My book is available for pre-order!
https://ucp-press-web10.uchicago.edu...196817685.html
Here's a blurb from Cathy Park Hong:
"Walter Ancarrow's fabulist maxims are laced with surprises. His entries are either notational or so profound, they seem etched in stone: 'We live between impermanences of language—building a home is settling on translation.'
Etymologies are glorious distillations of mischief and erudition."
And here's one from John Keene (who just won the National Book Award in poetry):
"With
Etymologies, Ancarrow returns us to the source and medium of all literary art: language itself. Formally playful, brimming with knowledge, and a poetic event with the subtle, yet dazzling contours of a puzzle, this collection unveils new insights on every page.
Etymologies marks a marvelous debut!"
And here is John Yau's foreword, which goes into more depth:
"Etymology—the study of the origin of words—has had many lives. In Plato’s
Cratylus, Hermogenes took the position that nothing but local or national convention determines which words are used to designate which objects. He recognized that language was a set of conventions or, what Ludwig Wittgenstein called, “devices.” The same names could have been attached to quite different objects, and the same objects given quite different names, so long as the users of the language agreed upon their usage. He seems to have been a literalist.
Cratylus took the opposite position. He believed that names were embodiments of the object’s essential identity, and that if you referred to something by a name other than its natural one, you failed to refer to it. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates’s own position has engendered much discussion among scholars without leading to any consensus, as he seems to either side with Cratylus or mock him or perhaps both, all while not quite fully rejecting Hermogenes. Did the ancients encode each word with meanings, which are waiting to be unlocked by a future reader? What stories does the changing usage of a word tell us? What has shaped their usage?
In
Etymologies, Walter Ancarrow writes up his findings of words, such as caravan,
pumpernickel, and
sequoia. Out of his choices the reader will sense a moiré pattern of associations emerging, at once particular and elusive. We seem to see it, but we cannot fix it in our mind’s eye. Ancarrow combines extreme precision with a wild imagination. In a note at the end of the book, he writes: “The etymologies in this book are correct, though not necessarily complete, sometimes poetically so.” And therein lies the magic of
Etymologies. The author seems to have made nothing up, to have been, it would appear, coolly objective throughout the writing of each study of a word’s origin. And yet, despite this claim, which I do not doubt, feelings and fancifulness emerge—like a swarm of genies freed from many bottles—at once impish, amatory, mysterious, provocative, funny, delightful, and dazzling."
I love how everyone calls the book puzzle-like and mischievous.
(Not so in love with UCP's summary, but so much of this process has been learning what I can control and not.)