John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the sinful fall of language

Abstract

The article considers the language of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and proposes a concept of the poem’s language having two dimensions: before and after the Fall. The concept stems from Christopher Ricks’s monograph Milton’s Grand Style. The two-dimensionality of the poem’s language is illustrated by an analysis of the words ‘error,’ ‘grateful,’ ‘wanton,’ ‘bold,’ and ‘wander’ and of the variations found in Russian translations of the epic. For example, the verb ‘to error’ is used both to mean the action as in ‘to wander’ or ‘to meander’ and, more conventionally, ‘to err,’ where the second meaning is connected to the Fall while the first refers to the language of the Garden of Eden period. Further analysis reveals how the Fall infects words by distorting their original meaning. A dispute around the poem’s stylistic achievements and failures has led researchers to discover a highly fascinating topic, which ties the poem’s language to its message: according to Milton, the fall from grace not only corrupts man’s thoughts and actions but also his language. In the conclusion of the article, the author argues the significance of the linguistic two-dimensionality for the poem’s interpretation as well as for subsequent attempts at its translation into Russian.