Poetry by the Numbers: (3) Rhythm, Culture, and Meaning

                           

Human beings…are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society…the “real world” is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.

                             —Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”

Strange I am—always been.   First generation Hungarian-American, I funny- spoke.  When, at five, I started to babble in English, my Hungarian accent was so thick that even mousy Sister Helen Michael laughed at me.  I funny-ate.  Instead of fragile peanut butter sandwiches bleeding guess-what-it-looks-like shapes in purple jelly, I had rough-cut rye with chicken fat and garlicky salami (which in turn made me funny-smell). I funny-dressed.  For cold weather my grandmother sleeved my legs in the arms of her sweater and buttoned the rest around me in a droopy cross between long johns and a dhoti.  I’m still a devotee of The Addams Family and The Munsters because, well, They ‘R’ Me; I sit on my office floor with adult students; I teach almost exclusively by inductive methods; I love Gertrude Stein; and I won’t eat anything wheat.  It’s mixed—both freedom and dissonance—all that—and not knowing exactly what makes me strange. 

Perhaps I’m suffering from the necessarily thwarted yearning of all humans to belong.  Perhaps my subtle but distinct sense of alienation is peculiar to all first-generation Americans. But it was not for goulash-paprika-Béla-Lugosi-csárdás kitsch that I visited Hungary where centuries of my ancestors were born and lived.  I went to understand the deeper emotional and cognitive habits of my two countries—America, the richest country currently on earth, in counterpoint to Hungary, a country that has had to rise, over and over, like the mythic Phoenix, from millennia of political, geographical, cultural, and linguistic upheavals.o it'  I would explore, as Stein wrote she had in a most relevant text—The Gradual Making of The Making of the Americans:

I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.

I would listen for this undercurrent—this movement of thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.  What I found lends credence to the Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis—that our sense of reality is determined by our linguistic habits.  I surfaced from jet lag to be astounded by the nature of the forces that conflict in me.

What seems to endlessly repeat in Hungary, is that—from the simplest to the most complex—it’s all inside out, upside down, and backwards to the English-speaking world:  family name precedes the given; women attach the né to their husband’s names instead of their maiden, even though né means born as; cut flowers are carried head down, and they’re sold in odd numbers instead of even.  Hungarian ambulances pierce the air with a high note and whine to a bass—school children refer to this sound as the nay-noo of ambulances (the rhythm being underscored by the fact that ai is a high frequency vowel and oo the lowest sound frequency)—as contrasted to the ascending weeee of American ambulances. There’s the descending chiming in a minor key to which metro and trolley doors close; the stomp/skip rhythms of the csárdás as compared to slam-footed skip/stomp of American clogging; the descending cadences and pervasive mood of the minor key of Hungarian folksongs, which, after all, is the use of the musical flat, the half step down, as opposed to the sharp, the half step up.  In my case, living on the east coast of the USA, the analog clock hands are 180° different from Budapest time.   And the name of one of the major bus manufacturers in Hungary is called Ikarusz, who, unfortunately, rose high, only to plummet into the sea.  

There’s more.  In A Country Full of Aliens, British journalist Colin Swatridge notes that Hungarian light switches have to be flipped up to turn off; that Hungarians say “Hello” when they’re bidding farewell; plastic sleeves receive papers from the top with punchholes on the left in England—in Hungary they are inserted from the bottom; the year is placed at the end of a date in England, at the beginning in Hungary; Hungarians do long division right to left, and multiplication from left to right—the opposite of American/English ciphering.  And so on.  Naturally, any such remarks smack of provincialism, but it’s true that in Hungary life is organized differently, often in opposition to countries where English is the dominant language.  And Hungarians were the first to notice the difference, themselves:  Swatridge’s title is in repartee with Hungarian George Mikes’s original tweak at British life, How to Be an Alien.  

