-Caveat Lector-
Poe's puzzle decoded after 150 years, but meaning is mystery
By JEFF DONN
The Associated Press
11/30/00 10:00 PM
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. (AP) -- Edgar Allan Poe, master of the
mysterious and the macabre, may have uttered his last words from
beyond the grave.
A coded message published by Poe in 1841 in a magazine where he
worked as editor has been deciphered with the help of modern
computing and the intuition of a young puzzle solver, 151 years
after Poe's death.
As it turns out, the translated passage wasn't Poe's message for
readers yet unborn or a key to comprehending his enigmatic
stories. In fact, the passage is so inept and sentimental he
probably didn't write it all. But the mystery of whether he
selected and encoded the passage remains.
It was one of two encoded texts that Poe presented as the work of
a "Mr. W.B. Tyler," challenging readers to break their codes.
No one did -- maybe no one cared to -- until scholars, in recent
years, began embracing the theory that Poe himself came up with
the messages and devised the codes.
The theory holds that Poe, obsessed with death and premature
burial in "The Tell-tale Heart" and other stories, would have
encrypted his own words in nearly impenetrable code meant to be
pried open only long after his death.
In 1992, Duke University doctoral student Terence Whalen, while
procrastinating on his dissertation, finally decoded the first
message. It was a passage from the 1713 play "Cato" by English
writer Joseph Addison.
But it took computer power and more time to fathom the second.
"I can't really say if I cared what it would say, one way or the
other. But I was curious to see what it would yield," said Gil
Broza, a 27-year-old computer programmer from Toronto who cracked
the code.
For his solution, he was awarded $2,500 in October by Williams
College, in Williamstown. Shawn Rosenheim, a Poe scholar there
who had pondered the problem for years, established the contest
in 1996.
The second message begins: It was early spring, warm and sultry
glowed the afternoon. The very breezes seemed to share the
delicious langour of universal nature, are laden the various and
mingled perfumes of the rose and the jessamine, the woodbine and
its wildflower. They slowly wafted their fragrant offering to the
open window where sat the lovers ...
The two texts were much like complex versions of today's
newspaper cryptograms. In Poe's time, they were often called
"ciphers."
The first cipher put the original message backward. But its
solution took just a few days, because each letter in the
original message matches just one other letter in the code.
The second cipher is far more complex. Each letter in the
original has multiple variants. The letter "e," for example, has
14. The code freely mixes upper and lower case and turns some
characters upside down.
It is also maddeningly brief -- fewer than 150 words -- and so a
discovered letter may provide clues to few words. It is also
littered with what appear to be typographical errors.
Rosenheim and many others tried to solve it and failed. The
breakthrough came when Broza decided, in traditional deciphering
technique, to assume that each three-letter code word could
represent "the," "and," or "not" and to play with the
possibilities. With a computer program of his own design, he
scanned lists of phrases showing the same patterns of letters.
He finally identified four letters in one word and conjectured
correctly, like a contestant on "Wheel of Fortune," that it was
"afternoon." That gave him yet more letters to decode more words
and ultimately the whole text, within two months of work.
The deciphered message is a treacly passage wholly unlike Poe's
work, with references to sultry breezes, amorous zephyrs and
delicious languor.
"I can't imagine Poe would have taken the trouble to construct an
elaborate cryptogram to disguise something this banal," said J.
Gerald Kennedy, a Poe expert at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge.
On the other hand, Poe was a prankster who used to write
anonymous reviews of his own work, accusing himself of
plagiarism. Some believe Poe chose the name Tyler to tweak
President John Tyler, whose administration had passed over the
chronically broke Poe for a job.
In the end, the solved texts do touch on themes that preoccupied
Poe, like immortality and enclosure, but neither appears to be
the coveted message to posterity. They don't even indicate
definitively if Poe encoded them.
"I spent years of my life on this," Rosenheim said this week.
"But I might be wrong."
"You can make an argument one way or another," said Whalen, now
at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
"That's just like Poe -- and just like life," he added. "There's
always another question."
Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
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