Word: khazar
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...there is an enormous Borgesian puzzle of hunting the Khazar dictionary that the reader thought he was holding, because the reader will quickly discover that he does not hold the Khazar dictionary itself, but only a collection of its fragments, among them bits of the 1691 edition of Joannes Daubmannus (rumored to survive; the reader could search for the last extant copy, printed in a poisonous...
...found the crucial paragraph. And Pavic provides many such mentions, because he is fascinated by the idea that every text has a male and female half. Always a text is incomplete without at least two ways of reading it. Perhaps more than two because according to one source Khazar nouns had seven genders...
...parrots who chatter the beautiful poetry of Princess Ateh, for example, continue to resurface centuries after the meaning of the Khazar language has been forgotten. Nonetheless, those who hear the parrots claim that the poetry has moved them. This might be a symbol of language communicating despite enormous gaps, or it might be a symbol of language only seeming to communicate, a delusion that the gaps belie...
THESE details are often the only clue available to establish an identity, and together the details give the book a sort of magic realism. The details begin to separate themselves from the more powerful cultures that have transcribed them; the Khazar world acquires a fantastic character that distinguishes it from the Jewish, Moslem and Christian voices through which it must speak...
...conference in Constantinople on "The Cultures of the Black Sea Shores in the Middle Ages," Pavic reveals, several scholars of the Khazar question attempted to pool their separated understandings of the Khazars. These scholars are the last heroes of the Dictionary, and, like their medieval predecessors, their desire to understand the Khazars leads them across cultural boundaries. The scholars' attempt to bring different traditions together is relevant to the 20th century Middle East. As Pavic's Dictionary chronicles the assimilation of the Khazars and their confrontations with other cultures, Pavic seems to plead for unity in the Middle East without...