Sometimes a single word is hard to separate from the context in which we first encountered it. In our private linguistic landscape, a word can remain linked all our lives to a particular book, or person, or place. Perhaps this is most common in a second (or third, or fourth) language: we tend to feel differently about words we have consciously acquired, which happens more often in a second language. Whenever someone says zut! — quite a common if perhaps slightly dated French expression for damn! — I still think, every time, of the character Zoot (so named because this was the only bit of French he every mastered) in a sad and excellent children’s book called One Green Leaf published in the 1980s by Jean Ure. And because I read almost nothing but Proust for the best part of a year not long after we moved to France, I associate an awful lot of actually perfectly ordinary French words and expressions with his distinctive style and atmosphere, which lends a strange and rather intoxicating effect to everyday conversation. (Though if anyone else is tempted to learn-French-from-Proust I can report that it also tends to lard your vocabulary with some pretty obsolete items, leading to baffled expressions in the boulangerie.)
In the opening poem of his 2009 collection, Comme un léger sommeil (“Like a light sleep”), the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis uses the word engourdie (‘numb’, here in the feminine form to agree with eau, water):
Eau parcimonieuse,
émouvante et glacée.Qui coule clair au fond de la cluse.
Engourdie, se rêve absente.
Last year I wrote about this poem in a piece comparing Chappuis with the English poet Gillian Allnutt (probably my favourite living poet in English). The subtle music of Chappuis’ very spare style is hard to translate satisfactorily, but here’s the translation that I offered then (if you want to read a fuller discussion, the post is here):
Water sparse [or sparing],
Moving and ice-cold.Which flows clear at the base of the gorge.
Numb, dreams [or imagines] itself absent.
So engourdi means numb, and, just like the English word, it is often as it is here related to coldness (as in ‘numb with cold’; ‘it was so cold my fingers went numb’). It’s a pretty ordinary word, but for some reason it was this poem that really gave it to me, moved it from my passive to my active vocabulary, and with which I now always associate it.
I didn’t read Proust in order (I started with the second volume), but if I had, engourdi would probably have been one of the first words I looked up, because we find it right at the beginning of the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, as the narrator describes the transition from sleep (and dreaming, like Chappuis’ se rêve) to consciousness, how each awakening is a kind of struggle to reorient ourselves within our life.1 This week, I’ve noticed the same word in two other opening sequences as well. Firstly, the initial poem of Louis-René des Forêts’ 1988 collection Poèmes de Samuel Wood; and secondly — twice in fact — in the first couple of pages of Maupassant’s novel Fort comme la mort.2 In both these cases, the context is an exploration of the difficulty or even impossibility of satisfactory artistic expression, a theme which is also, of course, central to Proust. Perhaps this is just chance, or perhaps there is something about the referential range of engourdi in French, or the history of its use, that suggests the struggle for articulation, the difficulty of expression.
Engourdi is in one sense simple to translate into English. Numb is the obvious choice, and both numb and engourdi are fairly ordinary words, of neither particularly high or low register, describing a familiar (lack of) sensation. But goodness, this is one of those moments when the gulf between languages, even languages as relatively close and intertwined as French and English, really seems to gape. Engourdi and numb are just such different words! In the mouth, of course, but also, I think, on the page.
With its very French sequence of sounds and vowels, engourdi seems designed for elegant prose or verse. Despite its meaning, it’s a satisfying, full word, with its own small internal rhythm and music, and we hear every element of it (British English speakers should remember that the French always pronounce their r). Its etymology is, I suppose, remote to almost all French speakers, because it does not derive, as one might assume, from gourde (gourd in American English), which means a large kind of vegetable which can be hollowed out but also, and most commonly in everday speech, a water flask — the sort your child requires for a school daytrip. In fact, it comes from a bit of late Latin borrowed from Spanish, gurdus, meaning a fool, an idiot, a stupid person. So the verb engourdir means, originally, to become or be made stupid. Though it has come to be used ordinarily of (the lack of) physical sensation, the original metaphor is to do with mental slowness, with failing to understand.
Numb, by contrast, is an ordinary word in one sense, but also rather a strange one: with that redundant and silent -b, it’s a mouthful of a monosyllable which is not obviously poetic. This English word, too, has an obscure etymology, since it is in origin the past participle of nim, a very old and long obsolete English verb meaning take (like German nehmen) and later (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) the more specific steal.3 So numb means (originally) taken or stolen: something missing.
If engourdi will always make me think of Chappuis, when I think of the word numb in English poetry I think of Hardy and Bunting. Hardy first of all for his poem ‘A Broken Appointment’, which I’ve known since I was a teenager, and many of you probably know too:
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,—
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
– I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?
