Gone fishin'

Moby Dick? What a minnow.

Reading Cotton’s translation of Montaigne is a little like going on a fishing expedition during which you’ve landed Leviathan and remark to yourself that you probably won’t see anything bigger until moments later you haul Jormungandr from the deep. Yes, not more than a few hundred words later, Essay XX produced this:

I am not satisfied, and make very great Question, Whether those pleasant Ligatures with which this Age of ours is so fetter’d, and there is almost no other Talk, are not mere voluntary Impressions of Apprehension and fear, for I know by experience, in the Case of a particular Friend of mine, one for whom I can be as Responsible as for my self, and a Man that cannot possibly fall under any manner of Suspicion of insufficiency, and as little of being enchanted, who having heard a Companion of his make a Relation of unusual Frigidity that surpriz’d him at a very unreasonable time, being afterwards himself engaged upon the same Account, the Horror of the former Story on a sudden so strangely possess’d his Imagination, that he ran the same Fortune the other had done; and from that time forward (the scurvy Remembrance of his Disaster running in his Mind, and tyrannizing over him) was extremely subject to Relapse into the same Misfortune.

Montaigne Essay XX, trans. Cotton (1711)

Basically, Montaigne’s giving an example of the involuntary effects of imagination by telling the tale of some (allegedly) reliable friend of his whose impotence was exacerbated by some acquaintance mentioning his own problem in the same department, which then caused the friend’s problem to worsen.

At 165 words, this could well be the longest sentence in the English language which I’ve ever encountered. Even when I try to break the whole thing down I’m not sure what goes with what exactly because the more I look at this, the less grammatical it appears, even allowing for the liberties of Augustan English. I am not satisfied… to …Apprehension and fear is one sentence, although to make it comprehensible, you need to add …and [about which] there is almost no other Talk… After that, things get a little more uncertain.

In my English, know needs a dO of some sort here, whether it’s a pronoun or a clause: For I know [this] by experience… After this, things get a little more uncertain again as I look for the phrase which goes with the who following enchanted. This is the paraphrase I have so far:

…from the case of a friend for whom I can vouch; a man who cannot be suspected of impotence or of being enchanted, [but] who, having heard a story about impotence from an acquaintance, which surprised him at an inopportune moment [because] he later developed the problem, [and] the shock of which so affected his imagination that he succumbed to the same malady as the other, and from that time on, the recollection of his misfortune tyrannising him, often suffered from this ailment.

The additions in square brackets are necessary to make better sense of the passage which I’ve still tried to render in a single sentence. By the time you reach …often suffered from this ailment, you’ve completely forgotten what the subject (who) is. The problem is made worse by …and from that time on, the recollection of his misfortune tyrannising him… because that seems more like a new sentence than part of what has preceded. It’s also hard not to read the recollection of his misfortune as the subject of suffered because of the proximity of some stray NP to a verb which lacks an obvious subject.

A comptently handled, lengthy sentence now and then adds some variety, but where there are no obvious connections between the parts, the language becomes unclear and the message obscured. As much as I like Augustan English for its pompous eloquence, the disappearance of sentences like this one from a writer’s arsenal is worth a profound sigh of relief.