In sorting through boxes of late, I’ve come across many things I’d long forgotten, and one thing at least that gave me a rueful smile. It is a little notebook from when I read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun*, starting with The Shadow of the Torturer. They’re good books, well written and building to a surprising culmination. However, they’re also written in a strange style. They are meant to have been ‘translated’ from an arcane and alien tongue, and to ‘better represent the original text’, Wolfe has used unusual words.

And I don’t mean unusual words like purulent, adumbrate or deliquescent. I mean unusual like he must have a full OED and perused the alternate spellings so long he decided he could invent more with confidence; I mean so unusual that I had online access to the OED at the time and could only guess at some; I mean unusual as if they were not words in the language, tools in its toolbox, but forgotten implements ranged for display in the cases of a museum of curiosities.

It drove me crazy. When there is a word I do not know in a book, I want to learn it. I scrawl it down, leave a Book Dart, or note the place, and then I look it up later. Or, if it isn’t clear enough from context, I do it right then. Now, Gene Wolfe is not mean enough to write a book in English that English-speakers cannot read (oh Lord, I just thought about the task of translating these) – all these words are used carefully so that you can get a rough idea – “Oh, it’s a building material” – and move on with your reading. Or positioned so you don’t really have to know. Or linked into long lists to make it easier to figure out the context (the one I remember is, in fact, building materials) and deadly obvious that you should not look them all up.

I did. At first, I looked up every one. And there were usually something like six each page. Which brings me to the little notebook. When I realized looking each up before proceeding made the act of ‘reading’ problematic, I bought this tiny notebook at the University Bookstore and started scrawling the words in, to be joined by their definitions at a later date. This solution, too, ended, and I stopped worrying and learned to love the evocative mystery. I managed, thus, to finish reading the tetrology ** in less than a decade and without stealing a copy of the OED.

The notebook, however, abides.

A sample:

gallipot: little pot, apothecary

badelaire: badelar (OED): short broad sword with scimitar-like curve

myste: myst (OED): priest initiated into mysteries

armiger: one entitled to bear heraldic arms

mestachin [I think]: sword dancer in fantastic costume or their dance

caracara: aberrant falcon in South America with vulture tendencies

saros: Babylonian for 3600 or a period of 3600; also, modern astronomy: cycle of 18 years, 10 and 2/3 days in which solar and lunar eclipses repeat themselves

nenuphar: water lily

wildgrave: ruler of an uncultivated or forest region

khan: a building (unfurnished) for the use of travelers

coffle: train of men or beasts fastened together, especially slaves

The list persists beyond the defined part for 13 pages. Looking at it now, I find many words I know – ‘martello’, ‘stunsil’, ‘anchorite’, ‘salubrious’,‘capybara’. I don’t exult too much over my former self, however, because I do seem to recall, in the enthusiasm of my drive to know, adding words I knew, but not precisely, to the pages, confidently expecting I would define them all. I already know about myself that as I have grown I have come to be on better terms – friends, almost – with ambiguity, but how startling to see it so demonstrated, the contrast so clearly drawn between the person I am now and the one that scrawled these lists, desperate to know, eight or so years ago.

* If anyone I know has a line on where these books are now, please let me know. Maybe I lent them?
** Really, really. They were a gift from my dad, they’re beautiful editions, and last time I looked I couldn’t find those TPB volumes in print.