Sourstuff

Finlay Worrallo

To the Dutch, oxygen is zuurstof.
We borrowed from French, but

Stevinus of Bruges grinned and split
oxygène back into two atoms

four hundred years back, an act
of fission on the tongue.

Oh oxús: Greek for sharp,
Oh génos: Greek for birth

– so named for the belief that acids
need this gas to form. Translate

each atom, loosely, and fuse together
again. Acidic-matter: sourstuff.

Germanic words are molecular, in a way
their Romance alter egos rarely are.

No chemist, I can still break down
a Dutch word into elements.

For example: onomkeerbaar. Un-
around-turn-able. We would render

this as irreversible, thanks to the Middle
French. The new trajectory given

to our language by the Normans
cannot easily be altered. And yet

I know of sci-fi writers, delighting
in alt-history, who render English oxygen

as sourstuff. We could break down
each loanword in our compound tongue

and build it anew. Chemistry
comes from Latin (from Arabic

from Greek). But Stevinus, whose lungs
were full of Dutch til his last gasp

un-borrowed chemie from Rome; fused
scheikunde together instead, for his folk.

Broken down again, it translates to
separating-art; how to say this

is different from that. Is that poetry,
or is that the opposite of poetry?

The Science

This poem was inspired by a Dutch class I took as part of my Modern Languages degree. I came across the word waterstofperoxide (hydrogen peroxide) in my reading and was intrigued by the combination of familiar and unfamiliar elements. Further investigation of Dutch chemical terms led me to zuurstof, which particularly captured my imagination. With this poem, I wanted to celebrate the Germanic languages’ somewhat molecular process of word formation -- the results are literally called "compound" words, so the link with chemistry was irresistible. While German itself is famous for its long words, each formed of smaller ones linked together to create rich meanings, its sister language Dutch is equally colourful, and I wanted to explore the poetry inherent in translating these compound words literally. Finally, with my poem revolving around oxygen, I wanted to define a birth tongue as the language one first learns to breathe in.

The Poet

Finlay Worrallo is a cross-arts writer and Modern Languages student at Newcastle University. His work is informed by questions of linguistics, queerness and national identity. His poetry is published in VIBE, Queerlings, 14, Impossible Archetype, Pennine Platform, and the Emma Press' anthology ‘Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs’.

Next poem: Speech Surfer by Jane Muir