A brief introduction to margins
In the Preface of his Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously writes “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (see ll. 797-8 in William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by Michael Mason (Harlow: Pearson, 2007)). One reader of this English Faculty Library copy has, in fact, drawn a little star beside this quote. I am not here to outline a definitive manifesto of poetry or its precise interpretation and value. Rather, I am writing this article to highlight the importance of expressing spontaneous emotions in all their beauty, grace, and crucially, in all their whimsy and filth, right on the margins.
Cordially, I present to you brief case studies of amusement, translation, and medievalism, and how marginalia enriches all of these fields. The amusement section explores the spontaneous overflow of emotion elicited by specific passages from literary works across the ages. Some of those emotions from the margins grow into firmer links across texts; it is through that process that I connect Madách, Rushdie, and my approach to translation, for instance. Ideas of greater academic importance are discussed in the section on medievalism. Although Middle English texts are incredibly hard to approach, the margins still do offer space for 21st century ideas to arise. Once you have a margin, you can suddenly record and link up your thoughts within the text, and across a greater variety of literature as well.
A case for dik for my bilingual beings
Dear English reader, let me take you to Hungary for a bit. My favourite word which I carry in my wee little heart is dik. This has nothing to do with the phallus, mind you, but everything to do with the sudden tide of overflowing emotion. My fellow Hungarians would call me an idióta who unnecessarily overcomplicates the simplicity of dik, but do we not use this word as an exclamation whenever we’re surprised? Or frustrated? Or overjoyed? Or taken aback? Dik is on the marginalia of conversation, not containing much substance, but loaded with feeling. Linguistically, it functions as an interjection. Holistically, once you say dik, you condense heartfelt passages from the likes of Attila József or George Eliot into a simple interjection, a marker of emotion. By noting dik in the great literature I read for my degree or other pursuits, I solidified the effervescence of dik, thus eliminating the chance of my emotion fading away on future re-readings.
For how could I live, having forgotten the following interaction in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi?
Duchess: Diamonds are of most value
They say, that have passed through the most jeweller’s hands.
Ferdinand: Whores, by that rule, are precious. (ll. 290-2)
How would I find peace in the Cape of Good Hope sipping my second discounted gin and tonic, had I brushed past Dostoevsky’s Dunya in Crime and Punishment proclaiming
“This gentleman has been sent by God himself, even though he’s come straight from a drinking bout.” (p. 244)
Would I remember how to connect with my voice, had I not written dik in Nabokov’s Pale Fire when the narrator muses:
“John Spade, perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.”
Süskind’s Perfume is a notoriously difficult novel to understand and appreciate, but I will forever remember the moment of dik reading the following quote:
“The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world has seen since the second century before Christ.” (p. 247)
Marginalia is poetry in its own right. You deposit little bits of yourself across your bookshelf; scribbles of emotion stubbornly persist on the page, like tattoos on your skin. The case of amusement speaks to the individual’s readerly pleasure. Allowing the margins to become places where you can feel indiscriminately, you illuminate the text itself. Quotes become ingrained in your memory, and no one can ever take that away from you – unless you let those quotes slip away from the margin, of course.
A case study of Imre Madách and Salman Rushdie
If I had to get another tattoo tomorrow, it would be a quote that comes back to me with each piece of literature featuring my love – Satan. Imre Madách unintentionally defined my understanding of language, boundaries and sheer spontaneity. His Lucifer said to God: “te anyagot szültél, én tért nyerék.” For my English-speaking readers, this translates to: “you bore matter, I attained space.” It is exactly that satanic, uncertain, undefined and forever indeterminate, free, negative space that gives me solace whenever I struggle to find my feet on the ground – or whenever I struggle to find the right word. For that reason, I scribbled this quote all over the margins of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
For his epigraph, Rushdie used a Defoe passage from The History of the Devil, where the last line triggered that beautiful Wordsworthian spontaneous flow in my mind: “Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled conditions, is without any certain abode; […] without any fixed place, or space.” By scribbling the Madách quotation underneath the epigraph, I went on to uncover several intertwined roots of intertextuality. Through those roots, I find my voice, my opinions, my inclinations. For instance, although I call no land my home, I can rest the sole of my feet on the soil of intersecting literature, of single phrases or quotes from literature all over the history, all over cultures, all over the world.
