»Serendipities

I read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's slim volume Serendipities, a collection of lectures edited for publication.

The power of falsity focuses on the legend of Prester John and the impressive force of verisimilitude (a concept that hearkens to my high-school Spanish lessons, reading Borges in Señora Schmerz's classroom).

Languages in paradise: what was the primordial language, the tongue used in the Garden of Eden? In addition to the cabalistic obsession with discovering this, wild theories abound since the days of the Greeks. Eco pays special attention to an essay by Dante Aligheri. The essay predates the Paradiso by a decade and presents a different

Dorothy L. Sayers died thirteen cantos short of completing the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy; Dante himself died before publishing these same thirteen cantos, andd only after his death did his sons discover and publish them. Or so goes the legend retold by Eco; I can never decide whether he quotes the truth, or even a well-told but unsubstantiated rumour. At one point in his second lecture he goes so far as to quote from an unpublished paper which quotes a manuscript attributed to Abulafia, and this particular attribution made me wonder whether his examination of language was real, or an exercise in fiction.

The book has the subtitle Language and Lunacy.