Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fitzgerald Doubleday/Anchor, 594 pp., $15 Chinese dogs bark “wang wang,” Greek dogs bark “bou bou,” English dogs bark “bow wow.” So much for the notion that language says things as they are. Languages register simply the observation that dogs say something abrupt, and say it twice. Only human beings really say “bow wow,” and English-speaking human beings at that, and what they say resembles what a dog says only to an ear that experience has filled with the rest of the English language.

A local stress in the language field, that’s a “meaning.”

HK

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Hugh Kenner

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Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fitzgerald Doubleday/Anchor, 594 pp., $15 Chinese dogs bark “wang wang,” Greek dogs bark “bou bou,” English dogs bark “bow wow.” So much for the notion that language says things as they are. Languages register simply the observation that dogs say something abrupt, and say it twice. Only human beings really say “bow wow,” and English-speaking human beings at that, and what they say resembles what a dog says only to an ear that experience has filled with the rest of the English language.

A local stress in the language field, that’s a “meaning.”