‘ That is, the unwritten (but sounded) H at the beginning of some Greek words beginning with a vowel. Formerly marked with a symbol that looked like half an H (my initial initial), it’s the sound at the start of my given name. Over time it simplified down to the form above. Later grammarians called it the spiritus asper, every bit as much ‘rough spirit’ as ‘rough breathing’. It is also called, in a nice mix of tonalities, an ‘aspiration’. Roland Barthes, speaking of the ‘grain of the voice’, describes movement deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes; the way the voice bears (out) the materiality of the body, with its checkings and releasings of breath. Simple breath holds no interest; the lungs are stupid organs. That graininess, for Barthes, inheres in friction, that sign of resistance: the body made manifest in the voice. As also in the hand as it writes. Rough breathing, then, is where writing, as well as speech, begins. Words must be shaggy as well as combed smooth. Theodor Adorno, in an aside during a lecture in the 1950s, affirmed that the pure ‘this-here’ that art seeks to present cannot unfold in time or in space – ‘all it can do really is take a breath’. Anything beyond that would be a betrayal. And yet we must keep breathing, must we not? And speaking. And writing. All language, poetry included, is a roughening of the breath. Harry Gilonis 9