Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers by Daniel Heller-Roazen

Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers Reviews

• 
  Myrdschaem

  Do not buy this book. There, I said it.
  I bought it more or less blind, intrigued by the title. Niche language variations made by criminals - what a great topic! And I could also invision where this could overlap with riddle making and occult practioners. Maybe the author would also use this topic to get out the word about language = power, which can be wonderfully demonstrated here. What but power do criminals gain when they use such languages? Why else are the authorities so afraid of them? It sounded great.
  In reality, about 1/4 of the book actually touches the title topics. We get introduced to one criminal language and two chapters on riddles, before the author drops them like a hot potato to veer into the actual subject of this book: poetry.
  If you don't know me, let me give you a swift look into my relationship with poetry, especially in dead languages: I. Love. It. I will voluntarily go to seminars about epic poetry and about other forms. I'm down for structural analysis and comparing them across different traditions. I'm still kicking myself I didn't insist on taking Ancient Greek. I am pursuing Tibetan, old and new, again soon. In short, I am the perfect target audience for this subject.
  Maybe you are like me and think you should check this out regardless. I tell you: don't fall into this temptation. Of the poetics section, one was good - the chapter about Jacobson's work, which is at least somewhat grounded into reality. I think poets deliberately picking words for sound and trying to evoke a mood with them is not a thesis that doesn't hold up. More "s" sounds when talking about snakes. I can also agree with his arguement about phonemes as a chord of sound attributes. Sure. For Jacobson's sensible chapter we have two, t w o chapters on approaches that are, in fact, unfounded.
  One is by Saussure, bless his heart, about anagrams hidden in phonemes all over indo-european poetry traditions and taught by teachers but never mentioned in any poetics books. The second is about anagram's in Villon's poem, once again sending secret codes to the reader. Only not, because it turns out that these anagrams pop up without trying, so if there were intentional anagrams, we would be unable to make that distinction. This should be pretty common sense - for Saussure's theory, one of the examples spelled "scipio" which is mix of letters you can get without trying in latin, even with the extra hurdles Saussure found. Nevermind the poetic conspiracy aspects.
  So, this chapters were hard to get through to, because the claims were in my understanding outlandish, which is why I wasn't surprised they didn't hold up. My understanding being the gist of it, but by no means expert knowledge on all the details. Now, if you are a reader without at least some basic undergrad knowledge of linguistics, structuralism and poetics? I have serious doubt
  that the parts on poetics and these two chapters in particular are understandable and I think most will not finish these. Technically the author explains everything, but without knowledge of "basic" concepts in linguistics like "The medium is the message" or Jacobson's take on all the different functions of a message this is a hard piece to swallow.
  I have plenty of other beef with this book, too. Now knowing that it is actually about poetry, it makes sense that the author focuses on indo-european examples, because deep enough knowledge in enough languages to compare poetries is tricky. However, this is never acknowledged on page. So eurocentrism without acknowledging or even explaining it. Making sweeping statements about poetry being pairing and restating of elements with Jacobson is not precise. Especially with poetry traditions that went for uneven numbers for symbolism.
  If you read this, you would go away with the impression that only european criminals used such language tricks - which I think is a bold claim without any proof. My first example would be "yakuza", originally meaning a losing combination in a cardgame popular with criminals, who adopted it as self-descriptor and rose to prominence after. Same with anagrams, we are left to wonder if they have been used elsewhere and which languages couldn't use them.
  Furthermore, I miss a basic acknowledgement that language is power. It's subtle things that irk me - quoting antisemitic and anti-ziganist statements from Martin Luther without giving a modern perspective on it (my guess would be that he was v wrong in his guess). Talking about language variations without mentioning modes of speech like AAVE while giving a category for "slang", which is only relevant for the moment. This also leaves out the possibility of words crossing from language modes into the main language - we have seen this with slang ("cool" for example) and with jargon (computer terms like terminal or homepage or internetwere once specialised vocabular!) and also AAVe terms. This unexamination of power dynamics continues throughout the book and doesn't befit a professor for comparative literature.
  I will come to a close and hope this review made it clear why not to buy this. TL; DR: If you want criminal languages, this book throws them to the side as soon as it can. If you think you want poetics lessons, I would warn people without fundamental knowledge of linguistics way from it for being to complex. If you have those down, I don't think this is worth your time and you can find other books on the topic out there.
  I am disappointed with this book and the only reason it has two stars is because I suspect most of the material is technically correct. What a shame that it is often useless without context, theories that are wrong and not about anything the title promises.
• 
  Doug Levandowski

