Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom that will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Secret languages may be playful or serious, as apparently impenetrable as a foreign tongue, or only slightly different from the languages from which they spring. Dark Tongues moves among these hermetic artificial tongues, exploring phenomena as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech, Saussure s and Tristan Tzara s work of anagrams, Jakobson s theory of subliminal poetic patterning, and the secret writing systems of the Biblical copyists and Druids. In its eleven succinct chapters, Dark Tongues advances a single thesis: that such willfully obscure languages all rest on poetic techniques, which work to play sound and sense against each other
Biografie
Daniel Heller-Roazen, geb. 1974, ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Princeton University. Er studierte Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft in Toronto, Baltimore, Venedig und Paris und hat zahlreiche Stipendien für seine Arbeit erhalten. Im Jahr 2010 wurde ihm die Medaille des Collège de France verliehen.
