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  • Sounds in Contact: The American Bird Sounds of a German-American Worker Poet and New Empirical Methods of Comparing Literary Sounds1
  • Gunilla Eschenbach and Sandra Richter

Unlike in linguistics and-recently-poetics (Schöller), onomatopoeia has long been overlooked in the fields of comparative literature and global literature studies. In 1998, the linguist Jürgen Trabant claimed that onomatopoeic words are more “international” (139) than other words, because these words refer to sounds that might be more or less similar across different countries. Furthermore, onomatopoeia could be regarded as the first evolutionary expressions; therefore, onomatopoeia may represent an early stage of shared linguistic development. It is not by accident that onomatopoeia is typical for nursery rhymes, whose purpose is to motivate children to imitate them and, step by step, learn to speak. The claim that onomatopoeia in literary works are international expressions and understandable for a global audience, however, seems naïve. What if a connection between the onomatopoeic word and its meaning (the “original” acoustic source) failed, or what if such a word were only understood in a specific social or local context? We will argue that onomatopoeic words require careful interpretation along the lines of their sound contexts, be they local or global or even entirely fantastic and invented only by a single author. Consequently, we will focus not only on written onomatopoeic words but also on their acoustic representation, reference, and meaning. Addressing these issues, we [End Page 449] aim to incorporate empirical research on literary texts, as informed and assisted by the use of digital database and quantitative analysis in linguistics and sound studies (Klimek, Müller). This approach promises a new method of comparison in global literary studies. Onomatopoeic words can become relevant in situations that, building on Uriel Weinreich’s notion of “languages in contact,” we call “sounds in contact.” Sounds in contact may facilitate communication between speakers of different languages, and even between animals and human beings, but they may also lead to misunderstandings.

Our main questions will be: what does the comparison of sound mean at all, what does it entail, and what is its goal? The general aim is to strengthen the comparative focus in the vast research field of literature and sound. Our examples are cases of birdsong onomatopoeia in the songs and lyrics of Wilhelm Benignus (1861–1930), a forgotten author who migrated to New York State from the small German town of Heilbronn in 1882, and who favoured nature writing, especially ornithological onomatopoeia, in order to write “American poetry.” Benignus provides us with extraordinary intercultural examples of birdsong that we will present in light of the long comparative history of birdsong from antiquity to the present.

Bird Sounds in Literature

Although birdsong has been a prominent poetic element since antiquity, the various onomatopoeia of birdsongs have seldom been compared and contrasted with each other. Since Julius Pollius’s Onomasticon (second century AD), a re-edition of the Greek, “voces variae animantium” have received considerable attention in fictional and didactical texts, such as Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Pictus. Until the fourteenth century, bird sounds were mainly transcribed phonetically. As Latin remained the most prominent language, translation did not matter much, although vernacular poems on birds were known. For instance, In “Der Mai mit lieber zal,” Oswald von Wolkenstein attributed “raco” to the raven” and “liri” to the lark. Building on Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, a number of bird parliaments and bird languages became prominent in medieval literature (Busch). In his Musurgia Universalis, Athanasius Kircher tried to note, or rather, to quote birds in standard notation (Wald-Fuhrmann 148ff).

Shakespeare is known not only for inventing a decisive confusion of birds in Romeo and Juliet-as Juliet asks: “Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: / It was the nightingale, and not the lark” (R&J III.v. 1–2)-but also for using onomatopoeic expressions. In the song “It was a lover and his lass” from As You Like It, we find both interjections such as “hey,” “ho,” and “hey-nonny-no,” and onomatopoeic words for singing birds such as “ding a ding ding” (AYLI V.iii. 13–18). In Schlegel...

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