“All Roads Lead to ‘Perverbs’’’: Harry Mathews’s Selected Declarations of Dependence (1977)

: The manipulative change of traditional proverbs into innovative anti-proverbs is nothing new. In fact, the playful rearrangement of proverb halves into insightful or nonsensical creations has been practiced by such aphoristic writers and poets as Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Éluard, Franz Fühmann, Marcel Bénabou, Paul Muldoon, and others. The art of scrambling proverbs was practiced in particular by several members of the French avant-garde group of writers and intellectuals called Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). The American author Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was one of its prolific members who excelled with his enumerative poems based on various patterns of proverb fragments. While he published such tour-de-force poetic texts in French, he also wrote a most unique book in English with the title Selected Declarations of Dependence (1977). The first part is a love story of sorts based on the 185 words that appear in 46 common English proverbs. Proverb halves are interspersed in this prose, but there are also multiple poetic texts that employ parts of proverbs in certain patters and as anaphora and leitmotifs. The second half is made up of 106 paraphrases of what he calls “perverbes”, i.e., anti-proverbs made up of two proverb halves. It is up to the readers to find which perverb (the English spelling) belongs to which paraphrase. All of this is meant to entertain and challenge readers into becoming active participants in these texts that at times make sense but also remain without any meaning. The entire book is conceived as an intellectual game with its own riddles and perplexities but also its playful humor that should intrigue and delight paremiologists everywhere

A Paremiologist’s Dream Come True: “The Wolfgang Mieder International Proverb Library” at the University of Vermont

This is a report describing the events that resulted in the establishment of “The Wolfgang Mieder International Proverb Library” in May of 2019 at the University of Vermont. It is an account of Prof. Mieder’s donation of about 9000 proverb collections and studies about proverbs to his university. They are now housed in the historical Billings Library on campus. As a research center it welcomes scholars and students from anywhere to pursue their paremiographical and paremiological research projects. The report also includes a number of press releases that reported on this exciting matter. Several pictures of the beautiful bookcases appear at the end of these accounts

“My Tongue – is of the People”: The Proverbial Language of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustrta

Friedrich Nietzsche repeatedly relies on elements of preformulated folk speech to add a certain metaphorical expressiveness to his thoughts and arguments, no matter whether they appear in aphorisms, fragments, poems, letters, essays or entire books. It is then surprising that the considerable secondary literature on Thus Spoke Zarathustra has been almost completely silent on its obvious proverbiality, and this even though Nietzsche occasionally refers with distinct introductory formulas to Bible and folk proverbs employed by him. This might well be due to the fact that Nietzsche seldom cites proverbs in their traditional wording since they would be far too didactic and moralistic for his insistence on the revaluation of all values. Thus he parodies, manipulates, alienates, and contradicts proverbs by changing them into innovative anti-proverbs while at the same time also creating his own pseudo-proverbs to argue for a life free of antiquated rules and regulations. Often he merely alludes to proverbs using their metaphors merely to enhance his expressive style without any agreement with their wisdom. After all, Nietzsche wants to show how everything is something becoming and not an end, and that the positive struggle with fate has to be undertaken in eternal return (repetition) without rigid guidelines as proverbs would be. In any case, proverbial matters accompany Zarathustra on his path towards self-recognition and the acceptance of life. The numerous proverbial expressions with their metaphors add much to the poetic style of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while the usually varied Bible and folk proverbs are used to underscore the break with God and Christianity. There is no doubt that the message of this literary and philosophical work is to a considerable degree in-formed by the multifaceted nuances of its proverbial language

Arvo Krikmann: Master Folklorist and Paremiologist

ARVO KRIKMANN: MASTER FOLKLORIST AND PAREMIOLOGIST Laudatio on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (July 21, 2014