Thanks for the link to Euonia, most impressive.

Thinking about words, langauges, systems of meaning is something that seems to link a bunch of people in the technology world. (It’s interesting that – maybe – these things generate more resonance here than in “established” literary circles. I’m similarly reminded by my son that Christopher Alexander nowadays much more familiar to software thinkers than architects).

Some connections that this sparked off for me: if you haven’t encountered it yet, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Le ton beau de Marot” is a wonderful reflection on language, meaning, translation, structure and intelligence, wrapped up in an intellectual autobiography which is also a song to the remembrance of love…

George Perec’s “Un Disparation” was written – in French, of course – entirely without the letter “e” (no “le”, “les”, “de”, “des”…) – there’s a masterful English translation by Gilbert Adair – the title “A void”. Perec was a member of Oulipo, a loose collective of writers dedicated to experimentation of this sort. One of these (Raymond Queneau) produced 99 stylistic variants on a simple narrative called “Exercises in Style”, which inspired comic book author Matt Madden to produce a graphical alternative (99 Ways to Tell a Story): this runs the gamut of formal and stylistic conventions in comics and will teach you more than you’ll ever need to know about graphic communication.

Happy hunting!

http://www.bartleby.com/100/690.161.html

Bartlett’s claims that at least one other version was printed in a London journal, and that the “author” provided the correct version to Wheeler’s. So Bartlett’s uses the Wheeler “author’s ” version.

That version, the one I remember from childhood, did not name an author. It was listed as “anonymous”.

As against that, the version I’ve referred to in the post explicitly refers to Alaric Watts as the author, and as far as I can make out, is the same as any other version associated with Watts.

So in the end I went with the version associated with Watts.

Fairly certain that this is not the original…
For example, I distinctly remember, “for fame, for freedom, fight fierce furious fray.”

As importantly, the there are a number of lines that seem completely unfamiliar… and that should not be the case even if I haven’t revisited the work in 35 years.

And what completely foxes me is the fact that I remember this as being credited to Anonymous, not Alaric Alexander Watts.

Will try and figure out what’s up. Perhaps AAW re-worked the original piece…

Anyone out there with answers?