No wonder Hungarians are so good at inventing that which untwists, such as the Ernő Rubik’s Cube, or János Bolyai’s non-Euclidean geometry. And how about the Hollywood of Fox, Zukor, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Lugosi, and the Gabor sisters—to name a few?  So talented are Hungarians in the business of illusion—showing what isn’t as if it were—that the MGM commissary has an ironic disclaimer posted on the wall: “Just because you’re Hungarian doesn’t mean you’re a genius.” Genius, wrote William James, “means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.”  If you come from a country that does things upside down and backward, that comes more naturally.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was right, Imagine a language and you imagine a way of life, for the Hungarian language both embodies and drives these differences: in Géza Balázs’s words from The Story of Hungarian: A Guide to the Language, “In the Hungarian Language everything is reversed.”  As Balázs points out, “in Hungarian the individual words are generally extended to the right, using a number of suffixes…while the Indo-European languages work backward from a word, or are left-tending”; there is a large number of palindromes in Hungarian (all that coming and going from two directions, like the changing of the tides); and Hungarian often uses the periodic sentence structure, placing verbs at ends of clauses.  Syntactical constructs are fairly obvious. What surprised me most was something more subtle than grammatical structures—something more pervasive that would have delighted Stein—rhythm.

English gallops happy on the tongue—ta Tum, ta Tum, ta Tum—unstressed/ stressed syllables most often start phrases on the downbeat, end on the up.   A sample of individual words will do:  increase, reward, omnipotent.  More importantly, English is rich with prepositions and articles and the infinitive to that form stepping stones to the more important nouns and verbs where the stress will land as in the tree, in fact, she left, to be.  And English tends to stress verbs—words of being and action.  Verbs follow subjects, so, again, the stronger word, the upbeat, is always coming.  Claimed to mimic the heart, in poetics this rhythm is called the iamb. A homonym of I am, even the name of the beat is assertive, confident.  Tending upward, anticipating increased strength—the recoil before the leap—repeated iambs rev into an I am, I am, I am exuberance.

                        Hungarian thrusts hard into initial syllables and then retreats—Tum ta, Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta ta.  The language can sound like the dissipation of a bouncing ball, losing height, velocity—disappointing itself to a stop.  The English I am translates into the Hungarian vagyok—the rising emphasis of English becomes declining in Hungarian. Given the strain of having to punch out those initial syllables, each repetition of vagyok, vagyok, vagyok becomes more plaintive, less and less convincing.  Consider what happens if we punch the I in I am—I am, I am, I am—it dissolves into Symphisian whininess.  

What repeats, and repeats, as Stein tells us—especially without conscious awareness—affects, shapes, and identifies us most.  So, for example, given the same decibels, the most deleterious noises are those repetitive ones to which we have become accustomed—the brain having been altered to accommodate the sounds, tied up in processing them.  It’s called sensory fatigue.  Gone numb to such noises, we are less able to react if necessary.  According to The Better Health Channel website, the symptoms of sensory fatigue will seem a specific: headache, elevated blood pressure, fatigue, irritability, digestive disorders, increased susceptibility to colds and other minor infections.  Things you can’t prove in court.  There’s a kind of despair in having so succumbed that you don‘t hear the constant jackhammering under your window.  So it is not untoward to ask whether and how language rhythms—a most pervasive aspect of speech of which most of us are too rarely conscious—might affect us. 

Consider, for example, the effect of the first line of “The Music of the Night” in The Phantom of the Opera: Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation.  The pulse of this line is the stressed/unstressed beat called the trochee:  Nighttime, sharpens, heightens each sensation.   Both Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music and Charles Hart’s lyrics are brilliantly keyed, rhythmically, to the intent and dynamics of the scenes in which the song is performed. Sung by the title character—a denizen of the bowels of the opera house, a man whose face is yin/yanged by a mask into darkness and light—it is fitting that his song of seduction to Christine, the musical’s Persephone, be predominantly in a downward lilting trochaic rhythm—the opposite of the upward tending iamb customary in English:  Down, down, down—says the music, says the rhythm of the dark (k)night. 

Compare “The Music of the Night” to the first line of “The Lusty Month of May” from Lerner and Lowe’s musical Camelot:  Tra la! It’s May! The lusty month of May!  Wrought in the traditional English iambic pentameter—the line is rhythmically light, frolicking, gay.  Tra la! It’s May! The lusty month of May!  Spring has come.  Persephone’s risen!  Had either composer or lyricist introduced downward tending notes and rhythms, it would have lent an ominous note which would have too soon introduced the note of tragedy into the musical. 

