The barrel organ is a mechanical instrument composed of wooden cylinders encoded with music, which pipes out a melody at the turn of a crank. These mobile music boxes are of uncertain origin: Primitive versions are said to date back to ancient Greece and China, but the first organ to pair a revolving pinned mechanism with pipes and bellows sprang up in 16th-century Holland. The modern barrel organ, with its familiar, decoratively painted box on wheels—the type still sometimes seen in the tourist-heavy piazzas of European cities—was patented by an Italian in Paris in 1892.

The barrel organ is also barbaric. In France, its common name is orgue de Barbarie, or “Barbary Organ.” The etymology of this name remains doubtful. It may derive from the organ’s tooting timbre, its barrels producing a cruder sound than the refined, ecclesiastical pipe organ. Apocryphal attributions include a Modenese organ maker named Giovanni Barberi, or a legendary English inventor named John Burberry, who is said to have dreamed up the organ’s mechanism after watching a hedgehog rub its quills against a harp. But in fact, “as with figs and so-called Barbary ducks, the simplest explanation,” the organ’s entry on French-language Wikipedia tells us, “is that its origin is ‘barbaric’ in the sense of foreign.”

Barbaric figs and ducks? There’s something exotic, even poetic, about the origins of the orgue de Barbarie. We might well expect to encounter amid those figs and ducks in the lush linguistic verdure of Marianne Moore’s famous “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” a barrel organ chirping playfully somewhere in the background.

This foreign, or barbaric, derivation is also one that Jennifer Scappettone offers in Poetry After Barbarism. Reading a poem by the Japanese poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu, the image of a barrel organ snags Scappettone’s attention, sending her on an etymological detour. The term orgue de Barbarie, she writes, is “based on the exonym ‘Berber’ applied to the Amazigh from across a cultural divide—deriving from the Arabic, or else the Greek, term suggesting ‘barbaric,’ from the nonsense bar bar bar.”

Poetry After Barbarism is a book about the “bar bar bar” of poetic language: not nonsense, exactly, not glossolalia, but the mistranslated, untranslated, and untranslatable. Or as Scappettone puts it, the “dysfluencies and awkwardnesses of grammar and of speech, linguistic jerks, hiccups, and chokes, cross-encroachments of vocabulary and syntax” that create “xenoglossic” textures in verse, a mode “poised at the threshold of the unintelligible” that Scappettone calls “pentecostal.” Not babble, then, but Babel, the ancient dream of a common language. In the Christian narrative of Pentecost as it appears in the Acts of the Apostles, speaking in tongues doesn’t mean gibbering nonsensical speech, but the miraculous ability to converse in unlearned languages.

If Scappettone is interested in the possibilities of a common poetic tongue, it is one pocked with failure and anxiety, alive to the ways that wobbly lingual switches practiced by a non-native speaker might be generative to poetic thinking—animated, she writes, by a “wistful aspiration toward communicability.” Importantly, this aspiration seeks to overleap national as much as linguistic barriers: All the poets in Scappettone’s study “crave understanding beyond the nation,” a political form long marred by “dubious programs aimed at walling off language.”

This is not, then, a book about fluent bilingualism or cosmopolitan multilingualism in modern poetry—of which there are already plenty—but a book about what Scappettone calls “translingualism,” a term that catches at the transgressive slippages that poetry makes possible across and between perceived national and cultural divides. The poets she gathers—Nakayasu, Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs—adopt the position of the “aesthetic barbarian,” by “expressing themselves in tongues officially foreign to them.” If language helps make us citizens, if it makes national and regional forms of belonging possible, then it is also through language that we experience displacement, dislocation, and exile. But what if both are possible at once? What if poetic language harbors a “fugitive and dynamic mode of citizenship,” one that eludes narrowly national models of linguistic community?

The narrowest and most pernicious such model, of course, is fascism, with its “tales of the tribe” and “policing of identity through language.” And for Scappettone, resisting fascism means embracing barbarism, in pursuit of stateless modes of social belonging. In practice, for readers of poetry, this means “push[ing] past the hermeneutic reflex that leads us to stop reading when confronted by obstructions to legibility.” But what does that entail? How can we train ourselves not to translate but to imbibe words that we don’t understand? How do we push past obscurity and opacity, without the requisite training in, or knowledge of, other languages?

