The English language has entered the twenty-first century at its usual meditative pace, reluctant to sacrifice its dignity and majesty to the impulses of progress, and yet, perhaps with a languid and repentant sigh, it is forced to admit that the advances of technology have led to huge extensions. of outdated vocabulary almost overnight. We now live in the age of email and texting, where nouns are used as verbs; where the punctuation is a tangle of bars, dots, arrows, and angle brackets; where complete sentences have been sent into exile, and mysterious abbreviations reveal hidden doors to knowledge with a simple touch.
And yet you have to admire the ability of the English language to adapt to the urgent demands of technology and science. These are ever-changing realities that cannot be ignored and any language must have the ability to communicate as its primary goal if it is to remain relevant.
So what about the unchanging realities, inner experiences, and realizations that remain essentially the same for humanity generation after generation? Here we cannot affirm that new circumstances have arisen that would validate the expansion of language; the wise have always been. “High thoughts must have high language,” said Aristophanes in the fourth century BC. C.
And yet it is undeniably true that writers throughout the centuries have faced what can only be called the limitations of the English language in the field of emotional and spiritual experience. “Words form the thread in which we chain our experiences,” wrote Aldous Huxley, but unfortunately, one is forced to admit that, in addition to some of the other languages of the world, particularly those of the East, the English language is singularly impoverished. in this field.
For the words we have, we owe a lot to Shakespeare, who is reputed to have coined over 1,000 new words to meet the needs of his dramatic dialogue. Barbara Wallraff, in her book Word Fugitives, attributes verbs such as “dirt”, “prevent” and “rant” to the bard. In the second half of the 19th century, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined such compounds as “walks in the wind,” “silk sack,” “dawning speckles,” and “fathers ahead.”
“My poetry certainly errs on the side of weirdness,” Hopkins confessed to Robert Bridges in a letter dated February 15, 1879. The fact that Hopkins’ innovations have not passed into general language does not diminish the exquisite beauty of his poems. urgency of a soul trying to find the most perfect means of expressing the divine.
Renowned Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore stated: “When old words die on the tongue, new melodies arise from the heart.”
The veracity of his statement is reflected by a small group of writers in the English language who have spontaneously improvised their own words for certain perceptions, experiences and inner realities. One of the most prolific is the contemporary Indian poet Sri Chinmoy, who has made compound nouns his lingua franca.
Although born in Bengal, Sri Chinmoy has been writing in English for more than half a century. You are no longer seen as a newcomer to the language, but in many ways your ability to innovate reflects the joy of discovering the language again. Imagine being the first person to say something, invites Barbara Wallraff. And Virginia Woolf vividly describes “the genius of word-coining, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and emerged
dripping “.
Here are some samples of Sri Chinmoy’s unique style. They are drawn from a small selection of his poems entitled The Caged Bird and the Cageless Bird:
My heart is loaded with many things,
But one thing haunts me
In every silence
And that’s the burden of the mountain
From the pain of the world.
————–
Browse
Beyond the dawn sky.
Reach
The Pinnacle-Target
Before the sob.
————-
The day is fast approaching
When the seekers’ caravan of hope
You must successfully and gloriously
Go through the desert of frustration.
————-
My soul-fire
Where can I find you, where?
My ignorance-mud,
When can I transform you, when?
—————
The mind
He’s a stranger in world peace
AND
A strangler of world peace.
Clearly, the poet has developed these variants of compound names to concentrate their expression in as few words as possible. It is, therefore, a technique of patent and power. He has removed any connecting words that, in a poetic context, can be perceived as weakening the impact of a sentence. “The burden of the mountain / pain of the world” has a much greater force, for example, than “The mountain burden of the pain of the world.”
While it is not common to use compound nouns in such abundance, Sri Chinmoy’s approach is definitely acceptable within the confines of the English language. Also, its compound nouns have the advantage of relatives. The words themselves are not new; it is their combination that impresses the reader’s imagination with unique novelty and freshness. We know, for example, what “silence” and “gap” mean separately; is the new acronym “hush-gap” that evokes a different kind of energy in the poem. Merge a sound and spatial image to create something intensely alive. Here is surely what Virginia Woolf called a thought that “plunged into a sea of words and came out dripping.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking from his own vast experience as a writer and philosopher, stated: “There is no choice of words for one who clearly sees the truth.” It is this imperative sentiment that permeates Sri Chinmoy’s writings and compels him to describe the mind, for example, as “a stranger in world peace” and “a strangler of world peace.” Both are extremely strong images, made even more so thanks to the precise parallelism of the triple compounds. There is nothing cryptic or dark about these references. In fact, the word order of each compound and its proximity in the
The poem allows us to follow the poet in his creative process, to trace his formation. In fact, the compounds highlight and illuminate your thought process to an unusual degree.
Sri Chinmoy is very fond of these comparative compounds to provide the key to understanding his poems. Thus, the “caravan of hope” crosses the “desert of frustration.” The intangible quality of hope is combined with a tangible image (“caravan”) moving, albeit slowly, through the arid moors. In the same way, the intangible quality of “frustration” is linked to the desert, a powerful image of dryness and emptiness without end and without relief. Together, the two composites make up a remarkably vibrant portrait of spiritual despair infused with a ray of hope.
A permanent feature of Sri Chinmoy’s compound nouns is that they are not intelligent in a purely intellectual way. It doesn’t turn your two words into a pastiche (like “ignoramire” for “ignorancemire”). Rather, you choose to build images and images from old words while allowing these words to retain their integrity. His technique is more akin to that of the Chinese calligrapher combining the characters for (1) tree, (2) large, and (3) sighing in admiration into a pictogram denoting a chair. Working with a similar type of craft, Sri Chinmoy breathes new life into some of the oldest words in our language: soul, sky, fire, weeping, tree, flower.
Writing in the late 19th century, Alexander Smith said, “Memorable sentences are memorable because of a single radiating word.” Sri Chinmoy’s poems are often memorable because of a single irradiated compound noun and I would not be surprised if many of these compounds enter the English language as a matter of course and endow it with a whole new spiritual dimension.
Dr. Vidagdha Bennett
References
- Chinmoy, Sri. The caged bird and the bird without a cage. New York: Aum Publications, 1998.
- Jacobs, Alan, ed. Mystical verse. Massachusetts: Element Books, 1997.
- Wallraff, Barbara. Fugitives of the word. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.