Traditionally, too, the downward tending poetic rhythm—the Tum ta ta dactyl, was used by the ancient Greeks in their elegies, especially to commemorate children.  Each poetic line would have five mournful dactyls as the predominant rhythm in each line, followed by the very finalizing stress/stress spondee.  The affect of these accumulating dactyls is an unbearable despair. Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta Tum ta ta, Tum Tum is a dirging drum.  The epic poem in Latin also uses the dactylic hexameter, but more freely varies the balance of dactyls and spondees in a line.  Joshua Schuster writes that these dactylic hexametric lines correspond to or are derived from marches and other war rituals.  John Philip Sousa’s marches are predominantly right-foot-forward trochaic, whereas the rhythm of a galloping horse is dactylic, as is, interestingly enough, the dactylic rhythm of a dance most loved by Hungarians: the waltz. 

On the lighter side, limericks in English—driven by iambic rhythms—generate very bawdy, fairly raunchy, invariably comical, illicit texts.  The last line always comes off as a punch line.  Once you get the joke of it, you’re done. In Hungarian, on the other hand, where the iamb is foreign, and the rhythms trochaic and dactylic, limericks tend to be more philosophical, as English rhythms do not.  They elicit reflection and rereading.

But what shift of meaning happens between English and Hungarian?  To further explore, I compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 in to its Hungarian translation.  The first line is written in iambic pentameter—five iambs:  That time, of year, thou mayst, in me, behold.  The native speaker of English is most likely to stress time, year, mayst, me, hold.  The stressed syllables create their own subliminal emphasis—time mayst me hold—time may sustain me.  But with the added emphasis, the conditional sense of mayst—perhaps time will hold me—is pre-empted by the directive sense, with the speaker in control—time, you may hold me. 

In renowned poet Lőrinc Szabó’s Hungarian translation—Nézd, életem az az évszak, amelyben—nézd, él..., év...  are most likely to be stressed:  look, life, year.  There’s a stridence here—imperative—even vigilance—as compared to the wistful statement in English.  And whereas the English line settles into five, steady, predictable, and hence comforting iambs—the security of age and experience—the Hungarian struggles to maintain the energy of the stressed syllables.  Tum, Tum ta ta, ta ta, Tum ta, ta ta ta.  In short, the English iambic strides forward where the Hungarian dactyl, trochee, pyrrhic limps to keep up with the unstressed beats.  Arguably, at least for this poem, the rhythm of the Hungarian translation—halting yet directive—may be more mimetic of the halting energy of maturity.  But that smacks of the mimetic fallacy—in another context, it would be to argue that you have to be boring when you write about boredom.  And Shakespeare’s sonnets as a whole tend to tend toward affirmation, immortality, control.  He considers the written word to be immortality, itself.

What creates its relentless down, down, down-going rhythm?  The socio-psychological, political and geographical answer is extremely complex and would take us into difficult questions of national identity.  For now, we can discern what creates these rhythms grammatically.  Let’s revisit what Balázs writes about how Hungarian builds words. The difference in predominant rhythms between the two languages is determined, in great part, by contrasting syntactic—coordinating—structures.  The Hungarian language is agglutinative—instead of dividing the language into discrete meaning/word units, it constantly combines—literally glues them into new words.  So, for example, into the house translates into házba in Hungarian.  Ház means house, ba is the suffix for into.  And there’s no need for the separate definite article the.  It’s elegant in simple formulations.  But more often than not Hungarian creates long strings of unstressed syllables such as the 21-letter single word elkáposztalanitátotak, which translates into the 20-letter but 5 word of the English you took the cabbage out, or the 38-letter megbecstelenithetetlenségeskedeitekért which barely translates into the 7(or 4)-word English “because of your-holier-than-thou attitude,” or my current favorite, the slowly evolving, hard to bite off and chew anything-but-quick 15-letter word gyorskiszolgáló, which is what the Hungarian chapter of McDonald’s touts itself as being:  fast.  Hungarians, themselves, enjoy lampooning this tendency of the language to lard on syllables that turns your brain into an abacus. Perhaps that is why there are so many significant Hungarian mathematicians.

