EthicalDative

‘Because You See His Teeth, Don’t Assume the Lion Is Smiling’

Posted on August 23, 2022 by JMN

(Acrylic brushed on wrinkled paper glued to cardboard scrap.) Joan Didion’s novel introduced me long ago to the reigning English solecism. I’m not a golfer, why am I attracted to *Play it as it lies*? Didion, a rigorous stylist, knew what she was doing. Her choice of the phrase’s version lends it the undermining force she needed. — JMN

The comment about the unsmiling lion is attributed to the 10th-century Arabic poet al-Mutanabbi (915 – 965). I heard it on a podcast called “Arabic Qahwa.” The line has a zesty zing to it that marks it as an old saying to be handed down indefinitely on the tongues of hoary elders, delivered with narrowed eyes and sagacious nods.

Old “Chinese” sayings abound in English. I’m not sure they’re all Chinese, or old, or even much said, but I have a favorite:

Wisdom consists in getting the names of things right.
Chinese Saying?

Whatever its origin, the saying bucks me up by validating a penchant for being ruled by grammar. The fewest words that are right can say enough barely, and leave the rest clearly understood. Excepting poetry, that’s good speech.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged grammar, language, poetry, style | Leave a comment

Translating Conceived as Sketching

Posted on August 21, 2022 by JMN

I wonder if a translation of a poem can be compared to a sketch of a painting? The sketcher recreates aspects of an original art work in a different medium, say pencil. Words are the translator’s medium. She uses those of one language to depict an object made with those of a different language. Both sketcher and translator do something akin to copying. The outcome may do a certain justice to the original, or not, but won’t be confused with it. We’re not talking about forgery or plagiarism.

What’s the point of sketching another art work? Take your answer to that question, I’ll take mine, and let’s see if they apply to translation: What’s the point of it?

Suppose the sketches were made from a painting that has disappeared? Whatever inspired it, say the rape of the Sabine women, is known to us only via the exertions of a sketcher. Pursuing the analogy, a poem may as well not exist for the reader who doesn’t know the language it’s written in. When a translator says, It looks somewhat like this, the reader gains a modicum of access to it, an awareness of it.

Scrupulous fidelity isn’t in the cards in either case. Both actions, sketching and translating, are drenched in subjectivity, contingent on the eye, the tastes, the skill of the renderer. Each is a form of imitation; an homage, perhaps; or an exercise; or an exploration; even an idle amusement. Secondary and derivative, yes, but each possessing a life of its own.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, language, translation | Leave a comment

‘There Are No Bright Lines Here’

Posted on August 19, 2022 by JMN

Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, describes a recent baptismal service:

Baptisms at our church are a mixture of solemnity and unbridled glee, often full of laughter and tears of joy. Those who were being baptized, or in the case of infants, their parents, took vows to put their trust in God’s grace and love and to renounce spiritual darkness, evil and “all sinful desires that draw” us from the love of God.
(Tish Harrison Warren, “The God I Know Is Not a Culture Warrior,” NYTimes, 8-14-22)

An old hymn’s chorus goes like this: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before….”

Warren’s essay exalts something different: piety nurtured by a radiant inwardness around two poles of behavior: affirmation, in the form of trust, and renunciation of… something or other. The “sinful desires” quandary is rotten fruit of the patristic tree. Humans can renounce harmful acts; thoughts, not so much. Warren’s strategic quote-marking of the phrase not only sets it off as liturgical cant, but lets her finesse the clash of theology with human nature by limelighting a joyful and forbearing style of devotion.

Warren’s oasis of psalmody shades us for a moment from truculent evangelism and religionist politics. For the last word of her refreshing homily, she quotes an ancient Christian soldier, Diadochos, the fifth-century bishop of Photiki: “… The soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech.”

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, rhetoric, spirituality | 2 Comments

Some Days I’m Angry AND Disappointed

Posted on August 17, 2022 by JMN

Those are stay-big-picture days: paint, write, read, think about language. If gender is fluent, so are the other language markers which assert us. What if I don’t always identify as a first person? I may feel like a you, for example, besotted with empathy for us. How many I am can also be in flux, neither singular nor plural quite doing the job, leaving me like a numberless child, forsaken by the grammar that traps me.

