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Background
I
hope that the editorially titled paraphrases below serve
two purposes—first, show unquestionably that the Runes communicate
wit and meaning, and, second, help makesome of those meanings
clearer.
Each
line-by-line restatement of the sense of the text—as I have
decided to construe and edit it—demonstrates coherence in
the rune and thus shows that the text, however knotty and even
at first glance incoherent, is tediously authorized to convey
at least some kind of sequential meaning or associated series
of ideas whose logic and musings the mind can follow—often
with difficulty. The texts make sense. And, to the extent that
they do, we must regard them as authorized compositions—not
happenstances, not the results of my “forcing” the lines
to communicate.
I’m
not smart enough to have done that.
As
attempts to clarify meaning, the paraphrases often make
implicit ideas explicit by turning vague pronouns into nouns,
for example, or by expanding an implied scenario or naming a putative
auditor. Often these explicit editorial choices sacrifice meaningful
ambiguity in the poet’s original construction. Often that
sacrifice has begun with choices about how to punctuate the text
in the first place. (Many syntactic elements in the Runes—as
in the Sonnets—“float” or “squint,”
connecting ambiguously either with what comes before or what comes
after in the sequential context.)
Both
purposes here—to show coherence and to help readers understand
the texts more fully by seeing some of their potentialities—are
grounded in the fact that the Runes are hard texts, ambiguous
and riddlic by their very nature. They are doubly hard because
in the present day, as we attempt to reconstitute them, we have
lost a full sense of their original coterie purposes and the immediate
historical context that produced them. Despite clear instances
where their line sequences hold together coherently in obvious
ways, modern readers outside the loop—as all or us now are—may
at first respond that “they don't make sense.” (It’s
easier to attribute any problems that we have construing them
to the text at hand than to blame own limited understanding.)
These
paraphrases are necessarily interpretations. To some
degree they are also expansions, since they make explicit some
of the implications of the line groupings. Paricularly they clarify
diction and syntax by making choices about the “best”
contextual meanings. An especial problem in the Runes—and
indeed a major riddlic game element—is ambiguity in pronoun
reference.
Each text, too, is apt to show features of the riddle genre because
a “key” of some sort may begin to make the text understandable.
Many of the texts, perhaps all of them, refer self-consciously
in some way or other to the very game that’s going on in
the Quarto. Many seem to anticipate the very process of discovery
that we are now participating in. Reader/players
here will no doubt disagree with how I’ve construed some
of the texts and their details. With any careful reading of a
given text, I’m likely to change my mind myself about nuances,
and often some minor epiphany will seem to clarify what before
had been murky for me: Catching up completely with Will’s
“Great Mind” (as he says) is finally unlikely. In any
case, I invite you to test the readings below against the original
lines and their edited forms (from which the paraphrases take
their cues)—and to try to construe the texts for yourself.
Titles
for the verses are mostly a subjective indulgence, though
one useful purpose for titling the texts may be to help readers
remember it and distinguish it from others. In most cases the
title adapts a key element from the language of the text. Since
the Runes are organized partly by association and are complex
in their thematic content (as, indeed, the Sonnets tend to be,
too), no single title is ever a wide enough umbrella for the whole
text. (Some runic first lines may be too closely associated in
readers’ minds with given sonnets to be of much use as a
rune title.) All in all, any proposed title for a given runic
text is unlikely to be a broad enough aegis for all the elements
of the poem to snuggle under. (The same would be true for proposed
sonnet titles, too.) The title is not bracketed because, like
the rest of the paraphrase, it’s clearly an editorial amplification
and not part of the authorized text.
I link these editorial titles with the paraphrases rather than
with the edited texts to try to keep the edited numbers as purely
authentic as possible. A reader who wants the pure authorization
needs to look at the paste-ups, with all their raw potentialities.
The
“set names” that I’ve picked are also
editorial rather than authorized, though some of them do lurk
as what I take to be sly puns sporadically inserted in Q, perhaps
as much to obfuscate as to clarify the poet’s purposes.
(Will’s line “Oh, what a happy title do I find”—in
Rune 95.8, coming two lines after a likely pun on “set”
in onset—may hint to the reader/player that “finding”
suitable names for the emerging texts is one part of his Quarto
Game.) Some of the set names that I use are topical umbrellas
designating the general content of the section. Perhaps the business
of “naming the sets,” a small item among scores of
editorial challenges, is a useful exercise because it encourages
us to distill diverse materials and find what is new.
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