Writing About the City
How do languages inhabit cities? What kinds of spoken idiom do they develop? Cockney? Verlan? “Der saloppe Groβstadtjargon, ein umgangsprachliches Parlando, das vom Kabarett und vom Simplicissimus vorbereitet worden war” (Rothe 1973: 19) [The slovenly city jargon, a colloquial parlando, which had been prepared by cabaret and the [satirical weekly magazine] Simplicissimus]? How does the poetic survive this onslaught, these serial adulterations? Hofmannsthal fears that, even in the case of “normal” linguistic usage, the city fatally contaminates the language it shares with poets:
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Scott, C. (2018). Translating the Poetry of the Urban. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_97-1
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