Broken Wheel

"Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."
Chuck Palahniuk

About two weeks ago, my knee betrayed me. I have no job, and I have no dependable schedule, so I am clothed in the evils of idleness. I do nothing all day which acts as evidence that I have existed that day. I make sandwiches, I ride my bike, I watch and listen to podcast debates, and I do one-legged pushups on the floor of a cramped bedroom. In the case that I had entered a time machine and I was concerned about irreversibly altering the future by polluting the past, this is the sort of life I would have to life in order to make sure that I affect nothing. Twelve days whipped by like the leaves of a flipbook, and I have made nothing with them. I hope that I do not have to experience this fate, but if it happens that I am one day lain in bed and around me are gathered the people I love, it is possible that I will look back on days like these have been and think to myself, there is no limit to what I would give to have those days back for the doing. I should crumple up the time I waste and shoot it at the wire basket next to my desk, like so much paper that is issued from the hands of writers who are obsessed with--and constantly motivated by--attempting to produce things of merit. I am often one of these; I have not been, recently, and my mood has soured noteably as a consequence.

For the emotional price I have paid by way of this lassitude, I have accrued quite a bit intellectually. I have watched or listened to something north of 20 debates and lectures, mostly revolving around the topics of religion, international human rights policy, or freedom of speech and press. I wish I could record the massive amount of thinking that I've done about these topics as a result of the impressive discourse, but sometimes the density of the material, combined with my poor organizational skills when I'm so furious with ideas, makes it impossible to summon order, especially among the interlacing topics. Here is a very brief list of the blogs which could come as a result of my only best use of time during my convalesence. My hope is that I will be able to turn this attrocious negative into something of a positive and productive experience, although my mood tonight, which is typical of how it has been most of the week, usually fosters either vitriol which I am sad to have thought or slop which I am embarrassed to have written. Intellectually and emotionally, then, it is obvious that I have good reason to resolve both my attitude and my body, but both of them are slow-going and neither mechanism cares much about my preference for not being ill.

1. Something comprehensive about my view on the role of religion in the world. This will easily be several essays, both perscriptive and descriptive. Specific topics needs to include dogmatism of any kind, the role and import of conversation, and the stricture that religion places around the neck of the global struggle to establish and ensure human rights. In each of these instances, I'm not sure that I can manage to reduce away the terrible fear I have about the way in which history will judge the time in which I lived.

2. Something about the terrible legacy of quarreling and antagonism beset upon us by the last administration, and the events that took place in its duration. I cannot listen to a single news telecast or talking heads show anymore without wondering what percentage of the truth I'm hearing. I very regularly hear two people say opposite things about the same event or person, so I believe there is one of two things happening. Either one or both of the people is wrong, or one or both of the people is lying. In either case, the quality and quantity of information to which I have access is depressing; the horrid clumsiness of intellectual pursuit confounds me every single day of my too short life. Should I have to constantly figure out whether or not I am receiving the truth, and how much of it? How can there be partisan news? Why can I not rely on something to just relate one small set of facts in a row? Nothing could be goddamned easier than this, and none of you will do it: you must taint everything. Well this is the world we have, because of it.

3. A short story I am working on about a man whose birth date had been confused.

4. A social contract theory for backpackers.

5. There is a Tennessee Williams quote that goes like this: "Why do I write? Because I found life to be unsatisfactory." So, something about that.

6. One of my primary historical interests, and political interests for that matter, is revolution. I have begun working on a short essay, informed by the ideology present in the entry about Dublin, that revolution must be non-violent in order to be successful.


Oh, to be able to travel again.

Spoken Word

The core session on the role of translation began today. The keynote speech was given by Esther Allen of PEN World Voices New York, who hazarded several challenges about the current state and future of translation. I have virtually no experience in the subject at the moment, but the speech was extremely interesting for its first allusion. In order to tease out the genesis of the problem of translation, Allen called upon the story of Nimrod, whose frustrated appearance in Inferno rouses a harsh scold from Virgil the intellectual. Nimrod is the giant who conceptualized the Tower of Babel, a mutiny which, as the legend goes, rendered the world pluralingual. The punishment that he suffers in hell is noncommunicability; he is unable to understand anybody, is likewise unable to be understood, and rails against his misfortune by belting thunderclap blasts on a tremendous horn. Allen's relation illustrated the lesson that often, this is the very dilemma-turned-paradox that many linguists constantly face: some pieces, for all their nuance and organic beauty, are impossible to translate properly, and still others are so vivid and common to the human experience that they do not require any translation at all.

