This book is a welcome tribute to the cosmopolitan language, the linguistic vehicle of the premodern man of letters, epitomized here by Latin and Arabic. As such, it serves as a counterpoint to a number of modern assumptions about language that are intimately linked to the rise of nation-states. In essence, modernity posits an overlap between territory and mother tongue, the latter being used as the normative language of literature, and it both overlooks the possibility of a break between written and oral registers and conceives of the mother tongue as a natural, directly accessible device for all speakers. Cosmopolitan language does not comply herewith, nor does it claim exclusive rights to identity: it is above all relational and intersectional (10). Mallette dwells on these aspects of language in four sections through a series of vignettes that follow so-called language workers of premodern times—with a focus on the Abbasid caliphate and modern Italy—in their engagement with Latin and Arabic. After all, a distinctive feature of the cosmopolitan language is complexity, and it is in light of the desire and effort to learn it that Arabic can be labeled as dead, just like Latin.
But although the human biology metaphor is repeated far beyond the book's title, Mallette warns of its inadequacy in describing cosmopolitan languages (which do not live or die but are refreshingly posthuman). Moreover, these are metaphors that lend themselves to making the leap to polemical genetic arguments, for which some recent examples are provided (175). The human dimension goes behind the scenes and so, too, do the protagonists in the vignettes, who merely serve to highlight some aspects of language. Yet many of Mallette's arguments live on by the grace of the narratives’ appealing main characters, who even become tales themselves (126), couched in the author's witty language, full of turns of phrase and expressions that straddle academic and literary style. Indeed, poetics have a specific weight in her argumentation, denoting both poetry (many “texts created in language” [4] are by poets), and the arts more broadly, with Aristotle's Poetics as a central subject in some chapters.
Mallette addresses the concept of the cosmopolitan language as a personal choice (part 1: Bashshār b. Burd, Petrarch) and its use as a vehicle for those who willingly or unwillingly become nomads, as a carpet to shelter under, to admire, or as a path or grammar to follow (part 2: Dante, Sībawayhi, 85). She unpacks the paradox of the cosmopolitan language as self-sufficient and yet dependent on multiple registers of a network of languages (parts 3 and 4). Here, Mallette highlights linguistic changes through translation following the Poetics's particular uses of the Arabic term ḥikāya, and the later Italian tradition (Abū Bishr Mattā b. Yūnus, Ibn Rushd, Petrarch). This inquiry serves to forward a broader theoretical claim concerning the neologism hikaya to denote the layers of meaning, the rhizomatic forms connecting past and present, which are encapsulated and sometimes revealed by the cosmopolitan language.
The author could have done more work on the relationship between the vernacular languages and Arabic (as illustrated using Latin). Combining what, according to Mallette, behaves as another Mediterranean (the Abbasid caliphate) with the Mediterranean itself—for example, by using the poetry of the Iberian Peninsula—would have complicated a linguistic scenario that now seems to fit the argument seamlessly. This might have also contributed to the discussion of the lingua franca for which, as the author points out, the evidence is scanty in the premodern period. Finally, the present reviewer cannot but note that Adorno's characterization of Beethoven's late works as fragmentary and a patchwork of conventionalisms—as a “catastrophe” (40)—goes against the grain of most musicologists’ and musicians’ sensitivities. Beethoven's works are generally seen as revolutionary, personal, philosophical, and abstract, transcending the social: think of the (cosmopolitan?) humanism of Alle Menschen werden Brüder. Many other composers wrote at their best late in life (Mozart, Schubert, Mahler, Janáček, etc.), so one wonders if Mallette is right in her use of “Adorno's adjectives” which, besides, “don't describe Petrarch's late style perfectly” (41). This stimulating study makes use of a range of concepts and linguistic tools but, above all, and true to its name, it offers a literary journey through the lives of Latin and Arabic, to the delight of those already familiar with linguistic research's finer and often more arid points, and surely also of an interested educated public.
