From the Editor

Prose and poetry are becoming increasingly “philological”. Philologists however, are tending to prefer purer belles lettres forms.

Reading the revelations of a semi-literate story-teller, even one with a fair share of writing talent, or hearing the chirping of birds, rather than poetry, is hardly going to interest anyone nowadays. “Natural” writers, without much in the way of an education, have been springing up consistently throughout history. They indulge ingenuously in their “gift” of cleverly laying down words, and create ecstatically, as if nothing had been written before them. In recent times, however, such literature has started to look out of place, almost non-literary. A writer who naively fails to ruminate upon his own work will no longer inspire a positive response. His reward will be a pitying, ironic and, at best, condescending smile. This is occuring in an environment where the typical postmodern novel requires of its reader a professional training no less rigorous than that demanded by a scholarly humanities volume, be it philosophical, culturological, or linguistic.

The average humanities scholar, on the other hand, is attempting to expand his audience by initiating a rapport with the expeienced (but not necessarily academic) reader in an accessible language. This involves eschewing the burdensome scholarly style and breaking the Procrustean bed of dissertations, monographs and other such ritualistic genres. The desire is growing amongst both linguists and literature scholars to be understood by more than just a handful of academic reviewers (toward whom, until recently, intelligent studies were exclusively targeted). As a result, we are witnessing a blurring of the traditional boundaries between fiction and orthodox philology, to say nothing of literary criticism (but that, to be sure, we’d best not discuss, given the current environment).

All philologists are writers deep down. If they could (Oh, if only we could!) compose stories and sonnets, would they really be working as service staff, sponging off Literature, humble servants of Logos. Philo — logists, adoring, lamenting, worshipping and tormenting the Word with their feeble love. And this, in fact, is the least offensive way of describing the situation. The most complimentary remark, alas, also sounds rather dubious: how many times Literature has been saved from graphomaniacs by a well-timed philological education!

The prose and poetry of philologists is by no means the work of dilettantes, but rather a professional product, in every sense of the word. Since showing this by logical argument would be a difficult and laboured task, we are left with the option of presenting the texts for judgment by the reader. It’s high time we philologists began treating our shameful, secret and sinful occupation with a willful calm. After all, noone has ever proved that a philologist must love the word only Platonically