This dichotomy underscores a principle point, as far as I can tell, about the objection many might have about the nature of translation. Allen notes that an enduring feeling amongst the academic community is that the new work is necessarily of a different, perhaps lesser quality or merit than the original, because it is impossible to put the original author's whole meaning into equivalent foreign words. Additionally, the translator's interpretation of the content of the text is just as prone to misunderstanding at it would be if any reader attempted the original, and it is difficult establish definitively whether a particular translator or reader has provided a version which is more convincing than another. But this idea seems to be more incomplete, the more correct it is. If it is so that language, experience, worldview, and other aspects of culture are so ingrained in the translator and his language that even so skilled a wordsmith loses the original beauty of the text, it cannot be too far of a step to imagine that an average reader in the original language also experiences a novel, an essay, a piece of poetry, or indeed a speech, song, movie or sitcom through this same sort of corrupting lens; it is a non sequitur to condemn translation, because this problem of misunderstanding is common to anyone's experience of any piece of art. If we extrapolate this point, then each great piece of literature has a qualitative deficiency that is proportionate to the amount of diversity in the society which reads it: the more differences between the author and the readership, the higher the likelihood that the piece is going to be misunderstood. Thus, it appears as if literary translators would not necessarily introduce anything corrupt by way of their art that an average reader would not introduce anyway; the specific problem that a translator might contribute seems to be a slightly different one.

At this point, it should be mentioned that the entire argument I am making is inextricable from my belief that in many pieces of literature, the author intends to present a specific message or set of messages; this is an easily disputable issue, and I would imagine that especially among literary translators, the opinion that literature is made even more vibrant with every new reading of the work is equally contended. The problem here is semantic: if literary translation is an art, then it must be referred to as a science just as well, at least in terms of the words used to describe it qualitatively. Regarding a poem or a mathematical proof or a touchdown pass, one could use any one of the synonyms of beauty; but for a translation, this is not so. If a translation is called something like beautiful, it seems to me that this is either a misnomer or a bad thing. When a reader calls a translation beautiful, he could actually mean that the text he is reading is beautiful, or, in other words, that if the translation is accurate (a tenuous word in itself), then the original work is beautiful, and that the translation reflects the quality of the original work. To be reductionist, we might instead say that the translation is good, and that the original work is the one that is beautiful. Alternatively, if the reader truly means to deem the translation itself beautiful, it seems to me that that adjective might support the charge that translation is an intrinsically flawed practice: if beautiful is accurate, that one word represents the dissolution of the original author's voice by highlighting the presence and skill of the translator. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does act as sort of an asterisk for the new piece, which is to say that it should be read as a translation which is additionally a commentary, which may very likely be intentional.

Perhaps we should rather abide by the vocabulary that is more commonly associated with science, not art, both in terms of a goal and an evaluative metric. Of course it is possible for a translation project to look more like a work of art, because these projects seem to be more exercises than assignments. We learned today that there is an author in the States who is taking all the English versions of Comedia, and making a unified English translation of all of those first translations. There was a similarly playful work published in the recent past, in which the dialect was that of rural 19th century Australia. Examples such as these are clearly in a different category from traditional translations, and they more easily fit into the artistic category: the voice of the translator, or some distinct skill that he possesses, is unmistakable. But to bring this same voice to all translated works would, I think, be a tremendous disservice to the canon of second-language works. There is something to be said for those types of creative productions; but also worthy of merit are the translations which intentionally pursue a very precise translation of the words contained in the original text, which may allow a foreign reader insight into the literary technique of the place and period; and further still, equally valuable are the productions which are not necessarily word-for-word transcriptions, but instead are themeatically identical, and would therefore consider a sort of cultural translation as well as a lingual one. If the practice of performing only beautiful translations is instituted, it is plain to see how quickly the closest version of the original work would be a forgotten pursuit; we would be incalculably worse off for it.