed the linguistic sign into “signified” and “signifier,” respectively the concept conveyed and the arbitrary form that carries it. In everyday conversation, the signified seems to dominate our perception of language, such that when we repeat a word aloud ten or fifteen times, separated from any possible meaning within a phrase, the impression is very odd: the arbitrary nature of the signifier, the form of the word, has just struck us, and for a moment the meaningful word becomes an empty sound. Just like this is the emptiness of words heard in languages we do not (or barely) understand—the signified, usually so dominant, has retreated, and the signifier comes into focus. But the signifier cannot remain empty, and indeed, as we saw from the Greek songs, it ends up richly full of a different kind of meaning. In a language we use every day, a word brings with it, above all, its standard use and the meaning a community assigns to it; a word in a language we hardly know can instead summon to mind all the past instances in which we have encountered it, the associated memories and moments in the development of our life. This, I find, is one of the joys of reading poetry in a language one barely, if at all, understands—and the effect is not lost with the use of a parallel translation. When I read, at the beginning of a poem by Nietzsche, “Noch einmal…,” immediately I think of Kraus’ aphorism, “Man lebt nicht einmal einmal,” and the song, “Das gibt’s nur einmal” (when I wrote these words, I still did not quite know what this latter meant). And with this, I remember when I first read Kraus and at whose recommendation, and when I heard the song—in Miyazaki’s beautiful film, The Wind Rises—and what that context means to me. And in the title of a book on Homeric similes (Die homerischen Gleichnisse), I see Goethe’s famous lines, “Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis.”
We might think that both the end and means of poetry is, in part, to bring the signifier to the foreground and imbue it with meaning in its own right, to make the arbitrary significant: “to make the stone stony,” in Shklovsky’s words. In a sense, then, poetry read in an uncomprehended or incomprehensible language, since it seems signally to fulfill this role, should be poetry at its most poetic. But there is a difference. Ordinarily, poetry imparts something of its author to us, however indirectly. But reading poetry in a language we don’t understand, with its evocation, not of the associations the poet might have expected or hoped to elicit based on a shared linguistic tradition, but of our own connections and memories, simply mirrors us, as readers, back at ourselves. And it is, to borrow a phrase from Simone Weil, “le plus beau, le plus pur des miroirs”: the most beautiful, purest of mirrors.
Nicholas Romanos
nicholas.romanos@worc.ox.ac.uk
Nicholas Romanos is a student of Classics and Sanskrit at Worcester College, Oxford, with interests that span much of ancient and modern literature and philosophy, with a focus on aesthetics, as well as Indo-European linguistics. His most recent publication discusses Virgil and Racine, and in the little spare time he has he is working on improving his German!
Published on February 11, 2025.
Cite this article: Nicholas Romanos, “On Incomprehensibility,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.