Slightly Off Center

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/worms-sing/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18930

The omnipercipient Trevor Joyce sent me a screenshot of what appears to be a Facebook post by the poet Ben Friedlander, which reads as follows:

Best footnote I’ve seen in a while.

34 worms sing (kyūin mei 蚯蚓鳴): Or “worms murmur”? Readers may supply for the verb mei 鳴 whatever type of sound they would like the worms to make.

A little sleuthing suggests that this is from “61. Song of the Dragon Ryūgin 龍吟,” 59 “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) [see Correction below], a chapter in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. And further sleuthing turned up this passage in Liza Dalby’s East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (p. 85):

 Shamisen wo hiku mo sabishi ya mimizu naku

 Plucking the shamisen
 desolately
 as the worms sing

 –Takahama Kyoshi (1918)

Do worms really sing? Even the most desultory research on the subject in Japanese leads you to confident statements that what was once considered to be the keening of lonely worms is in fact the voice of the mole cricket, a rather ugly burrowing insect that emerges on autumn evenings to chirp weakly for a mate. Yet the image of the singing worm is considered charming, and so it remains, a poetic conceit of peculiar appeal in the world of haiku. Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese. The only faintly similar occurrence that I have been able to ascertain in Chinese is a reference in an ancient apothecary to the phrase “singsong girl” as a local term for “worm” in the area south of the Yangtze River delta — and that could imply any number of lubricious comparisons, not necessarily that worms were chanteuses.

Although worms do not have lungs, they do have mouths, covered with a sensitive flap called a prostomium. Just as I was ready to accept that earthworm singing was merely a Japanese poetic conceit, I stumbled across a reference to a German naturalist, C. Merker, who claimed that he was able to hear the faint voices of earthworms in chorus as they deliberately flapped their prostomia open and closed over their mouths, in a series of sounds marked by a definite and changing rhythm.

She goes on to discuss the Japanese metaphor “worms climb trees.” And for lagniappe, Trevor included a link to Tony Burrello’s “There’s a New Sound” (1953); the sound (spoiler!) is the sound of worms.

Correction. Trevor sent me this from Ben:

Good sleuthing, with one minor correction: it’s from essay 59, “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) (and if it makes a difference, the worm line comes from a poem by Dogen’s teacher, Rujing, that’s quoted in the essay).

My apologies to Dogen’s teacher!

https://languagehat.com/worms-sing/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18930