(9788376560748 - The Linguistic Worldview) Part I. The Linguistic Worldview and The Poetic Text

Edited by: Adam Gaz, David S.
Danaher, Przemysaw ozowski
Part I
THE LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW
AND THE POETIC TEXT
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The Linguistic Worldview Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture
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Edited by: Adam Gaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysaw ozowski
Chapter 2
The Linguistic Worldview and Literature
Anna Pajdziska
UMCS, Lublin, Poland
1. The origin of the linguistic worldview idea

Language is usually viewed as a social tool, a means of expressing thoughts
and emotions, a sign system used for communicating with and influencing
others. But it can also be viewed as a symbolic guide to culture (Sapir, 1961
[1929], p. 70). The cultural aspect of language was already recognized by the
Ancient Greeks. Two major debates, referred to as the phsei vs. thsei debate
and the analogists vs. anomalists debate, involved nearly all distinguished Greek
philosophers, later also philologists and grammarians, and centered around the
language-world relationship: is it natural or conventional? Can language, as a
tool for naming things and phenomena, provide us with a knowledge of reality
and if so, to what extent? Do words derive from the nature of objects or are
they conventionally assigned labels? Is there a proportionality (analogy) or a
mere anomaly between language and reality? The debates were continued in
the Middle Ages as a controversy involving universals: what corresponds to
words denoting general concepts? According to realists, elements of reality do,
whereas according to nominalists, nothing really does, general concepts being
merely products of the human mind.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, as more and more languages were studied, it
became progressively clearer that there is no strict correspondence between
them (cf. Martin Luthers 1530 Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen). In subsequent
centuries, interest in languages on the part of philosophers increased again.
Until the end of the 19th century, attempts to find or construct a universal
language were repeatedly made, and many remarks found in philosophical
treatises continue to arouse interest up to this day. For example, Francis Bacon
claimed that the structure and characteristic properties of languages, as tools
constructed and used by language communities, indirectly testify to the
spiritual and psychological qualities of these communities. John Locke, in turn,
noticed that each language contains several words without equivalents in other
languages. They express, claimed Locke, complex ideas as derivatives of the
customs and lifestyle of a given nation. Also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz treated
languages as a source of knowledge about their users, as the best reflection of
human minds.
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The 18th and 19th-century German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder

and Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as Johann Georg Hamann before them,
underscored a bidirectional influence between language and its users:
language is a manifestation of the psychic life of a given community (the
nations spirit), i.e. a form of consciousness. The community leaves its
mark on the language it is using and can also be recognized through it. But
language, says Humboldt, does not only reflect human consciousness: it also
shapes it. Between the intellectually active speaker and the outside world
intervenes that speakers mother tongue with its specific and characteristic
interpretation of reality thus, how the world is experienced depends on
language. However, there is no determinism here: even though ones native
language puts a magic ring around its users cognition, every creative speech
event is to a certain degree an attempt to move beyond that ring, in the
same way that is involved in learning a foreign language with its distinct
conceptual network and worldview. For Humboldt, a complete understanding
of objective reality is not possible but that is not a cause for concern.
On the contrary, thanks to this aprioristic imperfection, the processes of
cognitive and epistemological enrichment and thinking in language are in
fact unbounded.
2. Two Sources of the Linguistic Worldview Theory

Humboldts ideas found fertile ground in the thinking of 20th-century
German linguists gathered around the figure of Leo Weisgerber, i.e. the
Neo-Humboldtians. Their major goal was to uncover the cognitive content
entrenched in ones mother tongue (Muttersprache) and transmitted from
one generation to another (hence a different name for the approach:
inhaltbezogene Grammatik, the grammar of content). They mainly analyzed
the structuring of the lexicon into semantic fields; this they deemed to be the
best method of identifying the fragments of the world made salient through
a given language, as well as those that the language fails to notice. The
linguists argued that
we need not only see language as a means of communication but as

a creative strength of the spirit. The fact that a language has a certain
body of lexis and a certain syntax means that it contains a segmentation
of the world which is not inherent in things but precisely in language.
Every language is a means of accessing the world; every language
community is constituted by a common worldview contained in its
mother tongue. (Christmann, 1967, p. 442)
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Beisdes the term sprachliches Weltbild, which replaced Humboldts

Weltansicht,1 another important term for Neo-Humboldtians was sprachliche
Zwischenwelt. This intermediary linguistic world they took to be the result of
transforming, by a given speech community, the perceived (material, substantial,
physical) world into the world of consciousness, i.e. the intellectual and
conceptual world. It is an intermediary being, situated between the speaker and
the outside world, and influencing the speakers view of that world.
There is also a striking similarity, which suggests an inspiration and influence,
between the views of German idealists and those of American ethnolinguists.
Research on Native American communities led Franz Boas to the conclusion that
language depends on culture and so it is legitimate to treat it as a testimony to
culture. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf,2 in their descriptions of Native
American languages and comparisons thereof with English, discovered several
deeply rooted differences on the level of lexis and grammar. They also noticed
a correlation between linguistic forms and human behavior, which led them to
a view of the language-culture interface as bidirectional influence. However,
the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the linguistic relativity/determinism
hypothesis is a double misnomer: (i) it is an in-line juxtaposition of apparently
equipollent terms whose import as to the role of language is in fact different,
and (ii) it suggests that Sapir professed linguistic relativity, whereas his disciple
had more radical views. In fact, the works of both scholars contain statements
that modulate the hypothesis in numerous ways. Linguistic relativity assumes
that there are differences between the perception of the world entrenched in
languages from different cultures (as well as conceptual differences within the
same national language), whereas determinists would have us believe that a
national language actually conditions human cognition: as a result, people who
speak different languages live, in a sense, in different worlds.
1 For a discussion of these and other terms, their connotations and (mis)interpretations, cf.
Underhill (2009) and (2011).
2 Whorf even uses the notion of world view and attributes it to the working of a language
or languages, cf. for example:
The participants in a given world view are not aware of the idiomatic nature of the
channels in which their talking and thinking run, and are perfectly satisfied with them,
regarding them as logical inevitables. But take an outsider, a person accustomed to
widely different language and culture, or even a scientist of a later era using somewhat
different language of the same basic type, and not all that seems logical and inevitable
to the participants in the given world view seems so to him. (Whorf, 1956 [1940], p. 222)
The most succinct formulation of the idea, however, seems to come from Stuart Chase,
the author of the Foreword to Whorfs Language, Thought, and Reality, who finds in the
latter linguists unpublished monograph the idea that [r]esearch is needed to discover
the world view of many unexplored languages, some now in danger of extinction (Chase,
1956, p. x).
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3. Language as an Interpretation of the World

No convincing arguments have been adduced so far to accept or reject the
deterministic view. Relativity, on the other hand, is well-documented: for
several decades evidence has been accumulating that every language is
an interpretation, not a reflection of the world in the sense of a one-to-one
mapping between them. Differences between languages lie deep: they are not
merely formal or superficial. A language consolidates the cognitive experience
of the community it serves, or more precisely, of the various generations and
groups within the community, each of which may approach the same fragment
of reality form a different viewpoint, following its own sentiments and needs.
In consequence, the linguistic worldview that results is complex, multi-layered,
heterogenic, and dynamic: it derives from continually occurring cognitive acts,
whose effects accumulate, coexist, change, supplant, or are superimposed upon
one another. Thus, although the linguistic worldview is in a sense conservative
or anachronistic, as linguistic change is slower than social or cultural change,
the dynamism of change is incessant: language on the one hand imposes a
certain conceptualization of reality upon its users, on the other hand it allows
speakers to overcome the limitations of that conceptualization, to move beyond
its boundaries.
Every language models the world in a way that makes it possible for members
of the relevant speech community to function in it properly. The modeling is
composed of several interlinked operations:
segmentation of the world, i.e. identification of things and phenomena
important for the speech community concerned;
interpretation of these things and phenomena, ascription of features to
them; the feature that is the most conspicuous from the point of view of a
given community usually becomes the name-providing distinguishing mark;
ordering of things and phenomena, delineating the relationships between
them;
a multi-aspectual valuation of things and states of affairs, in which an
especially prominent role is played by conceptual categories that organize
a given worldview: anthropocentrism and the usthem opposition.
In the processes of modeling the world, the latter is constantly being adjusted
to human cognitive capacities: its complexity is reduced, its changeability and
flow of events are weakened, and experiential chaos is transformed into an order.
An interpretation of the world characteristic of a given language can be
expressed with diverse means: the semantic structures of lexemes, the number
of items in a given lexico-semantic domain (the more important the domain,
the more items it usually contains), etymology, word-formational and semantic
motivation of lexemes, acts of naming, and the process of metaphorization.
However, a view of the world is entrenched not only in the lexicon but also in
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morphological and syntactic structures, as well as in a languages grammatical

categories. The grammar of each language encodes a certain body of meanings,
expressed in an often mandatory and automatized manner. Speakers are usually
not aware of their existence, let alone of their interpretive nature. Almost any
information can be conveyed in any language but its lexical or grammatical
modulation may differ, and its expression in one language may be easier than
in others, with aspects of meaning being more or less obligatory. What view of
the world is entrenched in a language obviously depends on the natural living
conditions of its community, i.e. the topography, climate, etc., but to the same
extent if not more so on its culture.
4. Language as the Raw Material of Literature:

Implications
It took a long time for scholars to realize the consequences of the fact that
literature builds on language as its raw material. Principles of ancient provenance
a good genological pattern, its application in a specific situation, a clear theme
and its rhetorical elaboration in accordance with the norms of a given genre
were still in operation in the Enlightenment. Apart from formal requirements,
the poetic value of ones work depended on whether and how the content was
idealized or sublimated. It was only in late 18th century that universal rules,
applied for the work of art to have an esthetic value, were counterbalanced by
that work as an expression of a nations spirit. The idea of poetry as a national
artifact appeared in opposition to the universalism of the classic model,3
and the idea of the significance of folk literature emerged as a counterpoint
to the theorys elitism. By underscoring national aspects and conditioning of
poetry, national languages became the center of attention in a natural way.
Admittedly, Georg Hegel, while discussing various types of artistic activity in
his Vorlesungen ber die sthetik, attributed a greater role to the content of a
literary work of art than to its linguistic matter. He explained it in the following
way: although content in literature is realized through language, something else
emerges between the linguistic sign (which he considered a means of spiritual
expression rather than an end in itself, Hegel 1886, no page) and what the sign
refers to namely, an internal view, image, or representation, which becomes
the center for cognizing. The arbitrary nature of the sign makes it so that its
3 I.e., the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman patterns, with attention being paid to
universal, timeless ideals rather than those related to national or more local contexts.
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role in poetic expression is decidedly smaller than the role of raw material in
painting or sculpture. However, the already mentioned Johann Gottfried Herder,
over a quarter of a century before Hegel, viewed the role of language in poetry
somewhat differently. He wrote: The spirit of the language ... is also the spirit of
the nations literature... It is therefore impossible to comprehend the literature
of a nation without knowing its language; it is only through language that you
can come to knowledge of the literature (Fragmente ber die neuere deutsche
Literatur. Erste Sammlung von Fragmenten, translated from Skwarczyska,
1965, p. 64). One can also deduce that for Herder, poets build their works from
the material of the very grammatical structure of language. For example, he
considered how much content can be extracted from the allegedly redundant
according to Cartesians gender distinctions of inanimate nouns, found only in
some languages and even there realized differently from language to language.
The most forceful view on the relatedness of poetry and language was
expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the very end of the 18th century when
he wrote that poetry is art practiced through language. In his view, poetry must
work language through and through (because language transforms everything
into general concepts) in order to activate its potential to move from the
general to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete. In her interpretation
of Humboldts work, Zdzisawa Kopczyska (1976, p. 189) writes: In the two
directions of poetic endeavor that he mentions, language is the main element: it
does not only define each of the two directions but is in fact decisive in shaping
their diversity. One extreme is the use of language as a means or an instrument
in poetry as art, i.e. for the shaping ... of the poetic work by making use of those
aspects of the language potential that render it effective as a tool. A radically
different situation is when language itself, as it were, decides the nature of
the poetic work. Here poetry does not so much utilize the defining properties
of language but absorbs them, acquiring in the process a significant degree of
autonomy as a form of artistic expression.
For Wilhelm Scherer, writing in the second half of the 19th century, it is no
longer the psychology or the history of a nation that constitutes the essence of
historical and literary inquiry. It was clear to him that poetry is a kind of attitude
to language and [that it] operates within language use; it is an art of speech,
and an artistic employment of language (Scherer, 1977 [1888], p. 9).
Polish authors also contributed to the discussion on the mutual relationship
between the national language and the language of poetry, on the role of
poetry in the development of the national language, and the poetic potential
of language. Kazimierz Brodziski (1964 [1818]), for example, took note of the
properties of national languages. He viewed the Romantic spirit of the Germans
as appropriate and understandable, since it was motivated by the German
tradition and the German language. In Poland, however, the tradition is closer
to the classical aura. It is matched by a language that does not easily fit in with
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the Romantic spirit due to its ancient classical structure,4 freedom, frankness
and conciseness, an almost inexhaustible potential for semantic shading, a
striking logic, and a natural clarity and common sense. An interdependence
of national characteristics and language was also assumed by Leon Borowski
(1820), whose research on poetry and elocution rested on the idea that the
spirit of nations and the spirit of their speech are such close companions that
one always speaks through the other (in Kopczyska, 1976, p. 88). Contrary to
Brodziski, Borowski did not have a high opinion of the Polish literary tradition
and criticized it for blindly following foreign patterns, without a clear national
taste. He did believe, however, that the Polish language, which had preserved its
power and valor, can facilitate an outstanding development of Polish poetry.
In the debate on the linguistic raw material of literature, a momentous
role was played by the phenomenological theory of a literary work of art.
According to Roman Ingarden, all extralinguistic artistically relevant elements
of the work ultimately derive from linguistic creations in that work and from
their properties. Some esthetically significant qualities directly depend on the
shape of those creations or derive from the complexity and expressiveness of
syntactic structure. Linguistic creations in a literary work of art play, therefore,
a double role: first, they determine all other elements of the work, and second,
they function themselves as the works elements. It is thanks to their presence
and meaning that specific esthetic qualities are realized.
Thanks to the structuralist approach it became obvious that an artistic text,
especially poetry, is a unique arrangement of elements in which everything has
semantic value. Even before it enters the work, the raw material of literature
is meaningful and structured this is not the case in other kinds of artistic
endeavor. Limitations imposed on a material of this kind help reveal novel
semantic qualities and a new sequence of meanings is superimposed over
the sequence of linguistic meanings. Textual meanings are also hidden in
the very structure of linguistic signs and their larger complexes, in linguistic
arrangements and configurations. All components are interlinked and constitute
a functional whole, irreducible to any of them individually. That whole, in turn,
is not meaningful in itself but in relation to higher-order structures: it is usually
interpreted against the backdrop of the language system and literary tradition,
but its relativized value in terms of the linguistic worldview also seems relevant.
This idea appeared already in the work of the Tartu semiotic school, in which
every national language was treated as a primary modeling system. For example,
Yuri Lotman frequently underscored the fact that linguistic structure systematizes
the signs of the code, turning them into tools for transmission of information and
4 The relatedness of Polish and Latin was for Brodziski unquestionable.
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at the same time reflecting peoples views of reality. Since linguistic structure
preserves human cognitive acts, the writer works with the material that contains,
in a condensed form, the centuries-old activity of a given speech community
whose members have made an effort to know the world. This reflection, however,
was all too weakly shared, if indeed shared at all, by literary scholars.
An obvious, not to say a banal view in contemporary humanities is that living
with others in a community is impossible without assuming a certain common
worldview, a kind of frame of reference for all the endeavors of the communitys
members. It appears, however, that this idea is still insufficiently appreciated, or
else accepted without due reflection on the fact that a common worldview is to
a large extent shaped by a common language.
If language is an interpretation of reality or a way of seeing the world, the
categories and values cherished by a linguistic community should also be taken
into account in interpretations of literary texts. Even if one assumes that literary
texts are radically different from other kinds of text in their very essence, their
intentions and execution, even if the author in his or her desire to enrich and
extend the knowledge of people and the world, to express the inexpressible, to
access a mystery, etc. continually strives to go beyond the limits of language in
its communicative function, everything that a work contains ... must go through
the medium of language (Mukaovsk, 1970, p. 169). This, says Mukaovsk,
at the same time refers to an internal connection of a work ... with the society
achieved precisely through language. A similar thought had been formulated
even more emphatically by Edward Sapir: The understanding of a simple
poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of the single words
in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the
community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones
(Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 69).
5. Poetic Exemplification
In order to realize how important it is to take note of the linguistic worldview in
an analysis of a literary text, let us consider a few examples. They all come from
the work of the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wisawa Szymborska. In her
poem Conversation with a Stone,5 a person is talking to an unusual interlocutor. Is
it, however, a coincidental interlocutor? Perhaps not: other objects are mentioned
5 The English translations of Szymborskas poems, by Stanisaw Baraczak and Clare

Cavanagh, come from Szymborska (2001). For a discussion of the linguistic view of Czech
kmen stone and some examples of its poetic elaboration, cf. Vakov this volume.
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in the poem a leaf, a drop of water, a hair but these remain backgrounded. By
choosing a stone out of many possible elements of nature, the poet was probably
guided by the suggestiveness of its image in the Polish language. For a speaker of
Polish, kamie stone is not only a piece of rock, usually hard, compact and heavy
(a dictionary definition) but has numerous semantic connotations, e.g. the fact that
it is inanimate motivates the feature immobile (cf. skamienie turn into stone,
fossilize, petrify, siedzie kamieniem sit still, or bodajby si w kamie zamieni may
he turn into stone), while the prototypical hardness is metaphorically extended
to yield the meaning of insensitive, unaffected, strict, unemotional, unfeeling,
ruthless (cf. kto jest (twardy) jak kamie someone is hard as a rock, kamie nie
czowiek hes a stone, not a human being, kamie by si poruszy this would move
a stone, kto jest z kamienia someone is made of stone, kamienne serce a heart of
stone, kamienna twarz a stone face). This characterization is evoked in the poem
when the stone responds to the human speakers words My mortality should
touch you with Im made of stone ... and therefore must keep a straight face.
In making such ample use of the linguistic view of kamie, Szymborska by
choosing a stone for the interlocutor rejects an important feature that results
from the objects inanimateness, namely its inability to speak. The expressions
milcze jak kamie to be silent as a grave (lit. as a stone), kamienna cisza/
kamienne milczenie dead (lit. stony) silence show that for Polish speakers
stones belong to the realm of the silent and are unassociated with sounds, let
alone with speech.6 In the poem, the stone is not only endowed with the ability
to speak, but its conversational function is actually stronger than that of the
human speaker. The latters request repeatedly meets with the stones rejection.
The stones unquestionable dominance is surprising because it contradicts our
conviction, which derives from our use of language, that humans are the most
important components of the world, and as such they occupy the highest
position in the earthly hierarchy of beings.
Why have these requests been rejected? What do they concern? At the very
beginning of the conversation, one reads:
I want to enter your insides,

have a look around,
breathe my fill of you.
6 Connections of stones with speech can be found in broader culture. For example, in the
biblical Book of Habakkuk (2, 6-11) the stone in the house built on bloodshed and evil gain
will cry out against the oppressor. In Lukes Gospel (19, 40), in turn, Jesus says that even if
the crowd in Jerusalem keep silent, the stones will cry out. These, however, are exceptional
and hypothetical situations: peoples behavior is so outrageous that it provokes verbal
reaction from otherwise mute stones.
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At the end of it, in turn, the human interlocutor asks:
Its only me, let me come in.