This isn’t one of those days. I flaunt a tenuous Scottish heritage today because of this news: Period products are now free in that country to anyone who needs them. My mother’s husband’s forebears’ home was Scotland, saving contrary evidence. If men in skirts be fable as some claim, / long live of fabled men in skirts the fame! (It’s hard to talk of Scotland without metre.)

The initiative makes Scotland the first country in the world to provide free sanitary products, part of a global effort to end “period poverty” — or a lack of access to tampons or sanitary pads because of prohibitively high costs.
(Remy Tumin, “Scotland Makes Period Products Free,” 8-15-22)

Northern Ireland is considering a similar measure; New Zealand and South Korea offer free menstrual products in schools. I was deprived of a girlhood by the fact of my birth, but if I could have one, I know where I would choose to be born: Edinburgh, Belfast, Wellington or Seoul.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, miscellaneous, personal | Leave a comment

Versicles & Dangleberries

Posted on August 15, 2022 by JMN

Wrath of Thrones
Thee 8TH of Henrys did decree
bad wyves &&& Thomases must meet 
their Heav’nly Fodder sharpishly,
ahead of shedjewel, toote sweet.
*****

Thee Archfellowe of Hi Kirk
For proper fayth 
Thee others bee
Beelzebubbish,
don’t ye see?
****

Saint Peete 
Monarkee & Papacee 
a-sittin’ in a tree, 
kay, eye, ess, ess, 
eye, inn, gee.
*****

Tory Pun Ditty Tree
Lordies & theyr Laidesses
a-puttin’ on the Ritz,
knaveree & wokeree
a’throwin’ hissy fits.
*****

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel | 2 Comments

Failure Foretold: Manifesto of Translation Excuses

Posted on August 13, 2022 by JMN

The physics of a tiny bead driven by a puff of air towards a miracle on airy wing guarantees that a kid plinking at dragonflies with his BB-gun will never bag one. That’s the comfort built into the action. So it goes with translating poetry — done because it can’t be done. The lost cause fallacy cushions the effrontery.

I’m not a poet but gravitate to poems for translation practice and vocabulary acquisition. A decent poem’s language is economical, concrete, precise and uninflated. If it’s flowery or obscure — and there’s plenty of that — it may suffer qua poetry but is still fit for purpose as long as it can be held in the mind and on the tongue, and interrogated at word level

Carmen Giménez, Graywolf Press’s new executive editor, has said she became a poet and not a fiction writer because she is “attracted to the granular level of language” Me too. My view of translation will be myopic in the sense of being literal-minded.

Here are the two poles of the dialog:

How literal must a literary translation be? Nabokov, who was fluent in three languages and wrote in two of them, believed that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Borges, on the other hand, maintained that a translator should seek not to copy a text but to transform and enrich it. “Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization,” Borges insisted—or, depending on the translation you come across, “a more advanced stage of writing.” (He wrote the line in French, one of several languages he knew.)
(Jiayang Fan, “Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation,” The New Yorker, 1-8-18)

If I had to pick a side, heaven forbid, I’d have to call myself of the Nabokovian persuasion, but not as proud or thunderous.

With Arabic, I can’t profit from having rubbed elbows with the culture such as I’ve done with Spanish and, to some extent, French. Tant pis. I won’t be denied a gander at the sources in company with my dictionary and grammars. Most fascinating is when other translators depart from the literal sense of texts as I’m able to glean it. The how and why are paramount, with due respect to whatever “spirit” and authorial intention they presume to have captured floating outside the rude language matchups that can be established.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, translation | Leave a comment

Fun With Man-Words

Posted on August 11, 2022 by JMN

In 2013, 52 Atlantic spotted dolphins migrated from the northern Bahamas to Bimini, 100 miles south, where a community of 120 of their species already lived. The encounter could have gone badly.

