Extinguished Languages

Globalization and Language
In addition to animals, plants, ecosystems, clean water, clean air, and fossil fuels, globalization and industrialization threaten languages. Linguists and anthropologists predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s ~6000 languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Not surprisingly, it is the marginal that are most in danger—languages spoken by small numbers of relatively poor people. There has been some outcry, mostly on the part of academics and missionaries, about the infinite value of what we stand to lose: any and all record of thousands of societies, whose myths, origins, histories, practices, relationships, beliefs, songs, and poems are the winding paths of entire cities on the grand map we are trying to transcribe of the Mind.

Mass production, mass communication, and mass transit, offering so much opportunity for travel and so much information about the places we cannot travel to, bring us together by collapsing differences along with distances. The benefits of grapes in winter, cheap flights all over Europe, and hand-held access to virtually any imaginable piece of data are checked by the narrowing of our escape routes from the known to the far-flung. Every fall we harvest a greater amount of a decreasing variety. The forces of mass tolerate only the most familiar of crops, and so cultivate conformity.

The View from the Other Side
The articles mourning the loss of all these languages generally consider the situation from the majority standpoint, trying to project impact on linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, sociology, history, and on the vast abstraction of the global community we all belong to. However, few really explore the view from the other side, that of the native speaker and the finite reality of their local community.

Consider being a member of a language community of 30—the size of a grade-school class. Or 11, enough for a soccer team. Or 3, the barest love triangle. Or 2, an endless dialog. Imagine being one of the few guardians of something as intricate as a language, how stunning would seem its fragility. If the broad idea of cultural history is too vague to elicit much empathy, think of losing your personal language, the one you swear in, the one you swear love in, the one you dream in, the one that fills in the melodies you sing absentmindedly to yourself while running errands or folding laundry with words. Feel the breeze as your way of seeing and being in the world rises off your skin like cool water and loses itself in the air.

Then appreciate for an instant the expansive—the practically speaking infinite—body of documents and recordings in the ten languages that together are native to approximately 3 billion people: Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. All the thought, all the thriving and struggling that takes place in these tongues in the space of a single day would take several lifetimes to conceive of. These languages are institutions; they are monuments.

Paris Nightmare
Long ago, on a Paris metro, I nightmared falling out of who I was. A few feet away from me, a couple sat speaking English of which I could not understand a word. Waves poured in around the sandbar of French I had found to stand on, separating me from understanding’s soft shore. Like sand, I thought, fluency seems stable but is not. I spent several minutes in a state of semi-panic before realizing the couple was speaking Dutch; the tides receded.

For a long time, I considered this vision to be a raucous fantasy, a dark flirtation with the impossible. How could you lose your native tongue? Even if your actual tongue fell right out of your mouth, don’t you practice every minute of every day by unwinding an internal monologue that, laid end to end, would reach the moon? And then I read this, from an article by Daniel Everett, a professor of linguistics at Illinois State University. It describes the Oro Win, a people from the Brazilian Amazon enslaved by Portuguese rubber traders until a half-century ago when the several dozen survivors escaped and went to live with another Amazonian people, the Wari’, who speak a different but related language.

“I also noticed that the Oro Win had forgotten much of their language, since their circumstances over the years had forced them to rely on Portuguese and Wari', rather than Oro Win, in order to survive. Yet they speak neither of these foreign languages well. The five remaining speakers of Oro Win now find that they are not only unable to fully recall their own language, they are unable to speak any other language as native speakers.”

One aspect of the definition of an endangered language (in addition to the number of speakers, their average age, and the percentage of youth who learn the language) is that there are no more monolingual speakers, i.e., no one who speaks only Oro-Win. It would be practically impossible for most people to survive unable to communicate with the larger dominant community—one of the reasons why some languages disappear is that they cease to be useful tools in things like finding employment or engaging in trade (sometimes minority languages are banned by a more powerful majority; that is another matter entirely). However, just because you can communicate in another language doesn’t mean you are fluent, and for the Oro Win, it’s not the nightmare of falling through the looking glass but that of getting trapped between the mirror and its silver backing that has become a reality.

For more on this topic, as well as recordings from the 1930s of now extinct Khoisan languages, see: http://www.yourdictionary.com/elr/whatis.html.

Prepositions: Excerpt from a Personal Dictionary

Marion: prep.;

1. the shape one word takes when it approaches another

2. a character in "The Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders

3. a trapeze artist who loses her job when the circus closes and falls in love with an angel who has become a man

4. narrative arcing over the heads of the crowd

5. the rung seized

6. the hand that seizes the rung

7. a French woman living in a German city

8. a nasty fall taken between languages

9. a weightless thing

10. flung up

Etymology: When I moved out to San Francisco, fall started and I decided to learn German. I could never remember where to put each word. It was always windy on the way to class and I used to warm up my brain by thinking in French, hoping this would help with the German. It never did, except for words like "restaurant" and "parfum" that they share. Most borrowed nouns are neuter in German, but looking for meaning in the gender of a word is like trying to climb a Jacob's ladder. It was around this time I became fascinated by the figure of Marion.

Preposition: n.;

1. a weightless thing

2. concrete

3. a hinge between the moving and the still

4. a way of traveling

5. the shape one word takes when evading another; the slither of a word in retreat

6. something that cannot be touched

7. something necessary to the touch

Etymology: I struggled most with prepositions. Misled by the false cognates between English and German, I expected them to be straightforward. I thought the relationships they describe -- in time, in space -- would be the same in any language: how much disagreement can there be that the cat is on the mat? But soon they came to represent for me everything irreducibly different in the different ways there are to view the world and, more than that, my own dislocation as I moved between them.