I havent got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof.
In order to interpret this, we must again make recourse to the linguistic worldview
idea. These poetic contexts rather clearly imply certain properties of a stone that may
be absent from its linguistic portrayal but that derive from that portrayal. Hardness
motivates durability and permanence, and these turn a stone into a symbol of
longevity or even of existence. From this, there is only a stones throw from viewing
it as a source of life.7 It is precisely this characteristic that is indirectly expressed
through breathe my fill of you. In Polish, the linguistic metaphors motivated by one
of the most fundamental human experiences, i.e. breathing, express the notion
of being alive: kto jeszcze oddycha someone is still alive (lit. is still breathing),
do ostatniego tchu/tchnienia to the last breath, kto ledwo/ledwie dyszy/dycha
someone is barely alive (lit. can hardly breathe), kto odda/wyda ostanie tchnienie
someone breathed their last, kto/co jest dla kogo jak powietrze someone/
something is indispensable to someone else to live (lit. like the air).8
The human subject in Szymborskas poem does not fully realize his or her
own fault in the failed conversation. A human perspective, a human ordering
and evaluation of the world, is never cast away: the stone is approached like an
artifact, the speaker knocks at the stones front door and says:
I want to enter your insides,

[]
I mean to stroll through your palace,
[]
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyones steps.
7 Certain cultural facts show that a stones hardness and immobility are no obstacles to
treating it as a living creature or even a life-giver. In Europe, until the end of the 17th century
it was assumed that stones are conceived, grow and mature in the depths of the Earth...
Hence there originates a connection, frequent in various cultures, between stones and the
earths symbolism of fertility: fertility is drawn from the earth via stones. A second source
of stones symbolism of fertility is the belief that they are inhabited by the spirits of ones
ancestors and mediate in the transmission of fertility from them (Brzozowska, 1996, p. 349).
8 More on linguistic and artistic metaphors with the source domain of breathing can be found
in Pajdziska (1999). Incidentally, similar metaphorical processes can also be found in English,
cf. with ones last/dying breath, to be the breath of life to somebody or to breathe ones last.
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The stone is thus not viewed as a part of nature but as an architectonic form,
an expression of a human creative attitude to the worlds primeval shape. This is
the sin of pride: the world is portrayed only from the human perspective, and if
there is no human viewer, then beauty is in vain.
The poem thus makes ample use of one of the most important categories
that organize the worldviews entrenched in natural languages (and not only in
Polish), namely anthropocentrism.9 The anthropocentric perspective, however,
is questioned on two levels: on the level of creative action (by instituting
an asymmetry between the interlocutors) and on the level of the human
speakers linguistic behavior. The conversation is based on two categories of
speech acts: request and refusal. The requester is by definition lower than his/
her interlocutor in the conversational hierarchy, since it is the addressee that
decides about whether to agree or not. In Szymborskas poem, perhaps contrary
to the readers expectations, the balance tilts to the stones side. The human
interlocutors weaker position symbolizes peoples general existential situation:
alienation, loneliness, and fear of death. To enter matter (the stones insides)
would be to return to the state of primeval unity, escape from the price one
pays for functioning in culture and away from nature, that is, from the feeling
of lonesomeness and from the awareness of ineluctable death. But it turns out
that nature and culture are mutually impenetrable. Indeed, a life embedded in
culture, deemed as superior to nature, precludes one from a familiarity with the
latter. The senses, which condition human cognitive interaction with the world,
are brushed aside by the stone as poor. The human speaker is said to lack the
sense of taking part, and no other sense can make up for your missing sense
of taking part. It is people themselves who, by severing links with nature and
occupying a more lofty position, have triggered their own alienation.
Let us now consider a fragment from another poem by Szymborska, Birthday
(Urodziny), in which the speaker describes what falls to ones lot on the day one
is born: one is presented with an unusual gift, the world, with all its richness,
complexity and changeability, its uniqueness and inimitability. The worlds
ontic nature is such that a human being can never and nowhere absorb it in its
fullness. The speaking egos monolog ends with:
9 This category is a natural consequence of the fact that language is a human creation:
it presents the world as it is seen through human eyes for the benefit of humans.
Anthropocentrism is manifested both at the level of grammar (cf. the natural hierarchy of
arguments implied by the predicate, in which the highest rank is reserved for those with
the selectional restriction human) and lexical (the human point of view is reflected in
the quantitative structure of the lexicon, in the meanings of lexical items; it can motivate
regularities of metaphorical processes or restrictions in lexico-semantic valence).
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Na chwil tu jestem i tylko na chwil:

co dalsze, przeocz, a reszt pomyl.
Nie zd wszystkiego odrni od prni.
Pogubi te bratki w popiechu podrnym.
Ju choby najmniejszy szalony wydatek:
fatyga odygi i listek, i patek
raz jeden w przestrzeni, od nigdy, na olep,
wzgardliwie dokadny i kruchy wyniole.10
I am just passing through, its a five-minute stop.

I wont catch what is distant: whats too close, Ill mix up.
While trying to plumb what the voids inner sense is,
Im bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies.
What a loss when you think how much effort was spent
perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent
for the one-time appearance, which is all theyre allowed,
so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.
The speaker will not succeed in trying to plumb what the voids inner
sense is the void that one faces at birth and will face at the end of ones
life journey.11 The unusual nature of all existence is symbolized by the
Polish bratek pansy. The choice of this minute fragment of reality is far from
haphazard: its very name, derived from brat brother, underscores brotherhood
and common fate. Similarly to a human being, bratek is an individual and
a particular entity. The speaker extends that similarity, attributing to the
flower certain characteristics typically reserved to humans: in order to look
a certain way, the plant spends effort, perfects its petals, its precision aloof
and fragility proud. At the same time, the expressions od nigdy since never,
na olep blindly (in the English translation rendered as which is all theyre
allowed) signal a fundamental difference between humans and the pansy
(which, incidentally, represents other entities through synecdoche). The
unusual syntagm od nigdy, which consists of the preposition od since, from,
marking the beginning of some state, and the adverb nigdy never, at no point
10 Quoted from Szymborska (1977, p. 172).

11 The conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is evoked by the Polish w popiechu
podrnym hastily when one is traveling, rendered here as Im bound to pass by. This
is a creative complementation of numerous linguistic metaphors in Polish, e.g. kto wybra
waciw/niewaciw drog someone has chosen the right/wrong path, kto stoi na
rozdrou someone is at a crossroads, kto jest na zakrcie someone is at the crossroads
(lit. someone is taking a bend), kto i kto id wspln drog someone is walking with
someone else along the same road/path. It is also a frequent literary motif.
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in time, suggests that although time is a parameter for every being, not all
beings are aware of the fact. The other expression, na olep blindly, without
thinking or paying attention to the surroundings, stresses the unreflective
nature of purely biological existence.
Therefore, paradoxically, all elements in a persons surroundings, even the
most minute, as well as that person him- or herself, contribute with their being
hic et nunc to the continuous presence and omnipresence of the world. But it
is only to a human being that this omnipresence comes forth as fundamental
and captivating. The human speaker in the poem has no illusions: only a tiny
fragment of the abundance can be enjoyed and absorbed.
Finally, we will look at the poem View with a Grain of Sand, which forcefully
makes the reader reflect on the relationship between language and the world.
Average speakers do not usually treat language as a complex cognitive system
that facilitates mentally locating oneself in the world or as an interpretive
network superimposed on reality; rather, they are prone to consider the analysis
of the world suggested by their mother tongue as undisputable and natural.
However, an awareness of the fact that every language captures reality in a
symbolic manner, i.e. has a formative and a limiting role in relation to thinking,
permeating even peoples direct experience, is frequently present in poetry. In
Szymborskas View with a Grain Sand it is mainly through language that people
and the world are juxtaposed:
Zwiemy je ziarnkiem piasku.

A ono siebie ani ziarnkiem, ani piasku.
Obywa si bez nazwy
oglnej, szczeglnej,
przelotnej, trwaej,
mylnej czy waciwej.
Na nic mu nasze spojrzenie, dotknicie.

Nie czuje si ujrzane i dotknite.
A to, e spado na parapet okna,
to tylko nasza, nie jego przygoda.
Dla niego to to samo, co spa na cokolwiek,
bez pewnoci, czy spado ju,
czy spada jeszcze.12
12 From Szymborska (1986, pp. 11-12).
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We call it a grain of sand,

but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.

It doesnt feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
In a poetic shortcut, the poem shows that people interact with the world
through language. Distinguishing things from the environment or isolating an
event from a situation is possible (or at least, easier) because it is named (cf.
a grain of sand, windowsill, falling). Linguistic categories [including] number,
gender, case, tense, mode, voice, aspect, and a host of others ... are not so much
discovered in experience as imposed upon it. In Sapirs words, we have to take
note of our unconscious projection of [the languages] implicit expectations
into the field of experience (Sapir, 1931, p. 578). Every event, including those
portrayed in poetry, must be captured with the use of grammatical categories
inherent in a specific language. Speakers of Polish have to view it as either
past (spado it fell), present (spada it is falling) or future, as completed or
continuing. They have to decide whether the agent or experiencer in that event
is/was singular or plural, as well as whether his/her/its gender is masculine,
feminine, or neuter. English speakers also have to choose between singularity
and plurality and additionally between definiteness and indefiniteness;
they also have to characterize the event temporally, by choosing one of the
numerous constructions referring to the past, present, or future. The Kwakiutl
from the Canadian British Columbia do not attend to the time of the event
or the number of participants in it, but to whether it was, at the moment of
utterance, visible to the speaker or not. Also, they necessarily specify who the
event was closest to: the speaker, the hearer, or a third party. In the language of
the Nootka, the Kwakiutls neighbors, the event described by Szymborska has
to be verbalized in a totally different manner. The utterance will not contain
a nominal element but a verbal construction, consisting of two major parts.
The first expresses motion or location of a given class of objects (the objects
status is implied in this way), the other expresses the downward direction of
the movement.
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Paradoxical phrasings from a later fragment of the poem beneath a sky by

nature skyless, the sun sets without setting at all, hides without hiding behind an
unminding cloud make the reader realize that language portrays the world
not as it is but as it appears to people. After all, the sky does not exist: it is a
virtual vault above the Earth, against which we see the Sun, the Moon, the stars,
or sometimes the comets. By identifying portions of condensation of minute
waterdrops, ice crystals, or their mixture, we also mentally create clouds.13
The changes in the position of the Sun, in turn, are described as if they were
intentional: the Sun sets or hides behind something to avoid being seen.
The poems ending even more explicitly points to the role of imagination
in conceptualizing the world and the incommensurability of the world and
language:
Mija jedna sekunda.

Druga sekunda.
Trzecia sekunda.
Ale to tylko nasze trzy sekundy.
Czas przebieg jak posaniec z piln wiadomoci.

Ale to tylko nasze porwnanie.
Zmylona posta, wmwiony jej popiech,
a wiadomo nieludzka.
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But theyre three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like courier with urgent news.

But thats just our simile.
The character is inverted, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.
13 The attributive epithet relating to the cloud in the poem (bezwiedna, Eng. translation:
unminding) is worthy of a separate comment. We are dealing here with a violation of the rules
of lexico-semantic collocability, for bezwiedny means occurring or made subconsciously,
instinctive, automatic, unintentional, unwitting and is usually used to refer to actions,
emotional reactions, peoples behavior etc., e.g. bezwiedny ruch unintentional movement,
bezwiedny umiech unwitting smile, czu bezwiedn niech/bezwiedne zaufanie to feel
an instinctive dislike/trust. Once these selectional restrictions are violated, the cloud has
received a complex characterization: beside the standard meaning of bezwiedny, the older
meaning of ignorant, unknowing is activated.
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The manifold metaphorical and metonymic processes in this fragment

play an important cognitive role: they are tools that facilitate at least a partial
understanding of what cannot be otherwise understood at all because it
is too complex or inaccessible to direct (sensory-motor) experience. The
metaphorically structured concepts include time, measured with increasingly
greater precision (cf. the names of the time units, a second being the smallest
unit used in everyday situations). Time can be modeled in a variety of ways,
among others as a mobile object, cf. the conventionalized metaphors time
flies, time is running short, the time will come, it seemed like the time stopped,
in the course of time, the passage of time, race against time, spend time.14 Time
can also be personified, e.g. the spirit of the time(s), time is pressing, time
heals all wounds (some of the expressions in the previous list can also be
seen as personifications). Szymborska underscores the metaphorical nature
of conventionalized ways of referring to time by using the stock expression
a second passes as a poetic manifestation of the same conceptual metaphor
TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT. What is more, she twice uses the expression ale
to tylko nasze trzy sekundy but they are three seconds only for us, ale to tylko
nasze porwnanie but thats just our simile. The possessive adjective nasze
our, corresponding to the personal pronoun my we, preceded by a limiting
particle tylko only, the contrast-introducing conjunction ale but these all
emphasize the opposition between the world and the way it is conceptualized
by people, or in consequence: between the world and people.
In this context, the final adjective in the poem receives special salience.
Contrary to its word-formational structure, the word nieludzki does not only have
a purely relational meaning not concerned with or belonging to people, but two
evaluative meanings not befitting a person or interpersonal relationships; cruel,
merciless and not designed for a human being; beyond any persons abilities
or strength (the English counterpart used, inhuman, displays a similar range of
meanings). This kind of semantic development of the word doubtless points
to its anthropocentric orientation. The evaluative function of the word is also
realized in the poetic context: the news acquires the property of being callous
or insensitive. But because the adjective is used comparatively, it indirectly
describes the working of time: both the evaluative and the structural meanings
play a role here. Since it is, moreover, just our simile, it reveals our own human
perspective for viewing and evaluation.
14 With very few differences, parallel metaphors can be found in Polish.
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6. A Final Word
The examples above hopefully show that for a reliable account of poetic
creation and the individual worldview of an author, an analyst must consider
as one frame of reference apart from linguistic or literary conventions the
worldview entrenched in the language itself. However, the relationship between
the linguistic worldview and literature is bidirectional. On the one hand, the
worldview characteristic of a given speech community leaves its mark on literary
texts, but on the other, the latter can also have a bearing on language-entrenched
conceptualizations. Moreover, they can be useful in actual reconstructions of the
linguistic worldview: they can facilitate verification procedures for hypotheses
proposed on the basis of systemic data or by revealing aspects of language
use that would remain otherwise unidentified. This question, however, merits a
separate treatment.
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References
Borowski, Leon. (1820). Uwagi nad poezj i wymow pod wzgldem ich
podobiestwa i rnicy, z wiczeniami w niektrych gatunkach stylu. Wilno.
Brodziski, Kazimierz. (1964 [1818]). O klasycznoci i romantycznoci tudzie o

duchu poezji polskiej. In Pisma estetyczno-krytyczne. Vol. 1. Wrocaw: Ossolineum.
Brzozowska, Magorzata. (1996). Kamie. In Sownik stereotypw i symboli

ludowych. Vol. 1, 1. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiski & Stanisawa Niebrzegowska. Lublin:
Wydawnictwo UMCS.
Chase, Stuart. (1956). Foreword. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought,

and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. v-x).
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Christmann, Hans Helmut. (1967). Beitrge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild
der Sprache. Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1886). Selections from Hegels Lectures on

Aesthetics. Bernard Bosanquet & W. M. Bryant. The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy. Quoted from www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae
[last accessed Feb 19, 2013]
Kopczyska, Zdzisawa. (1976). Jzyk a poezja. Studia z dziejw wiadomoci

jzykowej i literackiej owiecenia i romantyzmu. Wrocaw: Zakad Narodowy im.
Ossoliskich.
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Translating. Transl. Gary Mann, revised and annotated by Michael D. Marlowe. 2003.
www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html; accessed Dec 7, 2012]
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In Anna Pajdziska & Piotr Krzyanowski (Eds.), Przeszo w jzykowym obrazie
wiata (pp. 51-65). Lublin: Wydawnicwo UMCS.
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Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays (pp. 65-77). Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
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Vol. 1, part 1. Krakw: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
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Szymborska, Wisawa. (1986). Ludzie na mocie. Warszawa: Czytelnik.
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from the Polish by Stanislaw Baraczak & Clare Cavanagh. Boston: Harcourt
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Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. 220-232). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Translated by Adam Gaz
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References Download Date | 3/21/17 8:39 PM 59
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Chapter 3
The Linguistic Worldview and

Conceptual Disintegration: Wisawa
Szymborskas Poem Identyfikacja
and its English Translation by Clare
Cavanagh
Agnieszka Gicala
Pedagogical University, Krakw, Poland
1. Introduction
The present chapter aims to apply the notion of the linguistic worldview
of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics and Gilles Fauconniers theory of
Mental Spaces, together with his view of discourse as a mental-space lattice,
to an analysis of a text and its translation. The common denominator of all
these concepts is the fact that they deal with human cognition, albeit from
different angles, and that they involve the concept of viewpoint. I argue that
these are complementary and that, as such, they can be successfully used
to analyze and assess translation equivalence from a cognitive perspective.
These tasks will be exemplified through analysis of a poem by the Polish
Nobel Prize winner Wisawa Szymborska (1923-2012) and its translation by
Clare Cavanagh, the winner of the Found in Translation Award in 2011 for
translating Szymborskas volume Tutaj/Here (2009, in partial collaboration
with Stanisaw Baraczak).
Szymborska often writes poems, like miniature pictures, that present
unique descriptions of reality with a particular focus on details. It is through
these details that Szymborska indirectly, and often ironically, expresses her
view of the world. Her collection entitled Tutaj/Here (2009) contains a poem
called Identyfikacja (Identification), in which the construction of the scene being
presented is effected through unusual linguistic means. The disintegration of a
persons worldview following the tragic death of a beloved person is enacted
through disintegration of language.
I will argue that a given discourse, described by Fauconnier as a mental-
space lattice constructed in relation to a particular viewpoint, may yield
a specific linguistic worldview and that a poem may be seen as a non-
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standard, poetic worldview resulting from a particular arrangement of mental

spaces governed by an individual viewpoint. In other words, a non-standard
worldview is the linguistic record (e.g. in the form of a poem) of a certain
conceptualization, i.e. a scene as construed via linguistic means. In proposing
this, I extend Jerzy Bartmiskis (2009/2012) idea of linguistic worldview by
elaborating on his concept of non-standard linguistic worldview, cf. section
2 below.
The remaining part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of translation.
By comparing the determinants of the non-standard worldview evident in the
original with the reconstruction of this worldview in translation, I will draw
conclusions concerning the equivalence, or the degree of successful rendering,
of these two worldviews. Moreover, I will attempt to formulate a more general
judgment of the applicability of the idea of linguistic worldview to assessment
of translation equivalence.
2. Methodology and Definitions

The concept of the linguistic worldview is a major tenet of the Lublin School
of Ethnolinguistics, whose main representative is Jerzy Bartmiski. Bartmiski
defines the concept in the following way:
The linguistic worldview conception functions in two variants.

These can be described in a somewhat simplistic manner as subject
related and object related and assigned to the terms vision/view of
the world and picture of the world (German das sprachliche Weltbilt),
respectively. A vision is necessarily someones vision: it implies the
act of looking and, by the same token, the existence of a perceiving
subject. A picture, though also a result of someones perception of the
world, does not imply the existence of the subject to the same extent:
the focus is on the object, i.e. that which is contained in language
itself. (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 76)
Since my analysis here concerns poetry, which is at core an individual,

idiosyncratic vision of the world, Bartmiskis above distinction between the
two variants is crucial for my argument. I will therefore adopt Bartmiskis
understanding of the linguistic worldview as subject-related, sharing
his belief in the significance of the conceptualizing and speaking subject.
Bartmiskis definition coincides with the dictionary meanings of the words
vision and view, presented below on the basis of the Longman Dictionary of
English Language and Culture (2002) (cf. Tabakowska in this volume for a more
detailed discussion):
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The meanings of vision encompass not only the physical ability to

see but also a metaphorical extension of this ability to the domains
of understanding and mental experience: wise understanding of
how the future will be; foresight and a picture seen in the mind;
idea, as well as the metaphysical domain: something that is without
bodily reality, seen (as if) in a dream, when in a sleeplike state, or as a
religious experience.
The noun view has a very large number of metaphorical meanings

apart from the physical ability to see. Even this first meaning differs
from that of vision in that it means seeing something from a particular
place. The meaning that is the most interesting for the present
considerations is an act or manner of seeing, considering, examining,
etc. There are also several set phrases such as in view, in view of, or
with a view to, all referring to intentional mental activity rather than a
passive, physical act of seeing. For all of these reasons, the noun view
seems to be the best term for describing a given interpretation of
reality effected through specific linguistic means.
Bartmiski defines the linguistic worldview as the interpretation of reality

encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgements
about the world. The judgements can be either entrenched in the language, its
grammatical forms, lexicon and frozen texts (e.g. proverbs) or implied by them
(Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 76). The linguistic worldview is mostly social and
cultural, and therefore visible chiefly in entrenched linguistic forms, such as
proverbs or folk songs; it designates the portion of language that is shared by
a community of speakers. However, [t]he definition of linguistic worldview is
not fully agreed on (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 24); the scholar himself admits
that, apart from fossilized forms, linguistic worldview can encompass what is
dynamic in language:
My own definition of linguistic worldview as a set of judgements

reveals its epistemological (interpretive) nature, does not limit it to
what is fossilized or closed as a structure, makes room for the
dynamic, open nature of the worldview, and does not favour abstract
regularity in grammar and vocabulary. [...]
It [linguistic worldview A.G.] is also differentiated in other styles derived

from colloquial style: official, journalistic or the most individualised and creative
literary style. (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 24)
Given the fact that what is idiosyncratic in a text can only be perceived as such
against the background of what is stereotyped in language, Bartmiski makes
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a distinction between the standard linguistic worldview and a non-standard

linguistic worldview. He allows for interpretation of texts that make creative
use of stereotypes by referring them to a non-standard linguistic worldview:
The existence of standard linguistic worldviews also implies the

possibility of the existence of other worlds. [...] There are [...] texts
that we want to regard as semantically coherent but that one should
interpret by referring to a different, non-standard linguistic worldview.
(Bartmiski, 2007, p. 70, trans. A.G.)
Bartmiski, however, only mentions this distinction once and in the work
quoted above where he applies the concept to a Polish Christmas carol. He does
not seem either to elaborate on it further or to clearly propose that texts may be
treated as standard or non-standard linguistic worldviews.
The distinction between stereotyped and non-standard worldviews remains
in accordance with the cognitivist view of the scalar nature of cognitive and
linguistic phenomena, which derives from an encyclopedic approach to
semantics:
CL views experience as a continuum, where idiosyncratic individual

