Babel No More by Michael Erard Read Free Book Online

cardboard to look like books, they were antiqued with a patina of dust. Opening the lid released a musty smell—some hadn’t been cracked for decades. (The scrupulous librarians pantomimed how I should add my signature to a list of others on a sheet inside the boxes.)
    First box, first file. In “Angolana,” whatever that was, were four items of versi . One a poem about Bethlehem, another aboutthe Three Kings. Dated 1844, 1845, 1847, and 1848. Between the sentences was a Latin translation of each. Had my cardinal written these? If he knew Angolana, why did he need the Latin translation, too? I was tapping, tapping, and here was a hollow sound, which I ignored in order to move on.
    The next file, labeled Coptic, contained two poems about the Three Kings, another about Bethlehem, withLatin translations. This repetition of themes would make sense to me only later. Many letters, but not in the twiggy scrawl that I would come to recognize as Mezzofanti’s.On and on it came, on stiff, browned paper, cut in all sorts of irregular sizes. Time had reduced some of it to the texture of a butterfly’s wing.
    The next box. Albanian (a poem, a list of verbs, and some sentences); Algonquin(a grammar, a dictionary, and a catechism, none written in Mezzofanti’s hand, but the first part of a translation of the Book of Genesis, which was his); Amharic; Arabic (a long lecture by Mezzofanti about the history of Arabic); Basque (a collection of words); Burmese (some prose); Bohemian (some language exercises); “Californian” (a grammatical sketch of Luiseño, an indigenous American language,which wasn’t done by Mezzofanti); Quechua, a native South American language (a list of words, not in Mezzofanti’s hand); Persian (a poem by Mezzofanti about a Persian poet); and other assorted items in Chinese; Coptic (Egyptian written with an adapted Greek alphabet); Danish; Hebrew; Ethiopian (a translated letter); French; Greek; English; Italian; Latin; “Livonese” (possibly Livonian, a nearlyextinct language once spoken in what is now Latvia and Estonia); Maltese; and Dutch. Already I was finding evidence that Mezzofanti, indeed, knew parts of many languages. But how well did he know Algonquin or Burmese? That was less clear.
    The inventario listed many versi . I looked up versi in my dictionary. The first meaning was what I’d expected: “verse, poetry.”
    The less literal meanings surprisedme. Second was “sound, noise, cry,” as an animal might. Third was “silly noise.” Next was “direction, way.” Next was “way,” as in method: Per un verso o per un altro.
    If you know Italian well, this cluster of verse, sound, animal cry, silly noise, way, and method might seem perfectly natural, like a snail in its shell, like a leaf on a tree. Some would say these meanings are the surfaced tipsof submerged metaphors whose linkages, though very real, aren’t visible. Perhaps the mark of knowing a language is an ability to grasp what’s submerged as surely as you or I can recognize in a glance three connected lines as a triangle. Certainly Mezzofanti knew his native Bolognese this way, maybe a few other languages, too. But did he know all fifty-eight or seventy-two or one hundred fourteenof them like this? For that miracle alone, Mezzofanti might have been canonized, back in the days when people believed that a person could really be in two locationsat once (as Saint Catherine could do) or levitate (as Saint Joseph of Copertino could do). Today this claim would garner only skepticism.
    Sitting at that long table in the Archiginnasio, looking through the contents of the firstbox, I realized I was so intent on the voices of doubters and believers going back and forth in my head that I had stopped paying attention to the boxes and their contents. Stop, I told myself. You just got here. Stop and look. Revelations will come.
    That afternoon, I wandered up Via Malcontenti, the street where Mezzofanti was born. A narrow side street, its only