Glossary 97
Words kept in their own language, and what they mean.
- akyn
kazakh et kirghiz · Asie centrale
An improvising poet of the Turkic steppes, who composes while accompanying himself on a lute and confronts others in public contests followed by large audiences.
- anansegoro
akan · Ghana
A theatre drawn from the tales of Ananse the spider, formalised by Efua Sutherland: storyteller, chorus and audience keep on stage the role they had around the fire.
- apartheid
afrikaans · Afrique du Sud
A system of legal racial separation imposed from 1948 to 1991, governing housing, schooling, marriage and movement. It produced an entire literature.
- aymara
aymara · Andes
The language of the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano, older than Quechua in some regions, and still today a language of community and of oral poetry.
- baihua
chinois, 白話 · Chine
A written language modelled on the spoken one, adopted after 1919 against classical Chinese. That change of instrument gave birth to modern Chinese literature.
- bendrologie
mooré, bendré · Burkina Faso
The science of the speech of Mossi drums, named by Titinga Pacéré: the drum does not keep time, it utters sentences that the initiated decipher.
- bislama
bislama · Vanuatu
An English-based creole of Vanuatu, the national language of a country with more than a hundred languages, and the only one in which everyone can understand each other.
- bunraku
japonais, 文楽 · Japon
A puppet theatre with three visible handlers, accompanied by a chanter and a lute. Chikamatsu wrote his lovers' double suicides for it.
- candomblé
portugais du Brésil · Brésil
An Afro-Brazilian religion born in Bahia, in which the Yoruba deities dance by coming down upon the initiated. Long repressed, it runs through the Nordeste novel.
- chamane
toungouse, šaman · Sibérie et Asie centrale
An officiant who enters trance to travel in the world of spirits and bring back a diagnosis. The word comes from Siberia and has spread to other areas.
- cordel
portugais du Brésil · Brésil
A booklet of narrative poems sold in markets, hung on a string, illustrated with woodcuts and sung by its author to attract buyers.
- corrido
espagnol du Mexique · Mexique
A sung narrative ballad recounting a real event, revolution, crime or migration, with names, dates and places. It served as a newspaper for the illiterate.
- daina
letton et lituanien · Pays baltes
A very short Baltic folk song, often of four lines, about work, the seasons and marriage. Collections have gathered hundreds of thousands of them.
- dastan
persan et turc, داستان · Asie centrale
A long versified narrative, epic or amorous, recited by a bard from village to village. It mixes prose and verse and continues over several evenings.
- derviche
persan, درویش · Islam
A member of a Sufi brotherhood, often itinerant and living on alms. Some brotherhoods practise the whirling dance as a form of prayer.
- didiga
bété · Côte d'Ivoire
An art of the spoken tale, drawn from Bété hunting songs and turned into a poetics by Bernard Zadi Zaourou: what is told when reason no longer suffices.
- divan
persan, دیوان · Mondes persan et turc
A collection gathering an author's poetic work, arranged by rhyme rather than by theme. The word also names the ruler's council, whence the European sense of couch.
- esperpento
espagnol · Espagne
A form invented by Valle-Inclán: the world seen in a distorting fairground mirror, in which tragedy becomes grotesque without ceasing to be tragic.
- fado
portugais · Portugal
An urban song of Lisbon, accompanied on the Portuguese guitar, which speaks of fate, of waiting and of lack. The word comes from the Latin fatum, destiny.
- fatwa
arabe, فتوى · Islam
A legal opinion given by a scholar in answer to a precise question. It has no force of law in itself, but can weigh heavily on the fate of a book.
- favela
portugais du Brésil · Brésil
A neighbourhood built without land title on the hills of Brazilian cities, born after the abolition of slavery and become a literary subject in its own right.
- fespaco
sigle français · Afrique
The panafrican film and television festival of Ouagadougou, created in 1969 and held every two years: the meeting where African cinema sees itself.
- gaucho
espagnol du Río de la Plata · Argentine et Uruguay
A horseman of the southern plains, a herder without land, held to be a vagrant by the towns and turned into a national figure by the poets.
- ghazal
arabe et persan, غزل · Mondes arabe et persan
A short poem of love and wine, made of self-contained couplets linked by rhyme, in which desire and the search for God are said with the same words.
