A Key Into the Language of America

In 1643 Roger Williams published a study on the language of the Narragansett Indians entitled A Key Into the Language of America. Waldrop, author of a penetrating translation of Edmond Jabes's The Book of Questions, emulates the structure of Williams's primer, here offering 32 compact chapters, each divided into a prose section, a ``word list,'' another prose section and a few lines of verse. Waldrop wants to recreate the linguistic and cultural tensions between the Narragansett Native Americans and their European colonial adversaries, while alluding to her own experience as a post-WWII, female German intellectual in the U.S. She uses language as a generative source of conflict and forges phrases from Williams's book with phrases and words from her own consciousness. Seeking incompatible combinations, her writing subsumes clarity beneath a craft of displaced meaning and addresses personal experience only in a general manner. This technique works so well that it defeats itself, since the sentences by nature tend to dissipate in the mind, rather than sink in. The blueprint may be fascinating and the premise noble, but the actual text of ``A Key'' fails to compel; it seems oversophisticated and academic. Though experimentally as exciting as Susan Howe's work, it's a tad too impersonal. A near miss from a talented writer and translator. (Oct.)