Further into the novel, Rushdie’s Gibreel (a semi-fictional archangel) utilizes his special vision of seeing “essences instead of surfaces,” enabling him to perceive “with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his – to give the old word back its original meaning – shaitan” (p. 331). His perception illuminates the shaitan figure which is vital over the course of this novel: Rushdie’s Satan thrives in the “verses and converses, universes and reverses” (p. 126). Shaitan resists the prison of linguistic and philosophical determination and infiltrates each character with the same force that solidified this novel as one of my favourites of all time. He resists the confines of the text, privileging “reverses” and reconsiderations, just as scribblings resist the same confines and express themselves in the margins.
This is especially important for multicultural readers: marginalia saves our souls from the dread of fading away. In the margins we find our home; we deepen strange and ambiguous connections that tie our minds to literature, and through this, to the world itself. Even my translations hinge on the satanic space. In a way, I deface the original as I create a brand-new surface utilising the structures of a completely different language. I frantically search for Rushdian essences, original meanings, verses and reverses of the works, desperately hoping I can show my English or Hungarian speaking friends some meaning I have distilled from the original and supplanted in the translation. Margins are essential for me: I experiment with words, enjambment and syntax comfortably beside a text that initially seems unforgiving in its final unity.
A case study in which medieval literature is revived in 2025
No lecture room is as quotation-packed as Lecture Theatre 2 in the English Faculty during Marion Turner’s Troilus and Criseyde commentary presentations. Even as an avid laptop user, there is no other space where I am quite as keen to abandon my beloved Times New Roman on a Word Document. Instead, I reach for coloured pens, annotating a hand-out. In Turner’s lectures, it feels impossible not to jot down thoughts as we engage with the passages.
Now, the ethics of the love affair of Troilus and Criseyde are notoriously difficult to pin down: amid the active-passive verbs, predator-prey imagery, and coercion throughout this romantic pursuit, contemporary readers in 2025 may find the consummation scene in Book III difficult to stomach. Most potently, Turner highlights the recurring nightingale imagery: this may be familiar from the Procne and Philomela story, where the raped Philomela becomes a nightingale. Keeping that in mind, we may be disturbed when Chaucer’s narrator writes,
“And as the newe abaysshed [perplexed, frightened] nightingale,
That stinteth [became quiet] first whan she biginneth to singe,
[…]
Right so Criseyde, whan hir drede [fright, doubt] stente [became quiet],
Opened hir herte and tolde him hir entente [intention, desire].” (ll. 1226-7, 1238-9)
With this passage occurring shortly after the two have slept together, contemporary readers may rightfully question whether Criseyde could truly open her heart. I am not one to make a judgement either way, but it is important to keep track of classical intertextual references (and of course our modern interpretations of them) hiding within the lines. Thus, we can bring them to the surface in the space of the margin.
To be sure, Chaucer’s medieval English depiction of classical Rome is far-removed, distant, and almost impregnable. However, I implore all my peers who have the privilege of studying medieval literature at Oxford to bring their modern knowledge to these texts. Criseyde’s struggle lurks on every corner; in fact, Chaucer has gone great lengths to revise his sources in favour of the female love interest. It is only right that we complement his efforts with ideas, vocabulary, and feminist theories widely available and accessible in 2025.
Conclusion
If you were my tutor, you’d probably implore me to narrow my focus and streamline my article. While this may be true for essays – a lesson I have learned twice in four days – margins allow us to have fun, be incoherent, and make freaky connections intra-and-intertextually. The beauty of the English Language and Literature degree in Oxford (and indeed everywhere) lies in resonances, random instances of electrifying synchronicity between texts and ideas formulated centuries apart, across different cultures and nations. I can embrace a Middle English text written in London about a mythological love affair, even though I did not speak English properly until the age of 16 and have not joined Chaucer trying to untangle his sources by candlelight. Not even the greatest works of literature are untouchable – their margins invite us to feel, complement, and empathise, unrestricted by place or age. Seeing my thoughts materialise as I scribble on the margins reassures me that I am not lost; I am, in fact, right where I’m meant to be.