When groups of social mammals meet, things can get tense. Run-ins between chimpanzee communities, for instance, are known for their violence. Adult male mammals, especially, are keen to defend territory and access to females.
(Carolyn Wilke, “Dolphin Strangers Met in the Bahamas. Things Went Swimmingly,” NYTimes, 8-6-22)

As it happened, for reasons that included lots of steamy dolphin sex, the newcomers were assimilated with relative ease.

What’s arresting for this reflection is mention of the general propensity of man-males to defend access to femme-males. In tribal contexts, the integrity and purity of the son-bearing pool are paramount. Womb-men are a brood stock managed by male-men like any vital resource — such as a watering hole, a salt deposit, a grove of pippins. Post-Roe, a purdah-torial direction of travel is discernible in America, where resurgent he-men tighten the reproductive and behavioral screws on non-men. The tribe is on the move.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, society | Leave a comment

Also Good With Cheese on a Biscuit

Posted on August 9, 2022 by JMN

Anyone who has twisted the cap off an opened jar of Marmite rimmed with dried product will know why it’s used to glue the tiles on the heat shields of Elon Musk’s rockets. The shields enable the craft to withstand the searing stresses of passage through Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. Until they discovered Marmite’s aptitude for the purpose, Muskovite engineers had experienced frustration with conventional adhesives’ failure during flight, causing tiles to fall off and pose potential disaster for the rockets and their crews.

As often happens, a breakthrough in a billionairian space program sparks advances in adjacent industries — in this case, the development and manufacture of a wide range of edible glues.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged humor, personal | Leave a comment

‘Trsf yjr timr/‘

Posted on August 8, 2022 by JMN

When I tried to be a writer I was too young to have interesting thoughts. Rimbaud was a freak to be worshiped despairingly. Why couldn’t I be an ancient soul at nineteen like him? I could not find impassive rivers to descend on my Smith-Corona portable.

Now that I have a mature outlook, touch typing may rescue me. The skill requires assuming the home position from the onset of attack, index fingers bookending ‘G’ and ‘H,’ no droopy wrists, eyes on your copy — and sit up straight! My attractive high school teacher was emphatic. Her impact on my keyboarding endures.

In the throes of afflatus my occasional failing is to be carelessly right-shifted from home position by one key. My index fingers rest on ‘G’ and ‘K’ instead of ‘F’ and ‘J.’ A glance at the screen after a spate of keying reveals gibberish. For example, “Read the rune.” comes out as:

Trsf yjr timr/.

In point of fact, this isn’t true gibberish. Train wreck of a false start, yes, but it’s also a map to a message. Knowing the state of affairs, you could decode it yourself if you had half a mind. But what you deciphered would be less interesting than what my delinquent fingers had wrought.

Eureka!

Fun is ahead in shifting right expressly. I could type something disobliging here on my blog, say a snatch of billingsgate, and my reader would be none the wiser. She would take it to be a citation from Welsh or a Transcaucasian language.

I’m calling this gift rhapsodic typographicalism and its specimens typo rhapsodies. The best ones are destined for submission to the poetry journals.

z0vz0 3-33 zk,m == Ryjovs;Fsyobr/ S;; tohjyd trdrtbrf [<— rhapsodic copyright line]

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, miscellaneous, personal | Leave a comment

‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last…’

Posted on August 6, 2022 by JMN

“We’re going to draw a hard line in the sand for morality,” Precinct 4 Commissioner Clint Ives said… “I applaud their efforts to defeat liberalism…”
(George Coryell, “Victoria County [Texas] sides with group that wants city library books removed,” victoriaadvocate.com, 8-1-22)

The commissioner refers to a group of citizens who want 21 books about LGBTQ children and teens banned from the public library.

“America is being reintroduced to what preliterate or highly ethnically divided societies that have tried to implement the American model have known all along… All politics are tribal and zero-sum. You have created tribes and the tribes aren’t talking to each other anymore.”
(Farah Stockman, “Kenya’s Elite Talk About American Power in the Past Tense,” NYTimes, 8-3-22)

James Mwangi, executive director of Dalberg, an international consulting firm, is quoted in the article.

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, society, Texas | 4 Comments