Witches especially. Next come the birds and the flowers. The Danish sommerfugl means "summer bird. So in Greek, butterflies are seen as like flying flowers. Which sure beats witches who steal butter. But in ancient Greek, they used the word psyche, which also meant "soul" — more dead people fluttering around.
And, yes, there's the fluttering: Several of the words in other languages come from imitations of the butterfly's fluttering wings. The ancient Romans thought papilio was a good imitation of the wings flapping.
French papillon comes from that, and Italian farfalla and Portuguese borboleta may as well — or borboleta may actually come from Latin for "pretty little thing. Talk about words fluttering through history. English also has a related word, flinder, but we decided we liked butterfly better — just as the Germans preferred Schmetterling to Feifalter.
It's the witches, I tell ya. And then there are the dark mists of time. The Estonian liblikas and Hungarian lepke are descended from a single Finno-Ugric root, as is an alternative Finnish word, liippo. We're not sure where that root comes from, though it may be borrowed from a Greek word for "scales" which you'll also see at the start of the genus name Lepidoptera.
Some Slavic languages have a word like the Polish motyl, coming from a root that may have to do with sweeping as in back and forth or may be related to Small wonder that the Russians preferred their little old lady babochka.
Pineapples, meanwhile, just sit there. They may be delicious, but they're not magical like butterflies. Incidentally, in many languages, they use the same or a related word for moth as for butterfly. Some languages call moths "night butterflies.
And some languages, such as Italian and Russian, use the same word for bow tie as for butterfly. You can see it, right? And since this acquisition was so varied, our sense of its usage was correspondingly without limits; there was an internal rhythm to our understanding of the English language that did not seek to obey any single aesthetic, but instead let our intuitive sense of the world unfold on the page however we wished.
During those years, Sri Lanka had no tradition of public readings of work in English, though those who wrote in Sinhala and Tamil had their own, multitudinous audiences. As such, we, along with our peers, performed for private audiences in full length theater productions, or during examinations where we declaimed the words of others rather than our own.
Pulsing beneath what was taking place among those like me who wrote in English, was an entirely different scene: one where Sri Lankan writers saw their own work performed on stage. For those who wrote in English, publication translated into collections of poetry rather than prose, though there were always exceptions, and that work was assigned for study in university.
It was, in other words, a more cerebral activity, rather than one that included the out-loud utterance. It has been fascinating to discover, then, the more recent establishment of festivals of literature in Sri Lanka and, more importantly, readings of new work, as well as the local publication of fiction in English.
Beyond that, though, are the smaller local festivals that have taken on the matter of engaging with literature in a way that continues a cultural tradition of respect for language and books.
It spanned just one day, but included panels of people discussing literature and the creative process in three languages, Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Its very name is an acknowledgement of a particularly local love for nutritious, delicious, and completely addictive street food, and an attempt to demystify literature and the literary culture. Earlier this year, in the wee hours of a morning, I skyped in from the US on an afternoon gathering in Colombo. Assembled there was my brother, two young men who were active in the local literary scene, Rick Simonson from Elliott Bay Book Company who was in Sri Lanka after speaking at the Jaipur Literary Festival JLF , and a group of Sri Lankans, all women, who had been brought together by a former schoolfriend of mine.
The most interesting thing about this group was that none of the Sri Lankans other than my brother were writers, but they were all extremely well-read, continuing into this present day our tendency to place great value on the worth of books. Further, all of the women were in positions of power, most of them heads of private corporations from hotels and tourism to exports and finance, and all of them active patrons of the arts.
Even more importantly, they were committed to sharing their love of learning of the world through its literature with as wide an audience as possible, and willing to volunteer their time to make it happen. Pineapple and roasted nuts: Ru Freeman on Sri Lanka's enduring love of language and books. And since this acquisition was so varied, our sense of its usage was correspondingly without limits; there was an internal rhythm to our understanding of the English language that did not seek to obey any single aesthetic, but instead let our intuitive sense of the world unfold on the page however we wished.
During those years, Sri Lanka had no tradition of public readings of work in English, though those who wrote in Sinhala and Tamil had their own, multitudinous audiences. As such, we, along with our peers, performed for private audiences in full length theater productions or during examinations where we declaimed the words of others rather than our own. Pulsing beneath what was taking place among those like me who wrote in English, was an entirely different scene: one where Sri Lankan writers saw their own work performed on stage.
For those who wrote in English, publication translated into collections of poetry rather than prose, though there were always exceptions, and that work was assigned for study in university. It was, in other words, a more cerebral activity, rather than one that included the out-loud utterance. It has been fascinating to discover, then, the more recent establishment of festivals of literature in Sri Lanka and, more importantly, readings of new work, as well as the local publication of fiction in English.
More than that, though, are the smaller local festivals that have taken on the matter of engaging with literature in a way that continues a cultural tradition of respect for language and books. It spanned just one day, but included panels of people discussing literature and the creative process in all three languages, Sinhala, Tamil, and English.
Its very name is an acknowledgement of a particularly local love for nutritious, delicious, and completely addictive street food, and an attempt to demystify literature and the literary culture. Earlier this year, in the wee hours of a morning, I skyped in from the U.
Assembled there was my brother, two young men who were active in the local literary scene, Rick Simonson from Elliott Bay Book Company who was in Sri Lanka after speaking at the Jaipur Literary Festival JLF , visiting my father, and a group of Sri Lankans, all women, who had been brought together by a former school-friend of mine.
The most interesting thing about this group was that none of the Sri Lankans other than my brother were writers, but they were all extremely well-read, continuing into this present day our tendency to place great value on the worth of books. Further, all of the women were in positions of power, most of them heads of private corporations from hotels and tourism to exports and finance, and all of them active patrons of the arts.
Even more importantly, they were committed to sharing their love of learning of the world through its literature with as wide an audience as was possible, and willing to volunteer their time to make that possible. He made an appointment with me, sat bolt upright in a chair, asked questions and took notes.
The person who began the festival he had just completed was an airline pilot, a non-writer. He himself was a computer programmer. His friends who would handle publicity and tickets and every other conceivable detail that goes into producing a festival were mostly engineers and accountants. What were they doing immersed in books? Simply this: they loved literature.
He had lost none of that particularly subtle language of regard, a lexicon that is a blend of a quintessentially Sri Lankan character gilding this foreign tongue. The event took place at Barefoot, a favorite haunt of expatriates and well-shod Sri Lankans, and the whole evening had an elegance that was unusual in my experience; readings in America, with the notable exception of Seattle, seem largely unpredictable.
This launch took place in the open-air courtyard, with tables decorated with lamps and flowers, a porch provided the stage-setting for the reading, and books were bought and signed before a word was read. An airy reverence hung over the assembled. Most significantly, I noted the way in which the London-based author of the hour spent time with the guests who were almost all known in some fashion to him or to his family.
He chatted a little to Shyam Selvadurai and me, both of whom he knew well, but I noticed the care he took to pull up a chair and sit with my father, himself a poet and reviewer. I listened as they reminisced about various Sri Lankan writers, their own families, and conversed about books read and those yet to be written.
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