How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics.

• Author: Klein, Jared S.

For some thirty-five years now Calvert Watkins' published work has dealt extensively with philological and linguistic issues arising out of close readings of texts in a wide range of Indo-European languages, particularly those of the Anatolian, Celtic, Italic, and Hellenic subgroups. His oeuvre has focused increasingly on problems of lexicon (and associated cultural matrices) and poetics, with the evident goal of teasing out inherited Indo-European material in each of these areas. The book under review is at once an impressive summation of what has gone before and a bold step forward into new waters whose sources spring in no small measure from Indic, Iranian, Greek, and Germanic, with major contributions from Anatolian and Celtic. Watkins has a basic idea whose logic is ineluctable. If we accept the results of the comparative method, which tell us that two languages, A and B, are genetically related and therefore spring from a common proto-language O, then recognizing some subset A[prime] of A which represents that part of the lexicon of A implemented in "poetic language" and a corresponding subset B[prime] of B, it must follow that the forms of A[prime] and B[prime] that are found to be cognate presuppose a reconstruction within a language O[prime] that can be said to represent the underlying "poetic proto-language" of A and B. This reconstructed language by definition possesses a level of sound and a level of meaning. The implementation of sound in poetry results in phonetic figures. At higher levels of structure we find grammatical figures, diction (involving both syntax and lexicon), and formulas, which are for Watkins the vehicle of themes, which are in turn the verbal expression of culture. It should be noted that by "poetic language" Watkins does not mean only poetry as most of us would understand this term in opposition to a broad, undifferentiated category which we call "prose," but includes those instances of "prose" which show in general the same features of lexicon and stylistic tournures associated with poetry ("rhythmic prose"). Watkins does not limit himself to the reconstruction of merely the lexical items found in the poetic language of cognate traditions, but goes beneath these to reconstruct formulas and themes.

The book is divided into two nearly equal parts. The first, "Aspects of Indo-European Poetics" (pp. 1-291), provides a richly varied potpourri examining poetic structures in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, and...