# The Perfect Order of Words in the Sentences I Have

In his essay on James Joyce, “Joyce’s Choices,” David Lodge writes:

> There is a story well known to all students of Joyce, that one day in
> Zurich, when he was writing Ulysses, he met his friend Frank Budgen in
> the street and told him he had been working all day and had produced
> two sentences. “You have been seeking the right words?” asked Budgen.
> “No,”replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I am seeking is
> the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”

(From The Practice of Writing, p. 130.)

I seem to spend an awful lot of time ordering and reordering the words
within sentences too; my notebooks are filled with multiple renderings
of pretty much the same thing. But this is a feature of English, I
suppose. How well do the opening lines of Coleridge’s “Xanadu” translate
into other languages, say? _In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately
pleasure-dome decree…_

This reminds me of something Brad said recently. We were talking about
hip-hop, and he mentioned that he’d been listening to some French
hip-hop recently, and that it was pretty good. (He recommends MC
Solaar.) He reckons it’s good because French, like English, has both
lots of short, sharp, rhyming words and a flexible word order. I’m
comfortable with the idea that some languages _sound_ better than
others, but for some reason the thought that some art forms aren’t
really _possible_ in some languages is little unsettling. Is there such
a thing as German hip-hop?

One of my favourite CDs is a CD-R compilation I got for 50p from the
Bongo Club in Edinburgh. Australians don’t MC terribly well (it could be
just the accent)—but Scots do! The track breaks are pretty strange, but
there’s some good Scottish hip-hop about 1:15 into [track
3](/audio/bongo-club/03%20Track%2003.mp3). ([The whole
album](/audio/bongo-club/).)