experience is situated at one end of the scale, and universal (basic,
mainly bodily) experience at the other, with culture-specific experiences
of different types filling up the middle part. The scale corresponds to that
of conventionalization in language: the closer to the universal pole a
given concept is situated, the better chances it stands of finding its place
within the conceptual system of a given language, i.e. of becoming a part
of its conventional imagery. (Tabakowska, 1993, p. 128)
Given the scalar nature of language and the lack of clear-cut boundaries,
linguistic worldview may encompass not only the most entrenched linguistic
data but also those less established. It is thus important that the linguistic
worldview is an interpretation rather than a reflection of the world (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, pp. 76, 77), i.e. linguistic expression depends on the creativity of
speakers. Therefore, one is justified in including poetic vision in the scope of
the term. I propose to extend the concept of non-standard linguistic worldview
to embrace what is created by individual speakers, i.e. particular texts, including
poetic ones. I believe that it is possible to talk about a text as a non-standard
linguistic worldview or the non-standard linguistic worldview of a given author.1
1 A discussion of these issues can be found in Underhill 2011.
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The fact that within the term in question there is also room for poetry is
also stressed by Bock (1992, p. 250), who points to convergences between
the concept of worldview and language as brought out in the context of
proposals within cognitive linguistics like Lakoff and Johnsons Conceptual
Metaphor Theory or Langackers Cognitive Grammar. To further support his
view, Bock also quotes Friedrichs statement about the poetic character of
language:
For example, Friedrich (1986, p. 18) writes, There is no meaning

without the partly chaotic, imaginative individual; however, the
imagination is massively determined by the poetic potential of
language. (Bock, 1992, p. 250)
Bock wrote the above contribution for the International Encyclopedia

of Linguistics too early to include recent developments within cognitive
linguistics such as Fauconniers (1994) mental spaces and Fauconnier and
Turners (2002) theory of conceptual integration or blending, which is based
on mental spaces.
Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think

and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action... Mental
spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called
frames ... and to long-term specific knowledge... (Fauconnier &
Turner 2002, p. 40)
Coulson, another scholar who has contributed to blending theory, provides

a clear explanation of mental spaces and frames:
Mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) can be thought of as temporary

containers for relevant information about a particular domain. A
mental space contains a partial representation of the entities and
relations of a particular scenario as construed by a speaker. Spaces
are structured by elements which represent each of the discourse
entities, and simple frames to represent the relationships that exist
between them. Frames are hierarchically structured atttribute-value
pairs that can either be integrated with perceptual information,
or used to activate generic knowledge about people and objects
assumed by default. (Coulson, n. d.)
According to Evans (2007, pp. 85-86), a frame is understood as a schematic

conceptualization of knowledge or experience that is culturally or socially
bound.
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Discourse is viewed by Fauconnier as a mental-space lattice and the

development of discourse as the addition of new mental spaces to the
lattice (cf. e.g. Evans, 2007; Fauconnier, 1997; Libura, 2010). In short, new
mental spaces are signaled by the speaker and recognized by the listener
or reader by so-called space builders, i.e. explicit mechanisms, such as time
expressions, conjunctions, tenses, etc. The first space in a given discourse is
called the base; it usually functions as the viewpoint for the next space or
spaces, although the viewpoint may later shift to other spaces as well (the
space that has the role of the viewpoint at a given stage of the discourse is
called the viewpoint space).
The notion of a mental-space lattice is invoked in the following section in an
analysis of Wisawa Szymborskas poem Identyfikacja.
3. Wisawa Szymborskas Identyfikacja

(Identification)
Stanisaw Baraczak, one of the best-known translators of Wisawa Szymborskas

poetry into English (he has transalted most of her poems in collaboration with
Clare Cavanagh), perfectly captured the nature of her poems in the Afterword
to the collection of Szymborskas poetry entitled Nic dwa razy: wybr wierszy/
Nothing Twice: Selected Poems (1997):
The accessibility of Szymborskas poetry stems from the fact that the
pressing questions she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as
naive as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry
lies in pushing the enquiry much farther than the man in the street
ever would. Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question,
observation or statement that seems downright trite, only to surprise
us with its unexpected yet logical continuation. (Baraczak in
Szymborska, 1997, p. 391)
These words are a reflection on the poem entitled Nic dwa razy (Nothing Twice);
however, Baraczaks remarks may be understood to apply more generally when
he writes that Szymborska offer[s] a startling view of human existence and the
meaning of human history or perhaps the senslessness of it (in Szymborska,
1997, p. 391).
Identyfikacja/Identification is an account of a meeting between two women
after the husband of one of them has died in a plane crash. As made clear by
Szymborska herself, the poetic meeting is based on a real event:
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The description of at meeting has been waiting in my notebook for an

equally long time [a few years].
Once, many years ago, I had the sad opportunity to see a person in
trauma following the loss of someone close to her in a plane crash. It
is only now that I have described that situation, changing the details
a little... (Szymborska in Bikont & Szczsna, 2012, p. 197; trans. A.G.)
The poem is written in the form of a monologue by the widow, which is addressed
to her visitor and tells her about the plane crash. The woman is trying to argue that
the body she had been asked to identify was not her husbands and that he must be
alive. A closer look at the argumentations clever logic reveals Szymborskas unique
gift of poetic understatement and seemingly unemotional observation of the world
the characteristics of her poetry that have won her international recognition. I
believe that Fauconniers theory of Mental Spaces is an ideal tool to analyze and
reveal the mechanisms of emotional and logical manipulation employed in this
poem: they lead the reader to the emotional and startling discovery of the truth at
its end the truth that the reader is allowed to decipher via indirect linguistic hints.
As has already been mentioned, Fauconnier views discourse as a network
of interrrelated mental spaces, which he calls the mental-space lattice. The
poem in question involves different mental spaces connected not only linearly
(appearing as the monologue develops) but also reappearing in different
perspectives.
For the purpose of the present analysis, I would like to propose a division of
the poem into various mental spaces where each space will receive the symbol
S and a consecutive number: 1, 2, 3, etc. This part of the analysis deals with the
poem in Polish; each quotation in Polish will be accompanied by the corresponding
part of Cavanaghs translation (in brackets) or, in some cases, by literal translation
into English. I will proceed to an analysis of the translation in section 4. It is best,
therefore, to juxtapose the original and the translation for ease of comparison:
Table 3.1 Szymborskas Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed
mental
space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh
no.
S1 Dobrze, e przysza mwi. Its good you came she says.

Syszaa, e we czwartek rozbi si
You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?
samolot?
S2 Well so they came to see me
No wic wanie w tej sprawie
about it.
przyjechali po mnie.
S3 Podobno by na licie pasaerw. The story is he was on the passenger list.
S4 No i co z tego, moe si rozmyli. So what, he might have changed his mind.
Unauthenticated
Table 3.1 Szymborskas Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed

continued
mental
space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh
no.
They gave me some pills so I wouldnt

Potem mi pokazali kogo, [S6: nie wiem
fall apart.
kogo.]
Then they showed me [S6: I dont know
Cay czarny, spalony oprcz jednej rki.
S5 who.]
Strzpek koszuli, zegarek, obrczka.
All black, burned except one hand.
Wpadam w gniew, bo to na pewno nie
A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring.
on.
I got furious, that cant be him.
S7 Nie zrobiby mi tego, eby tak wyglda. He wouldnt do that to me, look like that.
A takich koszul peno jest po sklepach. The stores are bursting with those shirts.
A ten zegarek to zwyky zegarek. The watch is just a regular old watch.
S8
A te nasze imiona na jego obrczce And our names on that ring,
to s imiona bardzo pospolite. theyre only the most ordinary names.
S1` Dobrze, e przysza. Its good you came.
S9 Usid tu koo mnie. Sit here beside me.
On rzeczywicie mia wrci we He really was supposed to get back
S10
czwartek. Thursday.
Ale ile tych czwartkw mamy jeszcze But weve got so many Thursdays left
S11
w roku. this year.
Zaraz nastawi czajnik na herbat. Ill put the kettle on for tea.
S12 Umyj gow, a potem, co potem, Ill wash my hair, then what,
sprbuj zbudzi si z tego wszystkiego. try to wake up from all this.
S1`` Dobrze, e przysza, Its good you came,
bo tam byo zimno, since it was cold there
a on tylko w tym takim gumowym and him in just some rubber sleeping
S13 piworze, bag,
on, to znaczy ten tamten nieszczliwy him, I mean, you know, that unlucky
czowiek. man.
Ill put the Thursday on, wash the tea,
S14 = Zaraz nastawi czwartek, umyj herbat,
since our names are completely
S12` bo te nasze imiona przecie pospolite
ordinary
The base space (S1) is established by the womans greeting: Dobrze, e

przysza (Its good you came). The base space contains the following elements:
the two friends, the present time, the meeting with its elements of socializing
such as the casual tone of the conversation. This space has the epistemic status
of a present fact.
Next, the bereaved wife begins her account of the indentification of the body,
and, as her story unfolds, it becomes obvious that this is not a straighforward
report of the event. The second mental space (S2) reports the plane crash as a
fact, thus establishing the topic to be developed in the next spaces: Syszaa, e
we czwartek rozbi si samolot? (You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?).
The fragment Podobno by ma licie pasaerw (The story is he was on the
passenger list) is a new mental space (S3), starting with the space builder
Unauthenticated
podobno (direct translation: supposedly; here translated as The story is), which
signals its epistemic distance from the speaker and from the first space. This new
space has the status of a hypothesis. Moreover, it is also distant in time (which is
signaled by the use of the past tense) and in space (przyjechali po mnie literally
they came to fetch me). However, the next line (space S4) is a contradiction of
the hypothesis that the husband died, introduced by the phrase No i co z tego
(So what), denying the validity of the previous space and opening a different
past possibility (cf. the word moe in moe si rozmyli he may have changed
his mind). The use of moe (may) gives this new space a modal character, i.e. the
status of an opposing hypothesis.
The next space (S5) is a factual report on the proceedings of identification
of the body that was shown to the woman, and is interrupted with the negative
nie wiem kogo (I dont know who) (space S6). The list of details (shirt, watch, etc.)
is followed by a counterfactual space S7, an emotional judgment on why the
body was not her husbands that derives from the married couples relationship
(nie zrobiby mi tego he wouldnt do that to me). S8 then contains a seemingly
objective qualification of the shirt, watch, names on the wedding ring as very
common, popular items.
At this point, the monologue returns to the base space (S1): it is a repetition
of Dobrze, e przysza Its good you came. It develops into deontic space S9,
the speakers wish for her friend to sit close (Usid tu koo mnie Sit here beside
me). Next, the same line of argumentation starts again: the speaker refers to a
past fact only to deny its validity. The woman confirms the day of her husbands
arrival (czwartek Thursday, which constitutes epistemic space S10), but then
resorts to a rather unlikely argument that the man was not necessarily coming
back last Thursday (S11, introduced by the space builder ale but). The next
space (S12) contains future constructions (Ill); it refers to routine activities and
contains the verb zbudzi si wake up through which the tragedy is assessed as
something unreal, something that did not happen.
The monologue then returns to the base space S1 again. It is connected
with the next space (S13, containing the past tense: tam byo zimno it was
cold there) through the conjunction bo since. The conjunction is normally used
to express cause and effect so its use in S13 is illogical: there seems to be no
direct relation between the other womans present visit and the cold during the
identification a few days before or the fact that the body was placed only in
a thin rubber bag. Then space S13 seems to continue the factual description
of details during the identification. However, the use of the pronoun on him
and the reference to the rubber bag (a sleeping bag) betrays the fact that the
woman did in fact recognize her husband. She tries to hide it by saying that it
was just ten tamten nieszczliwy czowiek that unlucky man. The last space
in the poem, S14, established via the use of a future construction, refers again
to the same routine activities as in S12 but here the woman confuses them:
Unauthenticated
wrong collocations (nastawi czwartek, umyj herbat put the Thursday on, wash
the tea) and a wrong cause-effect relation while pointing to the names on the
wedding ring. Therefore, S14 may also be treated as S12`.
Let us now concentrate on those elements of the poem that build and
reinforce its final effect. Its poetic power lies in the womans apparently
unemotional attempts to deny her husbands death. The failure of her attempts
to not break down psychologically is conveyed through linguistic means: the
breakdown is merely suggested, expressed indirectly. However, the choice of
linguistic measures used for this purpose is guided by metalinguistic factors: the
viewpoint and the viewpoint mental space. It is the viewpoint that determines
what kind of linguistic worldview the discourse reveals.
According to Libura (2010, p. 27), when discourse begins, it is the base space
that constitutes the viewpoint, thus allowing for the appearance of the next
space. In Szymborskas poem, the base (S1) is the beginning of the monologue
(followed by an establishment of its topic in S2). It constitutes the viewpoint for
most other spaces in that the woman tells her friend about what happened from
her present perspective: the conversation takes place a few days after the crash,
she is at home, busy with her guest and with daily routines.
Let us look closer at the linguistic markers of this viewpoint in the whole
mental-space lattice. First, the viewpoint marker podobno (the story is), which
expresses the womans disbelief in and distance from the tragedy, shows that
mental space S3 is built from the viewpoint of S1. Another tool of this kind (in S5
and S6) is the speakers reference to the dead husband as if it was not him but an
unknown person: Potem mi pokazali kogo, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed
me someone, I dont know who) and ten tamten nieszczliwy czowiek in S12 (lit.
this that unlucky man). Moreover, her use of repetition in these places (kogo, nie
wiem kogo and ten tamten) seems to have an iconic function: the more words,
the larger her distance from the tragedy which, as she wants to prove, does not
concern her personally. Third, some spaces are introduced as contradictions of
certain past facts. Space S4 starts with the marker No i co z tego (So what); S8 with
its viewpoint marker, the conjunction a (translatable here as because or after all),
repeated three times for greater emphasis; S11 is introduced by the conjunction
ale (but) and its content is reinforced by its form as a rhetorical question.
The viewpoint of a woman whom the plane crash apparently does not concern
(let us mark it as VP1) is, however, not the only one in the poem. Skillfully
smuggled into that scene is the viewpoint of a woman who knows that the body
that she has been asked to identify was her husbands (VP2). This contrasting
viewpoint guides a different interpretation of certain of the poems mental spaces.
Juxtaposed and intertwined with VP1, VP2 creates a linguistic picture (an
idiosyncratic worldview) of a woman whose world is disintegrating despite
her attempts to deny it to herself and to her visitor. VP2 does not seem to
arise from one particular mental space, since, as was shown above, the whole
Unauthenticated
mental-space lattice appears to be a logical arrangement of arguments that

deny the tragedy. Yet the title of the poem, Identyfikacja (Identification),
prompts a double interpretation (either the formal procedure performed in
such cases or the actual act of recognizing the victim), and this is how VP2
clandestinely finds its way into the scene. Following other scholars, Bartmiski
(2009, pp. 212ff) notes that because the title always precedes the text, it
plays a strategic role in relation to the text, names it and guides the readers
expectations concerning the content to be read. The titles of literary texts are
of special importance as they prompt the interpretation of the texts that they
announce (Bartmiski, 2009, p. 216).
In Szymborskas Identyfikacja, the fact that the woman does know that her
husband is dead is manifested in mental space S8, through the use of the
possessive adjective nasze (our) in A te nasze imiona na jego obrczce (And our
names on that ring). Her awareness of the fact is also betrayed by her confusion
when she uses the personal pronoun on (him) in S13 and quickly explains that
she only meant that unlucky man. What is more, her counterarguments in S7
and S11 are simply ridiculous in the context. The fact that she is losing ground
when trying to be reasonable is shown by repetition in mental space S11: a
potem, co potem (lit. and then, then what) articulates her struggle to gather her
thoughts. Finally, at the end of the poem (in S14), the mistakes that she makes in
the two collocations combined with illogical reasoning in the last line result in a
nonsensical disintegration of linguistic meaning. This signals disintegration on
the mental and existential levels.
To sum up, the poem may be seen as a mental-space lattice strung between
two opposing viewpoints. As such, the poem presents the linguistic view of
a world that is falling apart along with the speakers common sense, logical
thinking and language a non-standard worldview built by carefully chosen
linguistic means.
4. Analysis of the Translation

The concept of the standard vs. non-standard linguistic worldview, as contained
in a given language or in a given text (cf. Section 2 for a discussion of this
distinction), can be used as a tool to investigate translations (cf. Danaher in this
volume). Translation equivalence is founded on the concept of the linguistic
worldview in that to translate means to reconstruct the non-standard linguistic
worldview of the original. This approach allows for embracing the various
linguistic means relevant to the assessment of a translation. In my analysis of
Cavanaghs rendering of Szymborskas poem, I will trace the markers of the
speakers linguistic worldview, comparing those used in the translation with
those in the original.
Unauthenticated
Cavanagh is an expert on Szymborskas poetry and on modern Polish poetry in

general. Over a period of more than twenty years, she has translated, together with
Stanisaw Baraczak, most of the former; she has also translated Szymborskas
prose. Cavanagh has also rendered into English the poetry of another Polish
Nobel laureate, Czesaw Miosz, as well as works by Adam Zagajewski, a modern
Polish poet who has been mentioned as the a candidate for the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Cavanagh was also Szymborskas friend. In an interview at a poetry
evening in Chicago organized to commemorate Szymborskas poetry following
her death, Cavanagh said:
Szymborska is absolutely unpretentious. Her poetry is a universal view of

the world, but also a very precise one, a balance between precision and
accessibility...
(http://kultura.onet.pl/literatura/usa-pozegnaly-szymborska,1,5025176,artykul.html;
last accessed Feb 19, 2013, trans. A.G.)
Clare Cavanaghs translation is very exact, almost word for word, which is
what the poem demands of its translator due to the simplicity of its language.
The English rendering does, therefore, retain most of the elements that convey
the original linguistic worldview. For example, in mental space S2 Podobno is
translated as The story is, both of which distance the speaker from the event she
is talking about.
Indeed, certain grammatical properties of the English language even
strengthen the effect in question, i.e. the womans apparent denial of the tragedy.
In the translation, the womans point of view becomes enhanced by the use of
the indefinite article in spaces S2 (a plane crashed on Thursday) and S5 (a scrap
of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring). In S2, the indefinite article stresses the fact that
the woman seemingly does not attach much importance to the plane crash as if
it did not concern her; in S5 the indefinite article qualifies the objects mentioned
as unknown: the woman apparently does not recognize them as her husbands.
However, the translation also reveals some subtle divergences from the
VP1 as constructed in the original. It does not contain the repetition in mental
spaces S5 and S6 that proves to be iconically important. The fragment Potem
mi pokazali kogo, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I dont
know who) is rendered more fluently as Then they showed me I dont know
who. A similar loss occurs in mental space S12, where the phrase ten tamten
nieszczliwy czowiek (lit. this that unlucky man) is translated more smoothly
as that unlucky man. Moreover, the Polish conjunction a, repeated three times
in S8, is not rendered at all, as a result of which the desperately argumentative
character of the womans words in this mental space becomes less felt. The
rhetorical question in S11 is translated as a statement, which weakens the
effect.
Unauthenticated
The opposing VP2, i.e. that of the woman who admits that the tragedy does
concern her, becomes blurred in three places in the translation. One instance
can be found in S8, where the original viewpoint marker (the possessive
adjective jego in jego obrczce his wedding ring, which may indicate the
husband) is rendered as the demonstrative adjective that, which points to the
ring itself rather than to its owner. Secondly, repetition, and hence the effect of
the womans effort to gather her thoughts, becomes lost in mental space S11: a
potem, co potem is shortened to then what. The last, crucial instance comes in the
final line where the disintegrated collocations find their absolutely illogical
justification: bo te nasze imiona przecie pospolite translated as since our names
are completely ordinary. The key word, apart from the conjunction bo (since), is
przecie, which implies that what is said is an argument against an earlier view
or an explanation of something that should be obvious. The translation renders
przecie as completely, and thus weakens the argumentative force here.
5. Conclusions
While the English version of Szymborskas poem Identyfikacja has the advantage
of stressing the womans reasonable viewpoint (VP1) by using linguistic means
unavailable in Polish, it also somewhat weakens her other, more dramatic
viewpoint (VP2). In the translation, the womans judgments, the proportions
of the reasonable and the tragic elements of her view of reality as expressed
in the monologue, shift slightly away from the dramatic. In English, linguistic
means that prove more fluent, less stammering, and less argumentative create
a linguistic worldview that is less overtly tragic and reveals subtler signs of
disintegration.
As a general conclusion, it is worth recalling Bartmiskis definition of the
linguistic worldview as the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language,
which can be captured in the form of judgments about the world (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, p. 76) as well as the distinction he makes between the standard
and the non-standard linguistic worldview. The extension of the latter proposed
here allows treatment of a poetic text as a non-standard linguistic worldview. A
comparison of non-standard linguistic worldviews in the Polish original and the
English translation, coupled with an examination of the linguistic markers of the
two clashing viewpoints (VP1 and VP2) intertwined in the mental-space lattice
that constitutes the womans monologue, allow for an assessment of translation
equivalence.
Unauthenticated
References
Bartmiski, Jerzy. (2007). Jzykowe podstawy obrazu wiata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo
UMCS.
Bartmiski, Jerzy. (2009). Tekstologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Bartmiski, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jrg

Zinken. Shefflied and Oakville, CT: Equinox.
Bikont, Anna, & Szczsna, Joanna. (2012). Pamitkowe rupiecie. Biografia Wisawy
Szymborskiej. Krakw: Znak.
Bock, Philip K. (1992). World wiew and language. In International Encyclopedia of

Linguistics, Ed. W. Bright (pp. 248-251). Oxford University Press.
Coulson, Seana. (n.d.). Whats so funny?: Conceptual integration in humorous

examples. http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/funstuff/funny.html; accessed
May 8, 2012
Evans, Vyvyan. (2007). A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in

Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles, & Turner, Mark. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending
and the Minds Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
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Friedrich, Paul. (1986). The Language Parallax: Linguistic Parallellism and Poetic
Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Libura, Agnieszka. (2010). Teoria przestrzeni mentalnych i integracji pojciowej.

