Read Online The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg - Free Book Online Page B

individual figures worth noting.
    The Gravine’s modern history was no less placid. Now and then an aspiring emperor would lay claim to it; but the valley was mineral-poor and unstrategically placed, and no foreign ruler had ever exerted sovereignty there in more than name. At the time of McTaggett’s lecture the Gravine was a semiautonomous district of the U . S . S . R . The Soviet government had changed the name of the capital to Beriagrad but had otherwise left the place alone. That was where it stood.
    That night I told Julia I was quitting art history. She took it well. The fact was, I hadn’t been much good at art, and both of us knew it. When I told her I was taking Gravinic she wrinkled her nose.
    â€œJust so long as you don’t speak it in the house,” she said.It was months, it turned out, before I could speak it at all. The Roman alphabet had arrived in the Gravine too late to exert much normative force on the spoken language. Pronunciation was governed by a staggering collection of diacritical marks, haphazardly applied. But the pronunciation was simple compared to the task of constructing a grammatical sentence. Gravinic, like Latin, had its cases: its nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and ablative. But then, too, there was the locative, the transformative, the restorative, the stative; the operative and its tricky counterpart, the cooperative; the justificative, the terminative, the reiterative, the extremely popular pejorative, the restive, the suggestive, the collective, the palliative, the argumentative, the supportive, the reclusive and the preclusive, the intuitive and the counter-intuitive, the vocative and the provocative, the pensive, the defensive, the plaintive . . .
    As the declension of the Gravinic noun dragged on, the enrollment of our class declined alongside. One morning in December, I found myself the only one left. The boy-woman, my last classmate, had left the field.
    A little self-conscious, I sat in my usual place, opened my notebook, and cocked my pen just as if a roomful of students were following along.
    â€œDon’t be embarrassed,” McTaggett said. “This happens every year. Shall we just call it an A minus and go home?”
    For a moment I was tempted. I had never had an A minus. But I wanted to continue. True, the forced march through the Gravinic inflections was grinding, thankless work. But I had never before submitted myself to grinding, thankless work, and the hours spent at my desk—really just a card table with a forty-watt lamp clipped to the back—conferred on me a novel feeling of virtue, whose unrewarded-ness was a kind of reward in itself. Certainly I preferred it to the mock sportscasts I was obliged to deliver each Tuesday afternoon, trying to keep up with the action of that weekend’s contest on videotape while the dullard basketball players, my fellow mass communicators, hooted at my stammering and my ignorance of the rules.
    McTaggett responded to my decision with frank dismay. In all the time he’d been teaching, he admitted, no one had ever stayed on past Thanksgiving. He had no more lectures prepared. So he started me on translation right away. My source text was the sentence, “I kicked the dog.” McTaggett’s idea was that I would acquaint myself with the mechanics of Gravinic by producing a complete list of possible translations. The tally would run into the tens of thousands. One had to know, first of all, what sort of kick was involved—was it a field-goal swing, a sidewise foot-shove, a horizontal sweep involving the entire leg? All these, and more, called for different verbs. Was the kicking of the dog habitual, or a one-time action? Does the speaker mean to imply that the kick is apt to be repeated? And whose dog is it?
    My initial interest in the language had by now transmuted itself into something like awe. Gravinic was a perfected vehicle for meaning— exact meaning. All the