  Fascinating in parts, it felt disjointed overall. I wondered if it was building to some grand synthesis at he end, but then it just ended. Still, a wonderfully interesting read if the content grabs you as it did me.
• 
  Leif

  In the past I've considered Heller-Roazen's scholarly erudition a piece of his mastery over the subjects he chooses to write on: a beguiling combination of elemental politics, ancient philosophies, linguistic history and philological poetics with healthy doses of style and telling evidence to seal the deal. Here he stumbles. The erudition becomes a mean to its own end, and the overall idea – a nice twist on a conventional theme or an innovative thesis – becomes a banal thought: poets mask their tongues, they are the rogues, those riddlers. There's nice moments here but really nothing on par with the guns-blazing
  Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language or the thoroughgoing armchair trustworthiness of
  The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, while only glimmers of the contrarian beauties of
  The Enemy Of All: Piracy And The Law Of Nations emerge.
• 
  Tony Gualtieri

  The fifth in a series of cultural investigations by Daniel Heller-Roazen dealing with subjects that lie between the usual categories of such studies. This one deals with hidden forms language that create a population of initiates by subverting and masking the normal rules of communication. It starts by recalling Marcel Schwob's study of 15th century cant as practiced by a group of criminals known as the Coquilliars. There are chapters on riddles in Norse sagas and the names used by the gods for places and things in Homer's epics. It moves on to Ferdinand de Saussure's conjectures about aural "anaphones" in the enigmatic Saturnian lyrics of early Rome and Roman Jakobson's further development of those thoughts. Finally, there is a chapter on Tristan Tzara's theory of symmetrical anagrams in the verse of Villon.
  
  The implicit idea is that poetry is defined, in part, by hidden language. But Heller-Roazen is more of a historian than he is a philosopher. He never really pursues a thesis so much as he presents eccentric theorists (Tristan Tzara!) wrestling with concepts that refuse to be coalesce. The results are provocative and entertaining. His books float between academic treatises and popular miscellanies, eluding classification as much as his subjects.
  
• 
  Tom

  Although the individual cases of "secret languages" that Heller-Roazen studies are interesting, there isn't a thesis here that joins them. The "secret languages" he discusses include such things as jargon particular to criminal activities that allow these activities to be discusses openly without their contents being understood by uninitiated outsiders. But apart from the statement that "secret languages" exist, there apparently are not overarching principles that unite them. Fine. In addition to that--but which is nowhere explicitly stated, either in the introduction or in the table of contents--Heller-Roazen sets out to discuss two types of secret languages: real secret languages and languages that, to some researchers (Saussure, Jakobson, Tzara), contain secrets but really don't. Unfortunately, Heller-Roazen doesn't first explicate specific modes by which coded languages are created, provide examples demonstrating his point, followed by examples demonstrating the point at which that methodology no longer applies. I like theories, but I also like finding out where they break down, what the limits are of what they can explain. Here, however, Heller-Roazen leaves us only with studies of various coded and purportedly coded speech patterns.
• 
  Alexis

  There were a couple chapters I really, truly enjoyed: French thieves' language, Old Norse poetry, and the chapter on riddles. Those were all very interesting. I'd have to say, though, that the rest fell flat. This is in part my fault for not realizing the book is really about poetry and not about actual secret languages. This is in part the author's fault for writing in the purplest prose you ever did see and obscuring his message a lot.
• 
  Humphrey

  Pretty interesting. You'd think he'd make reference to Daniel Tiffany's Infidel Poetics, which is covers many of the same subjects. Most of the chapters feel incomplete - like short essays. The book does not cohere into a larger, explicit argument. The implicit claim of the book, that, contra Derrida, orality precedes textuality, is appreciated by this reader.
• 
  Jason Waldrop

  Another fine study by Heller-Roazen. The rogues are, for the most part, poets who mess with the plain view.