Struktura modelu i jego funkcjonalno. Wrocaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Wrocawskiego.
Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. (2002). Ed. Della Summers.
Harlow: Longman.
Szymborska, Wisawa. (2007). Nic dwa razy: wybr wierszy/Nothing Twice: Selected
Poems. Krakw: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Szymborska, Wisawa. (2009). Tutaj/Here. Krakw: Znak.
Tabakowska, Elbieta (1993). Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation.

Tbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews: Metaphor, Ideology and

Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Chapter 4
What Words Tell Us: Phenomenology,

Cognitive Ethnolinguistics, and Poetry1
Irena Vakov
Charles University, Prague, The Czech Republic
1. The Natural World and Its Linguistic Image:

Body, Community, Language, World
The ground of our human relationship to reality is, from the perspective of
phenomenology, the natural world (Patoka, 1992 [1936]). This philosophical
point of departure is in obvious agreement with the concept of the linguistic
worldview from Polish cognitive ethnolinguistics (Bartmiski, 2009/2012) as
well as with the naive worldview from Russian linguistics (Apresyan, 1995).
A correlate of Patokas natural world is a semantic structure that represents
the linguistic worldview in its foundational situation: language having a
commonplace connection to reality and language used in everyday, subjectively
grounded communication (cf. styl potoczny colloquial style as described
in Bartmiski, 2001). This type of language is usually opposed to scientific
language. Scientific language is marked for objectivity and abstraction, a
correlation with intellectual reflection rather than experience, and also the use
of terms that are, in contrast with everyday words, technically precise and
devoid of connotation. The language of science corresponds with a theoretical
world that obviously represents a non-primary or secondary way of relating
to our reality. Objectivizing abstraction removes from things their fundamental
human meaningfulness the very ways in which they figure in our lives and
thereby co-create the natural world in which we live.2
In this regard, it is instructive to consider the dictionary definitions of a
number of Czech words: slza tear is defined as a secretion of the ocular glands,
vrska wrinkle as a line in the skin caused by shrinkage, dbn jug as an
1 For his encouragement, valued suggestions, and translating patience, the author extends
her thanks to David Danaher.
2 Cf. Bartmiski this volume.
Unauthenticated
oblong, convex container with a handle, sestra sister as a female sibling. True:
as many cognitively-oriented linguists have been noting for over thirty years,
even traditional linguistics (in this case, lexicography) is not often willing to take
into account the basic, pre-reflective horizon of our natural world. Language is
unrivalled as form of testimony to our experience of the natural world. What is it
that we signify by the words tear, wrinkle, jug, sister? What do these phenomena
represent for a human being, and what do they mean to us in the context of a
specific language, culture, or human community?
The phenomenological argument in favor of a return to things can be
understood as a challenge similar to the one issued by proponents of cognitive
linguistics and ethnolinguistics in the sense both of a turning away from
impersonal theoretical constructions and moving back to reflecting on the
primary and natural human relationship to the world, as well as of profiling
the ways in which human conceptualizing and understanding (and pre-
understanding) are manifested in the context of a cultural community. With
differences in emphasis, this approach has been advocated by, among many
others, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Anna Wierzbicka (1996), and
Jerzy Bartmiski (2009/2012). All of these scholars stress the primacy of human
experience in its relational or relative aspects: in relation to either a general
human (anthropocentric) perspective or the perspective of one linguistically
and culturally bound ethnos.
We investigate, then, both how people actually are and also how things are
manifested (as a philosopher might say) to us as human beings and as speakers
of a given language. According to phenomenologists, this process takes places
through the mediation of our body and senses, as a result of our relationships
with other people (in a community), and naturally also through language; to
this can be added that it takes place also through our continual contact with the
whole of the world, which serves as our absolute or ultimate horizon. Jan Patoka
wrote that we are anchored in existence in just these four ways: through body,
community, language, world (Patoka, 1995). Cognitive linguistics, although it
draws from other sources and is associated with other contexts, is nonetheless
aware, in one way or another, of this phenomenological truth, which means that
when we investigate the semantic structures of language with cognitive and
ethnolinguistic tools, we are also contributing, as linguists, to phenomenological
discovery of the natural world.
2. Things
Things enter into obviousness, and therefore they are. To be means to be
manifested. We comprehend things through our senses (and not merely through
our sense of sight, even though sight is probably the most prominent and
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prototypical of human senses). In a poem entitled The Pink Shrub by the Austrian
poet Karel Lubomirski, we read (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 141):
You smell nice Von

as if you knew jako bys vedl
about the blind. o slepch.
Smell is also one of the ways that things manifest themselves to us. In another
poem, the same Austrian poet asks (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 99):
Is beauty Je krsa
the love of things? lskou vc?
From ancient times, beauty has tended to be associated with liking by means
of sensory experiences: the name for the study of beauty, aesthetics, derives
from the Greek expression aisthtiks that which is perceivable.
According to Eugen Fink, our relationship to things in the world is
dependent upon the ways in which those things meet us (Fink, 1996 [1958], p.
118), and precisely this is the ground of intentionality. The fact that things are
sensually perceivable allows us, who are sense-equipped, to also meet them
halfway. Perception is, as a result, a two-way relationship between perceiver and
perceived, and things exist only in their relation to us.
Things Vci
I adore things, reticent companions, Miluji vci, mlenliv soudruhy,

because everyone treats them protoe vichni nakldaj s nimi,
as if they are not alive jako by neily,
and meanwhile they live and look at us a ony zatm ij a dvajse na ns
like loyal dogs with focused faces jako vrn psi pohledy soustednmi
and put up with the fact that a trp,
no one talks to them. e dn lovk k nim nepromluv.
They are embarrassed to speak first, Ostchaj se prvn dt do ei,
they are silent, wait, and are silent still ml, ekaj, ml,
and yet a peci
they would so much like to chat a bit! Tolik by chtly to trochu si porozprvt!
Which is why I adore things Proto miluji vci

and the whole world. a tak miluji cel svt.
(Wolker, 1958)
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In this poets (somewhat child-like) anthropomorphization, things are

analogized to living creatives that have feelings (of embarrassment) and loyalties
(like dogs). Things merely await a friendly gesture from us that would bring them
into our world to begin a dialogue and relationship with us. Wolkers things are
embarrassed to speak first, and they have to wait to be offered our attention
and given permission by us to communicate. As we have seen, however, the
phenomenological perspective suggests an entirely different relationship
between things and people. Contrary to Wolker, things do speak first to the
extent that they manifest themselves to us and, in doing so, offer their existence
to our disposal. To be therefore means both to be perceivable and to be perceived.
There is an essential difference between a thing in the world and an object
(of scientific investigation). To science which is objectivizing, generalizing, and
reductive a jug, for example, is something entirely different than what it is
for us given the horizon of the natural world. The primary and original human
experience of the world is thus one of subjectivity, and as has been said, the
ground for our experience of reality is the natural world. Objectivity (as the
ontological point of departure for science) is bound up with a derived world that
is artificially created and therefore un-natural. Says Neubauer:
An entity in an objective sense is the exact opposite of an entity that

we relate to in the context of the natural world. Human experience
in the natural world foregrounds the particular and lively activity
of things, their self-transcendent openness, and their welcoming,
partnerly relationality to other things. (Neubauer, 2001,p. 22)
Heidegger writes that science destroyed things as such and has thereby forced
us to distance ourselves from the jug filled with wine and put in its place a hollow
space used to hold fluid matter (1993, p. 15).3 Phenomenologists urge a return to
the roots of things, that is, to our experience of them. We need to remember how
a given thing manifests itself to us in its materiality or its thing-ness.
Objects are indifferent, and objects come into being through the reduction
of things: we abstract away from those very qualities that constitute the
essence of them. When we incorporate them into a scientific framework, we
render them descriptively exact, measurable. We designate water as H2O, and
in doing so water loses its original nature. Or we derive the characteristics of
water from its categorial association with fluid matter. But when we need to
3 This study references a Czech-German collection of Heideggers late essays (Heidegger

1993), and we are concerned primarily with two of them, both from 1950: Das Ding
(Vc) and Die Sprache (e).
Unauthenticated
put out a fire, we will not be looking for either H2O or the abstraction that is
fluid matter.
The thing-ness of a thing (how water differs from the abstraction that is fluid
matter) carries over also to the word that names it. A word is correlative with the
thing it names, and at the same time it has the ability, through connotation, to
evoke it, to call it to mind. This is true even more so when we share the word with
others, given that language belongs not to me but rather to us (Gadamer,
1999, p. 27).
3. Things and Words

According to Jungmanns dictionary (SN, 1989 [1835-1839]), a thing is
anything that can be uttered, called, and named. The fact that a thing is bound
up with discourse is also supported, in the same semantic explanation, by an
etymological reference: Czech vc thing is connected up with the base vt-
(cf. odvtit to reply to, vta sentence, zv last will and testament); similar
correspondences in other languages are also mentioned: German Sache and
sagen, Latin res and reo, and also Polish rzecz in the meaning of Czech vc.
Even, then, in language itself we see evidence for the philosophical stance
that there is, in the relationship between thing and word, a double horizon of
world and language. In the words of Zdenk Kratochvl, the word in speech and
the thing in the world correspond to each other (1994, p. 50).
Further on in his discussion, and in regard to the medieval philosophical
dispute about whether Adam has a belly-button given that he was not born like
other people, Kratochvl writes:
Every thing carries with it traces of its naturalness, its origin, its
situatedness. Put figuratively, every thing has a belly-button Every
thing always has its belly-button or something analogically similar;
something that points not only to its inception in the sense of its
generative emergence, but also to the manner in which this thing is
separated off from the background of all Being, a kind of constitutive
contrast in relation to its bedrock or surroundings. (Kratochvl, 1994,
p. 44)
It can be added that we could consider every word associated with a thing
also to be its belly-button. We have separated off from the background
of all Being the concept as logos, and the thing begins to exist in a human
context thanks to its being a word-concept. The word itself then testifies to
this in that it also can serve as a trace in a search for a things naturalness,
origin, and situatedness. (By thing is not of course meant only something
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concrete, nor is it intended to be understood exclusively as some kind of

substance, even if the prototypical examples might lead us to think so.)
We might pause for a moment to consider, in this connection, the
motivation behind a linguistic concept. Words are traditionally divided
into those that are motivated and those that are not, and this is done in
accordance with whether or not we can find indications of lexical meaning in
their word-formational structures. For example, the Czech adjective katanov
auburn, which designates a shade of hair-color that is reminiscent of the
color of the nuts of the chestnut tree (katan in Czech), is motivationally
transparent; the same is true for the shade of green in the adjective lahvov,
which is unproblematically relatable to lhev bottle. On the other hand,
the adjective erven, which is for the color red, appears unmotivated to
most native speakers, and when they learn that it is derived from the noun
erv worm, most people are surprised. When, however, they come to learn
that our ancestors used worms as raw material to make colored dyes, then
presto! the word becomes a belly-button of the thing: erven originally
meant colored by erv.
In acquiring a language, children find it difficult to understand unmotivated
words, and this difficulty is easy to spot. A little Czech girl might speak o
kocouru Vbotchovi about the cat in the shoes because she grammatically
declines the phrase v botch in the shoes, adding the -ovi ending for an
animate masculine singular noun in the locative case, as if it were the proper
name of a tomcat from a fairy-tale (i.e., Puss Intheboots). Wax crayons (Czech
voskovky, from voska, the word for wax) become for her oskovky because
she is trying to speak correctly and she thinks that the initial v- is an artifact
of colloquial Czech (cf. colloquial Czech vokno window in place of literary
Czech okno). She does not understand the connections between words
because, at least for the moment, she understands the world also only in a
partial way. Only with time will she begin to be able to mutually interrelate
her world experience with language, and it will become gradually clear to
her why one thing is said and not another and what words are connected to.
Understanding the world goes hand-in-hand with understanding language.
It is also true that when we study a foreign language, words remain for
us for a long time and sometimes forever mostly unmotivated. They only
serve to denote certain strips of reality. Even if we can communicate well in
another language we can get by and understand public signs, read menus,
and perhaps even comprehend sophisticated texts in our fields this does not
mean that we understand the internal semantic threads running through the
language, that we feel in and beyond that language the existence of a coherent
world that holds together thousands of such interconnected phenomena.
Our maternal or native language is a different matter altogether. In our native
language, the correlate of a word is not a concept, but rather experience itself
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(Neubauer, 1999, p. 88). One aspect of this is perhaps a sensitivity to motivation,

which is, starting in childhood, built from the experiential connection between
words and their maternal reality. Another aspect is our spontaneous ability
to understand connotations and allusions that are bound up with words and
their associated collocations: our linguistic (sub)consciousness is prepared to
react authentically to fine-grained and nuanced semantic distinctions between
words as well as to all kinds of wordplay. It is precisely in relation to our native
language that we truly experience the natural world.
It would be naive to suppose that understanding in and of ones native
language is definitively fixed once and for all. We know from experience that
this is not true. We are often even in adulthood taken aback by what words
or phrases that we had thought we knew actually do mean. For example, while
the Czech word hudba music is understood as unmotivated, it takes only the
sudden realization that it is related to huden violin-playing, which is derived
from the verb housti to play the violin, to see that hudba is also undoubtedly
related to housle the violin as an instrument. It is in this way that we begin to
understand words against the background of further horizons.
In this regard, it is possible to understand how a thing is rendered more
material (more thing-y) through the prism of the word that denotes it.
Closely connected with word motivation, which we have already discussed,
is a words conceptual construction, which tends to be different in different
languages. The Czech word zelenina contains a reference to the color green
(zelen barva) of some (parts of) vegetables, and in this form of reference the
Czech word, compared with words in other languages for the same thing, is
rather specific. The English word vegetables refers to plant growth, and Polish
warzywo to cooking. Polish does also have the word zielenina, but it refers, in
contrast to the similar Czech term, only to the fresh tops of the vegetables,
the parts actually used in the kitchen (that is, the part of Czech zelenina that
is really green or zelen).
We should be reminded here of Heidegger (1993), who said that naming is
a kind of calling out, and calling out brings closer to us the existence of that
which had previously not been called. It is this very calling out of something,
or calling to something, that represents an evocation of the thing being
called. A thing is thus not only designated or denoted by its word, it is also
evoked by it.
Our discussion has brought us back to phenomenology: a phenomenon
is that which appears or reveals itself, and logos is sense-making discourse.
Our discussion is then aimed at those things that are apparently obvious and
evident, things that no one really looks at or asks about precisely because of the
obviousness of superficial seeing and understanding. Our task is to discover
through language! something that was already here, something that we felt,
something that we somehow saw out of the corner of our eye but that we did not
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quite catch, something that has not yet been given conceptual form (Patoka,
1995, p. 11).
4. The Thing Called Dbn Jug and the Word

Dbn
Once again the question of the relationship between thing and word arises: this
time, however, more specifically between the thing called dbn jug and the
word dbn.
Let us consider again a childs perspective. The world appears richer in
meanings to children than it does to adults: children do not yet have extensive
experience of life and they direct considerably more attention to the obvious.
A childs world is a natural world a primary, pre-reflective world. The following
poem in prose, entitled The Jug, credibly stylizes a childs perspective; in its
formal contours it likewise represents a so-called poetic definition, which
offers up for our consideration a concrete conceptual explication:
The jug is a big glass bird with a bulbous belly. It has a beak and an
enormous ear. It floats in a well and it sinks. I have to immerse my
hand deep under the water to pull it out. I scoop up water and the jug
breaks out in sweat. The water is so heavy. And so cold. My hands, in
which I am clutching it, get suddenly bigger. When I put the jug down
on the ground, my hands are little again. Its too bad that one day the
jug will break! (Nezval, 1956, p. 12)
A small child has no need to generalize by searching out a superordinate

concept that could be used to categorize the jug. From the perspective of the
materiality of the jug (its thing-ness or jug-ness), superordination is, after
all, hardly essential. A linguistic dictionary, in contrast, offers an Aristotelian
definition of the word dbn jug as a convex, oblong container with a
handle (SS, 1994): the dictionary generalizes, it uses as its starting point
the general concept of container, and then looks for additional specifying
semantic features (convex, with a handle).
The child, of course, is thinking of a specific jug and sees it as a profiled
participant in a familiar setting and action as an object that is part of an
interesting experience, which is about getting water from a well. The childs
account is full of important sensory references: a poetic description of the
jugs appearance, the intense experience of dipping the jug into the well and
the weight and coldness of the scooped up water. We also find here child-like
wonder in the form of an optical illusion, and finally an awareness that one
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day the glass jug will break. These details represent the basic elements of
the childs experience with the jug: a summary of how the jug-as-thing looks
(how it manifests itself and comes across to the child), what it is used for, the
context in which we encounter it, the place it occupies in our world.
The word dbn evokes an encounter with a real jug by, in Heideggers
words, calling it out so that it emerges from unbeing into being. If we
want to capture the meaning of the word dbn, then we cannot reduce
it to a definition consisting of a superordinate concept along with a few
differentiating features. That kind of definition is precisely what Heidegger
warns us against: it distances us from the jug filled with wine (or cold water
from the well) and replaces it with an abstracted container, the interior space
of which is used to hold fluid matter.
Thanks to the word (the verbal sign), a thing is evoked. The nature of
meaning thus conceived points to the unity of cognition and language, to
the essential role played by bodily and sensory experience in conceptual
formation, to the naturalness of metaphoric and metonymic conceptualization,
and also to the narrativity of meaning as well as the fact that human
thinking is, when all is said and done, literary (Turner, 1996). Things have a
deep involvement in stories, scripts, and narrative structures.4
5. A Truly Stony Stone, or Why Linguists Should

