Palindromes

Do geese see God?

Anyone who’s interested in words finds something fascinating in palindromes – words, sentences, or phrases that can be read the same backwards as they are read forwards. The word comes from Greek palin ‘back again’ and dromos ‘running’. Many individual words in daily use, such as noon, level, and racecar, are palindromic, as well as names such as Hannah and Elle, and places such as Notton in Kent and Serres in Greece (the hometown of a good friend).

In English the most often quoted palindrome is the statement that might be put into Napoleon’s mouth – Able was I ere I saw Elba. Another historical palindrome could refer to the vision of Ferdinand de Lesseps for building the Panama canal: A man a plan, a canal: Panama. Some that are nicely turned include Never odd or even and Was it a car or a cat I saw? Once a palindrome is established, it’s usually possible to extend them with suitably palindromic inserts, even if the sense becomes a touch suspect… A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, a rut, a rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal: Panama.

Ancient Greek inscriptions were written boustrophedon – as the ox ploughs, i.e. back and forth. But while an ox turns to plough a new furrow, a crab scuttles back along the same path: thus the term cancrine (crab-like, from Latin cancer, crab) was sometimes used (modern Greek similarly uses karkinikê) to describe a palindrome. Sotades of Maronea, a scurrilous Greek poet of the 3^rd century BC, created verses which were very rude if read backwards – not quite palindromes in our sense; unfortunately none survive (an obscene verse that does survive led to his imprisonment and execution by king Ptolemy II).

The most famous Greek palindrome is found inscribed in various places (the lovely mosaic at the top is from the Panagia Malevi Monastery in the Peloponnese). It was said originally to have been written on a water font outside the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, and means “Wash your sins, not only your face”:

                              ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ 

                                nipson anomêmata, mê monân opsin

In Pompeii a graffito from the first century AD runs sator arepo tenet opera rotas, meaning ‘the sower Arepo holds the wheels at work’. All the words are five letters, so can be formed into a word square (such as that below, found in the French town of Oppède-le-Vieux, with reversed S and N).

Sidonius Apollinaris, a poet of the 5^th century, quotes what he calls a “classic recurrent verse” as follows:

Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor

       “Rome, love will suddenly come to you with passionate feelings”

Another Latin palindrome, sometimes falsely attributed to Virgil, is often quoted as In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni “We go into the circle at night and are consumed by fire’.  As this is not quite a full hexameter line, I thought of adding the palindromic word ecce, ‘behold’ at the beginning and end to make the first line a hexameter:

Ecce, in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni:

Ecce!

I subsequently discovered that someone had added ecce in the middle (Latinists, watch out for all the elisions) to make a single, slow, hexameter line:

In girum imus nocte, ecce, et consumimur igni

I suspect the verse was created without much thought for its meaning, but it might well be put into the mouth of moths who, being attracted by firelight, end up consumed by it! (Another possibility is that torches placed in a circle at night would be consumed as they burn). The romantic interpretation, harking back to Sidonius’s amor, would be Johnny Cash’s rousing song ‘Ring of Fire’:

Love is a burning thing
and it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire.

I fell into a burning ring of fire.
I went down, down, down,
and the flames went higher
and it burns, burns, burns,
the ring of fire,
the ring of fire…