Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 195

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PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
the frail unwary anchoress, to the wind – or spirit – that moves
upon the waters.
At what point does it start or stop becoming important whether
I am discussing the writer’s own meaning, or the meaning I am
reading out of the text (an extrapolation of the text or a new begin-
ning?), or the text’s own independence of both the writer and the
reader? And at what point do these movements start and stop for
you the reader of my text? We must reaffirm the continued rele-
vance of this by now familiar question, so often put aside; my inten-
tion is not to seek insights into the world-view of 13th-century
anchorites and their mentors, important though that may be, but
into the movements of language which inform these views, and
which continue their work as long as they survive as texts. My ques-
tion, what is the Latin translation of ‘word is but wind’? is neither
trivial nor solely socio-historical; it invites us to examine more
closely an essential component of language, the nature of words and
winds.
The Ancrene Wisse has already given us a lead in the quotation
from Bernard, who speaks of verbi flatus, the bodily belching (or
farting) word which inflames the anchoress to anger instead of waft-
ing her into higher realms. The motif of the empty puff of words is
a Biblical one: in Jeremiah 5.13, “And the prophets shall become
wind, and the word is not in them;” and in Job 6.26, “… the
speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind.” The term used
in these passages in the Vulgate is ventus, the normal Latin term for
‘wind’ as a phenomenon of weather.
However, if we turn to the original Hebrew a different picture
emerges. The Hebrew term for ‘wind’ here, ruach, is overwhelm-
ingly used in the Scriptures to apply to the wind which is at the
same time the breath of God; the corresponding Greek and Latin
terms are pneuma and spiritus. Psalm 33.6 is of particular interest to
us, since the terms ‘wind’ and ‘word’ come together; and here the
King James Version renders ruach as ‘breath’: “By the word of the
Lord were the heavens made; and all the hosts of them by the breath
of his mouth.” Earlier translations such as Wycliffe (late 14c.), and
the Catholic Douay-Rheims version (1582) have “the spirit of his
mouth”; Luther has Hauch ‘breath’.
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