in praise of the music of language
I keep thinking of things I want to write about, but it always seems like so much effort to actually compose a post. I'm not sure why. Instead I just endlessly refresh the various websites I read, and I do laundry, and bake goodies, and brush the kitty, and sometimes get a little work done.
Anyway, I really want to talk a little bit about one of my very favorite books, Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter, because I think a lot of you would like it, too. Those of you who have me friended on Goodreads might have seen my recent review (which is where the link goes); I've actually read it through three or four times, and parts of it closer to a dozen times, but I was recently inspired to reread it after a discussion with tekalynn about connotations of words and terms in American vs British English. I'll just re-quote the bit that I quoted to her there:
Le Ton Beau is about language and translation and transculturation and poetry, about the properties of a written work in addition to literal meaning (such as formal or informal tone, rhyme, rhyme scheme, letter frequencies, syllable count, typeface, etc): which of those should be preserved when the work is translated, how does a translator handle properties that imperfectly cross language boundaries, and what happens when two or more of the properties come into conflict. It's structured around a short 16th-century poem in archaic French (by Clément Marot), and each chapter ends with a selection of translations of this poem by Hofstadter, his colleagues, his friends, and his family. Within the chapters themselves are all kinds of entertaining and thought-provoking goings-on.
In one chapter he talks about reading Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (a Russian novel written as a series of sonnets) in four different translations, each faithful to the sonnet form, and gives a few of the same verses by each of the translators. It's fascinating to me how each translator made different choices, and yet, by comparing them all one can get a feel for what the original must be like - or does one? Can a person reading Pushkin in translation claim to have any conception of what Pushkin himself actually wrote? (And of course I am cheating by calling it "Eugene Onegin" as the title ought to be the original Russian title, and in Cyrillic, to boot...)
Another chapter has a discussion of the works of Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer. His stories are filled with brilliant wordplay, of the sort that seem impossible to translate. For example, one of his stories (which I remember having read - in translation, of course) is about a man who invents a machine that can make anything beginning with the letter "N". The thing is, though, that things that are named by words beginning with the letter "N" in Polish don't necessarily begin with the letter "N" in English. So what does the translator do?
How does one translate Georges Perec's La disparition, a story written in French about the search for a missing figure named Anton Voyl, without the use of the letter 'e', into English? On one level it's a narrative story; but on the meta level - 'Voyl' is French for 'Vowel' - its whole point is that missing 'e', and obviously an English version which translated the words literally but failed to obey the e-less constraint fails as a translation. By the way, Hofstadter calls the 'language' Perec used Gallic; the equivalent version of English he refers to as Anglo-Saxon, and, inspired by this wordplay, I wrote my Goodreads review (linked above) in this linguistic medium. Here's just a little, by way of example: This was my third (or fourth? Or fifth?) trip through [this book], and I still think it's amazing, brilliant, quirky and fun. Basically, it asks: What should stay constant across translation of a work? Translation is normally thought of as to do with plot, mood, connotations of individual words - but what about rhyming, scansion, lipogrammatic constraints? Is transculturation a thing to avoid, or to work toward? If your various constraints conflict, how do you pick which to follow?
There's a quite long section on nonsexist language, and 'translation' between ordinary (presumably sexist) English and nonsexist English. There's discussion of transculturation - how do you translate something rooted very strongly in its native place and tongue? If a character's diction and word choice implies something about his social class and background, how do you translate that to another language?
And there are a lot of tangents and side explorations. Hofstadter talks about machine translation and AI (unsurprising, given his computer science background). He talks about 'translation' in the broadest of terms: how do you understand it when someone else hates a food you love - can you 'translate' someone else's feeling about chocolate to your feeling about liver? He talks about compound words, which native speakers tend to miss completely ('skyscraper', 'understand' - and examples in Chinese and German as well). He talks about translators (who interpret books written by others) vs musicians (who play ['interpret'] pieces composed by others) - and why in the latter case is such glory heaped on the performer, but the translator in the former case is given little if any credit? There is quite a bit of the memoir about the book, Hofstader's own recollections about learning languages and playing with translation. And it is also a memorial to his wife, who shared his love of language and wordplay, who died young of brain cancer.
