Tag: Ponying the Slovos

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Anthony Burgess versus Stanley Kubrick

I had the pleasure last week of speaking at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, as part of a panel discussion to launch a new book entitled Burgess, Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange.

The book is co-edited by Dr Matt Melia from Kingston University, and Georgina Orgill, the archivist of Stanley Kubrick. For those with an interest in the great brainwashing fable, in either literary or cinematic form, it’s a great read, from Matt and Georgina’s introduction, to the final essay.

The Ponying the Slovos team were honoured to be able to contribute to the volume, and eagerly grasped the opportunity to compare Burgess’s Nadsat to that which features in Stanley Kubrick’s script (and thereafter, the movie itself.)

Alas, as is so often the case with academic research these days, the purchase price is not so cheap. My suggestion is to ask a friendly academic librarian to consider purchasing it on your behalf. However, I can offer you a flavour of what we discovered, and subsequently wrote about in the volume.

M’learned colleague Benet Vincent has written up a fascinating article over at the Ponying the Slovos blog, explaining the differences between Burgess’s Nadsat and Kubrick’s.

I hope you will read it, and perhaps also get the chance to look at the book, not to mention its gorgeous cover.

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‘Beyond Nadsat’ now in print and available for free via Open Access

Over at Ponying the Slovos, our ongoing project on invented languages in art and literature, I wrote a series of posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few.

These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal of English literature, The Anachronist, and (almost all) the journal is free to read or download in the spirit of open access thanks to the publishers at ELTE, Hungary’s foremost university.

View Vol. 20 (2022): Burgess and Droogs: A Post-Centennial Collection of Essays

In this paper, Burgess is used to demonstrate that the role of invented languages in literature goes far beyond the existing well-explored territories of Science Fiction (SF) or High Fantasy, though they predominate therein, and can also be found in historical novels, and even realist fiction, as Burgess’s variegated novels reveal.

This is Ponying the Slovos’s second publication for 2023, and it’s not even two weeks in. We might need a little lie-down!

Anyhow, feel free to read the article here, and the whole journal, all of which will be of interest to Burgess scholars, may be accessed from this page.

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In addition to Nadsat

I’m the co-director of the Ponying the Slovos project which looks at invented languages in translation, predominantly focusing on Nadsat, the teen slang of Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

But Burgess didn’t just invent one language for his fiction. In fact, like Tolkien before him, he invented quite a few. So we thought late last year it was time to take a look at the others, and try to explain how they function and what they’re made of.

It was only intend to be a quick overview, but about 10,000 words or so later, we realised we’d have to split this work up into smaller chunks so as to be more easily digestible on a blog format. As a result, the first part of a series of eight posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages can now be found on Ponying the Slovos.

There will, as you might have surmised, be seven more to follow. If the languages of aliens, stone age man, Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, the streets of 19th century Rome, Australia, Sicily or Medieval Latin blasphemers is of interest, it’s a series which may intrigue you.

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Riddley, Max, Iain and Dave

My fourth (of three originally intended!) article on Riddley Walker and invented literary languages is now live on the Ponying the Slovos project site.

This one looks at the various legacies and tributes to the post-apocalyptic debased English invented by Russell Hoban for Riddley Walker. Unsurprisingly, they’re largely post-apocalypse narratives themselves.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome Edizione: Regno Unito Edizione: Regno Unito: Amazon.it: Tina Turner: Film e TV

We have the third Mad Max movie, an Iain M. Banks NON-Culture SF novel, and a novel by Will Self, The Book of Dave, wherein the rantings of a psychotic London cabbie form the basis of a post-apocalyptic future religion.

It’s a fun mixed bag, linked by language, and it was fun to write about them all.

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Enjoy the Sylents

Okay, I lied. There will in fact by four articles in total on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker at the Ponying the Slovos project site.

This one’s the third of four now, and does the heavy lifting, addressing the linguistic structure of Riddleyspeak and navigating through some of the earlier critical perspectives on Hoban’s language invention.

To make up for that, the last one, out in a week or so, is all about Riddley’s legacy – Iain M. Banks’ non-Culture SF, Will Self’s post-apocalypse and Tina Turner’s wig, in other words. Don’t forget to tune in.

Pin on Shadowside: Meet Saliriel
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Sum Poasyum

Today, scholars, academics, artists and writers will gather (except they won’t, this being plague year) in Canterbury (ie virtually but hosted there) to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

It’s an astonishing novel, an evocative work of post-apocalyptic world set millennia in the future but demonstrating how the future will be back to the past if we permit the fragile, complex thing we call technologically-enabled civilisation to collapse.

The most notable thing about Hoban’s novel is of course Riddleyspeak, the quirkily spelt, puntastic invented language in which it is written. Meant to evoke both the post-literate society in which it is set and the limited cognitive capacities (and low cunning) of its 12 year old narrator, Hoban’s invented language is a remarkable piece of literary creation.

I’ve been posting about Riddley Walker over at Ponying the Slovos in my own meagre celebration, seeking to get under the bonnet of Riddleyspeak and identify how it works and what it does. I’m hoping to experience sum of the sum poasyum too, but that will be dependent on another creature of complex idiosyncratic communication and low cunning, my infant son.

So if I fail, good luck instead to all who attend and hopefully some of the materials will end up archived and online for those unable to be there, even virtually.

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Riddley me this

So, after a summer hiatus, there’s a new post on the Ponying the Slovos blog, the first of three looking at Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

Hoban’s novel, like A Clockwork Orange, deals with dystopia by distorting the language, the very means of communication between author and reader. A broken world is revealed piecemeal via broken English.

Can we talk about Riddleyspeak as a language in itself? It’s obviously derivative of English and is supposed to be that English which has evolved over 2000 years following a civilisational collapse. In that regard, by its own premises, it fails. A mere 13 centuries after Anglo-Saxon and Caedmon’s hymn, English is entirely unrecognisable compared to its forebear tongue, whereas Riddley Walker’s English is mostly comprehensible to us on first sight.

Perhaps that is nit-picking, since books are written to be understood and read.

Anyhow, more here.