Windchimes

dumb and dumberer

This is what I love about being an English student after having read so much in French. It’s difficult, in a foreign language, to get much deeper than reading for a first-level kind of meaning. One finds the definitions, denotations and sometimes even connotations for the words in a text, but always in the context of struggling to understand something not as well understood as a text in one’s own language would be. I am sure one of my professors said to me, at some point, during my studies in French, that Baudelaire is famous for synesthesia, and probably even explained to me in French what the French word means, but hell, I just found out wtf that word means in English after seeing it demonstrated in a translation of one of his poems. You know, we read some Baudelaire in my World Lit class, too, which was taught in English, but I still don’t think I’d ever heard that he’s famous for synesthesia. Or if I did, it was in the context of a conversation spoken in French.

Dammit, the longer I’m a student, the dumber I feel. I refuse to hold myself totally responsible though. I read samplings of Baudelaire in two separate literature survey classes. Survey classes: courses in which a bundle of texts are cloistered together to represent, supposedly, the most important texts and movements in writing in a given country during a given time period. The upshot: you’re going to read a lot of different authors and not get to know any of them very well. Smorgasbord. Plenty of things to taste, you’re supposed to taste at least a little bit of everything. By the time you’re done tasting, you couldn’t eat another bite if someone brought you the most delectable dish you could imagine. But the next time you come to the table, you’ll have a better idea what you’d rather eat more and less of. You just have to have some time to let the food settle.

Burp.

What does synesthesia mean? Stick it in your search window.

J.H. Larrew
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