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Just What Word Did Mandel'shtam Forget? A Mnemopoetic Solution to the Problem of Saussure's Anagrams

Russian, Dartmouth College

To the extent that memorability is one of the poet's chief (even if unconscious) concerns, poetic composition may be seen as a kind of mnemonic "reverse engineering" that utilizes the very operating procedures of verbal memory. In this article, I focus on the similarities between the cognitive operations involved in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (a frustrating failure to retrieve a known but temporarily unavailable word) and those involved in creating the anagram, a poetic device discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the phonemes of the important theme word of a poem are dispersed throughout the body of the poem, while the word itself remains unsaid. Both the retrieval of a word on the tip of one's tongue and the (re)construction of an anagram involve sorting through the phonetic and semantic cues that hint at the absent target word. I suggest that these similarities may be due to the fact that both phenomena are subserved by a common cognitive mechanism: semantic and perceptual priming. On the basis of this analogy, I argue that in both ancient and modern literary traditions the anagram, whose origin puzzled Saussure, may have served a mnemonic function. The case study is provided by Osip Mandel'shtam's poem "I have forgotten the word that I wanted to say"—which both contains an anagram and presents an introspective analysis of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

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