In comparison, contemporary English is scantily inflected—an s here and there to indicate plurals, possessives, or to manage noun/verb consistency; an –ing tacked on to a verb such as swim to create the noun swimming.  Word order, more than pre- or suf-fixes determine connections between ideas, and therefore meaning.  The woman also ate the fish means something vastly different from the more evocative, albeit ordinarily nonsensical The fish also ate the woman, or worse Ate fish the woman also.   Hungarian, on the other hand allows for greater flexibility in word order.  A nő halat is evet is as logical as Halat t is evet a nő, Evet halat is a nő, or the less idiomatic Halat, is, a nő evet.   This flexibility engenders all sorts of interesting ways of organizing and creating experience that just don’t occur in English.  But if we deleted the inflections of the first line of the Hungarian translation of Sonnet 73, we’re reduced to the survival level of intent—and no connections, nothing to connect.  In English, other words and their order will help us understand.

Agglutination is a constant murmur in Hungarian—even telephone numbers are spoken as agglutinations—seventy-six instead of the American seven six.  Although Hungarian is uniquely musical because of its vowel patterns, it has often been considered by foreigners to be a language of monotones—hence the dissipating snare drum of unstressed syllables in the Shakespearean translation Nézd, életem az az évszak amelyben: Tum, Tum ta ta, ta ta, Tum ta, ta ta ta.  Where English loses flexibility in word order Hungarian gains.  Where English gains rhythmic strength, Hungarian struggles against the drag of agglutination.  English can focus on root words and their content; Hungarian is freighted with inflections.  It’s the difference between saying into the house and housetheinto.

My mother tongue is Hungarian, and I’m still fluent.  But I rarely speak it in America.  In Hungary, I spoke it constantly.  What I noticed is that, especially in the beginning of my three-month tour, I was constantly out of breath, literally, and/or mentally.  The expression coefficient of drag took on new meaning for me.  Those long agglutinated words were words, nonetheless, and had to be delivered in single units.  I was always having to stretch the amount of breath I have—rhythms I had developed from speaking in English.  The overall feel of it was that I was tripping after myself.  At the end of each day, the literal oxygen depletion created, metaphorically, a spiritual, energetic, psychological depletion. 

Because English is not heavily inflected, the words are relatively stable and lend themselves to sight-recognition.  Hungarian is constantly creating new words and formulations—and so there is the constant shiftings of possibilities.  Where English is relatively more secure and stable, Hungarian is freer if unpredictable.  But because of this, Hungarian requires compensatory reading strategies that English doesn’t.  I often felt as though I was committing an act of worship when navigating street and commerce signs in Hungary: my eyes lifted, fairly admiring the letters before me, keeping myself focused, as if in prayer, that I might be granted some light.  In the beginning was the word—but where, with all those pre and suffixes, was it? As linguist Judith Hajnal pointed out to me, when learning to read in English, I was learning to identify whole words on sight.  I am used to identifying English words as discrete units—as well as in French, in which I am vastly less proficient that Hungarian.  But Hungarian words are like mini-sentences.  To read Hungarian as I do English would be like identifying whole English sentences on sight.  While I was reading signs in Hungary I performed acts of back-and-forth recursive negotiations of the meanings of previous word chunks before the aha of oh-that’s-what-it-means.  Meanwhile, the trolley would have left, the light changed, and I’d have to wait to get—the next word or the next trolley.  Of course, I was acclimating, and much of the drag might have been just that.  But I asked some native Hungarian readers how they read.   One friend said that, yes, she, too, finds it a challenge. Her strategy is to read backwards from the end, identifying the core noun or verb and thenre.ample, mentally.    reading backwards. There it was again, the having to go backwards before or instead of forwards.

Stein says, Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating.  If  Stein is correct, and I believe she is—that what repeats is what endures—then surely the differences in the metronomes that drive American English and Hungarian would have significant effects. And this is Stein’s brilliant insight—consider how this experience, repeated within and between individuals a googol number of times will affect every aspect, conscious and unconscious of the people swimming in the soup of that language.  Studies have shown that fetuses exposed to one language rhythm inside their mothers have more difficulty learning a different language.  Also, suckling infants will change their sucking rhythms with a shift in language rhythms—say from French to Russian.

It is no surprise, then, that there’s a distinction between a familiar and a formal voice in which a one-up ascendant one-downs an inferior.  That the legal system is top down Roman instead of case-informed Common Law.  That the country is filled with massive statues that force the living to look up at the dead.   That there is a thrust of overcompensation in the perennial brass bands and ceremonies and adoration of honorifics and titles.  That education tends to be Prussian—memorize, memorize, memorize what is handed down to you.  That there is in the charm of the Hungarian the residue of top-down noblesse oblige marking centuries of aristocracies and patriarchies.  And that, predictably, the gender-splitting in Hungary is so embedded that women, themselves, believe feminism is a campaign to destroy men. 