Scappettone shows us how, through nimble close readings that dance between languages, cultures, and lyric forms. She draws our ear and eye to the ways poets have shunned languages imposed on them by national (and nationalist) institutions, deforming and reshaping words by reimagining translation itself. In a chapter on the Italian poet, artist, and translator Emilio Villa, Scappettone shows how his revolts against the Italian language also mounted a “lasting rebellion against fascist dogma.” Villa’s writing “seeks out and creates holes”—of logic, language, and thought. These slips, interruptions, and gaps distinguish Villa’s poetics from the erudite, macaronic writing of an Ezra Pound or a T. S. Eliot, the kind of polyglot poetics that requires years of linguistic scholarship both to read and to write. Rather than the dense lexical accretions of The Waste Land or the Cantos, Villa creates a kind of negative texture, a play with what’s not there, like the “canvas slashes” of his contemporary Lucio Fontana.

Here is Scappettone’s “attempt” at a translation of a work by Villa that is, she says, “only partially translatable”:

-ESSO OOFLÉ
-ESSO BREFF
-INNA DA ASS
-THE ENTRANCE
-THE BEINGENGLISH
-ESSO OOFLÉED

These lines comprise a single stanza from a short text Villa produced for Disco Muto, “a choral object-poem . . . produced with the collaboration of artist Silvio Craia and poet Giorgio Cegna between 1967 and 1972.” The words flicker between sense and nonsense, impishly transgressing the limits of each of its languages. In Scappettone’s gloss of her own translation, the first line’s “ESSO” refers to both the US oil brand and the Italian word for “it,” while “OOFLÉ” riffs on “the French words soufflé and souffle (breath), as well as, perhaps, the Italian exclamation ‘uffa!,’ meaning ‘what a drag!,’ and onomatopoetically mimicking the sound of sighing, grumbling, or huffing and puffing.” Disco Muto, Scappettone notes, “was designed to mimic the proportions and format of a phonographic record”; here sound and sense fold into one another, as the ear and eye begin to catch linguistic frequencies humming just below—or is it above?—the level of meaning. Like Cy Twombly, whose asemic scribbles Villa admired, the poet “articulates a barbed desire for communicative marks and phonetics to hoot and jeer within the bonds of uniformed letters.” In so doing, Scappettone suggests, Villa “voices the barbarism of writing lyric in the wake of fascism.”

Here we are reminded—in case the title didn’t give it away—that Scappettone’s book is in dialogue with the work of Theodor Adorno. Poetry After Barbarism reworks Adorno’s famous claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—a line so well-worn now as to feel a little threadbare. A Google search throws up a series of memeified images: a photo of Adorno’s face with a gormless expression next to the quote, which has been shrunk to a six-word minimum (“to write” has been contracted to “writing”); or the same quote transposed onto serene stock images—mist-wreathed mountains, an antique typewriter, the spiral staircase of a library. Hauled from its original context, the apothegm has become a toothless soundbite.

And to a certain extent, Scappettone allows it to remain one. “My title echoes (and makes a Möbius strip of) Theodor Adorno’s notorious remark,” she writes—and then lets the infinite loop do its work. The “notorious remark” haunts the book only as a platitude. Scappettone doesn’t note, for example, that before he mentions poetry, Adorno addresses “cultural criticism,” which “finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.” Nor does she comment on Adorno’s revision, which appeared seventeen years later in Negative Dialectics. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream,” Adorno writes, “hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”

The addendum is telling. The later Adorno parses his own most famous quotation less as a normative admonition (against “barbarism”) than as a descriptive observation: “After Auschwitz you couldn’t write poems anymore.” And while Adorno questions his own earlier foreclosure of poetic praxis, he nevertheless reveals something of his original line of thinking: Read together with his suggestion that cultural criticism finds itself in the “final stage of the dialectic,” this would suggest that there can be no after barbarism to speak of.