Here's one more section that I think captures the flavor of the book:[I have two recordings] of the great Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady in languages other than English: one in Spanish, the other in Hungarian. Each of them has a special twist of irony. At the core of the original story is how the coarse Cockney girl Liza Doolittle is, as a challenge, taken in by the insufferably smug but utterly smitten professor Henry Higgins, and through painful exercises - "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" - acquires such an impeccably upper-class Oxbridge way of speaking English that at her (and his) ultimate test, a posh ball that she attends incognito, drifting amongst the cream of British society, the keenest linguistic sleuth in the land dances with this mysterious beauty and in the end declares her too good to be true, and hence not English at all, but Hungarian!
The whole idea of de-anglicizing this story strikes me as really nutty - and yet there they are, those recordings on my shelf. And so, on what wet plains do those heavy, drenching rains mainly fall, in Mi Bella Dama? And in the Hungarian version, to what elite nationality is the too-good-to-be-true unrecognized Cockney girl assigned? Of course, the truly strange part in both cases is that the whole time she is speaking Spanish or Hungarian, the charade is maintained that she is actually speaking English, and, unlike most plays or movies where one language is made to pass for another, the linguistic medium here is not just an incidental fact, but the very crux of the entire plot. I suppose the suspension of disbelieve involved is no more strained than our willingness to accept as "reality" a story that is occasionally punctuated by the actors' breaking into lyrical song, and then, as suddenly as it started, the singing is over and apparent normalcy resumes on stage.
Also posted on Dreamwidth where there are
comments.
Anyway, I really want to talk a little bit about one of my very favorite books, Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter, because I think a lot of you would like it, too. Those of you who have me friended on Goodreads might have seen my recent review (which is where the link goes); I've actually read it through three or four times, and parts of it closer to a dozen times, but I was recently inspired to reread it after a discussion with tekalynn about connotations of words and terms in American vs British English. I'll just re-quote the bit that I quoted to her there:
- Does a sentence written in American English mean what it means in British English? (Does the word "monarchy" mean the same thing in both places? How about "Yankee"? How about "jolly"? How about "you"?)
- Does a sentence written in British English mean what it means in Indian English? (Does "cow" mean the same thing in both of them? How about "beef"? How about "Crown"? How about "nose?")
- Does a French sentence written by someone in Pushkin's Russia mean what the same French sentence written in Hugo's France meant? (Did "Napoléon" mean the same thing to both of them? How about tsar?)
- Does a San Franciscan speak the same language as a New Yorker? (Does "Chinatown" mean the same thing to both of them? How about "China"? How about "Broadway"? How about "earthquake"? How about "steep"?)
... - If John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were to speak the same patriotic sentence, would it have a fixed meaning? (Did "patriotism" mean the same thing to both of them? How about "communism"? How about "Abraham Lincoln"? How about "assassination"? How about "New York"? And "nose"?)
Le Ton Beau is about language and translation and transculturation and poetry, about the properties of a written work in addition to literal meaning (such as formal or informal tone, rhyme, rhyme scheme, letter frequencies, syllable count, typeface, etc): which of those should be preserved when the work is translated, how does a translator handle properties that imperfectly cross language boundaries, and what happens when two or more of the properties come into conflict. It's structured around a short 16th-century poem in archaic French (by Clément Marot), and each chapter ends with a selection of translations of this poem by Hofstadter, his colleagues, his friends, and his family. Within the chapters themselves are all kinds of entertaining and thought-provoking goings-on.
In one chapter he talks about reading Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (a Russian novel written as a series of sonnets) in four different translations, each faithful to the sonnet form, and gives a few of the same verses by each of the translators. It's fascinating to me how each translator made different choices, and yet, by comparing them all one can get a feel for what the original must be like - or does one? Can a person reading Pushkin in translation claim to have any conception of what Pushkin himself actually wrote? (And of course I am cheating by calling it "Eugene Onegin" as the title ought to be the original Russian title, and in Cyrillic, to boot...)
