English Dictionary

circumlocution

/ˌsɜːkəmləˈkjuːʃən/

noun

(uncountable) Unnecessary use of extra words to express an idea, such as a pleonastic phrase (sometimes driven by an attempt at emphatic clarity) or a wordy substitution (the latter driven by euphemistic intent, pedagogic intent, or sometimes loquaciousness alone).

He used a lot of circumlocution in his speech.

意味（1）

(uncountable) Unnecessary use of extra words to express an idea, such as a pleonastic phrase (sometimes driven by an attempt at emphatic clarity) or a wordy substitution (the latter driven by euphemistic intent, pedagogic intent, or sometimes loquaciousness alone).

意味（2）

(uncountable) Necessary use of a phrase to circumvent either a vocabulary fault (of speaker or listener) or a lexical gap, either monolingually or in translation.

It may seem quite straightforward to render line 15 metrically regular by means of a grammatical trick: the style as bright as soul. However, the stylistic feature of the adjectival compound does not occur in isolation but is employed again in the following line, dem Staubfaden himmelswüst, where a grammatical circumlocution in translation would be metrically disadvantageous. Both compounds, seelenhell as well as himmelswüst, should therefore be translated as compounds. When Michael Hamburger remarks that German lends itself to the formation of compound words in a way that English does not (in Celan 1988: 24), he probably refers to nouns such as Türspalt or Algenteilchen.

意味（3）

(countable) An instance of such usage; a roundabout expression, whether an inadvisable one or a necessary one.