From Literary Poiesis to Experiential Reality Alexander Maré

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“So, know that words hold only that which is continually imparted to them. They are vital when those who use them vitalise them. They expand with the expansion of a thought.”

Sullivan, 2015:132

As language can give shape to experience and reality, so translation allows categories of experience to be transferred from one language into another, with implications for disciplines such as the built environment. The creative role of language in everyday life is as a fundamentally constructive tool, for poiesis, the Greek root of “poetry”, means “to create”. Our use of language engages even the unconscious mind, or as ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus stated in the first century CE that “thought and language usually unfold together” (1991:41). The initial conceptualisation finds expression in language, and so language not only has an epistemological dimension (helping us to identify, categorise, and communicate knowledge about the world around us), but also an ontological dimension (giving shape and experience to reality by making it knowable and colouring it with associations, contradictions, irony, and metaphor). Experience informs the conceptual content of language, and language informs what we can identify as legitimate experiences. The way in which language creates and shapes our experience, and the way this differs between languages, becomes most clear through the act of translation, when an attempt is made to move a word, with all its attendant associations, experiences, and worldviews, from one language into another.

“To develop” in English is defined as “to grow or change”, to “bring something into existence”, or to “build houses” (Cambridge English Dictionary, 2020). The normal appearance of “develop” in an architectural setting would include such sentences as “to develop an idea”, or to “construct a development”, one is a verb and the other a noun. Development is the process of change that something undergoes as a means of asserting its existence. In Afrikaans, the nearest

equivalent is ontwikkel, which is not borrowed directly from English, and which is defined in the HAT (Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal) as a verb meaning to come into existence and to grow (1988:776). What is interesting, however, is the fact that ontwikkel consists of two words: the prefix ont- and the verb wikkel. Afrikaans, like German and Dutch, is prone to portmanteaus and neologisms, for it has the capacity to throw disparate words together and so to create both a linguistic and experiential intersection. Ont- is generally a negation, serving the same purpose as “de-” in, for instance, “devalue”. Yet in ontwikkel, it does not serve to negate wikkel, which is a verb meaning to move, wiggle, or make haste (1988:1361), but rather to emphasise it. The usual negative quality of ont- thus subverts its own role: to ontwikkel is to become more, rather than less.

Ontwikkel thus has a very strong connotation of organic motion, speed, and disruption, which its English equivalent lacks. In fact, the English variation “develop” has a connotation of slowness: to develop takes time, whereas to wikkel is to defeat time through speed. The use of ont- in an encouraging rather than negating sense, liberates wikkel to the extent that the visual connotation of ontwikkel is a spreading, flowering explosion of development. Wikkel also means to destabilise, something can be wikkelrig (wobbly), or made to come loose, or one can wikkel to make haste, or wikkel (manoeuvre) one’s way into a conversation. These uses colour the word ontwikkel by extension, and comparatively recent architectural tendencies such as urban sprawl and skyscrapers can perhaps be seen as a manifestation of ontwikkeling (development), in keeping with modernity’s emphasis on speed and change.

Finally, and perhaps most

related to architectural development and modernity, it is worth connecting the fact that ontwikkel is a portmanteau to the physical event it describes, development, as a manifestation of this portmanteau in practice. “To develop” means to bring together disparate entities, whether people or structural materials, and so create a new identity. The word ontwikkel also reflects this linguistically and draws attention to the connective nature of development as the word itself is a combination, but so too is the act of developing. Ontwikkel thus has the potential to contribute a richer understanding to its English translation in the built environment. To “develop” a piece of land, or to place a “development”, in English may mean little beyond “making the land change to what it was not before”. But to ontwikkel a land means to loosen the land to its roots, to destabilise it, to tease it into a rapid explosion of “development”. Moreover since ontwikkel is not a single word, but two with an errant negation, to ontwikkel is to have a fraught and complex conversation with the land, one that oscillates between imposition (ont-) and encouragement (wikkel), negation and growth. Rather than defining the land as a commodity to be (ex) changed or seen as an enduser “development”, ontwikkel encourages a processual rather than economic understanding, filled with contradictions and unexpected combinations.

References:

Odendal, F.F. (Ed.), 1988. HAT: Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal. Johannesburg: Perskor Uitgewery.

Longinus., 1991. On Great Writing (on the Sublime). (G.M.A. Gruber, transl.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Quine, W.V.O., 2013. Word and Object. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Sullivan, L., 2015. Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings. New York: Dover Publications.

Whorf, B.L., 1978. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. (Carroll, J.B., Ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

ontwikkel

Ontsuffix a negation, serving the same purpose as ‘de-’ Wikkel verb

to move, wiggle, or make haste; to destabilise

Figure 6: Development to come into existence and to grow ”

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