- goulag
russe, ГУЛАГ · Union soviétique
The administration of the Soviet labour camps, and by extension the camp system itself, which produced an entire literature of testimony.
- griot
mandingue, jeli · Afrique de l'Ouest
Genealogist, musician and keeper of speech, attached to a family whose history he preserves. He is not a free artist but a hereditary professional, and his word binds the community.
- gusle
serbo-croate · Balkans
A one-string fiddle of horsehair, held on the knees, with which the singer accompanies himself to recite epic songs. Its drone supports the voice without covering it.
- hacienda
espagnol · Amérique latine
A large agricultural estate inherited from the colony, where the owner holds de facto authority over the peasants. The indigenist novel makes it its stage.
- haïdouk
hongrois et slave, hajduk · Balkans
An outlaw of honour in the Ottoman Balkans, taking refuge in the mountains, at once bandit and resistance fighter. Folk songs made him a figure of justice.
- haïku
japonais, 俳句 · Japon
A poem of seventeen syllables in three segments, in principle containing a season word and a caesura. It notes an instant without commenting or drawing a lesson.
- haka
maori · Nouvelle-Zélande
A Maori sung dance performed in a group, with stamping and shouts, to welcome, to challenge or to mourn a death. Each haka has its own text and occasion.
- hangeul
coréen, 한글 · Corée
The Korean alphabet created in the fifteenth century so that the people could write, long despised by scholars who preferred Chinese, and read mostly by women.
- hassidique
hébreu, ḥasid · Europe centrale et orientale
Relating to the Jewish movement born in eighteenth-century Poland, which favours fervour, song and the told story over learned study.
- hikayat
malais · Monde malais
A Malay prose narrative, court chronicle or adventure romance, copied by hand on imported paper and read aloud before a seated audience.
- huasipungo
quechua et espagnol · Équateur
A plot granted by the hacienda owner to the Indian peasant in exchange for his labour, and by extension the system of servitude it organises.
- hyangga
coréen, 향가 · Corée
Ancient Korean songs, written down in Chinese characters used for their sound, of which only some thirty pieces survive, often Buddhist.
- ifa
yoruba · Nigéria
A system of divination and a corpus of versified narratives learned by heart by the diviner. Each figure obtained refers to poems that hold the answer.
- indigénisme
espagnol, indigenismo · Amérique latine
A current that takes the Indian as subject rather than as scenery, often carried by mestizo or urban authors, and tied to the land reforms of the twentieth century.
- intelligentsia
russe, интеллигенция · Europe de l'Est
The body of educated people who saw themselves as the nation's moral conscience, born in nineteenth-century Russia, between state service and opposition.
- joual
français du Québec · Québec
The popular speech of Montreal, long held to be a fault to be corrected, claimed from the sixties onwards as a language of theatre and of the novel.
- kabuki
japonais, 歌舞伎 · Japon
Japanese popular theatre born in the seventeenth century, performed by men only, with coded make-up, held poses and spectacular stage machinery.
- kanun
albanais · Albanie et Kosovo
Albanian customary law, handed down orally and then codified, which governs hospitality, honour and blood vengeance. It structures part of the country's literature.
- kava
langues polynésiennes · Océanie
A drink made from a pounded root, consumed in a circle in a precise order. The kava session is the frame in which decisions are taken and narratives told.
- kolkhoze
russe, колхоз · Union soviétique
A collective farm created by the collectivisation of the thirties, the obligatory frame of peasant life and the imposed setting of many official novels.
- kora
mandingue · Afrique de l'Ouest
A twenty-one-string harp-lute mounted on half a calabash, played by the griot as he recites. The instrument accompanies the epic and sets the measure of the narrative.
- krio
créole de Sierra Leone · Sierra Leone
An English-based creole born in Freetown among freedmen and captives freed from slave ships, today spoken by almost the whole country.
- kris
malais et javanais · Monde malais
A dagger with a wavy blade, charged with power and handed down in families. In the tales it chooses its bearer and sometimes turns against him.
- loa
créole haïtien · Haïti
A spirit of Haitian vodou, an intermediary between the living and the distant god. Each has its rhythm, its dish, its colour and its way of manifesting.