Study Poetry
According to Heidegger, language speaks that is, words speak. If human beings
also speak, we do so only secondarily in answer to the speech of speech and
thanks to the fact that we have listened intently to what words have had to say.
Heidegger often added to this that the heart of speaking speech the essence
of what words communicate is revealed most authentically in poetry.
Victor Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to give back to us the ability to
experience life, to make us once again able to truly perceive things: to make the
stone stony (see Mukaovsk, 1971). What makes the stone stony? The stony-
ness of the stone is evidently a matter of the semantic connotations that are
bound up with the linguistic utterance. The word stone does not simply designate
4 In the Czech linguistic worldview, dbn is involved in narrative structures through

its use in phraseology (including proverbs), collocational phrasings, etc. It is, in this
way, symbolically and expressively anchored in Czech culture broadly understood (see
Vakov, 2004). It is interesting to note that one of the expressive features most strongly
associated with dbn is its breakability.
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a piece of rock: it does not function merely to denote the thing. According to
Heidegger, the word serves to call the thing out from a state of unpresent non-
existence to a state of present existence, and this occurs in all of its associated
sensory and contextual richness.
In the Czech linguistic worldview, and undoubtedly in many other linguistic
worldviews as well, a stone is associated with the image of something hard,
sharp, immobile, heavy, and cold; a stone is, from a human perspective, a tool,
and usually a tool used to injure or do harm. These characteristics of a stone can
be (at least in Czech) backed up with connotational evidence, and we have found
linguistically systemic data that verifies them (cf. Bartmiski & Panasiuk, 2001):
consider, for example, the derivational adjective kamenn stony that occurs
in collocations like kamenn tv stone face and kamenn srdce stony heart
(in the sense of hard heart) and that confirms the connotations of immobility,
if not also insensitivity; one verbal derivation kamenovat to stone with its
connotations of harm, sanction, enmity, unfriendliness; another verbal derivation
zkament to turn to stone with connotations of stiffness that are associated with
a strongly felt experience of fear or fright. Verificational evidence is also found
in phraseological expressions: spadl mi kmen ze srdce a stone [weight] fell from
my heart and odvalit nkomu z cesty kad kmen to roll away every stone from
someones path in the sense of paving the way for someone. Also, of course, in
phraseological analogies: bt chladn/studen jako kmen to be cold as stone,
bt tvrd jako kmen to be hard as a rock, bt tk jako kmen to be heavy as a
stone, jt ke dnu jako kmen to drop [to the bottom] like a rock.
In addition to these strong systemic connotations, there are also so-called
weak connotations that are not confirmed in the language system as a whole
but can be conveyed and understood textually. We encounter these most
often in poetry or in creative texts of all kinds, and usually in contexts that
substantiate their communicativity (Pajdziska & Tokarski, 2010; Tokarski, 2007).
The word kmen stone appears in poetic texts as a prototypically concrete
object, as a basic element found in the world, but also sometimes as an entity
endowed with a certain sensitivity to the world or its own inner life that people
cannot comprehend. A stone (kmen) can even have its own language and
spirituality: Vladimr Holan once wrote a poem called Modlitwa kamene (The
Stones Prayer) that is written entirely in stone language.5 These kinds of cases
represent implicit polemics with the stones linguistically systemic connotations
of inanimacy and insensitivity (cf. Vakov, 2010). In a similar way, the poet Jan
5 Cf. Pajdziska this volume for Wisawa Szymborskas poetic elaboration of the
characteristics of the stone in Polish linguistic worldview. Special attention is paid to the
way the poet contradicts the stones feature of muteness.
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Skcel questions connotations associated with kmen in this quatrain:
and you who dont wish to cast stones a ty jen neche kamenovat
be like a stone in your heart bu jako kmen v srdci svm
so merciful no stone has yet tak milosrdn jet nikdy
cast the first stone nehodil kmen kmenem
(Skcel, 1996, p. 154)
In Skcels polemic with our stereotypical understanding of kmen, he

introduces a paradoxical explanation of a stones mercifulness (milosrdnost),
and it becomes a mercifulness that we should take as a model if we ourselves
truly do not want to cast the first stone. The two sides of this evocative attitude
on the one side the stones emotional hardness (mt srdce jako kmen to have
the heart of a stone) and on the other the potential desire to cast the first
stone (kamenovat), a Biblical activity associated with judgment and punishment
blend surprisingly together in this verse. Whoever is actually like a stone
(jako kmen) is the very opposite of callous because stones do no harm.
Heidegger said that poetry is discourse in its pure form and that poetry
conveys most clearly the essence of speech or what speech conveys (Heidegger,
1993). This is obviously similar to the idea encountered in cognitive semantics
in connection with the study of meaning potential. Ryszard Tokarski paraphrases
Anna Wierzbicka in asserting that it is important not what an expression means
but rather what an expression could mean (Tokarski, 2007), and he then explains
why it is important that linguists examine poetic texts. We should understand
poetry as the prototypical realm for the occurrence and engagement of textual
connotations, and we should therefore take poetry into account when we study
meaning. Linguists often consider poetry to be an inappropriate source for their
research it is thought to be the realm of the linguistically exceptional or the
linguistically atypical but it is actually poetry that represents an unparalleled
source for investigating weak semantic connotations (cf. Pajdziska & Tokarski,
2010). Various types of connotations are richly realized in poetry: it is possible
not only to find them there, but also, given the poetic context, to grasp and
interpret them.
In this regard, then, we can understand poetry (and artistic writing in general)
as the prototypical realm for the evocative realization of discourse potential.
There is of course more to it than just this. Artistic texts, as sui generis
manifestations of linguistic worldviews, also represent a realm in which specific
reconceptualizations and reinterpretations of conventional worlds, stereotypes,
preconceptions, and other fixed conceptual interpretations are most often
realized. Poetry is the true realm of metaphors we live by (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989: Vakov, 2010).
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Connotations and reconceptualizations do not appear exclusively in artistic

texts, but they do so both typically and distinctively in these kinds of texts,
which is why we should consider these texts to be the prototypical realm for
their realization. We might recall the words of Jan Mukaovsk, writing about
languages aesthetic function, although we might also prefer to designate this
function by the term aesthetic or cognitive-aesthetic potential of language: The
aesthetic function... is potentially present in every manifestation of language;
hence the specific nature of poetic naming lies only in more radical revelation
of the tendency inherent in every naming act (Mukaovsk, 1941, p. 188; italics
mine).
In the foreground, then, are those dimensions of speech aspects of the
text and, in our case, of aesthetic naming that carry with them an evocation of
experiences perceived through our body, senses, and emotions and that lead us,
through such an evocation, to reach outward toward our experience of life, that
is, toward our human existentiality. When we focus instead on the sign itself (or
on the text itself, on naming itself in the abstract), then the texts relation to our
imminently given reality (in rough terms, the denotational or referential relation)
is naturally weakened.
Put succinctly: the evocative potential of words, which is given in a words
connotations, predominates over denotation, but this does not happen quite so
often in other realms of communication. Artistic texts therefore represent the
prototypical realm in which speech is released from its functional servitude: it
is not a tool, but a medium through which human existentiality is realized. And
this is wrapped up in an enjoyable experience an experience that questions
and problematizes, to be sure, but also one in which free reign is given to play,
imagination, and fascination. Even a linguist, much like a poet or philosopher,
may be inclined to ask: Who exactly are we as people? And more importantly:
if words speak, as Heidegger would have it, then what do they tell us? What
do they tell us about how we understand the world and all of its parts? What do
they tell us about things? What do they tell us about ourselves? We, as linguists,
might orient ourselves toward these considerations by taking phenomenological
philosophy as our starting point as well as by seeking analytic inspiration in
poetry.
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jzyk polski (pp. 115-134). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

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Mukaovsk, Jan. (1941). Bsnick pojmenovn a estetick funkce jazyka. In Jan

Mukaovsk, Kapitoly zesk poetiky I (pp. 180-188). Praha: Melantrich.
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Translated by David S. Danaher
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Chapter 5
Ethnolinguistics and Literature: the

Meaning of Svdom Conscience in
the Writings of Vclav Havel
David S. Danaher
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Co vechno dnenmu svtu hroz, vme velmi dobe,

vle k odvrcen tchto hrozeb je vak pramlo. ili: nesta
kat pravdu, je teba, aby se vzpamatovalo lidsk svdom.
We know quite well what threatens our world today, but

there is precious little will to deter those threats. Or rather: its not enough
to speak the truth, it is necessary to awaken our human conscience.
Vclav Havel, November 19951
1. Introduction
Of the many paradoxes associated with Vclav Havel is one that renders his
writing an ideal candidate for comparative ethnolinguistic analysis: Havel is a
Czech writer who has achieved world renown primarily through translations of his
texts into English. The implications of this paradox for reading Havel have yet to
be acknowledged in existing scholarship on Havel. Indeed, many commentators
on Havel in the English-speaking world are themselves not proficient in Czech
and have operated under the assumption that the translated versions of his
texts are canonical. This unconscious assumption fails to raise a question that
follows logically from Havels paradox: how do the English translations differ
from the original texts in Czech and how might these differences influence our
1 This citation is taken from an interview in the magazine Kavrna. Havels speeches
and other texts as president are available online, indexed by year, at http://old.hrad.cz/
president/Havel/speeches/index.html. Translations from Czech to English are mine (D.D.)
unless otherwise cited.
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reading and interpretation of them? Answering this question seems like a proper
task for a kind of literary criticism that is grounded in ethnolinguistic analysis.
The question has particular relevance with regard to key concepts or key
words in the texts words that represent core vocabulary in Havels thinking.
While Wierzbicka (1997) uses the term key word in application to a language
or culture,2 it would also seem productive to apply the same strategy to
literature: that is, to search for and analyze words that occupy a key position in
a work or even the entire oeuvre of a given author because they exhibit a
special organizational and semantic potential for that work or for that particular
authors whole system of thought. Given Havels paradox, a focus on Havelian
key words begs the question of the extent to which the meanings of their English
translations are, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, indeed equivalent to the
meanings of the Czech originals.
To be clear, I do not intend to suggest that this is a question of the translations
themselves, and I am certainly not casting doubt on the skills of Paul Wilson,
Havels main English translator, whose work is exemplary. Indeed, as we will see, the
Havelian key word under consideration here Czech svdom has an absolutely
stable translation equivalent into English conscience that the translator is
necessarily obliged to use. Rather, the nature of the question is ethnolinguistic in
Bartmiskis sense of the term in that ethnolinguistics is a discipline that:
deals with manifestations of culture in language It attempts to

discover the traces of culture in the very fabric of language, in word
meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure.
It strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it
is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject. (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, p. 10)
In this regard, ethnolinguistics has a potentially significant role to play in

literary analysis, not only for reading and interpreting literary texts in the context
of one culture but perhaps especially for comparing the interpretation of literary
works in the original with their translations.3
An application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature ought to respect
the texts as literature and strive to engage with the literary-critical discussion
2 Vakov (2010) contains a useful discussion of and commentary on Wierzbickas

understanding of the term.
3 Bartmiski (2009/2012) contains a discussion of comparative ethnolinguistics in chapter
17 where a proposal is made to initiate investigation of semantic discrepancies in terms
for values that have sociopolitical or ethical import. Examples given include democracy,
human rights, justice, sovereignty, freedom, homeland (p. 220).
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surrounding both the texts and their author. This is quite a different approach
from using works of literature as resources in ethnolinguistic analysis proper,
a valuable methodology in its own right. In the sense, however, that I am
advocating it here, the application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature may be
considered a hybrid discipline in which a literary figure is investigated with help
from an ethnolinguistic ground (see Danaher, 2007; Gross, 1997; and Vakov,
2005). Ethnolinguistics is, then, a methodological tool that can contribute to the
ongoing literary-critical dialogue.
The result of such an investigation will ideally represent a contribution
to both ethnolinguistics proper as well as literary criticism. Ethnolinguistic
grounding can open up our reading of a text by developing an understanding of
the meaning and semantic potential of key words in it, which has implications
for criticism at the textual level (the aesthetic organization of the text) as
well as at the personal level (the readers response to it).4 Put another way: if
defamiliarization is one of the main functions of literature, then it is helpful to
know the starting point of that process or the familiar meaning that the work
of literature seeks to reshape and reframe; such an awareness helps us arrive at
an appreciation of the literariness of the authors project and allows us to better
visualize our personal relationship to that project. The literary-critical discussion
may benefit from an ethnolinguistic approach because familiarity which comes
into being through the interplay of language and culture is the very thing that
ethnolinguistics seeks to uncover and describe. More specifically and in the
context of the present contribution, I will show that the status of svdom as a
key word in Vclav Havels writing and thinking is essentially a response to the
ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, p. 13).
Key words in Havels writings and thinking are not difficult to identify,5 and
they tend to be key in the broader sense of extending across a range of texts and
time periods. They are words that Havel continually returns to because they act as
metaphysical touchstones in his thinking. Svdom, especially in its relationship
to a kind of responsibility (odpovdnost) that lies at the core of human identity,
is one of those words.6 It is a key word in Havels pre-1989 so-called dissident
essays and forms the central motif of his 1984 essay entitled Politika a svdom
(Politics and Conscience). It is one of a handful of words that comprise the core
vocabulary in his philosophical letters from prison (Letters to Olga) written in
4 See Danaher 2002, 2003a, and 2003b for examples.

5 See Danaher (2010b) for an exploration of three such words.
6 Danaher (2010b, pp. 253ff) sketches an approach, amplified here, to svdom as a
Havelian key word.
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the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although not represented verbally, conscience
as Havel understands it is arguably a major theme of his plays, which often
prefigure the more rationalized explications of the same themes that we find in
the essays. Finally, conscience is also a touchstone concept in Havels post-1989
presidential speeches and other texts (1989-2003), which Havel conceived of
as a coherent collection with later speeches building upon earlier ones (and,
we might add, the post-1989 texts as a whole building upon Havels pre-1989
writings).
In analyzing Havels reframing of the meaning of svdom and its relationship
to, on the one hand, the conventional Czech understanding of svdom and,
on the other, English conscience, I will first trace the development of Havels
thought and only then provide a comparative ethnolinguistic account to ground
it. Havels approach to svdom will be captured in a sampling of key contexts
from his pre-1989 essays, in the relationship between the voice of Being (hlas
byt) and svdom as developed in Letters to Olga, and in contexts from his post-
1989 texts that reinforce and extend these considerations. In the comparative
ethnolinguistic analysis, I will focus on the etymologies of svdom and
conscience and the bearing that they have on the contemporary semantic value
of each word in Czech and English respectively, on one common metaphorical
conceptualization associated with both words, and finally on scholarly as well
as naive evidence that speaks to each words meaning.
2. The Literary Figure: Svdom as a Havelian Key

Word
In his 1984 essay Politika a svdom (Politics and conscience), Havel problematizes
the contemporary meaning of the word by arguing that modern man has
privatized conscience by locking it up in our bathrooms and thereby cutting it
off from engagement with the world. Conscience and the responsibility that
ought to come naturally with it is reduced to a personal matter or what Havel
calls a phantom of subjectivity [peluda subjektivity] (1991, p. 255; 1999, 4, p.
425). An echo of the conscience-in-the-bathroom image appears in the essay
Thriller, written about the same time, where Havel imagines modern demons
in business attire who inflict moral ruin on the world as the gods sequester
themselves in the refuge of individual conscience: Dmoni si prost dlaj,
co chtj, zatmco bohov se plae skrvaj v poslednm tulku, kter jim byl
vykzn a kter se nazv lidsk svdom [The demons simply do what they
want while the gods take diffident refuge in the final asylum to which they
have been driven, called human conscience] (1991, p. 288; 1999, 4, p. 510).
A privatized and personalized understanding of conscience a conscience
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seeking refuge from the world is decidedly not what Havel intends to invoke
when he writes dramatically of the need to awaken our human conscience in
the citation that serves as epigraph to this chapter.
Havel is not the only modern intellectual to have raised the question of the
privatization or individualization of conscience. Jedediah Purdy, for example,
has noted that in the American cultural tradition, free conscience came to be
understood as being true to oneself, which risks both failing to look beyond
oneself and thereby falling into a solipsism that is often as banal and derivative
as it is self-impressed (2010, p. 21). In more hard-hitting terms than Havel, Purdy
wonders whether the spirit of conscience that Burke called the dissidence of
dissent has arrived at the end of history as full-blown narcissism (p. 22).
In Politics and Conscience, Havel places the phrase lidsk svdom human
conscience at the very end of the essay as the culminating term in a rhetorical
question that he leaves for the reader to ponder: does not hope for a better
future, Havel asks, lie in making a real political force out of a phenomenon so
ridiculed by the technicians of power the phenomenon of human conscience?
(1991, p. 271; 1999, 4, p. 445). The essay as a whole defamiliarizes our
conventional understanding of conscience and specifically its relationship to
politics. By liberating conscience from the confines of the individual mind by
freeing it from Purdys narcissism Havel presents a possible way out of the
existential crisis that engulfs the modern world.
The groundwork for Havels reframing of conscience in the essays of the mid-
1980s was laid in his 1979-1983 philosophical letters from prison, published in
1983 as Dopisy Olze (Letters to Olga), in which ruminations on svdom comprise a
central theme. Foreshadowing the bathroom image, Havel notes that conscience
as an active force in the world is but a shadow of what it ought to be: it has
become perfunctory, ritualized, a mere formality. The crisis of the modern world
is a crisis of human identity and human responsibility, but Havel insists that an
orientation toward Being which conscience somehow embodies has not
disappeared. After all, who would dare to deny that they have a conscience?
(letter 142). The voice of Being has not died out: we know it summons us [e
ns vol], and as human beings, we cannot pretend not to know what it is calling
us to [k emu ns vol] (letter 142). We have many ways in the modern world of
drowning out that voice ([i]t is just that these days, it is easier to cheat, silence
or lie to that voice [letter 142]), but no matter how badly we behave, there is
always a voice in some corner of our spirit saying that we ought not to have
done so.
Indeed, throughout the letters Havel emphasizes the dialogic nature of
conscience and its inherent relationship to what he terms the voice of Being
[hlas byt]. This frees conscience from its cage of narcissism as conscience is
understood to be not so much an inner, personal voice but rather an internalized
manifestation of the voice of Being itself. In letter 139, Havel claims that while
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the hlas byt informs the voice of conscience, it is greater than that personal
voice. At the same time, the personal voice of conscience manifests the
interconnectedness of two worlds, the world of man (the concrete human here
and now) and the world of the transcendental (of God, of the absolute). These
worlds are one and the same, but our access to Being is necessarily grounded in
the former: Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything; it is the Being
of everything and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world
of mine and through this I of mine (letter 139). Conscience is internal to the
individual only in the sense that its personalized voice represents a concrete
realization of the transcendent voice of Being: rather than saying that conscience
(Being) is in us, it would be more true to say, in Havels interpretation, that we are
in conscience (Being).
Havels focus on the voice of Being in its relation to conscience is not
surprising given Heideggers influence largely via Jan Patoka, Charter 77s
philosophical godfather on Czechoslovak dissident intellectuals. According
to Hannah Arendt, Heideggers later writings are unusual in the Western
philosophical tradition for Heideggers emphasis on hearing over seeing as a
primary metaphor for thinking: Metaphors drawn from hearing are very rare in
the history of philosophy, the most notable modern exception being the late
writings of Heidegger, where the thinking ego hears the call of Being (Arendt,
1978, p. 111).7 Havel seems to have borrowed Heideggers metaphor of the
soundless voice of Being and elaborated it in his treatment of conscience.
In Letters to Olga, Havel hangs his philosophical argument concerning
conscience on one concrete and rather trivial experience: you are in an empty
night tram and have to decide whether or not to pay the fare for the ride. Your
voice of conscience is activated, and Havel insists that the resulting inner
dialogue takes the form of an exchange between your ego and a partner that
is outside of your ego and therefore not identical with it:
This partner, however, is not standing beside me; I cant see it, nor
can I quit its sight: its eyes and its voice follow me everywhere; I can
neither escape it nor outwit it: it knows everything. Is it my so-called
inner voice, my superego, my conscience? Certainly, if I hear it
calling me to responsibility [slym-li jeho voln k odpovdnosti], I
hear this call within me [slym toto voln v sob], in my mind and my
7 In this connection, Arendt notes the Jewish tradition of a God who is heard but not
seen and compares Hebrew truth, which is heard, versus the Greek vision of the true
(1978, p. 111). Some implications of Arendts statement with regard to the ethnolinguistics
of the senses are discussed in Vakov 2007 (pp. 176ff) and Vakov et al. 2005 (pp. 98,
109, 132).
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heart; it is my own experience, profoundly so, though different from

the experiences mediated to me by my senses. This, however, does
nothing to alter the fact that the voice addresses me and enters into
conversation with me, in other words, it comes to my I which I trust
is not schizoid from the outside. (letter 137)
One thing seems clear to Havel: that our I, if it has not completely suppressed
its orientation toward Being, has a sense of responsibility purely and simply
because it relates intrinsically to Being as that in which it feels the only coherence,
meaning and the somehow inevitable clarification of everything that exists
because it hears within and around itself the voice in which this Being addresses
and calls out to it [kterm ho toto byt oslovuje a vol] (letter 137).8
Commenting on Havels understanding of the relation between conscience
and responsibility, Radim Palou has written that Havelian responsibility exerts
an ever-present claim upon us and that this claim may be expressed as the
mere voice of conscience (Palou, 1997, p. 171). Havel insists that we rely
on this voice as a moral instinct. It represents something simultaneously inside
and outside of us: Indeed, it is through conscience that a demand to be in
harmony with the worlds moral order is exerted upon us (Palou, 1997, p. 171).
Conscience initiates a dialogue with Being.
Havels reframing suggests a latent dramatic potential in the voice of
conscience and its relation to the voice of Being. The absolute horizon of
meaning the voice of Being that calls out [vol] to us is present in us
not only as an assumption, but also as a source of humanity [zdroj lidskosti]
and a challenge [apel] (letter 95). Conscience is a uniquely human experience
that serves as a challenge or appeal [apel], and this is a characterization that
explicitly references Havels dramatic style, which is associated with the
theater of the appeal [divadlo apelu].9 (This leads us into another argument
that Havel is primarily a playwright because theater of the appeal is the genre
that best expresses his approach to meaning and the key role that conscience
plays in it but one that would be more profitably undertaken in another
venue.)
8 In an earlier letter, Havel defines responsibility [odpovdnost] in terms of being

responsible to or for something else (one responds or odpovd) that is usually concrete
and immediate, although not only so. The particular incarnation of ones responsibility
does not exhaust the matter: there is always something more, something outside,
something that transcends [pesahuje] it, and sometimes we call this feeling conscience,
and in doing so we localize it within ourselves (letter 109).
9 For an account of Havel as playwright with a discussion of his association with theater
of the appeal, see Rocamora 2004.
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By the time Havel becomes president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the
Czech Republic, his conceptual reframing of svdom has been established. The
presidential speeches and other published texts from this time reinforce and
extend this reframing, continuing to insist on the importance of conscience (as
Havel describes it) for confronting the existential and moral crisis that defines
the modern world. A non-exhaustive list of post-1989 contexts that reinforce
and extend his reframing would include the following:
(1) The argument that conscience ought not to be understood as

psychologized or localized in our minds is reinforced in, among others, a
speech at the University of Malta (Valetta), where Havel notes that svdom
is activated when we fail to do something good or when we do something
wrong. This, however, is a psychologized characterization of conscience as
a mere sentiment as if conscience was a particular segment of our brain,
identifiable within a certain area, or some kind of singular feature of a human
being (Valletta 2002). The reality is more complicated: responsibility means
awareness [jsme si vdomi] that there is someone who watches us, and we
are intrinsically conscious of that silent eye and relate to it.
(2) In place of psychological localization, the dialogic aspects of conscience

are described in a 1991 speech before a joint meeting of the Czechoslovak
parliament (Vystoupen ve federlnm shromdn, 24 September) where
Havel emphasizes both that svdom is activated in any kind of dialogue
and that dialogue means both speaking and listening.10 This sentiment is
echoed a decade later in a speech given in New York when Havel states
that although each of us may have a conscience, not all of us heed its
voice and many of us have become skilled at deceiving it.
(3) Conscience as a point of access to the transcendent is consistently reinforced

