Posted on by Jim Clarke

‘Beyond Nadsat’ now in print – and open access!

Regular readers of our irregular blog will recall the series of posts we did on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few. These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal of English literature, The Anachronist, and (almost all) the journal is free to read or download in the spirit of open access thanks to the publishers at ELTE, Hungary’s foremost university.

View Vol. 20 (2022): Burgess and Droogs: A Post-Centennial Collection of Essays

In this paper, Burgess is used to demonstrate that the role of invented languages in literature goes far beyond the existing well-explored territories of Science Fiction (SF) or High Fantasy, though they predominate therein, and can also be found in historical novels, and even realist fiction, as Burgess’s variegated novels reveal.

This is Ponying the Slovo’s second publication for 2023, and it’s not even two weeks in. We might need a little lie-down!
Anyhow, feel free to read the article here, and the whole journal, all of which will be of interest to Burgess scholars, may be accessed from this page.

Posted on by Jim Clarke · 1 Comment

Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 8: Macaronic Muggers and Nazi Newspeak

And so we approach the end of Burgess’s extensive writing career and his surprisingly prolific foray into invented languages in his literature. I promised at the outset that we’d end up with Nazi Newspeak, and we shall.

Anthony Burgess’s curious compendium novel, The End of the World News, did not emerge until 1982, though most of its contents had been created in some form during the late 1970s. A tripartite narrative, it features the story of the dying Sigmund Freud, alongside a musical version of Leon Trotsky’s visit to New York. All of this is hastily glued together via a frame narrative which leads out of a disaster movie scenario in which an asteroid is set to collide with Earth. If this sounds like three separate stories that don’t belong together, that’s because they don’t.

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Posted on by Jim Clarke · 1 Comment

Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages

or, how to get from Nadsat to Nazi Newspeak via Aliens, Stone Age man, Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, Roman sonnets, Trade Unions, Aussie rhyming slang, Medieval Latin blasphemy, and the Sicilian dialect.

Nadsat is Anthony Burgess’s best known invented language, just as Elvish is JRR Tolkien’s. But Tolkien did not just invent Elvish. Indeed, he created a whole raft of invented languages. What’s probably less well-known is that so did Anthony Burgess. In this series of articles, let’s take a look at his other encounters with invented languages. But first, some background. Or to put in another way, as is so often the case when dealing with the topic of invented languages in literature, but first, Tolkien.

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