- madrasa
arabe, مدرسة · Islam
A school where law and the religious sciences are taught, often attached to a mosque and endowed by a pious foundation. It housed libraries and lodged its students.
- mahjar
arabe, مهجر · Amériques
The literature of Syrian and Lebanese emigrants settled in New York and São Paulo in the early twentieth century, who reformed Arabic poetry from abroad.
- mana
langues polynésiennes · Océanie
A power that inhabits a person, a place or an object and is transmitted by contact. It grounds the authority of chiefs and requires precautions from all.
- manga
japonais, 漫画 · Japon
Japanese comics, published first in instalments in thick weekly magazines, then bound into volumes. The word first named sketches drawn at the run of the brush.
- marabout
arabe, murābiṭ · Afrique musulmane
A man of religion and learning, often master of a Quranic school, whose authority is as much social as spiritual. The word also names his tomb, a place of pilgrimage.
- marronnage
français des Antilles · Caraïbe
The flight of a slave from the plantation and life in community in the hills or the forest. In literature the word also names an art of detour and cunning.
- moko
maori · Nouvelle-Zélande
A Maori tattoo cut with a chisel rather than pricked with a needle, whose patterns state lineage and rank. It is a text carried on the face and the body.
- monogatari
japonais, 物語 · Japon
A Japanese prose narrative, from the court romance to the collection of legends or fantastic tales. The word literally means the telling of things.
- mvett
fang · Afrique centrale
A sung epic of the Fang of Gabon and Cameroon, and the name of the stringed instrument that accompanies it. The player recites through whole nights the story of an immortal people at war.
- nabati
arabe, نبطي · Péninsule arabique
Poetry composed in the spoken language of the peninsula rather than in literary Arabic, handed down orally, long despised by scholars and now celebrated.
- nahda
arabe, نهضة · Monde arabe
The nineteenth-century Arab cultural renaissance: presses in Beirut and Cairo, translation of the European novel, reform of the language and debate on modernity.
- nahuatl
nahuatl · Mexique
The language of the Aztecs and their neighbours, written in the Latin alphabet from the sixteenth century by indigenous scholars trained in Franciscan colleges.
- négritude
français · Afrique et Caraïbe
A word coined by Aimé Césaire in the thirties to turn the insult into a claim: to assume a black identity as a fact of culture rather than of nature.
- nô
japonais, 能 · Japon
A slow, masked Japanese theatre in which a ghost comes to tell a passing monk of its former life. The repertoire has been fixed since the fourteenth century.
- orisha
yoruba · Nigéria et Amériques
A deity of the Yoruba pantheon, each with its colour, its prohibitions and its domain. Carried by the slave trade, they reappear in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti under other names.
- pampa
quechua · Argentine et Uruguay
The treeless, featureless grass plain of the Río de la Plata, the obligatory setting of gaucho literature and an image of emptiness in the Argentine novel.
- pansori
coréen, 판소리 · Corée
A narrative sung by a single voice accompanied by a drum, for hours, before an audience that punctuates it. The voice is deliberately roughened by years of training.
- picaresque
espagnol, pícaro · Espagne
A novel told by the servant of several masters, who crosses society from below and lives by his wits. It is born in Spain in the sixteenth century.
- pidgin
anglais · Afrique et Pacifique
A contact language born for trade, with borrowed vocabulary and simplified grammar. Once it becomes a mother tongue it is called a creole.
- qasida
arabe, قصيدة · Monde arabe
A monorhyme poem of the Arabic tradition, often opening with a halt at the traces of an abandoned camp, then leading to praise or satire.
- quechua
quechua · Andes
The language of the Andes, carried by the Inca empire and then by the colonial Church, spoken today by several million people and written since the sixteenth century.
- quipu
quechua, khipu · Andes
A bundle of knotted cords used for counting and perhaps for recording narratives. Most were destroyed, and nobody can read them any more.
- quốc ngữ
vietnamien · Vietnam
The writing of Vietnamese in the Latin alphabet, devised by missionaries in the seventeenth century and made official in the twentieth, replacing Chinese characters.
- rasa
sanskrit · Inde
The flavour or emotion a work must make one feel, according to classical Indian poetics, which counts eight or nine of them, from love to peace.
