From the Editor

The limits of language are what every artist knows.  The edges and cliffs of possibility, the straight lines that pass into mirage, a murderous anvil of the imagination on which to bend and to beat with fire whatever can't be said with water.  Languid liquid prose or poetry can't seem to fill all the expressions of human existence, Ecclesiastes notwithstanding.  For whatever purposes an artist puts brush to canvas or pen to paper, the result becomes an embodied form, encoded with the hieroglyphs of history, barcoded by librarians and critics and all the other necessary catalogers of human thought.  Like thousands of brush strokes that make us see, words create the forms of all that what we can imagine or understand.  And words have become the ultimate beans with which to count the success or failure of our understanding.  It is estimated by Don Watson that there may be over 20,000 new words added to the English Language every year; Mark Liberman puts that figure closer to the OED annual production of 2500; whatever the case, the world is adding words at an alarming pace.  Words rush in where imagination fears to tread.  Almost too many words for not as much to say.

Regardless of the numbers or limits of words, they still (as best as they are able) serve human desire.  ECU was fortunate to have several scholars visit campus to share their views on language and how it shapes the world.  Jack Chambers from the University of Toronto gave several talks about how the sudden growth and instability in the English language is analogous in importance to the melting polar ice caps.  Mobility, life expectancy, urbanization, global communication, and literacy rates have converged, heating things up a bit.  More and more words and more and more carbon dioxide, which makes sense, as far as we can tell, there is too much talk and not enough oxygen.  The environment is polluted with cell phones.  Then Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar honoring Chip Sullivan, dropped in to demonstrate the mutability of literature and the plasticity of source material.  How language and literature can be shaped to serve the needs of the age.  If only we could figure out what those needs are?  And Biodun Jeyifo of Cornell University spoke on the language of world colonialism, Anglophone English, the world language of commerce, of the G-8 masters, shadowing the competitve struggle of developing nations in a Blade Runner future world.  No doubt, language is in service of the Queen, of the center of control and power, and we mere underlings are just beginning to understand the currency of our servitude.

These three distinguished linguists would comprise an incredible league of extraordinary gentlemen battling the forces of evil in the world.  If language, indeed, calls forth existence, as the thinking of today encourages, the world is in our hands to shape.  If only the linguists were in charge, or the artists, or better yet, people with imagination and a slight facility with words.

We are just in the wrong paradigm at the wrong time -- the blink-slap-take-my-ball-and-go home-but-not-before-I-kick-your-butt paradigm.  I am not just talking about "us" or "them" or any other privileged pronouns.  I'm talking about the paradigms of the world or, as DBC Pierre would call them in his vicious little novel Vernon God Little, "paradimes," that is, not worth much.  We better get to creating our own narratives before someone else gladly comes forward to do it for us.  Or maybe that is the trap of logic, the evil that knows too much for its own good, to build the tower even higher with words, and stories too numerous and diverse ever to cohere or to converse.

Recently, our visiting Fulbright scholar, Shahla Naghiyeva, returned to her work in Azerbaijan, but she left us some words translated from the Azeri so that we could understand her favorite poet, Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, and his conversation with the world.

                                                 Shipmates
                                           by Bakhtiar Vahabzadeh
 

  We're sailing on the same ship, 

  You and I and so many others, 

  Always steering toward or away 

  From our own happiness and sorrow, 

  Always sharing the same luck. 

  Hurricanes are the enemy 

  And teach us togetherness -- 

  Me for you, you for me. 
 

  We are sailing on the same ship, 

  With endless possible headings, 

  Our course veering this way or that, 

  Uncertainty always in the offing. 

  We share the torture 

  Of storms and plunges into bitter gulfs 

  Or the ecstasy 

  Of glinting azure seas. 
 

  Now the ship moves off, 

  Diving into a deep gorge 

  Of hurricane waves, 

  Then surges to the crest again. 
 

  Isn't it curious 

  That shipmates could fix each other 

  With anger in their eyes? 
 

[Translated from the Azeri by Shahla Naghiyeva and Peter Makuck]