3.5
The Tongue of Adam
ByPublisher Description
A playful and erudite look at the origins of language
In the beginning there was one language—one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. “These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly.” So begins Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam’s tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam’s poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind’s multilingualism.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Tongue of Adam Reviews
3.5
“Interesting collection of essays on language from a Muslim scholar. I've not read much of Arabic literature (this is a sign to remedy that) and so I found the Islamic representations and dissections of the layers behind Biblical stories (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel) fascinating. Kilito does fall into the common trap of glorifying Arabic as the penultimate language (contrary to an earlier statement in a prior essay about how all languages are seen equal in the Quran) - this I found funny, if a little bit irritating. Otherwise, a decent and eminently readable introduction to this author.”
“''I'm even rather proud of this great work I never undertook-just as I'm very proud of all those studies I never produced, which remain elusive, desirable, promissory. How beautiful they all are, the things I never wrote! ''”
About Abdelfattah Kilito
Abdelfattah Kilito was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1945. He has received the Great Moroccan Award (1989), the French Academy Award (1996), and the Sultan Al Owais Prize for Criticism and Literature Studies (2006).
Other books by Abdelfattah Kilito
Robyn Creswell
A critic, translator, and scholar, Robyn Creswell is currently the poetry editor for the Paris Review and assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale.
Other books by Robyn Creswell
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