Where and when, then, can we locate the after of Scappettone’s title? Lyn Hejinian’s own rejoinder to Adorno, in her 1995 essay “Barbarism,” might offer a clue:

Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic, and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied by) foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness.

Hejinian reads Adorno’s declaration as a “challenge and behest” to continue to write poetry in the wake of genocide. If writing poetry after Auschwitz must be barbaric, Hejinian says, then let us write barbaric poems. Let us confront barbarism with barbarism. This is the call that Scappettone takes up in her book—or at least, the interpretation of Adorno’s thinking that she adopts, exploring the ways that poetry might reclaim a barbaric strangeness through xenoglossic practice.

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Still, that after remains troubling. Does the book’s title imply that we have now arrived at a time after barbarism, a more civilized time, when poetry can be written again? Clearly not. Scappettone explicitly resists “any formulation that might suggest that the end of World War II signaled an end to fascism.” Perhaps, then, the title’s after sounds a utopian note, a hope for a time after barbarism and for a poetry that might take us there. But Scappettone might also be acknowledging that the rupture created by fascism, by Auschwitz, places us in a perpetual after. If we are now alwaysafter barbarism, must all poetry be barbaric? The only thing we can do is to follow Hejinian’s lead and transform Adorno’s remark into a challenge—to take up the gauntlet, or else fall silent.

It’s a compelling proposition, if not an entirely novel one. Under the British Raj, as J. Daniel Elam argues in his 2020 book World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth, “unrecognizability, indecipherability, unintelligibility, untraceability, and untranslatability” were important literary modes of resisting colonial authority, practiced not just by poets but by anti-colonial revolutionaries including Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. Such readerly strategies not only flouted an imposed grammar of empire and mastery, but also helped to forge forms of colonial selfhood—precisely the kind of transient citizenship that Scappettone also outlines.

Throughout the 20th century, avant-garde poetic practices have been cutting, tearing, and deforming language, under varying political banners. Scappettone’s interest in the diasporic possibilities afforded by these experiments is timely and important, but how viable is the championing of what she calls “studious unlearning”? How much does she really subscribe to these unruly, untutored reading practices? Surely the dexterous reading of Villa relies on Scappettone’s own expansive knowledge of the languages between which he moves, not to mention the fact that Villa himself—who was a translator by profession—loudly exhibits his learned linguistic fluencies. Only a robust grasp of a language (or several) could make such linguistic distortions possible. And if we do take Scappettone at her word, then the valorization of “unlearning” risks the promotion of a kind of willed ignorance or, worse, appropriation. Does a refusal to fully engage with other languages—and, by extension, other cultures—make possible a long-sought rebabelization? Or does it simply endorse an enjoyment of the exotic cadences of foreign words, the blunted sound of poetry emptied of its fury?

Scappettone isn’t deaf to the charges of appropriation that have been leveled, if not at her own project, then at the translingual strategies of the poets she reads. The book opens with a chapter on the Italian Futurist poet (and ardent fascist) F. T. Marinetti, a move she posits as a kind of necessary evil: Before it can really get going, Scappettone says, the book needs to “face off against this modernist.” Here is how not to write xenoglossic poetry, the chapter proclaims, as it exposes the poet’s “dubious primitivist appropriation[s]” of “exotic” African cultures. The poets whom Scappettone presents as xenoglossic exemplars, on the other hand, are able to transcend (but not transgress) cultural and linguistic difference by being altogether more tactful, more critical and, above all, more humble. “Studious unlearning,” she says, doesn’t “shir[k] deep and prolonged study (for any cavalier incorporation would only reproduce the violence of appropriation),” but “embraces being plunged into the humble stance of apprenticeship.”

This pose of genuflection—another one of the book’s Christian undertones, perhaps—is central in Scappettone’s thinking. Poetry After Barbarism, she insists, seeks to “reimagin[e] . . . the form and expectation of the academic monograph” by introducing “a more collaborative, speculative, and above all humble dimension to a genre typified by assumptions, demands, and proofs of mastery.” Collaboration, not to mention reimagining the monograph, is all very well, but are the performance of humility and the rejection of “mastery” really scholarly aspirations? Can this lavishly erudite book—which, as Scappettone remarks more than once, took fourteen years to write—stake such a claim, either for itself or for the work of the writers it engages?