- rihla
arabe, رحلة · Monde arabe
A travel narrative, a literary genre in its own right in the Arabic tradition, often tied to pilgrimage and to the search for masters across the Muslim world.
- romancero
espagnol · Espagne
The body of romances, short narrative poems on a single assonance, sung since the Middle Ages and taken up by learned poets down to Lorca.
- runes
germanique ancien · Europe du Nord
Signs cut into stone, wood or metal, used in Scandinavia before the Latin alphabet, for brief inscriptions rather than for books, and often for names and memorials.
- saga
vieux norrois · Islande
An Icelandic prose narrative, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, recounting families, voyages or kings with an almost legal soberness.
- samizdat
russe, самиздат · Europe de l'Est
Clandestine publishing by recopying: the text circulates in carbon typescripts, each reader producing new copies. The word literally means self-publishing.
- samouraï
japonais, 侍 · Japon
A warrior in the service of a lord, member of a hereditary caste that produced its own literature of codes, journals and treatises on swordsmanship.
- santería
espagnol de Cuba · Cuba
An Afro-Cuban cult in which the Yoruba orishas hid behind Catholic saints, which allowed them to survive three centuries of prohibition.
- saudade
portugais · Monde lusophone
The lack of a thing or a person one has known, mixed with the pleasure of remembering them. The word has no exact equivalent and serves as emblem for a whole literature.
- scaldique
vieux norrois, skáld · Europe du Nord
Relating to the Scandinavian court poets, whose highly coded verse rests on periphrasis: the ship becomes horse of the waves, battle a storm of swords.
- seppuku
japonais, 切腹 · Japon
Ritual suicide by opening the belly, reserved for warriors and performed according to a precise protocol. It redeems a fault or refuses submission.
- sertão
portugais du Brésil · Brésil
The semi-arid backlands of the Brazilian Nordeste, a land of droughts, prophets and bandits, the matrix of an entire part of the country's literature.
- sevdalinka
bosnien · Bosnie
An urban love song of Bosnia, slow and ornamented, born in the Ottoman towns. The word comes from a root that says both desire and melancholy.
- shtetl
yiddish, שטעטל · Europe centrale et orientale
A small, mostly Jewish town of eastern Europe, with its synagogue, its market and its trades, the setting of Yiddish literature and destroyed by the Shoah.
- sijo
coréen, 시조 · Corée
A short Korean poem of three lines, each broken in two, in which the last line must surprise by a reversal. It was sung as much as it was written down.
- sira
arabe, سيرة · Monde arabe
A popular epic in rhythmic prose, recited by a coffee-house storyteller over months. It has neither author nor fixed version, each reciter holding episodes of it.
- solidarność
polonais · Pologne
A trade union born in the Gdańsk shipyards in 1980 and become a mass movement. The word names both the organisation and the period it opens.
- soufi
arabe, صوفي · Islam
Relating to the mystical current of Islam, which seeks union with God through poverty, music, dance or the poem rather than through law alone.
- tanka
japonais, 短歌 · Japon
A Japanese poem of thirty-one syllables in five segments, a court form practised since the eighth century, often exchanged as a message.
- tapu
langues polynésiennes · Océanie
A prohibition that protects a person, a place or a moment charged with power, and whose transgression calls for reparation. The word gave taboo to the European languages.
- vodou
fon, vodun · Bénin et Haïti
A religion born in the Bight of Benin and recomposed in Saint-Domingue, where the spirits, the loa, manifest by mounting the living during the ceremony.
- wayang
javanais · Indonésie
Javanese shadow theatre, in which a single puppeteer animates all the figures and speaks all the parts, for a whole night, on episodes of the Mahabharata.
- yourte
turc, yurt · Asie centrale et Mongolie
A round felt tent on a wooden frame, dismantled in an hour. It organises domestic space and recurs constantly in the narratives of the steppe.
- zombi
créole haïtien · Haïti
A dead person awakened and deprived of will, set to work by the one who drew him from the grave. The figure comes from Haitian vodou and first says the fear of endless slavery.
- zuihitsu
japonais, 随筆 · Japon
Notes taken at the run of the brush: lists, moods, anecdotes, with no plan or progression. The genre begins with Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book.