Gregory Forth Guest Blog: On winning the 2020 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year

McGill-Queen’s University Press is thrilled to announce that Gregory Forth’s A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society is the winner of The Bookseller’s 2020 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Forth is the first Canadian author and McGill-Queen’s the first Canadian press to be honoured with the prestigious award.

In this first comprehensive study of animal metaphors in a non-Western society, A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path focuses on how the Nage understand metaphor and use their knowledge of animals to shape specific expressions. Based on extensive field research, Forth explores the meaning and use of over 560 animal metaphors employed by the Nage.

There are many more “odd” and funny sayings in the book—Child of wild piglet, Dog mounting a buffalo—that could have made the list and are no less interesting once you get into the details of what they mean. We hope the attention this award brings to the more superficial elements of the book prompts readers to spend time with the contents. The propensity to verbally express oneself by referring to animals is widespread and so is the humour that comes along with this universal tendency. We’re sure we took it by a nose (or won by a whisker?) over Introducing the Medieval Ass.

I’m naturally pleased to be named winner of The Bookseller’s 2020 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Actually when I first proposed the title I was a bit concerned it might be considered too ‘vulgar’, but McGill-Queen’s editor-in-chief, Jonathan Crago, assured me it was not—a wise call, it seems. ‘A dog pissing at the edge of a path’ is a metaphor the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores (home to the ‘Hobbit’) use to refer to someone who starts a task but doesn’t complete it before skipping to another. There was an alternate title I had in mind: ‘A monkey roasting a crayfish’. While in some ways more interesting, that takes some explaining. Still, anyone interested can read the book themselves—or better still, buy it!

There are other metaphors that could have served, or at any rate that I find particularly interesting. One is ‘Monkey fooled by the sun’. This draws on a story of sorts, where a monkey sees the afternoon sun still shining on the top of a mountain, and thinks there’s still time to go down the slope and take a dip in a stream. But by the time he gets out of the water, he finds the sun has already fully set and he’s (I assume it’s a ‘he’) left shivering cold. Nage people use the metaphor to refer to the time of day just before sunset. But it also refers, appropriately enough, to an old man who takes a very young wife, and a short time later dies—not of cold but presumably of exhaustion.

Further examples include others of a sexual nature. ‘Riding a mare [female horse]’ refers to a man who has (usually forbidden) sex with a woman. Then there are two that describe high-ranking people who have (again forbidden) sex with, or who marry, persons of lower rank. The first is ‘Buffalo mounting a dog’ (where the buffalo is a man of high rank); the other is ‘Dog mounting a buffalo’ (here the buffalo becomes a woman). ‘Mounting’ of course means fucking, but I thought readers would understand that, so I decided in this case not to be so frank in my translation. Anyway, either of these two metaphors with the famous four-letter word would probably have been too vulgar for a university press—though I’m not sure. As I said, anyone interested can read the book and make up their own mind!

A favorite of mine is rather long and takes some explaining. The metaphor is ‘(departing from a house) leaving nothing behind, having even beaten the walls and floors to remove the bedbugs and dog fleas’. That’s quite a mouthful, and it’s easy to see why it wouldn’t work as a book title. But it’s interesting particularly as the idea recalls the English metaphor (yes, it is a metaphor of sorts) ‘taking everything but the kitchen sink’. And as it refers to everyone who lives in a house departing the dwelling, for example to go on a trip, it’s one of many Nage metaphors that illustrate a general point made in the book: that the animal metaphors of this eastern Indonesian people are often comparable to metaphors, animal or otherwise, that we find in English.

But it’s not just bugs and beasts that make for interesting animal metaphors. There are lots that use birds (in fact, nearly 180 of a total of over 560). Thus Nage describe an only child as an ‘Imperial pigeon’s egg’, because, they explain, the Imperial pigeon, the largest of the several pigeon species found on Flores Island, only ever lays a single egg in any given breeding season. On a more somber note (especially as the pandemic continues its surge) Nage call people everywhere ‘chickens of God’. By this they mean that just as chicken-owners decide when they want to slaughter a chicken, so it is God who decides when every individual will die. Of course, whether He (or She) ever acts like ‘a dog pissing at the edge of a path’ and postpones completing the task, is another matter. But we might hope He often does!

As The Bookseller knows, this is a serious book. But as these examples may show, it has its funny side as well.

Gregory Forth is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. He is the author of A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society.