The Tongue of Adam

by 

Abdelfattah Kilito

£8.99

Description

“One would be hard-pressed to find a
Moroccan writer who is more respected by his
peers and more appreciated by his readers”
The Nation

In the beginning, there was one language—one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. “These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly.” So begins Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam’s tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam’s poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind’s multilingualism.

Additional information

Author

Country

Format

Paperback

Introduction

Marina Warner

ISBN

9781850773122

Publication Date

April 2018

Original Language

Arabic

Translator