The Tongue of Adam

Abdelfattah Kilito, Robyn Creswell

• Publisher: Darf Publishers
• Topic: Philosophy
• eBook ISBN:
  9781850773139
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics

In the beginning, there was one language—one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. "These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly." So begins Abdelfattah Kilito's The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam's tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam's poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind's multilingualism.

Footnotes

^* See Marina Warner’s essay, “Story-Bearers,” London Review of Books 36, no. 8 (17 April 2014): 19–20.

¹ See Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots (Paris: Éditions José Corti, 1987), 9.

² All citations from the Quran are from Tarif Khalidi’s English translation (New York: Penguin, 2009).

³ Tha‘labi, Qisas al-anbiya’ (Beirut: n.d.), 19.

⁴ A. M. Harun, ed., Kitab al-hayawan (Cairo, 1938– 1945), 4:163.

⁵ Ibid., 200. Kisa’i, a writer whose dates are unknown, also notes that following the original sin the serpent “became mute and had a split tongue” (Isaac Eisenberg, Qisas al-anbiya’ [Leiden: Brill, 1922], 1:44).

⁶ Kitab al-hayawan, 4:200.

⁷ Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt and John M. Marincola (New York: Penguin, 2003), 95–96.

⁸ See Maurice Olender, Les Langues du paradis (Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1989), 13.

⁹ See Horst Stern, Mann aus Apulien (Munich: Kinder Verlag GmbH, 1986), 343–44.

¹⁰ The fate of children brought up in isolation is in fact deplorable: “‘Tales’ about ‘savage’ children are well known. They were initially shocking, as one might imagine, to those who believed in a specifically human nature. Children who were not proud to stand on their own two feet, who did not, given their early experiences, easily acquire a language … But we would merely ask this: who would be so rash, these days, as to claim that children, prematurely set apart and deprived of contact with adults, would behave in some innocently charming fashion, that they would display special refinements, or prodigious skills at literature or mathematics?” Lucien Malson, Les Enfants sauvages (Paris: U.G.E., coll. 10/18, 1964), 41.

¹¹ Léon Gautier, trans., Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Paris: Éditions Papyrus, 1983), 33.

¹² Ibid., 34.

¹³ A Latin translation of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan was published in 1671 under the title Philosophus Autodidactus.

¹⁴ Ibid., 126.

¹⁵ Ibid., 128.

¹⁶ Ibid., 24.

¹⁷ Pierre Gibert, Bible, mythes et récits de commencement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986), 118.

¹⁸ Jean-Pierre Vernant, preface to Les Langues du paradis, 7.

¹⁹ See “Babel, Tower of,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 4:26.

²⁰ Qisas al-anbiya’, 22.

²¹ Ibn Khaldun, Peuples et nations du monde, extracts of the ‘Ibar, ed. and trans. Abdesselam Cheddadi (Paris: Sindbad, 1986), 156–57.

²² Razi, Mafatih al-ghayb (Beirut: Dar al-fikr, 1981), 7:23.

²³ Ibid., 20:20.

²⁴ See Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre testament (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 2:144.

²⁵ Qisas al-anbiya’, 57.

²⁶ Yaqut, Mu‘jam al-buldan (Beirut: 1955–57), 1:310.

²⁷ Suyuti, al-Muzhir, ed. M. A. Jad al-Mawla, A. M. al-Bajawi, and M. A Ibrahim (Cairo: n.d.), 1:32.

²⁸ Compare this with the New Testament, Acts 2:1–4: “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

²⁹ See Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” L’Homme 21:1 (1981), 5–20.

³⁰ See bernhard Anderson, “Le récit de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Coyright page
• Foreword
• Babblings
• Babels
• A Babelian Eden
• The Oldest Poem in the World
• Poet or Prophet?
• The Oblivion of Adam
• Poetic Destiny
• Afterword
• Footnotes
• Back Cover