Another chapter has a discussion of the works of Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer. His stories are filled with brilliant wordplay, of the sort that seem impossible to translate. For example, one of his stories (which I remember having read - in translation, of course) is about a man who invents a machine that can make anything beginning with the letter "N". The thing is, though, that things that are named by words beginning with the letter "N" in Polish don't necessarily begin with the letter "N" in English. So what does the translator do?
How does one translate Georges Perec's La disparition, a story written in French about the search for a missing figure named Anton Voyl, without the use of the letter 'e', into English? On one level it's a narrative story; but on the meta level - 'Voyl' is French for 'Vowel' - its whole point is that missing 'e', and obviously an English version which translated the words literally but failed to obey the e-less constraint fails as a translation. By the way, Hofstadter calls the 'language' Perec used Gallic; the equivalent version of English he refers to as Anglo-Saxon, and, inspired by this wordplay, I wrote my Goodreads review (linked above) in this linguistic medium. Here's just a little, by way of example: This was my third (or fourth? Or fifth?) trip through [this book], and I still think it's amazing, brilliant, quirky and fun. Basically, it asks: What should stay constant across translation of a work? Translation is normally thought of as to do with plot, mood, connotations of individual words - but what about rhyming, scansion, lipogrammatic constraints? Is transculturation a thing to avoid, or to work toward? If your various constraints conflict, how do you pick which to follow?
There's a quite long section on nonsexist language, and 'translation' between ordinary (presumably sexist) English and nonsexist English. There's discussion of transculturation - how do you translate something rooted very strongly in its native place and tongue? If a character's diction and word choice implies something about his social class and background, how do you translate that to another language?
And there are a lot of tangents and side explorations. Hofstadter talks about machine translation and AI (unsurprising, given his computer science background). He talks about 'translation' in the broadest of terms: how do you understand it when someone else hates a food you love - can you 'translate' someone else's feeling about chocolate to your feeling about liver? He talks about compound words, which native speakers tend to miss completely ('skyscraper', 'understand' - and examples in Chinese and German as well). He talks about translators (who interpret books written by others) vs musicians (who play ['interpret'] pieces composed by others) - and why in the latter case is such glory heaped on the performer, but the translator in the former case is given little if any credit? There is quite a bit of the memoir about the book, Hofstader's own recollections about learning languages and playing with translation. And it is also a memorial to his wife, who shared his love of language and wordplay, who died young of brain cancer.
Here's one more section that I think captures the flavor of the book:[I have two recordings] of the great Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady in languages other than English: one in Spanish, the other in Hungarian. Each of them has a special twist of irony. At the core of the original story is how the coarse Cockney girl Liza Doolittle is, as a challenge, taken in by the insufferably smug but utterly smitten professor Henry Higgins, and through painful exercises - "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" - acquires such an impeccably upper-class Oxbridge way of speaking English that at her (and his) ultimate test, a posh ball that she attends incognito, drifting amongst the cream of British society, the keenest linguistic sleuth in the land dances with this mysterious beauty and in the end declares her too good to be true, and hence not English at all, but Hungarian!
The whole idea of de-anglicizing this story strikes me as really nutty - and yet there they are, those recordings on my shelf. And so, on what wet plains do those heavy, drenching rains mainly fall, in Mi Bella Dama? And in the Hungarian version, to what elite nationality is the too-good-to-be-true unrecognized Cockney girl assigned? Of course, the truly strange part in both cases is that the whole time she is speaking Spanish or Hungarian, the charade is maintained that she is actually speaking English, and, unlike most plays or movies where one language is made to pass for another, the linguistic medium here is not just an incidental fact, but the very crux of the entire plot. I suppose the suspension of disbelieve involved is no more strained than our willingness to accept as "reality" a story that is occasionally punctuated by the actors' breaking into lyrical song, and then, as suddenly as it started, the singing is over and apparent normalcy resumes on stage.
Also posted on Dreamwidth where there are
comments.