(for example, in the major international speeches given at Asahi Hall in Japan in
1992 and George Washington University in 1993). It is subjectively through our
individual consciences that we establish a connection with the metaphysical
order that both includes and transcends us. In a 1996 speech at Trinity College,
Havel quite explicitly defines conscience and responsibility as a certain
attitude of man toward that which reaches beyond him, that is, toward infinity
and eternity, the transcendental, the mystery of the world, the order of Being.
This sentiment is echoed in his 1999 speech at Macalester College where
conscience is equated with a moral order that promotes love for fellow humans.
10 This speech is available only in the original Czech.
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(4) A final theme reinforced in the post-1989 texts is that conscience is the
hope for the future, a sleeping force whose potential has yet to be tapped:
A conscience slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that
is what we have to put our trust in (Harvard University 1995).
(5) Havel extends his pre-1989 account by granting conscience a key role in
bringing down the socialist regimes in Central Europe (Davos 1992) with
the corollary that an understanding of politics as moral conscience was
what the post-1989 East could offer the West (Warsaw 1999). For Havel,
this was, in fact, the true meaning and lesson of the dissident movement
in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere: Our fundamental experience
has taught us very clearly that only politics that is preceded by conscience
really has any meaning11 (Warsaw 1999).
(6) A further extension derives directly from the argument made in

Politics and conscience (as well as in a number of Havels plays): that
the technological, scientific age of humanity an age that privileges
explaining over understanding12 lacks a conscience in the sense that
Havel conceives of it. In a speech in February 1990 to commemorate
the anniversary of the 1948 communist-party putsch in Czechoslovakia,
Havel notes: Science [vda] does not have a conscience. It is certainly
beautiful and important, but the human spirit is not mere rationality
[rozum]. It is judgment. Deliberation. Conscience. Decency [slunost].
Tact. Love for those close to us. Responsibility. Courage. Stepping away
from the self. Doubt. Even humor13 (Prague, 25 February 1990). In other
speeches, Havel similarly suggests that human conscience lags behind
technological and scientific knowledge, which may very well be the
modern worlds defining dilemma.
(7) Havels final post-1989 extension is his suggestion that conscience plays the same
key role in shaping modern democratic political communities that it played in the
dissident era under socialism. Democracy is defined as an unending journey
and a constant appeal [trval vzva] to the human spirit and human conscience
(Prague, 12 March 1996). The task of Europe the meaning of which ought not
11 The English version of this speech online has a serious mistranslation, rendering the
original Czech politika, kter pedchz svdom as politics that precede conscience,
which is the exact opposite of the intended meaning.
12 For a discussion of the dichotomy between explaining and understanding that underlies
much of Havels thinking, see Danaher (2007).
13 A translation of this speech is not available.
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to be reduced to cooperation on economic and political matters is to once

again find its conscience and sense of responsibility in the world (Aachen 1996).
Cultivating this extended understanding is the chief responsibility of intellectuals,
who are the conscience of society (Wellington 1995).
By way of summing up Havels reshaping of the meaning of conscience

over the course of his literary and political career, we might look back at the
epigraph to this contribution, in which he plainly pins hope for the future of
humanity on the awakening of human conscience. What Havel means by this
is just what we have explored in this section on conceptualizing conscience
as literary figure. The awakening of human conscience and Havel frequently
insists on the adjective human in reference to conscience as if to continually
emphasize the responsibility that having a conscience places on us as human
beings14 presupposes a reconceptualization of its spiritual and cultural
meaning. While a degenerate understanding of conscience that ultimately
leads to solipsism localizes it in the individuals mind as an exclusively
internal dialogue, Havel imagines conscience as a transcendent dialogue
with Being an appeal for engagement in and with the world that has the
potential to be a game-changing political and moral force.
If lexis is a classifier of social experience that provides access to the
conceptual sphere, to the realm of ideas and images important in a given
culture (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 17), then Havel seeks to influence the
cultural sphere through a careful and systematic redefinition of the meaning
of human conscience. The status of svdom as a key word in Havels thinking
is therefore a response to the ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have
cognitive reality.
The extent to which Havels redefinition of svdom differs from the
conventional meaning of the concept remains, however, to be determined. In
other words, if Havel defamiliarizes, then what is his starting point, the familiar
ground? And to extend this line of thinking: is that ground the same for Czech
svdom as it is for English conscience? These are essentially ethnolinguistic
questions, and it is to them that I now turn.
14 Indeed, the adjective lidsk (along with the derived word lidskost) represents another
key word in Havel, especially in his post-1989 texts: in the presidential speeches, Havel
uses this adjective in combination with over one hundred different nouns. Translating
lidsk into English is not as straightfoward as it might seem since its meaning can subtly
blend the meaning of the two separate (although obviously related) English words human
and humane. See Danaher (2010a).
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3. The Ethnolinguistic Ground: Svdom and

Conscience Compared
In comparing Czech svdom with English conscience, we first note that they
are, etymologically speaking, parallel: each has a prefix meaning with (s- and
con- respectively) attached to a suffixed root with the original meaning of
knowledge (-vdom and -science).15 The origin of both words implies a form of
mental deliberation that comes with knowledge of the world, and this brings
them close to Havels extended definition: conscience establishes a relationship
between ourselves (our inner voice) and events in the world at large (the voice of
Being). In other words, conscience responds to questions that are raised by our
experience in and knowledge of the world: what we know should therefore be
closely related to what we do and how we act (Saul, 1997, p. 181).
The etymological identity already exposes, however, a crucial difference
in how the words resonate in each language: the Czech root for knowing
(-vd-) is more etymologically and semantically transparent in a host of other
common words related to knowledge, consciousness, and awareness than the
comparable English root (-sci-), which, if anything, might tend to associate
English conscience with a particular scientific kind of knowledge. A partial list
of Czech words where -vd- is immediately perceivable and where a connection
between svdom and knowing or awareness is therefore strongly felt include
the following: vdt to know (Polish wiedzie), vda scholarship, science (Pol.
wiedza), vdom consciousness (Pol. wiadomo), povdom awareness (Pol.
wiadomo), and uvdomit si to realize, become aware of (Pol. uwiadomi
sobie). By comparison, the -sci- in conscience is conceptually opaque: even the
connection between conscience and consciousness is, at best, only tenuously
felt. Whereas Czech has one root that serves as a semantic locus for many
experiences of knowing, the multiplicity of English roots for knowing fails to
activate a connection between conscience and Being that Havel privileges and
extends in his interpretation.
A crucial concept in the Czech vdom-svdom nexus proves to be the Czech
terms for witnessing: svdek witness (Pol. wiadek) and svdectv testimony (Pol.
15 Etymological and lexical information on svdom is taken from Gebauer (1970),

Jungmann (1989 [1835]), and Machek (1968). In Polish we encounter a somewhat different
situation. The word wiadomo follows the same etymological path as conscience and
svdom, but it means consciousness or awareness. In Polish, conscience is sumienie, which
consists of the now unproductive prefix s- with and Old Polish mnienie (thinking or
conviction: cf. Greek mnme memory or Latin men, mentis reason). I am grateful to Adam
Gaz for this clarification.
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wiadectwo). The Czech words derivationally conflate knowledge, witnessing,

and conscience.16 In Jungmanns entry on svdom, the second meaning is listed
as svdectv, glossed as Latin testimonium, and it is this witnessing connection
that is arguably more activated in the meaning of Czech svdom as opposed to
English conscience. The association of svdom with svdectv also helps lay the
groundwork for Havels creative extension of the meaning of the former. Indeed,
in an analysis of faith and belief in Havels writings, Milan Balabn sees Havels
concept of the absolute horizon of Being as the most important witness
[svdek]... of the deliberations that we have with ourselves on a daily basis
(2009, pp. 43-44): in other words, svdom in Havels extended philosophical
sense is a dialogue with the svdek of Being, and this is an active kind of
witnessing since we, who also belong to Being, both observe and simultaneously
participate in it.
Although Balabn does not mention it, it would be productive to read Havels
plays within what might be called a witnessing framework: the theater of the
appeal activates conscience by transforming theater-goers in the audience
into witnesses. The witnessing element in Havels dramatic style is embodied
in particular by the character of Vank, who appears in three of Havels plays
and has been turned into a theatrical device by other playwrights (Goetz-
Stankiewicz, 1987). As Havel himself has said about the dramatic principle
that is Vank:
[H]e does not usually do or say much, but his presence on stage and
his being what he is make his environment expose itself in one way
or another He is, then, a kind of key, opening certain always
different vistas onto the world a kind of catalyst, a gleam if you
will, in whose light we view a landscape. And although without it we
should scarcely be able to see anything at all, it is not the gleam that
matters, but the landscape. (quoted in Rocamora, 2004, p. 381)
If the semantic development of Czech svdom in relation to other words

in the same etymological and derivational network reaffirms a connection to
witnessing, the meaning of English conscience seems to have shifted away
from the knowledge-witnessing relationship toward the more personalized or
privatized understanding of conscience that Havel aggressively polemicizes with
in Politics and conscience and elsewhere. This development also seems to have
16 Cf. also the situation in English. The ModE witness comes from OldE witnes knowledge,
and wit can be linked with the Latin videre see or Sanskrit vidati (he) knows, which
contains the same root as the Polish widzie see or wiedzie know.
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run parallel with the narrowing of the meaning of English conscious as outlined
in Humphrey (1999, pp. 117ff). Humphrey notes the etymological structure of
the word and states that the original meaning of the Latin verb conscire (from
which the adjective conscius is derived) was to share knowledge widely. As
time passed, the usage changed, and it shifted to mean sharing knowledge with
some people but not others, sharing it within a small circle and thus being
privy to a secret (p. 118). This knowledge circle narrowed even further until
eventually it included just a single person, the subject who was conscious (p.
118). Humphrey sums up:
Thus, as the English language has evolved (and perhaps as the users
of the language have become more self-concerned and introspective),
the meaning of the word conscious has not only become narrower and
narrower, it has in effect turned around. Rather like the word window,
which has changed in meaning from a hole where the wind come in
to a hole where the wind does not come in, conscious has changed
from having shared knowledge to having intimate knowledge not
shared with anyone except oneself. (p. 119)
The parallel with a privatized conscience (or one that is locked up in the
bathroom) is rather striking.
At the very least, the narrowing of the dialogic aspects of English
conscious its journey from sharing to not sharing is similar to the way in
which the voice of conscience has come to be internalized. Both svdom
and conscience share a conventional metaphorical association with a voice
(Ulin, 1999), but the schema suggested by the voice metaphor is open
to a variety of elaborations. Is it a voice entirely inside ones head an
inner dialogue with oneself or, as Havel advocates, an inner voice that
instantiates a connection with the very voice of Being? In other words, we
conventionally understand conscience as something internal to each of us,
whereas Havel instead argues that we are participants in a dialogue with
Being that is activated by conscience.
This distinction evokes Erich Fromms writing on modern identity and
specifically the opposition that he details between, on the one hand, having or
using and, on the other, being. Fromm wrote: Man became a collector and a user.
More and more, the central experience of his life became I have and I use, and
less and less I am. The means namely, material welfare, production, and the
production of goods thereby became the ends (2005, p. 21). In Fromms terms,
then, a privatized conscience is one that we have and that we use. Opposed to
this is Havels understanding of conscience an understanding grounded in the
knowing-witnessing nexus that is much less a matter of practical utility and
much more a matter of who we fundamentally are.
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Existing scholarship on the conventional meaning of conscience confirms a

tendency toward conceptual narrowing (personalization) and a having/using
interpretation. Miroslava Nejedl (2001) studied the semantics of Czech vdom
(consciousness) and svdom in comparison with English and concluded in part
that English conscience seems to be understood as more of a mechanism than
Czech svdom: with conscience there is more of an element of individual will
that makes its function potentially controllable by an exertion of that will (2001,
p. 29). This correlates with a sense of duty or moral obligation in conscience, a
sense not as strongly felt in the meaning of svdom. The qualms or prickings
of Czech svdom are considered to be phenomena independent of the will of
the subject who is undergoing them (p. 30). Perhaps another way of making the
same point would be to say that English conscience in comparison with Czech
svdom is conceptualized more as an ability, one that we have and that we use.
In this connection and in the American context, we might mention Stanley
Fishs recent discussion (Fish, 2009) in the New York Times of the so-called
conscience clause that allows medical professionals to deny healthcare (for
example, contraception) that they believe runs counter to their own moral or
religious beliefs. Fish notes that it is so named because it affirms the claims
of conscience ones inner sense of what is right against the competing
claims of professional obligations. He then, however, demonstrates that the
meaning of conscience has radically changed over time. Fish cites Hobbes,
who had quite a different sense of the word and who argued that considering
conscience to be the private arbiter of right and wrong was a corrupted usage
invented by those who desired to elevate their own opinions to the status
of reliable knowledge and try to do so by giving them that reverenced name of
Conscience. The sense, then, that conscience represents an inner mechanism
for determining right from wrong is entrenched in modern English to such an
extent that it has become the substance of legal maneuvering, but, at the same
time, this entrenched sense is not entirely beyond dispute.
Predating and foreshadowing Fishs discussion of the conscience clause is
Anna Wierzbickas tracing of the historical development of the English concepts
right and wrong and the extension of these originally conversational words
into the ethical realm a realm that includes conscience (Wierzbicka, 2006).
She argues that the rise of right and wrong is a language- and culture-specific
phenomenon, and it sets English apart from other European languages in which
good and bad which have a more general meaning and are less subject to an
individuals will still hold sway. She writes: [T]he ascendancy of right and
wrong over good and bad seems to reflect a more rational, more procedural,
more reason-based approach to human life and a retreat from a pure distinction
between GOOD and BAD unsupported by any appeal to reason, procedures,
methods, or intersubjectively available evidence (2006, p. 72). In Wierzbickas
analysis, ethical decision-making has evolved into a matter of good thinking (like
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scientific thinking) and interpersonal validation: It is a rational ethics, an ethics

that doesnt need to be grounded in metaphysics (in particular, in God) but can
be grounded in reason (2006, p. 72).17
The concepts of right and wrong are, in this view, Anglo-cultural constructs
(Wierzbicka, 2006, p. 65). When other concepts are defined in terms of right
and wrong, these concepts are then imbued with the Anglo-specific associations
related to right and wrong. In this regard, Wierzbicka specifically mentions
conscience, which is defined in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy as the
sense of right and wrong in an individual (p. 66). She notes that this was not,
in fact, how philosophers who were not speakers of modern English understood
conscience, and gives the example of Aquinas: But for Aquinas, conscience was
not the sense of right and wrong, but rather the sense of bonum and malum,
that is, good and bad For speakers of most modern European languages, too,
conscience is usually linked with the notions good and bad, rather than right
and wrong (p. 66).
If Nejedl, Fish, and Wierzbicka are correct, then we could conclude
that conventional usage of English conscience strongly implies the kind
of understanding that Havel cautions against: it has been privatized and
rationalized, reduced to a mechanism in each of our minds that is more or less
subject to our control. The conventional meaning of Czech svdom, however,
seems to resist this process whether it be because the concepts of good and bad
still predominate over right and wrong (Wierzbicka) and individual will is less
emphasized (Nejedl) or, and this might be stating the same idea in different
terms, the relationship between an individual and her or his awareness (vdom)
of the world a relationship mediated by svdom and its semantic/derivational
network is more foregrounded. In Fromms terms, English conscience privileges
a having/using mode while Czech svdom leaves more semantic space for an
interpretation in the being mode a space that Havel uses to full effect in his
conceptual reimagining of the import of svdom for the modern world.
By way of summing up this comparative analysis, we might move away from
scholarly investigations and consider nave evidence of the semantic distinction
between Czech svdom and English conscience. Comparison of the respective
English and Czech Wikipedia pages devoted to conscience and svdom provides
17 Both Wierzbickas focus on a rational ethics and the notion that English conscience
in opposition to Czech svdom might be understood more as a mechanism or ability
raise the question of whether reason itself is also a mechanism or ability. It can be and, of
course, has been (or conventionally is?) construed as such, but this may very well also be
a culturally grounded understanding. For a persuasive counter-argument in the cognitive-
linguistics tradition, see Johnson 2007.
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just this sort of evidence and confirms the analysis that has been offered here.18
The English page from the outset defines conscience as an aptitude, faculty,
intuition, or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong;
dialogic aspects of the term are downplayed while its potential link to reason
is highlighted (if questioned). A possible feature of the nave semantics of
conscience that has not been considered here but perhaps ought to be looked
at in the future is its close association to religious or spiritual traditions:
this association is given a special status in the English but not the Czech
Wikipedia entry.
In contrast, the Czech page does not mention right or wrong, and the
focus from the outset is on the dialogic aspects of svdom, which is defined
as vnitn instance, mlenliv voln, kter vede soudy lovka o tom, co sm
zpsobil nebo co se chyst zpsobit [an inner authority, a silent calling that
guides a persons judgments about what he or she has done or intends to do].
Beyond the dialogic aspects, there is an emphasis on svdom as a primarily
procedural ability (schopnost) as sebereflexe, tj. schopnost uvaovat o sob
samm, podvat se na sebe jinma oima ne je pohled vlastnho zjmu a
prosazovn [self-reflection, ie, the ability to contemplate ones own self, to look
at oneself through eyes other than ones concerned with ones own interests
and with self-promotion] and this is not privileged in the English entry. In
the procedural part of the definition we also find a suggestion that svdom
inherently involves transcending self-interest whereas in the English entry on
conscience, this semantic aspect is not foregrounded in any way other than
stating that conscience is associated with moral evaluations (of right and
wrong).
The Czech page also has a section devoted to an etymological breakdown
of the word svdom and in which the vdom svdom relationship is made
explicit. This relationship is further underlined by the mention of fixed phrases
in Czech that contain both words: for example, the oath uttered when assuming
an important office that states that the person promises to carry out the duties
podle nejlepho vdom a svdom (literally, according to the best of ones
consciousness and conscience). English does not have an equivalent.
The Wikipedia comparison serves to highlight the semantic differences between
svdom and conscience that we have previously noted. Some of these differences
are stark while others are more a matter of nuance or emphasis. Considered
together, they demonstrate that the conventional meaning of svdom which is
18 The English entry is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience, and the

