Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

LiteratureLanguage

The story behind the card

The line ends 'Spelling', a poem in Margaret Atwood's 1981 collection True Stories. Atwood, born in 1939, is one of Canada's best-known writers and the author of The Handmaid's Tale. The poem opens with her young daughter on the floor with plastic letters, learning to spell, and plays on the old link between spelling words and casting spells. It then turns to women who were kept from writing or silenced. The closing line gathers this up: words, added one by one, are how people build and hold power.

Türkçe oku
Bir sözcüğün ardına bir sözcük, onun ardına bir sözcük daha. Güç budur.
Margaret Atwood

Bu dize, Margaret Atwood'un 1981'de yayımlanan True Stories adlı kitabındaki “Spelling” (Heceleme) şiirinin son satırıdır. 1939 doğumlu Atwood, Kanada'nın en tanınmış yazarlarından biridir; Damızlık Kızın Öyküsü de onun romanıdır. Şiir, yerde plastik harflerle oynayıp heceleme öğrenen küçük kızıyla açılır ve İngilizcede “heceleme” ile “büyü yapma” sözcüklerinin akrabalığıyla oynar. Ardından yazması engellenen, susturulan kadınlara döner. Son dize bunların hepsini toparlar. Güç, birer birer eklenen sözcüklerle kurulur ve korunur.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Margaret Atwood
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

Near the end of The Trial, a prison chaplain tells Josef K., a bank official arrested for a crime nobody will name, the parable “Before the Law”: a man from the country waits all his life at an open door to the Law, and the doorkeeper never lets him in. As they argue over its meaning, the priest says this, warning K. not to lean on any single reading. Kafka left the novel unfinished; his friend Max Brod published it in 1925, after Kafka's death.

Franz KafkaRead card
StillnessLiterature

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Kipling said this at the annual dinner of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in February 1923, in a speech later printed as ‘Surgeons and the Soul’. Speaking to doctors, he took the idea of a drug seriously: words, he went on, can infect, poison, numb and paralyse, and even colour the tiniest cells of the brain. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), born in Bombay, wrote The Jungle Book, Kim and the poem ‘If—’, and in 1907 became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Rudyard Kipling, address to the Royal College of Surgeons (1923)Read card
WonderLiterature

French writer Georges Perec's novel La Disparition (1969) never uses the letter e, and that was deliberate. It came out of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who set themselves writing rules like this one.

A text written without a chosen letter is called a lipogram. In French, e is the most common letter, found in articles, verb endings and countless everyday words, so leaving it out forces constant rewording rather than one clever trick. The title means 'The Disappearance', and the plot turns on something missing. Oulipo stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, 'workshop of potential literature': its members used mathematical and linguistic rules to push writing where habit would not take it. Gilbert Adair's English translation, A Void (1994), also avoids e. Other translators dropped the letter hardest to avoid in their own language: the Spanish version has no a, the Russian no о.

OulipoRead card
StillnessLanguage

Tsundoku is the Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up unread. It carries no real reproach: it joins 'piling things up' and 'reading', and the pile is treated as a fairly harmless habit.

The word first appeared in print in the 1870s, in a mild joke about a teacher whose library grew faster than his reading. It plays on 'tsunde oku', to stack up and leave for later, blended with 'dokusho', reading. That makes it different from bibliomania, an older Western term for a compulsive, even pathological urge to collect books: tsundoku describes an ordinary, slightly sheepish habit, not a disorder. The word spread well beyond Japan in the 2010s, when English-language writers began using it as a wry, forgiving label for the habit of buying more books than anyone could realistically read.

JapaneseRead card
WonderArchaeology

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are some half a million scraps of ancient writing dug out of an Egyptian town's rubbish dumps. Lost plays and poems lie among contracts, tax returns, private letters and school exercises.

Two young Oxford scholars, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, began digging the ancient rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a town about 160 kilometres south of Cairo, in 1896. Egypt's dry climate had kept papyrus, the paper-like writing material made from a reed, from rotting. Among tax returns, receipts and letters they found fragments of Sappho's poems, comedies by Menander that had been lost for centuries, and early Christian texts. The haul was so large that only a small share has been published so far, because each scrap has to be cleaned, pieced together, read and translated. The Egypt Exploration Society, which keeps most of the collection in Oxford, is still publishing new volumes.

Oxyrhynchus PapyriRead card
Next card in the archiveFor every dark night, there's a brighter day.Read next →