Thursday, June 24, 2010

French Burqa Ban

I have been thinking about it and have decided that maybe when I first read the NY Times Op-Ed on why France wants to ban the wearing of burqas and niqabs in public, I judged it too harshly. After all, I forgot to consider the environmental perspective. Back in the old days, when fuel was cheap, France had the luxury of journeying across many oceans in order to subjugate people who were not French. These days, things are not so easy. The environmentally sensitive xenophobe must instead find ways of discriminating against others locally -- n'est-ce pas?

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Elegy

"Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I'd been asked to translate them."

--Anne Carson, Nox

Anne Carson's Nox -- an elegy and memorial for her brother, who passed away recently -- is a hybrid between a scrapbook and a translation, an elegantly folded exploration of how grief works its way through a psyche for which syntax is soulcraft. I don't want to write a full review of it here, especially after others have already done such a nice job: here and here.

But I can't not say something about the line quoted above because it is such a poignant way of describing both the need to savor the linguistic remains of someone with whom you can no longer speak and the need to comb fine the surface of a conversation, a phrase, a word, to scrape free any last residue of the mind that bore it.

A reminder that sometimes language is not the only impediment to understanding.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Borderline

This is about translation.

I want to expand this into a full essay, but right now I only have time to get the bare idea out; forgive me if you've heard it before.

One of the things that interests me most about Language writ large is the way that it is at once immensely personal -- a tool for self-expression, for creativity, for art, a vehicle for inside jokes and catch phrases and dialect -- and demonstrably external -- mutually intelligible by all other speakers, objectively definable, exchangeable, recognizable, current. Language has the fluidity of other types of currency in that any two speakers can exchange words with one another, but without the faceless chill of actual currency. Perhaps language represents some sort of ultimate or ideal barter system.

This subjective/objective or internal/external dichotomy is, I think, entirely compelling and what makes language such a rich and fascinating object of study.

In my endless search to find different ways of characterizing the process of translation, I have found yet another: translation requires teasing apart the personal language of the author from the language spoken by his or her community. The goal of the translator is to change the bits that belong to the language into the new language but to leave the author's trace intact. So, if you were translating Hamlet into Icelandic, you would want to change all the English into Icelandic but you wouldn't want to change the parts that are Shakespeare.

That paragraph probably makes it sound like I'm on drugs. Really, I think this is a stunning insight. But it is hard to express without an example, which I am not going to provide right now. Feel free to express your befuddlement in the comments.

I will say that the essay I want to write will be about borders, and also about heights. How scary it is to be on the border of something, the dizziness, the trepidation. The difficulty of balancing yourself on that sort of edge. And the exhilaration of keeping your balance from word to word, page to page, day to day.