Abstract

In the opening section of his 2017 memoir An Odyssey, the American writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn aptly notes that the English language has a number of nouns to describe the act of moving in space from one point to another. While “voyage,” due to its Latin provenance is “saturated in the material”2 (Lat. viaticum, i.e. provisions for a journey), and “journey,” which originates in the Old French word jornee (meaning day or its portion), points to the temporal dimension of moving, the word “travel” (also French in origin, travail) refers to effort and pain (Mendelsohn 20). “Travel,” Mendelsohn asserts, “suggests the emotional dimension of travelling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels. For in the days when these words took their shape and meaning, travel was above all difficult, painful, arduous, something strenuously avoided by most people” (20–21).

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