Orpheism: How Does a Language Die?

This is a question exclusively English, Chinese, Russian or Arabic speakers do not ask. As an Armenian, cultural assimilation is commonly on my mind. In that process, language remains the walls of the fort where a culture is facing invasion.

While I have read much about what is language to culture and how languages die, I am still in search for that explication where ancient and modern threats to cultures are addressed and where language is placed in the forefront of these threats.

Perhaps I just found it. I was learning about modern Latvian literature (since practically no one writes about it) when I came across an essay by J.C Todd entitled “To be The Roots.” (1) She starts the essay with a beautiful statement:

A language dies as one might expect: the weak find they must speak to the strong in the language of the strong 

Perfect. This includes power, economic dominance, war and invasion. Speaking to the strong with the language of the strong is survival. 

What this definition leaves out is the non-exclusive scenario when the temporarily weak speak to the strong in the language of the strong, but never stop speaking their language among themselves. 

Because a language dies when it is not used anymore.

My interest in learning more about the practical rarity of Latvian poetry and literature took me to sites where a few of modern works have been translated. 

“The Butterfly's Apology” (2) by Māris Salējs caught my attention. As a young artist, Māris has a retrospective perspective about the Baltic languages, especially the Latvian. He writes:

“After a peripatetic journey of some 1,000 years, the current Baltic states having been annexed first by one, then another conqueror — Germany, Poland, Sweden, Russia, and, in the end, the Soviet Union — after a series of pestilences and wars, the assimiliation politics of the dominator: indeed it is a miracle that this country, this literature, exist— a literature which had to be preserved under the circumstances of totalitarianism, in order to keep alive this unique linguistic cosmos, guarding it from being devoured. 

… [ ] from a once full Baltic language group, only Latvian and Lithuanian remain. Linguists study these with etymologists' absorption — as the most ancient relics of a living Indo-European body of language.

… [ ] At this time Latvia has cultural publications in numbers that can be counted on the fingers of one hand that are independent from the rather conservative and, at times, from campaign-oriented ownership or party financing: it is likewise worth noting that within the count are one weekly newspaper with a section dedicated to literature and two literary journals.”

I have to confess that I do not know much about Latvian literature, perhaps because very little is translated. However, I was delighted to learn that a term I knew, and used in my writings, was central to the thinking of a Latvian literary icon of the 1950s. Indeed, Gunars Saliņš escaped oppression in the 1950s and established in New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” His work borrows from myth, art and folklore which he called Orpheism.

And that is the concept I have been attracted to mainly through the poetry of the Austrian poet Rainer M. Rilke. Orpheism (Ὀρφικά) is an ancient Hellenic set of beliefs that were incorporated in philosophical and literary works. The term Orpheism or Orphic related to beliefs associated with the works of the mythical poet Orpheus, who descended into the Greek underworld and returned. Orphics also revered Persephone (who annually descended into the Underworld for a season and then returned) and Dionysus or Bacchus (who also descended into the Underworld and returned.)

So, there seems to be a logical connection between Orpheism, to be the roots, and power of the weak in shielding its language from the dominance of the strong. It makes perfect sense to an Armenian who inherited the history of a unique language based on a 36 letter alphabet created by Mesrob Mashdots in 405 A.D. Mashdots was also the first one to translate the Bible into Armenian and is credited with the creation of the Caucasian Albanian alphabet. My mother tongue, Armenian, has also survived because her sons and daughters have descended to the “underworld” very often over the millennia.

And they have returned.

So, what does the underworld look like for Latvian literature? For Lithuanian and other Baltic languages? 

I think it is an underworld where we all need to descend not only to check on our roots, but to find the harmonious co-existence of our roots with tubers and rhizomes from other and spreading roots. 

The soil where our roots are found cannot be only the soil of the past – it has to make space for other roots co-existing into the future.

A vivid recognition of this reality is the work of Québecan poet Nicole Brossard. She writes in French and English as one fluid language, intermingled in each poem. For example her poem  “Time Out” reads:

or ici la mort n’est pas une image

mais un pont

entre la theorie

du chaos et la realite virtuelle     
dreaming the faraway of humanity

you thumble on sparkling eyes

nevertheless you summarize

about skin and soft arguments.

… So, how does a language die? Perhaps when purposefully kept away from other languages, in a lonesome and unvisited underworld where the only nutrient of its roots is its past.

May 15, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

(1) http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/latvianintro.html

   (2) (http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/salejsessay.html)