Piranhamasia

or, a suspicion of hermeneutics

“Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool’s face.”

--Festus

Reminded again of an old thought, by this on “triple (& quadruple) entendres¹”; the first thing i thought of was Elvis Costello’s album-titling song, “My Aim is True”: I shoot accurately, my intention is clear, my direction is straight. (But that’s not the only multiple: “took all that he could take”, “can’t stand to see you this way” have at least two.) Long ago i noticed this happening more frequently than might-be-accidental in the songs of Neil Young, though i don’t have an example² handy. Generally this isn’t a big part of English poetry (as it is in Japanese³), outside of the plays of Shakespeare, which have hundreds of puns (some of Hamlet’s are famous⁴, & others go right past a modern audience without footnotes). It’s our songs that use them, not just for humor, but functionally.

One came to me this morning: in the song “Fever”, made famous by Peggy Lee, there’s a line “be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade”. This is literally two ways of measuring temperature, & as a difrasismo⁵ establishes the gamut of romantic love. It also—& i think this is intentional—alludes to the possibility of love equally being either heterosexual or homosexual.

The titles of novels not infrequently involve a double entendre, one of my favorites being Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (to elucidate it would give a plot spoiler). Hal Clement’s Close to Critical invokes (for chemistry nerds) the Critical Point of Water, which to me is the most genius thing he ever came up with. Using legal terms for the titles of mystery novels is almost its own genre…

In the introduction to the 1997 edition of Ottoman Lyric Poetry by Andrews, Black & Kalpakh, “…the [rhetorical] figure tevriye, in which a word with two distinct meanings is used in a context where it could have either meaning and where the least obvious meaning gives the most interesting reading”⁶ (p. 19). (The 2006 edition online.) I have tried to use this idea in a number of poems, especially in my bouts-rimés on Pessoa’s sonnets book, where whenever i could, i used the endword with a different meaning⁷ than the way it was used in P.’s poem.

It is not far from the usage i have named “etymonarchical”:

"...it is always prudent to consult Persian dictionaries when reading Ghalib; he often uses words of Persian origin with their original Persian meaning rather than, or in addition to, the adapted Urdu meanings of the same words." --Aijaz Ahmad, Ghazals of Ghalib (1971)

"One of his [Milton's] strangest devices is to use existing English words, not in their current sense, but in the sense which their Latin root possesses." --Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (1949). Highet goes on to cite "pontifical" used as 'bridge-building', "astonished" as 'thunder-struck', and "exploded" as 'hissed off'...

Mallarmé probably can be added to this list (& certainly Celan)… (from my 2008 blog, reprinted in Antikythera). There is a critical work on the former that maintains his hidden meanings can all be found in the great Littré dictionary (but another hunts his meanings among homophonic phrases—which abound in French, of course; while a third says it’s all about the unrhymables). With Celan, if he had a typical process, it would be like finding a technical term & using part of it in its normal meaning.

This is well on the way to Finnegans Wake, if you do that to every word (or so).

“Japanese poetry began to concentrate multiple meanings during the ninth century, English in the late sixteenth, French as recently as the nineteenth; in China it is plausible to trace the beginnings of the development to the poems which Tu Fu wrote after his arrival in K’uei-chou in 766.” —W S Graham, Introduction to Poems of the Late T’ang (1965), which can be found here.

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1. “double entendre” should be reserved for things taken in a different way than intended, & “double entente” for things intended in a second meaning, but usage has decided otherwise.

2. “Running Dry”: “I took from her the love I’d won/ And turned it to the sky” (‘to disguise’ the way he sings it)

3. Murasaki has a tanka made of words with double meanings.
   "'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings"
   --Led Zeppelin

   This resembles the “charade poem”. i.e. “therapist/ the rapist”.

4. My favorite might be his quibble on “conceive” in an exchange with Ophelia.

5. I bring this up in my essay on Kennings.

6. Riding & Graves, in dissecting a Shakespeare sonnet according to this principle, famously invented the New Criticism.

7. Antanaclasis, which is also a constraint i determined to follow in such forms as the sestina: each time i repeated a word, it meant something new. This can be contrasted with another adscititious fixed-form i thought of: the Conceptual Ghazal, in which the rhyme-refrain part consists of a series of synonyms: Rock, Stone, ktp.