Czech at http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svdom. Wikipedia entries frequently change, and
these pages were last accessed April 4, 2011.
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Havels conceptual ground, his starting point already contains the seeds that will
grow into Havels defamiliarizing semantic extension: conscience as, potentially,
a moral and political force to be reckoned with in the modern world.19 In contrast
to the meaning of svdom, the entrenched meaning of English conscience is
decidedly less amenable to the kind of aesthetic extension that Havel has in
mind: the conventional understanding of conscience is, in fact, much closer to the
privatized, mechanistic conceptualization that Havel sets out to undermine.
4. Conclusion
In other words, the semantics of svdom provides more fertile ground for Havels
argument than does the semantics of conscience: the English reader of Havel is
obliged to make a greater leap of faith in following the line of Havels thinking
because conscience is not, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, a semantic
equivalent for svdom. There is a hint of a transcendent breeze in svdom that
conscience lacks, and this seems to be true for a range of Havelian key words in
comparison with their translations into English (Danaher, 2010b). Havels paradox
that he is a Czech writer who has gained world-wide influence as an intellectual
through translations of his texts is a phenomenon that warrants consideration,
and ethnolinguistics can provide a methodology to ground the investigation.
In conducting comparative ethnolinguistic research, Bartmiski has noted that
comparing concepts related to spiritual culture presents the greatest challenge:
The comparative procedure is relatively straightforward in the

case of objects unambiguously identifiable on the basis of
extralinguistic empirical observation, such as the sun, stars, the
elements, plants, animals or body parts. It is more difficult in the
case of artifacts, such as clothes, prepared foods, kitchen utensils
etc., very different in different cultures and environments. The
most problematic are components of the spiritual culture, such
as political, social or moral concepts and ideas. These are mainly
untranslatable, specific to individual cultures and languages.
(2009/2012, p. 216)
19 In light of Havels argument, should conscience be added to the list of value terms
that Bartmiski (2009/2012, p. 220) suggests be ethnolinguistically studied because they
have a direct bearing on sociopolitical and ethical questions? If Havel is to be taken at his
word, then discrepancies in how we understand the term and how it functions in both
our individual lives and the life of society may well lie at the heart of the success or
failure of politics in the modern world.
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In analyzing terms related to spiritual culture, it is perhaps necessary to

delve into literature and ethnolinguistic literary analysis of the kind
exemplified here to help us better grasp the entrenched semantic value
of each term and to help us better perceive its familiar starting point.
Literature is, after all, at least partly concerned with reframing entrenched
meanings, and I am reminded in this regard of Milan Kunderas famous
assertion regarding the novel: A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing
but a long quest for some elusive definitions (1988, p. 127).20 If literature
reshapes familiar meanings as part of its core mission and if the cognitive
definition itself is, as Bartmiski compellingly argues, a cultural narrative then
an ethnolinguistic approach to literature has a potentially crucial role to play in
both ethnolinguistic analysis proper as well as literary criticism. It is in this dual
spirit that the present contribution is offered.21
20 Note the recent best-selling epic novel by Jonathan Franzen (2010) entitled Freedom:
the novel itself is a narrative reframing of the meaning of this key cultural term in the
American context.
21 For supporting my investigations of key words in Havels writings, I am grateful
to Christopher Ott, Irena Vakov, Daniel Vojtch, and to students in my monograph
course on Havel at the University of Wisconsin (http://web.mac.com/pes/havel/). Sincere
appreciation is extended to the Kruh ptel eskho jazyka affiliated with Charles
University in Prague for inviting me to present on svdom and other words in November
2010. Many thanks also to Adam Gaz, Megan Munroe, Ruth Ann Stodola, and Jos Vergara
for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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References
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Balabn, Milan. (2009). Vra (u) Vclava Havla. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Danaher, David S. (2002). The semantics of pity and alost in a literary context.
Glossos, 3. [http://seelrc.org/glossos/issues/3/; last accessed Feb 19, 2013]
Danaher, David S. (2003a). A cognitive approach to metaphor in prose: Truth and

falsehood in Leo Tolstoys The Death of Ivan Ilich. Poetics Today, 24 (3), 239-
269.
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FALSEHOOD in Russian and the Image of the Black Sack in Tolstois The Death of
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Bloomington: Slavica.
Danaher, David S. (2007). Cognitive poetics and literariness: metaphorical analogy

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as (2006). Poetyka kognitywna a literacko: analogia metaforyczna w Annie
Kareninie. Przestrzenie teorii, 6, 277-298.]
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literature: lidskost and duchovnost in the writings of Vclav Havel. Roenka text
zahraninch profesor, 4, 27-54. Prague: Charles University.
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accessed Feb 17, 2013]
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Havel, Vclav. (1991). Open Letters. Trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Knopf.
Havel, Vclav. (1999). Spisy. Praha: Torst.
Humphrey, Nicholas. (1999). A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of
Consciousness. New York: Copernicus.
Johnson, Mark. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human

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Jungmann, Josef. (1989 [1835]). Slovnk esko-nmeck. Praha: Academia.
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Chapter 6
Cognitive Play in Daniil Kharms Blue

Notebook 101
Jos Vergara
University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA
1. Introduction
As a master of the alogical and nonsensical, Daniil Kharms forces language into
the most unusual of combinations. From his nonsensical poetry and childrens
literature to the short Incidents and other prose, he intentionally brings together
situations, words, and meanings in odd compositional arrangements. Through
this deconstructive, seemingly anarchic method he activates certain linguistic
functions and allows his readers to see beyond the logical world and into what
he considered the world of true meanings (Kharms & Vvendensky, 1997, pp.
248-250) and the purity of order (Kharms, 2001, p. 79-80). The attainment
of this higher order comes from a radical rethinking of literature and language
as such. For Kharms writing is a performance and reading an event that actively
implicates his audience. If we typically use language to construct and to ground
ourselves within reality, then Kharms language attempts to reverse such a
process and reveal the inconsistencies of existence by releasing words from
their traditional meaning in this cognitive space. What we see, instead, are the
new and explosive meanings created by those juxtapositions. The reader is able
to experience the world anew due to Kharms awareness of cognitive play.
Adopting a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach can help elucidate exactly
how and why Kharms artistic methods manage to accomplish these goals.
Though the language of his Incidents cycle may be straightforward, the intricate
manner in which Kharms constructed the texts speaks to a desire to invert
expectations and experience on many levels. Neil Carrick has defined Kharms
prose as a collision with a familiar, hackneyed narrative sequence (Carrick,
1995, p. 708), that is archetypal narratives and literary utterances. Kharms relies
on this pre-text (a prototype), understood by the reader on some level, to invert
1 I would like to thank David Danaher, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Jenny Jalack for their
careful readings of this chapter in its various stage of development.
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the art of writing at large. I argue that his generic and stylistic parodies are in turn
supplemented by the parodic treatment of linguistic regularities. In short, an
awareness of the cognitive and linguistic tricks that Kharms uses will illuminate
the literariness of his prose. These techniques include blending concepts and
construals,2 reversing prototypical reading processes, and layering of metaphor
and metonymy. Such an analysis provides further insights into the nature of the
authors choices in language and how these impact readers intake of the text.
Jerzy Bartmiskis approach to ethnolinguistic analysis has been a vital catalyst
in the development of these ideas. Bartmiski has proposed that culture exists
in language and constitutes its inalienable component (Bartmiski, 2009/2012,
p. 11). The manner in which we comprehend both texts (cultural artifacts) and the
world is thus always linked to the language we use. Moreover, Bartmiski assigns
the following elements to the style of a text: the worldview projected in a given
style, the ontological status of that worldview, the rationality and communicative
intentions it assumes (p. 14). Each statement, whether written or spoken, then
presupposes a particular conceptualization of reality. Behind this outlook lie the
cognitive (or ethnolinguistic) values found inherently in the words one uses.
Using Blue Notebook 10 (Golubaya tetrad 10) as a primary case study,
I will explore the connections between Kharms prose and the cognitive and
ethnolinguistic processes at work in order to describe how Kharms manipulates
construals for precise aesthetic effect. The cognitive-semantic relationship
between the concepts BE and HAVE in Russian plays a most prominent role
throughout Kharms Incidents cycle, a collection of thirty texts with little in
common other than a predilection for senseless violence, unexpected turns of
action, and the disorientating jerk of an unresolved ending. As such, I will begin
with a short overview of the linguistic details concerning these two concepts
EXISTENCE (BEING) and POSSESSION (HAVING) in relation to Kharms text. My
focus will fall on apparently minute details when discussing this connection to
Kharms Blue Notebook 10 more closely, but linguistic analysis reveals exactly
why these elements make the text so particularly effective and rich in meaning.
After detailing Kharms use of BE/HAVE, I will consider additional related forms of
cognitive play in Blue Notebook 10: the scale of subject definiteness as well
as modes of sentence scanning. These considerations will lead naturally to a brief
examination of Kharms cognitive play in other stories from the same cycle. Finally,
2 Taylor defines construal as the process by which a given state is structured by a

language-user for purposes of its linguistic expression (2002, p. 589). Each individual
construes any given phenomenon (a scene, person, object, etc.) in a different manner
depending on his or her mental experience. For example, the lamp may be above the
table or, conversely, the table below the lamp. The notion comes from Langackers
Cognitive Grammar, whose author in a recent publication defines it as our manifest ability
to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways (Langacker, 2008, p. 43).
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I will conclude by reflecting on translations of Kharms Blue Notebook 10 in

order to further elucidate the cognitive-ethnolinguistic essence of my analysis.
Ultimately, I will show how the meaning of Kharms texts is not only a product, but
inherently a function of his language as well. The meaning or message that Kharms
wishes to convey is encoded into the very fabric of his words.
2. BEING and HAVING in Russian

Much has been written about the connection in Russian between BE and HAVE,
which may be understood either purely linguistically or from a wider cognitive
and philosophical perspective. Here I will provide an outline of materials most
relevant to the present analysis. Most importantly, Steven Clancy (2001; 2005)
has proposed a semantic nexus for BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING that takes
into account all the multifarious lexical and semantic notions shared by BE and
HAVE. The two concepts are shown to express many categories of meaning. Table
6.1 features a selection of Clancys findings.
Table 6.1 The BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING NEXUS (adapted from Clancy, 2001)
CATEGORY BECOMING BEING UNBECOMING
MAKE/DO
existence BE (UNMAKE)
BECOME
GIVE, TAKE TAKE, GIVE
possession HAVE
GET LOSE
creation CREATE EXIST DESTROY
These conceptual items, not always expressed by verbs, make up the notions
most likely to become new expressions of BE and HAVE, as well as the semantic ideas
most likely to be grammaticalized as auxiliary verbs (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Kharms
manipulation of construals is rooted in these cognitive-semantic categories, and I
will show how his untraditional approach to writing partly gains its effect from an
awareness of cognitive linguistic play at the syntactic and lexical levels. Clancys
nexus will serve as the primary analytical tool toward this understanding.
Clancy demonstrates the correlation between the two concepts (see
Figure 6.1).3 Among the various Slavic languages, Russian features the most
3 Clancys model might benefit from reworking in terms of Fauconnier and Turners (2003)
theory of conceptual blending, but this falls outside the scope of the present contribution.
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complicated semantic map4 for BE/HAVE. Due to similar mapping in meaning,

structure, function and a lack of a clear verbal expression for HAVE, the two
concepts are often expressed in the same manner. As will be shown, Kharms
texts, particularly Blue Notebook 10, make use of this blending that allows
for an expansion of meaning.
existence abstract idea possession
location/ presence/
position absence location availability
auxiliary impersonal auxiliary modality
copula joining idea relationship

BE HAVE
Fig. 6.1 Blended Prototype Model (from Clancy, 2001, p. 4)
A historical analysis of the shift from BE to HAVE for all languages shows that
the roots of this blended prototype model lie in metonymy and metaphor, the
former a particularly critical device in Kharms works. An expression for EXISTENCE
can appear by metonymy, reinterpreted as metaphor, from an expression for
RHEMATIC POSSESSION (Koch, 1999, p. 297). Kharms utilizes such a metonymic
and metaphoric link throughout Blue Notebook 10 with reference to body
parts and BEING; this cognitive play elevates, if subtly and at the level of the
individual words, the meaning of the whole text and endows it with greater
philosophical import. It moves POSSESSION into the sphere of EXISTENCE. These
are some of the linguistic nuances that Kharms Incidents frequently aestheticize.
3. The BE/HAVE Nexus and Blue Notebook 10

I will now investigate the function of the BE/HAVE nexus in Kharms story. Blue
Notebook 10 is Kharms at his most playful and serves as the best example
of the sort of cognitive manipulations utilized throughout the cycle. He wrote
4 A graphic representation of all possible meanings associated with a term or concept, e.g.
BE or HAVE.
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this well-known text in January 1937 as part of the Blue Notebook (Golubaya
tetrad) and later selected it for inclusion in the Incidents (Sluchai) cycle of 1939.
It should be noted that Kharms so-called mature works, as opposed to his
childrens literature, were for the most part not published in Russia until the
advent of glasnost. His drafts and notebooks, which were preserved by family
and friends after his arrest in 1941 remain in varying degrees of (dis)order,
but Kharms himself collated the thirty stories and drew up a title page for a
theoretical future publication.5 The two versions of the text differ in very few
ways, perhaps even by just two words. I will first discuss the general nature of
the cognitive play in Blue Notebook 10, then move on to the significance of
changes between the two versions of the text in conjunction with the BE/HAVE
nexus. Finally, I will take up the issue of other related forms of cognitive play
that Kharms deploys in his story, including shifts in definiteness and inverted
sentence scanning. All of this cognitive play, as will become evident, is linked to
the BE/HAVE nexus.
Only a few lines long, Blue Notebook 10 stands among the shortest and
certainly most famous of Kharms works:
, .
, .
, . .
. ,
, ,
. ! , .
. (Kharms, 1997, p. 330)
There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didnt have
hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldnt talk because he had no mouth. He didnt have a nose either.
He didnt even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back,
no spine, and he didnt have any insides at all. There was nothing! So,
we dont even know who were talking about.
Wed better not talk about him anymore. (Kharms, 2007, p. 45)
It is a deceptively brief story in which a man exists, and then he does not.
When this Incident is examined in conjunction with Clancys BE/HAVE nexus,
5 Such an act, given the unlikelihood of Kharms ever being able to publish his stories
under the Stalin regime, signifies both his desire to have these stories read in a particular
order and the implicit existence of a certain unity to the cycle as a whole.
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however, key nuances can be observed. Kharms begins with the subject: the
redheaded man. At the opening of the text the man is complete. He exists, and
he possesses certain traits. Kharms has created life through writing. With a few
calculated words and several missing limbs, though, everything shifts. Kharms,
not without a certain subtle bravado, moves from Clancys BECOME to BE to
(UNMAKE) in a single sentence. Alternatively, because the BE/HAVE nexus links
together conflated concepts expressed by diverse constructions, one could read
this as CREATE-EXIST-DESTROY. The lexical expressions of these concepts are
limited within the text to the byl and the u nego constructions, but the progression
is clear. Kharms moves toward what Matvei Yankelevich calls annihilation and
oblivion (Yankelevich, 2009, p. 32). He seems to recognize the blend between BE
and HAVE and ingeniously uses it to his advantage. Most literally, the redheaded
mans body parts are not existing thus the metonymic line is drawn between
BE and HAVE. From a readers perspective, the two concepts begin to merge and
the absence of a body part slides from simple POSSESSION into the realm of
existentialism and the conceptualization of BE.
As Clancy has claimed, the negation of fundamental BEING is simply not
expressed lexically and is not a part of our everyday experience of living and
interacting with the world (Clancy, 2001, p. 4). He recognizes that being unable
to fill the UNBECOMING category slot for existence feels rather comforting.
This in itself is a considerably telling comment, as what Kharms accomplishes
with his art can be, in fact, exhilaratingly terrifying. A cognitive approach to the
absurdist writer allows us to visualize the gap between the world of logic and
Kharms space of pure order wherein existence is nullified and logic fails to
cohere. Where most words fall short, Kharms finds a lexical and syntactic manner
in which to express this concept (UNMAKE) that Clancy finds difficult to name
precisely the seemingly contradictory opposite of BEING, of EXISTENCE, of is.
The careful reader witnesses the illusory and undefined presence of the mans
NON-EXISTENCE through Kharms artistic gesture.
The exact differences between the two versions of Blue Notebook 10
remain somewhat unclear due to the inconsistency of published collections.
Nonetheless, one thing is certain given the variants and their implications:
Kharms was acutely aware of the different construals offered by choices in
diction. What I propose below is based on the following distinction:
Blue Notebook version Incidents version

(1) (1b)
(2) . (2b) !
(1) There lived a redheaded man (1b) There was a readheaded man
(2) He didnt have anything. (2b) There was nothing!
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In regard to the original, the two major differences between Kharms drafts
illustrate the BE/HAVE blend as concerns the writers own intentions, as far as
one may say so, rather well. The change from (1) to (1b) or (2) to (2b) modifies the
cognitive representation drastically and reveals that cognitive blending was part
of Kharms plan in editing the text. Cognitive Grammar posits that profiling, the
process by which an expressions specific focus of attention is derived from
its base, is a part of our cognitive organizing of the world and, thus, the way we
express what we conceptualize and experience through language (Langacker,
2008, p. 66). Bartmiski likewise stresses the subjective nature of profiling: The
factors which drive profiling are connected with [] subject-oriented categories:
someones rationality, someones knowledge of the world, someones system
of values and point of view (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 89). He goes on to say
that not only does a human organizing figure remain at the center of profiling,
but that an entire complex of culturally established elements takes part as
well. In other words, an author imbues a text with his or her own ideas while
simultaneously drawing upon the traditions (linguistic, cultural, syntactic even)
that exist in a language. This allows for further deconstruction of expectations,
as is the case in Kharms text.
When choosing this draft for the Incidents, Kharms placed the redheaded man
into a different participatory role a role in which he lacks any control whatsoever
and is subject to the gradual amputation of his body parts. The reader sees this
figure, but he is more the textual shell of a man. Craig Hamilton notes that as
writers we can vary the focus of our utterance by putting different participants
in different roles (Hamilton, 2003, p. 4). Precisely so, Peter Stockwell adds,
choosing a patient as the subject (such as in a passive) is a marked expression
that requires some special explanatory motivation: defamiliarisation, or evading
active responsibility, or encoding secrecy (Stockwell, 2002, p. 61). In the case of
Blue Notebook 10, defamiliarization is likely the aim. As a rule, the agent of
a standard statement or utterance performs the action, while the patient is the
receiver of said action. In the second version of Blue Notebook 10, the man
is no longer the agent, but the patient and, as such, events happen to him, rather
than because of him (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). He exists in vague terms (There
was), rather than more concretely and actively (There lived). In this story and
other Incidents, these techniques a manipulation of the readers expectations
in regard to content, tone and form (Nakhimovsky, 1982, p. 70) defamiliarize
logical presumptions about language and the standard experience of reading.
4. Scales of Definiteness: Subject and Possession

In conjunction with the BE/HAVE nexus, it will also prove fruitful to consider
other forms of cognitive play in Kharms story, which will allow us to see how
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Kharms language consists of a system of interrelated devices. One such method

is linked to Stockwells (2002) scale of definiteness, according to which the
degree of the readers familiarity with a texts subject is tracked. Stockwell states:
Definite subjects (The town, that man) are generally preferred to indefinites,
and specific indefinites (a certain Mrs. Jones, a girl I know) are preferred to
non-specific ones (a girl) (p. 61). The man in Kharms text gradually loses his
definiteness, moving from being a so-called redheaded man to simply a man
and then to the shadow of a person that was once there. And although his lost
limbs would seem to distinguish him and give him a certain definiteness, this
too cannot be, for he is soon transformed into blank, impersonal non-existence.
Given these points, Kharms seems to want to present the general concept of
MAN. The short text is of course not about any one particular redhead, who in
any case is called so only by convention, but the general idea of man who suffers
existentially, perhaps because of the divide between the absurd and the so-
called logical world.
Such a sense of definiteness can also be observed in the critical difference
between (2), in which the man himself possesses nothing, and (2b), in which
there is simply nothing. It is a slight variation, but for Kharms, a scrupulous
writer, each word contributes to a greater meaning. Natalya Fateeva, in a study
of Kharms manipulations of verbal predication for semantic effect, also notes
his preoccupation with linguistic play at this level: Such deviations, irreducible
to semantic standards, stimulate a collision of meanings in the text and generate
new meanings, based not only on the shift of usual compatibility, but also on
an unusual juxtaposition of semantic spaces (Fateeva, 2006, p. 310).6 At the
very least, the version of Blue Notebook 10 in which there is nothing
illustrates the totality of the mans forced disappearing act. If the man possesses
nothing, the idea of the man remains; if there is nothing at all, then the man can
no longer factor into the equation. It again becomes an existential matter, not
one of simple POSSESSION, though the semantic connection between the two
in Russian remains clear. The variants illustrate Kochs metonymic link between
POSSESSION and EXISTENCE. Kharms moves from possession of body parts to
the non-existence of man, and the BE/HAVE nexus allows him to do so with
careful linguistic sleight-of-hand. The progressive lack of body parts is taken to
represent a larger non-existence; the man-ness of the redheaded man is lost.
Kharms is performing a complex two-fold metonymic operation: the connection
between EXISTENCE and POSSESSION inherent in Russian serves to magnify the
gravity of the also metonymic connection between the mans parts and his very
conceptualization as MAN. The missing part can no longer define the whole when
6 Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Russian are my own, J.V.
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the man disappears, and as Carrick suggests, the redheaded man is greater than
the sum and the separation of all his parts (Carrick, 1994, p. 642). By removing
the pieces from the entirety, Kharms stakes his claim in an absurd world, these
parts and individual fragments are what truly matter.7
The depth of readers construal of Kharms text will vary widely depending
on the sentence variant at hand. It appears that in preparing this Incident for
a theoretical publication, the author hoped to change the readers construal
into one that more fully acknowledges the existential nature of BE/HAVE,
a truly philosophical matter. This can be said with a high degree of certainty.
In the margins of the manuscript to Blue Notebook 10, Kharms scribbled
against Kant (1997, p. 474). Hilary Fink notes that Kharms, in line with the
general modernist spirit of anti-Kantianism, proclaimed that the true nature
of the wor(l)d may only be grasped through the breakdown of strictly rational
modes of apprehension, the abandonment of causality, the birth of the absurd
(Fink, 1998, p. 527). The latter version of Blue Notebook 10 is an enhanced
reflection of this deconstructionist approach to writing and points to this
polemic with its atypical form and absurdist content. Thanks to linguistic details,
Blue Notebook 10 takes on even more weighted meaning as Kharms makes
use of the blended BE/HAVE prototypes. Moreover, it is through such techniques
that, as Graham Roberts argues, Kharms forces us as readers to engage actively
with the text, and to re-examine the assumptions which we make in reading
(Roberts, 1997, p. 97). Roberts suggests that Kharms wrote texts that challenged
the conception of the writer as the authoritative figure of a text. In particular,
he ascribes to this the content and alogical nature of their writings. I would
add that central linguistic features, like those involving the BE/HAVE nexus that
implicates the reader and forces him/her to actively co-create the meaning of
the text, play a large role as well.
5. Photograph and Film: Sentence Scanning in

