The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

Henry Richard Niles: A Meritorious Life

NILES, HENRY RICHARD (b. 1940). Poet. Place of birth: Cleveland, Ohio. Born to Polish parents, Henry Richard Niles did not speak his first words until the age of seven. Originally, his parents had assumed that their son was born deaf, but hearing tests disproved this theory, and doctors suggested that the boy’s vocal cords didn’t work properly. The doctors then suggested that his parents teach him to read and write, and that the best way to communicate with their son was by way of pad and pencil. Rather than subject the mute boy to the ridicule and mismanagement that he would surely encounter in any school system, whether public or private, his parents kept him at home to teach him themselves how to speak, how to read, how to write, how to calculate numbers, and the uses of shapes. Niles could understand only the basics of the Arabic numbering system, never quite cognizant of the numbers past seven, and was oddly more adept at Roman numerals. Furthermore, as a child, he was unable to work either his left or right fist around the nub of a pencil comfortably enough to scratch out those words predominant in (and necessary for) communication through the English language—the, and, to want—and although he was able to place vowels correctly in between consonants and was able to place consonants correctly alongside one another, the combinations formed by his hands were both illegible and indecipherable as spoken language.

Niles’s first words were oeghene lachen. And from there, he let loose with a string of vowel sounds, grunts, and guttural whines released at an imperceptible and near constant speed. “The sound of it hurt our ears,” his father said. It would be another three years before his parents would learn that his first words, when translated into English, were eyes laughing. Some believe this to have been Niles’s first poem.

According to James Avara (Journal of Linguistic Studies, 1971, 46–52), Wulfila Jutes was the last speaker of the Germanic language Ostrogothic, and it is from Jutes that linguists were able to piece together the small and incomplete list of one hundred vocabulary words that we recognize and can translate today. Wulfila Jutes died sometime in the early nineteen hundreds and was by no means a fluent speaker. The last fully fluent speaker of Ostrogothic is presumed to have died over a century ago. It is now widely assumed that Henry Richard Niles is the only living fluent speaker of Ostrogothic and the first person to speak this dead language in over one hundred years.

Once the root of Niles’s speaking problem had been discovered, his parents placed him with well-respected and renowned linguists in hopes that they could 1) discover the origins of the language that he spoke, and 2) teach Henry Richard how to speak properly and in English, if possible, but at the very least in French. Niles remained with the linguists from his seventh until his eighteenth birthday. Despite intensive lessons in English, Spanish, and French, and although perfectly fluent in each (he is more than able to read and understand technical manuals, financial reports, and newspaper headlines), Niles cannot express himself (poetically) in any language other than Ostrogothic.

Armed with a vocabulary that grows daily, Niles has produced some six hundred poems, ranging in length from a two-word verse to a one thousand — line canto, of which only segments can be translated through the use of the one hundred — word vocabulary list once provided by Wulfila Jutes. Much of his poetry, when translated, looks bullet-ridden, torn, and scooped out, though when heard in their original language, read aloud by the author — there exists but one recording of Niles reading a series of short poems made twenty years ago — these same poems, while unintelligible, have been known to make the listener weep and thereafter dwell on a history of lost opportunities.