The poet here is numbing himself (or trying to) with the syntactical and rhetorical complexity of the central six lines of each stanza, but the bare facts of the case — and the emotion that goes with them — keeps breaking through in those stark partial lines. He says he has accepted the situation (‘I know and knew it’), but the poem ends with a question, not a statement: ‘even though it be / You love not me?’. There’s something like a love sonnet lurking unfulfilled in this poem, with its 12 full lines of pentameter and four less-than-half lines of just four syllables each, but we are denied the emotional resolutions of the typical sonnet. Everything about this poem gives the lie to that resounding numb. (Indeed, numbness in Hardy, that most emotional of poets, seems always to be about its opposite.4)
My strongest poetic association with numb, though, is with Bunting, whose metrical genius and particular ear for quantity gave him an especial way with a monosyllable. The word occurs a few times in Briggflatts, but perhaps the most characteristic example is from his Odes 1.3. It’s a shame to break up this storm front of a poem, so I’ve indulged myself and copied the whole thing:
I am agog for foam. Tumultuous come
with teeming sweetness to the bitter shore
tidelong unrinsed and midday parched and numb
with expectation. If the bright sky bore
with endless utterance of a single blue
unphrased, its restless immobility
infects the soul, which must decline into
an anguished and exact sterility
and waste away: then how much more the sea
trembling with alteration must perfect
our loneliness by its hostility.
The dear companionship of its elect
deepens our envy. Its indifference
haunts us to suicide. Strong memories
of sprayblown days exasperate impatience
to brief rebellion and emphasise
the casual impotence we sicken of.
But when mad waves spring, braceletted with foam,
towards us in the angriness of love
crying a strange name, tossing as they come
repeated invitations in the gay
exuberance of unexplained desire,
we can forget the sad splendour and play
at wilfulness until the gods require
renewed inevitable hopeless calm
and the foam dies and we again subside
into our catalepsy, dreaming foam,
while the dry shore awaits another tide.
Here the shore (or the speaker) is ‘numb / with expectation’: sensation is suspended only in the expectation of overwhelming sensation. The tide is absent, but it will return. In Bunting, as in Elizabethan poetry (and in Horace), the sea represents sex and death; and very often, as in this remarkable erotic poem, both at once. It’s hard to think of many more effective examples of carpe diem, or — for that matter — of a poem more different than Chappuis’. (This, incidentally, was the poem of Bunting’s that Yeats had memorised and asked him to recite when they met.)
Perhaps my sense of the differences between these two ordinary words, between numb and engourdi, is just a product of the literary works with which I most associate them, or perhaps there really is a nuance of range or of association that escapes translation. Either way, anyone who translates regularly trips over this kind of thing all the time: words which — according to the dictionary — ought to mean pretty much exactly the same thing, but somehow don’t feel the same at all. It’s in that gap, I think, that poetry begins.
Toujours est-il que, quand je me réveillais ainsi, mon esprit s'agitant pour chercher, sans y réussir, à savoir où j'étais, tout tournait autour de moi dans l'obscurité, les choses, les pays, les années. Mon corps, trop engourdi pour remuer, cherchait, d'après la forme de sa fatigue, à repérer la position de ses membres pour en induire la direction du mur, la place des meubles, pour reconstruire et pour nommer la demeure où il se trouvait.
The whole of des Fôrets’ poem does not seem to be available anywhere online, though you can read the first half (unfortunately not the section containing engourdies) here. Maupassant’s protagonist, a highly successful and acclaimed painter, is ‘numbed’ by a cigarette and the good meal he has just eaten; but also by the ‘numbing’ smell of paint and turpentine, the markers of his own success. As the scene develops, we realise that he is struggling to find a fresh subject and doubtful of his life’s achievements.
Probably the same word as Greek νέµειν (deal out, distribute, hold, occupy). The adjective numb only began to be used as a verb (to numb) in the mid-sixteenth century, when the memory of its original verbal formation had begun to fall away.
See also ‘The Year’s Awakening’ about the unnumbing of spring, and the ‘numb relief’ of bereavement in ‘After the Last Breath’.
I really enjoyed reading this. I remember meeting Gillian Allnut a couple of times in the 80s (I did my degree in Newcastle where she lived/lives?). Loved how you brought in Hardy and Bunting. One of my favourite Thom Gunn poems includes the word ‘numb’ (from ‘Touch’ - ‘my skin slightly/numb…’). Thank you.
Thank you, this was fascinating. I think "emotive" would be a better translation for "emouvante". Although "moving" can have an object, here without other clues the obvious way to read it is simply "having motion" rather than "causing emotion".