Blue Notebook 10
Kharms cognitive play also involves an inversion of the readers natural

processes of reading sentences, though this again connects to Clancys BE/
HAVE nexus and the way that it is used throughout the story. In what Stockwell
calls summary scanning, attributes are collected into a single coherent gestalt
7 It is these parts that interested Kharms, who saw in the proposition of a world that is
whole, a denial of the essential role played by its parts (Fink, 1998, p. 530).
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that constitutes an element. Sequential scanning, on the contrary, happens

when an event or configuration has to be tracked (2002, p. 66). The former
involves nominals and stative conditions (BE) and the latter active changes
to a state (perhaps HAVE the completion of coming into possession of an
object).8 Here is a summarily scanned sentence: Daniel is tall and dressed like
an English dandy. The mans attributes (his man-ness, height, and clothes)
and existence all congeal in a single, motionless image. Sequentially scanned
statements such as Daniel walked along the edge of the Dom knigi balcony in St.
Petersburg, on the other hand, require the reader to visualize motion or change.
The difference between the two can be compared to a still photograph and a
dynamic film clip, respectively. The bulk of Blue Notebook 10 is made up of
existential or attributive statives, which state a condition and should normally
undergo summary scanning. Kharms, however, systematically arranges his text
in a manner that inverts this cognitive process and puts words and meanings
into conflict with one another. The reader is forced to sequentially scan the story
of a man losing his body parts without cause. Kharms first states, There was
a redheaded man, which naturally implies certain prerequisites: a complete
anatomy and a concrete existence. Before the sentence is over, however, the
situation starts to unravel. It would be one thing to say, There was a man who did
not have eyes or ears. It is another to begin with a full body and then to delete
parts. In doing so, Kharms shifts from what would under normal circumstances
be summarily scanned (an image of a man with or without certain body parts) to
a progressively smaller picture taken in through sequential scanning. It requires
the reader to see things change gradually, rather than as a series of complete
gestalts. Arguably, the difference between variants (1) There lived a redheaded
man and (1b) There was a redheaded man also reflects this change. The
concept LIFE calls to mind a progression of events that constantly alter the
man in one way or another: life as a collection of incidents that make up the
individual. Thus, LIFE, and the active process of LIVING, is sequentially scanned.
BE, on the other hand, is expressed as there was (byl) in (1b) an instance of
summary scanning. This construal suggests a more static situation. By changing
8 The notions of sequential and summary scanning, as used by Stockwell, come from
Langackers model of Cognitive Grammar:
Sequential scanning is the mode of processing we employ when watching a motion
picture or observing a ball as it flies through the air. The successive states of the
conceived event are activated serially and more or less instantaneously, so that the
activation of one state begins to decline as that of its successor is initiated... On the
other hand, summary scanning is what we employ in mentally reconstructing the
trajectory a ball has followed... The component states are activated successively but
cumulatively (i.e. once activated they remain active throughout), so that eventually they
are all coactivated as a simultaneously accessible whole. (Langacker, 1991, p. 22)
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this single verb, Kharms makes a major cognitive move. The verb was serves
to accentuate the inverted nature of the scanning that takes place immediately
after when the mans body parts are gradually stripped away. It is once again
the connections between BE and HAVE in Kharms text that accentuate and even
allow for such a development.
6. The Reasons for Cognitive Play

We can better understand the purpose of all this cognitive play if we consider
Hilary Finks three approaches to Kharms 1930s prose: the alienation of
man in society, the decomposition of language and subsequent failure of
communication, and the general incoherence of a world plunged into the
madness of Stalinism (Fink, 1998, p. 528). I believe that in expressing these
themes, among many others, throughout his prose miniatures, Kharms used the
more unusual aspects of his language, and a reading of his work through the lens
of cognitive ethnolinguistics can offer insight into the results of what has been
termed cognitive play. Kharms did not wish to shock, but rather to bemuse
spectators and defy automatized tendencies in both life and art, especially
through writing (Komaromi, 2002, p. 422). As such, Fink is absolutely correct in
endowing Kharms prose with these broader meanings. The texts that comprise
the Incidents cycle deal with the expression of the absurd split between man
and his surrounding world (Fink, 1998, p. 528), that is, any world that has been
castrated through strict everyday logic. In the final analysis, Kharms aesthetic
and philosophical concerns are reflected in his words. This facet of language is
part of Bartmiskis linguistic worldview, which is different than the scientific
picture of the world (2009/2012, p. 36). Such a worldview is subjective and
permeated with the authors conceptualization of reality. Moreover, Kharms
language not only reflects ideas but even allows the author to aestheticize
them in stories such as Blue Notebook 10. Kharms collaborative group, the
OBERIU (Union of Real Art), aimed to overcome human logic and its respective
idiom by subverting language itself. Aleksandr Kobrinskii has noticed this
interest in language as an ontological tool in Kharms texts as well as in the
mutual concerns of the groups with which he associated:
This suggests that the problem of language as an intermediary

between man and the world occupied the other Chinary, and they
actively discussed it at that time. Anticipating the ideas of Whorf and
Wittgenstein, Druskin compared the system of linguistic concepts
with a net, with which man covers the world. The net allows for
understanding and provides the means for people to communicate
with one another, but it also becomes an obstacle to a deeper
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understanding of the world. It is necessary to create a new net in

order to see the world anew. Such an understanding, coincidentally,
is close to the ideas expressed in the OBERIU declaration about the
necessity to see the world through naked eyes. (Kobrinskii, 2009,
p. 362)
Kharms inverts readers expectations in Blue Notebook 10 both on

a structural level and in the fact that by the end no content remains. He
manages to present the world and man in a new light through the cognitive
play he wields, showing, as Roberts writes, how at least certain languages
can shape [or] transform reality (1997, p. 145). This, of course, occupies a
central position in Bartmiskis ethnolinguistic worldview the creative force
of language. The BE/HAVE nexus allows Kharms to address this concern by
making use of the semantic link between the two concepts, and the redheaded
mans parts, removed with precision by Kharms the writer-surgeon, come to
signify much more than simple possession in a story that ostensibly appears
to be about just that, but, instead, delves into the existential core of human
life.
7. Beyond Blue Notebook 10: Cognitive Play

in the Incidents Cycle
What follows here is not a comprehensive analysis of the remaining stories

in the cycle through the lens of cognitive linguistics, but instead a step in
that direction. This sort of analysis reveals how Kharms systematic approach
to writing is rooted in an understanding of the cognitive and ethnolinguistic
nature of language. Kharms makes deft use of not only the BE/HAVE nexus but
also other cognitive strategies in the rest of the Incidents, sometimes resulting
in a fascinating meta-literary commentary on the themes of cognitive play
elucidated above. BE in Russian has also been linked to SEEMING and verbs of
position. I will address these connections, along with other types of cognitive
play, in two further stories: An Optical Illusion (Opticheskii obman) and The
Trunk (Sunduk).
First, the BE/HAVE nexus is frequently expressed through the position
category: STAND UPSTANDSIT DOWN/LIE DOWN or, alternatively, SIT DOWN/
LIE DOWNSIT/LIESTAND UP (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Generally, BEING is often
rendered through the interaction of an individual upon a given space and how s/he
occupies it, whether it be sitting, standing, or lying. In An Optical Illusion the
character Semyon Semyonovich experiences something quite strange related to
this linguistic phenomenon:
Unauthenticated
, , :
.
, , ,
(Kharms, 1997, pp. 332-333)
Semyon Semyonovich, having put on his spectacles, looks at a pine

tree and this is what he sees: in the pine tree sits a man showing him
his fist.
Semyon Semyonovich, taking off his spectacles, looks at the pine tree
and sees that no one is sitting in the tree. (Kharms, 2007, p. 50)
The action repeats itself several times before Semyon Semyonovich doesnt
want to believe in this appearance and considers it an optical illusion. Logically
it should be the case that the man in the tree either is there or is not. And
yet Kharms challenges this idea, much like he does in Blue Notebook 10.
Kobrinskii has described how Kharms breaks the law of the excluded middle
by introducing the new condition to be redheaded arbitrarily.9 Applying the
same sort of analysis to An Optical Illusion, we see that the construction is very
similar: the existence (is sitting) of the muzhik achieves a third option in which
a spectators choice controls reality.
Here, Kharms intuitively connects sits (sidit) and no one is sitting (nikto ne
sidit) to BE and, therefore, EXISTENCE. Sitting and not sitting become synonymous
with existence and non-existence. By considering the fist-waving muzhik an
optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich disrupts a traditional understanding of
the world. The man in the tree occupies the same linguistic and metaphysical
space as the redheaded man. This, in fact, may be what Kharms himself called the
purity of order, a space devoid of logic.10 Again, the Russian language provides
him with the means at least in part to express this philosophical idea.
Examining the text more broadly, we see that Kharms grants Semyon
Semyonovich the power of the writer. In terms of participatory roles, the
protagonist becomes an agent in control of the patient (the muzhik) (Hamilton,
2003, p. 58). Hence, Kharms arrives at a meta-commentary on the nature of fiction
9 For example, in logic there exists the law of the excluded middle. Transferring over this
law to the situation depicted by Kharms in Blue Notebook 10, it can be said that there is
the state to be redheaded and there is the state to not be redheaded. Kharms transforms
the two-valued logic into three-valued, introducing the new state to be redheaded
arbitrarily [by convention]. (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 417)
10 Thus arises that which can be named in Kharms own words the purity of order
[chistota poryadka]. That is, order which does not depend on any outside conditions or
connections. (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 429)
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and existence. Whereas the writer-narrator of Blue Notebook 10 controls

the obliteration of the redheaded man, in this story one character manipulates
anothers reality. Simply by considering the event an optical illusion, Semyon
Semyonovich has wielded the power of conceptual EXISTENCE. Kharms activates
this function through a series of cognitive moves: the use of the inherent link
between POSITION and EXISTENCE, an alternation of the muzhiks presence in
the tree and in reality, and finally the opening of yet another glance into a world
of absurdity or nonsense (chush).11
Much of the same sort of cognitive play continues in The Trunk (Sunduk).
Having placed himself in a sealed trunk, the narrator witnesses a fantastic
struggle between life and death. The storys conclusion remains ambiguous
with one of the two in the nominative case:
. In English, without the aid of case endings, the
English translator must make a choice. This passage typically reads: That means
that life defeated death by a method unknown to me (Kharms, 2007, p. 55). The
English is explicit in its construal of the outcome an issue I will address in the
following section. In the original, however, because Kharms renders the long-
necked man an uninvolved patient and observer of this battle between life and
death, it remains unclear.12
As an example of a slightly different form of cognitive play that Kharms
deploys in this text, we may consider Lakoffs container metaphor, which also
represents the mans experience within the trunk. Inside, he undergoes some
sort of transformation by removing himself from logical reality and placing
himself in a space where the metaphorical battle between life and death is
literalized. Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jrg Schmid write: Although metaphor
is a conceptual phenomenon, we have access to the metaphors that structure
our way of thinking through the language we use (2006, p. 118). Kharms in
this manner uses Russian to construct a world in which metaphor bleeds into
reality. The ideas LIFE and DEATH exist within the trunk and the man. They are
encapsulated in the trunk by the experiment, while the man always contains
the potential for both. Ungerer and Schmid continue: We think of our minds as
containers for ideas (p. 126). The man then is a metaphorical vessel for the two,
which adopt more prototypically agential roles than he. His existence is reduced
to this precise moment in which he lacks all control. In this way Kharms suggests
that within the container (a body) LIFE and DEATH exist beyond human control.
11 On a further level, we can read this text as commentary of the self-deceptive power
of logic and the universal human inability to completely comprehend ones own self and
motivations.
12 Kharms himself noted the ambiguity of his language on the manuscript (Kharms, 1997,
p. 480).
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The mans hands might be forced to move by life and not necessarily by an active
desire to live. Death, though, the narrator says, is naturallyvictorious as if it is
a forgone conclusion.
Such anthropomorphizing of LIFE and DEATH is not unique. In fact, it is
prototypical: LIFE and DEATH as two forces locked in relentless battle. Death
takes lives; life favors someone. The multiple cognitive layers Kharms develops
in The Trunk, however, are exceptional: BE/HAVE blending, container metaphor,
agent/patient roles. Kharms deftly places everything, from the existence of the
air the man breathes (or does not) to the metaphysical trunk, into question by
constantly shifting primary agency among the three parties involved. Moreover,
humans as agents typically control ideas, not the other way around. The man
only seems to understand what has occurred. This verb once again connects
with Clancys nexus as another expression of BE things seem to be, seem to
exist. The reality of what truly transpires within the trunk remains unknown
because there is no solid truth that one may grasp. The man possesses only
fallible understanding (kazhetsya), and the trunk creates another instance of the
break from the logical world, realized through Kharms curious language.
8. Cognitive Analysis of Kharms in an

Ethnolinguistic Perspective: Translations and
the Encoding of Language
Returning to Blue Notebook 10, we may consider the ethnolinguistic
implications of the preceding analysis with reference to translations of the text.
This will be useful for several reasons. First, it spotlights the dichotomy between
Russian as a BE-language and English as a HAVE-language.13 The BE/HAVE nexus,
functional in Russian, simply cannot exist in English. Furthermore, a translators
choices reveal the very ways that we as readers construe a work of literature by
opting to focus on one subtext or layer of a work over another. Yankelevichs
collection of translations contains both versions of the story and aligns with the
proposed differences elaborated upon earlier. Others, such as Neil Cornwells
Incidences (Kharms, 2006), either translate (1b)/(2) for the Incidents cycle version
or another combination of variants, e.g. (1)/(2b).14 Even translating the cycles
13 A Czech translation offers the same HAVE-oriented results: Byl jednou jeden zrzav
lovk, kter neml oi ani ui Neml prost vbec nic! (Charms, 1994, p. 9).
14 This problem is also rampant in Russian editions of the story, which tend to vary widely
regardless of which version (Golubaya tetrad or Sluchai) is intended for publication.
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title, Sluchai (), has been problematic; English renderings include: Events,
Incidences, Incidents, and Happenings. One can only imagine that Kharms would
have been pleased to see such a horde of meaning springing from a single word.
In the English translations there is a consistent preference for expressions of
HAVE (He had no X, he had no Y), and it seems fairly obvious that this would
be the case. English, unlike Russian, lacks a way to concisely state what the
latter suggests in a sentence such as, U nego nebylo ruk. The ambiguity and
complicated subtexts are quite literally lost in translation. The Russian can be
interpreted as the man possessed no hands, there were no hands existing (near
him), or even all at once. The task of the English translator, then, is to determine
which meaning and thus construal is most vital to preserving the intent of the
text, while maintaining the brevity and minimalism of Kharms language.
This highly complex linguistic task, of course, aligns with Bartmiskis
understanding of the linguistic worldview as a language-entrenched
interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements
about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection
(Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 23). The language Kharms uses in his texts, particularly
Blue Notebook 10, shows how both writer and reader conceptualize reality
through language. A single difference in diction can contribute to a major
semantic shift. In this way, Bartmiski notes how the subject acts as the
prime experiencing, conceptualising and coding authority (p. 222). Kharms
then pushes his reader in a certain direction with his linguistic choices, and the
cognitive processes at work help disclose the larger thematic issues he wishes
to explore. Using a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach allows us to see how
Kharms language in fact acts less like a mirror and proclaims its own system
of devices and referents. It brings together culturally relevant expectations
(literary, linguistic, and so on) precisely in order to disrupt and challenge them,
and it provides both writer and reader with the power of interpretation.
9. Conclusion
Vladimir Nabokov said that readers should feel good literature as an
indescribable tingle in the spine. He proposes reading as not entirely a cognitive
task based in brain function, but one that has a more physical, tangible effect
the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure
art (Nabokov, 1980, p. 65). But the good reader can also sense great literature
elsewhere. Kharms, I believe, is felt in the gut. His prose produces the same
feeling on the reader as the shift in inertia does on the rider of a roller coaster.
Bartmiski champions the subject, who is experienced empirically, as central
to cognitive ethnolinguistics and as long ignored by structural linguistics. This,
in fact, lies at the heart of the present analysis. Kharms language falls into a
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mutually dependent relationship with the reader. As it challenges us with odd

semantics and atypical processes, we interpret it strangely. Without typical
grounded causality or a logical reality in Kharms texts, we are left with the
floor falling out below our feet, plunging toward a hitherto unfamiliar and
overwhelmingly disconcerting plane of understanding. His cognitive inversions
play a large role in how a reader processes the stories. A better understanding of
these elements of Kharms Russian can help provide more complete insight into
his literary and thematic aims. Though we are not bound to read the Incidents in
any one specific way, the manner in which Kharms constructed the cycle leads us
down certain paths, at times alogical or circular, that highlight his philosophical
concerns and observations.
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Edited by: Adam Gaz, David S.

Danaher, Przemysaw ozowski

The Linguistic Worldview and Literature

1. The origin of the linguistic worldview idea

The 18th and 19th-century German philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder

2. Two Sources of the Linguistic Worldview Theory

we need not only see language as a means of communication but as

Beisdes the term sprachliches Weltbild, which replaced Humboldts

3. Language as an Interpretation of the World

morphological and syntactic structures, as well as in a languages grammatical

4. Language as the Raw Material of Literature:

4 The relatedness of Polish and Latin was for Brodziski unquestionable.

5 The English translations of Szymborskas poems, by Stanisaw Baraczak and Clare

I want to enter your insides,

At the end of it, in turn, the human interlocutor asks:

Its only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

Na chwil tu jestem i tylko na chwil:

I am just passing through, its a five-minute stop.

10 Quoted from Szymborska (1977, p. 172).

Zwiemy je ziarnkiem piasku.

Na nic mu nasze spojrzenie, dotknicie.

12 From Szymborska (1986, pp. 11-12).

We call it a grain of sand,

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.

Paradoxical phrasings from a later fragment of the poem beneath a sky by

Mija jedna sekunda.

Czas przebieg jak posaniec z piln wiadomoci.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.

The manifold metaphorical and metonymic processes in this fragment

14 With very few differences, parallel metaphors can be found in Polish.

Brodziski, Kazimierz. (1964 [1818]). O klasycznoci i romantycznoci tudzie o

Brzozowska, Magorzata. (1996). Kamie. In Sownik stereotypw i symboli

Chase, Stuart. (1956). Foreword. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought,

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1886). Selections from Hegels Lectures on

Kopczyska, Zdzisawa. (1976). Jzyk a poezja. Studia z dziejw wiadomoci

Mukaovsk, Jan. (1970). Wrd znakw i struktur. Wybr szkicw. Warszawa:

Pajdziska, Anna. (1999). Metafora pojciowa w badaniach diachronicznych.

Sapir, Edward. (1931). Conceptual categories in primitive languages. Science, 74,

Sapir, Edward. (1961 [1929]). Status of linguistics as a science. In Edward Sapir,

Skwarczyska, Stefania. (Ed.). 1965. Teoria bada literackich za granic. Antologia.

Szymborska, Wisawa. (1977). Poezje. Warszawa: Pastwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Szymborska, Wisawa. (1986). Ludzie na mocie. Warszawa: Czytelnik.

Szymborska, Wisawa. (2001). Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997. Translated

Underhill, James W. (2009). Humboldt, Worldview and Language. Edinburgh:

Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews. Metaphor, Ideology and

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956 [1940]). Linguistics as an exact science. In Benjamin

Translated by Adam Gaz

The Linguistic Worldview and

standard, poetic worldview resulting from a particular arrangement of mental

2. Methodology and Definitions

The linguistic worldview conception functions in two variants.

Since my analysis here concerns poetry, which is at core an individual,

The meanings of vision encompass not only the physical ability to

The noun view has a very large number of metaphorical meanings

Bartmiski defines the linguistic worldview as the interpretation of reality

My own definition of linguistic worldview as a set of judgements

It [linguistic worldview A.G.] is also differentiated in other styles derived

a distinction between the standard linguistic worldview and a non-standard

The existence of standard linguistic worldviews also implies the

CL views experience as a continuum, where idiosyncratic individual

1 A discussion of these issues can be found in Underhill 2011.

For example, Friedrich (1986, p. 18) writes, There is no meaning

3. Wisawa Szymborskas Identyfikacja