One communications specialist remarked in response to my observations:  “Americans are optimistic.”  No wonder: English is the universal language, the colonizer, the forward and upward of the lance.  On the other hand, Hungary has been, over its 1,100-history, the colonized, the ball dropped and dribbling to a stop.  Hungary, with the highest suicide rate in the world—four times that of the U.S.—is not “optimistic.”  As Hungarian psychologist Margot Honti characterizes it, “We know what it is to be losers.  We have all been losers for centuries.”   No wonder János Selye, a Hungarian, first formulated the concept of “stress” (losers are stressed) or that the Woman’s World Chess Champion—a master at navigating complexities (the lost have to be)—is Hungarian Zsuzsa Polgár.  No wonder that Hungarians run to the two extremes of despair or overachievement.

Naturally, I have not exhausted how these rhythms and directional oppositions generate and are generated by what we might call a national identity—and certainly not why.  These patterns are too complex even for fractal analysis—that wonderful mathematical systematization of complex patterns that drove John Forbes Nash, Jr.  But the counterpoints between my cultures have stranged and estranged me—in America and in Hungary, both.  Although I’ve done nearly all of my schooling, professional, and creative work in English, I’m starting to notice that I write, and probably speak, in Hungarian rhythms: an inordinately large percentage of the titles of my poems are written in Hungarian dactyls and trochees. This essay, in a much earlier draft, started with the sentence—English gallops happy on the tongue—written in three Hungarian trochees, but followed by a characteristic, up-skipping American ta ta Tum anapest.  Readers and editors consistently remark that my syntax is quirky—subjects and verbs in unusual configurations—and that I tend to write periodic sentences—waiting for the end of a clause to place my verb.  In Hungarian, I often construct sentences like an American.  But, as a creative writer, I’m not sure I mind.  

Still: so-what?  What about the deeper effects of the counterpoint between my nationalities—my sense of myself as a woman, a member of a family, an author, a physical being; how I solve problems, experience, win or lose, love or hate?  Belonging—unstranging—is not so much a process of reducing experience to a system to which I can commit.  Nor is it lopping off roots and grafting onto other stems.  The so what is that taking my cues from rhythms—what repeats—helps me to frame questions:  Where are the oppositions?  How am I this rather than that?  How do I drift now here, now there?  How do I rebel and resist? 

Before I noticed the rhythmic counterpoints, I asked these questions.  But they were abstractions, applicable to most anyone.  Rhythm took me back to the body, to preverbal effects—and below all that rhetoric muddles. The questions, so rooted, are more compelling.   I can ask: What does it mean to live in a language whose rhythms tend downward, as compared to living in a language whose rhythms tend upward?  What has it meant to be wired originally in the down rhythms of Hungarian and then to have my switches switched predominantly to the up of English?   It also makes sense to ask seemingly unrelated, biological questions:  Might my wheat gluten sensitivity, as journalist Bill Bridges suggested, be read as a cellular American struggle against Hungarian agglutination. It even makes sense to ask—English rhythm or Hungarian—“Am I strange?”  

If you speak another language, notice the rhythmic patterns in your speech, conversations, music, dance, and other aspects of your culture.  What do the rhythmic patters in your other language mean?  If you do not speak another language, notice the rhythmic patters in the speech of another culture in a YouTube video.  What do you notice?

Works Cited:

Balázs, Géza.  The Story of Hungarian. Trans. Thomas J. DeKornfield.  Budapest:  

              Corvina, 1997.

Hart, Charles, Richard Stilgoe, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Songbook of the Broadway 

             Musical,  Phantom of the Opera.  New York: Hal Leonard.  (HL 360830)

Rich, Susanna.  “Hungarian is Hungarian is: The Backward and Inside Out.” Budapest:

            Pilvax. 11-18.  The above post was originally published in Issue 5: Winter 2008.

 Shakespeare, William.  Dalok és Szonettek. Budapest: Sziget, 2003.

             ---. Sonnets. New York: Avon, 1969.

 Stein, Gertrude.  Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.  New York: Vintage, 1990.

 Swatridge, Colin.  A Country Full of Aliens.  Budapest: Corvina, 2005.