Perhaps these criticisms are too barbed for a work that otherwise deserves to be lauded, and not only for its confrontation of contemporary forms of fascist resurgence and because it brings the writings of lesser-known poets to light. Poetry After Barbarism is also a brilliant work of criticism, an imaginative and original intervention into the twinned fields of poetics and translation studies. Maybe this is why Scappettone’s protestations of “humbleness” feel all the more frustrating. The kinds of close reading that she models require years of learning and labor, as do all forms of literary translation. With humanities education under assault in large parts of the Anglophone world, now is surely the time to affirm, not renounce, the expert learning and skilled craft of scholarship.

Of course, the specters threatening this work are not only political, but technological. At last, the dream of rebabelization can been realized with the help of a little black box—or so Google Translate and ChatGPT would have us believe. Though she doesn’t discuss computer translation or generative AI, Scappettone’s reclaiming of barbarism is a clear rejection of precisely these kinds of communication-smoothing, labor-saving linguistic aids. AI software is learning how to ape (if unconvincingly) the style of a given poet when fed a prompt. But, for the time being at least, no large language model could—or would—create the kinds of poems that Emilio Villa was writing in the 1940s and ’50s, or Etel Adnan in the 1970s, or LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs today. Preprogrammed to provide efficient and pristine language modes, AI simply wouldn’t understand the nuance and value of the xenoglossic slip. And perhaps this is what Scappettone really means by “unlearning”: not a rejection of intellectual labor, but a fundamental rethinking of how we read.

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At the end of Andrés Neuman’s 2009 novel El viajero del siglo (Traveler of the Century), an old organ grinder lies dying on a filthy straw mattress in a cave. His soiled surroundings might be called barbaric; they certainly seem so to his friend Hans, a cosmopolitan traveler and translator, who keeps vigil over the old man. In one of his dying breaths, the organ grinder makes a final, bizarre request of his friend: “I want you to find out how to say barrel organ in as many different languages as you can, I’d like it very much if you could tell me their names,” he says. “I need to hear them.”

And so Hans does: Leierkasten and Drehorgel in German, straatorgel in Dutch, lirekasse in Danish, positiv in Swedish, fataorgan in Norwegian, realejo in Portugese, katarynka in Polish, hurdy-gurdy in English, and of course orgue de Barberie in French. Neuman, who trained as a philologist, doesn’t comment on the barbaric derivation of the French name. He’s not interested in etymology, but in the timbre of each word (“this one has a tinkle,” the organ grinder remarks of the Polish katarynka), the way that sound changes sense, the way linguistic slippages might give rise to new impressions, might make us see the world differently.

Traveler of the Century is a novel about poetry, about translation, and about how literature and language intersect with questions of national belonging, shifting borders, and social migration. More obliquely, it is a novel about barbarism, in the sense of foreignness. And it is also a novel about a barrel organ. Peering inside the instrument, the old organ grinder explains its mechanism. “Each pin is a mystery,” he says. “Not a note exactly, the promise of a note.”

One evening, watching the sun set, the nameless organ grinder muses to Hans, “I think music is always there, do you see, music plays itself and instruments try to attract it, to coax it down to earth.” “I have a similar idea about poetry,” Hans replies. “I think poetry is like the wind you enjoy listening to, which comes and goes and belongs to no one, whispering to anyone who passes by.” The barbarous barrel organ stymies the will to “mastery.” Any hand can turn its crank; the music plays itself.

Perhaps poetry’s susurrations do something similar, lingering “at the threshold of the unintelligible,” as Scappettone puts it. Learning to tune into foreign sounds without feeling a need to master meaning might prompt productive new ways of reading in politically reactionary times. But as AI tries strenuously to render our mental faculties redundant, now also seems like the moment to defend all forms of learning. To do otherwise would be barbaric.

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