Poetry in a Divided World

Among an impressive array of Russian words for nonsense there is a term that may be translated as ‘gibberish’, volapyuk. This is derived from an over-elaborate and ill-starred predecessor of Esperanto called Volapük. There may still just conceivably be old persons who exchange international greetings in the language. But I doubt whether anybody has tried to compose poetry in Volapük; the result in any case would not have been successful. ‘Genuine poetry’, Eliot believed, ‘can communicate before it is understood’. Volapük presumably was intelligible to its users, but it did not communicate in the full sense. On the other hand Lewis Carroll's ‘Jabberwocky’, like other good nonsense verse, communicates rather well. A recent Moscow anthology of English poetry in Russian translation included two enterprising attempts, and a note describes the original as ‘one of the best examples of English poetic nonsense’.

The German priest who devised Volapük a little over a hundred years ago set about the task from the wrong starting-point. But the quest for an international language, to be acquired easily, has ended with a similar deficiency; it is inorganic, a vehicle cannibalised by its inventor. There has been much interest in the idea of a common language already there waiting to be revealed. One may think of a critic much admired today, Walter Benjamin.