Concrete: adj.; a metaphorical way of describing that which is solid, real, and can be touched or walked upon

Auf: prep.; German

1. at, as in " at your own risk"

2. in, as in "in German"

3. on, as in "to be bent on something"

4. to, as in "to nail something down to something else"

5. up, as in "to be up to something"

Etymology: This is an example of a German preposition. As you can see, it maps onto many different English prepositions, depending on the situation. Some of this must be the fault of our own overlapping prepositions, but not all of it.

At: prep.; English

1. am

2. an

3. auf

4. bei

5. im

6. uber

7. um

8. zu

Etymology: It's just as bad in the other direction.

Jacob's Ladder: noun;

1. a ladder that Jacob dreamed connecting heaven to Earth

2. a toy made of wooden squares connected with ribbon

3. a metaphor for Jesus

4. a figure of string looped around the fingers

5. a ladder that is difficult or impossible to climb, that slips and sways when stepped on; an unstable ladder

6. in nautical usage, a ladder whose outside edges are rope

7. a plant of the Polemonium family with variegated leaves

8. the path that moonlight weeps onto the ocean

Etymology: Approaching the world is difficult; it shies, it slips. Prepositions remind us of our separation from the world: Marion becomes the path we follow towards it. She is both the flinger and the flung, the hand and the rung. Climbing up she carves out a way between languages, between a preposition and its object, between a speaker and her tongue.

Performing

"Performance" is a word at odds with itself.

This word and its inner out-of-joint-ness became tangible for me when, a month ago, I started singing with a Catholic choir. I have sung in choruses for years and years and years, and thought I was completely used to the routine of rehearsals and concerts and, especially, perfectly comfortable singing religious music in churches, even though I am not religious. But I soon realized that what I was used to was singing Christian hymns and masses during secular performances and that singing at mass is not the same thing as giving a concert. It is singing religious music "for real," and the disjunction between what the Catholic mass has to say -- and what I now say along with it -- and what I think is acute.

In looking for a way to understand and accept what it means to be singing religious music "for real," I was reminded of an idea that started with J.L. Austin and was developed further by Derrida, at the center of which sits a similar word echoing the same dissonance: "performative." Performative is an adjective and a theory used to describe utterances that perform an action or accomplish a change in the world (other than the action of speaking) simply in being spoken. There are a few examples and they are, as we will see, necessarily limited. These include things like a priest saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" at a wedding; a celebrity breaking a bottle of champagne over a bow and saying "I christen this ship the Good Ship Wet;" an explorer stumping up a hill and jabbing a flag into the soft earth, declaring "I claim this land in the name of England;" a particularly hip Queen gazing down at the man kneeling before her and uttering "I dub thee Sir Mix-a-Lot."

Underlying and enabling all of these statements is some sort of social code -- most often, a legal or political code -- and a group of people who adhere to this code, such that if the right person says the right thing at the right time then something happens. If it sounds like magic it's because performative speech is not improvised but strictly scripted -- just like a magic spell. And although these scripts can have indirect material effects (a couple pays less taxes, a boat has its name painted on its hull, a baby is called by its name), their effects are never directly material. They work entirely in the realm of the linguistic: that is what makes them such tempting nuggets for a philosopher of language. And yet it is all the more frustrating to find that these linguistic events are contingent upon so many non-linguistic variables.

This is where Austin's theory of performative speech acts starts to digest itself. Austin seeks to distinguish between "serious" speech acts, in which all the external conditions for action are met, and "non-serious" speech acts, in which the script is followed but is, for whatever reason, void. The example he uses is a real wedding between two people intending to marry each other led by a real priest vs. a wedding scene in a play. The problem is that, from a linguistic point of view, there is no way to differentiate between these episodes. The real priest and the actor may very well speak the same lines, and likewise the couples. At the end of one ceremony a couple will be married and at the end of the other a lot of people will wash off their make-up and go home, and attributing this key difference to context, as Austin is forced to do, is deadly, for resorting to context is the linguistic equivalent of saying "I can't define it but I know it when I see it."

Derrida is the one who untangles this knot and he does so by splitting the word performance along its own natural fault line. Austin is preoccupied with the action sense of performance, as in performing a deed -- taking action, enacting, doing. But Derrida turns our attention to the other side of the word: performance as drama or art, acting instead of action. All of a sudden, the contradiction jumps out, like a sailboat in a magic eye poster: performing is both actually doing something (as opposed to sitting back and reflecting) and pretending to do something (putting on a show).

Derrida's insight occurs in two movements: first, he slices performance open to reveal its two opposing halves. So strange, we remark -- how did these two ever fit together in the first place? And then he shows us the seam that joins them. Performative speech requires a code of some sort, a script. In the right context, this script will take effect. However, the nature of a script is that it can be repeated by anyone, anytime, unlike spontaneous speech originating within a single consciousness. Performative speech is accessible to anyone even if it won't work for everyone in every situation. And if it couldn't be repeated by anyone then it wouldn't be part of a pre-established code and it wouldn't work for anyone -- if a priest gets up and says: "Now, um, you guys can move in together, I guess," no one would recognize that as an action. Performative speech acts depend on their own iterability and the foundation of the ability to actually do something with words is the ability to pretend to do something with words. Performing an action depends on being able to stage an acted performance.

Today is Palm Sunday. As we enter Holy Week, I am feeling more and more comfortable in my new robes, my new role. This comfort does not come from the fact that I have started to accept the teachings of the Church, but rather that I have realized my ability to go through certain motions without being implicated in them. There is no reason why a mass has to be different from a concert, for me, the performer. These chants and motets are available to me and I am free to intone them and not mean them without degrading either them or myself for they are, in a very important sense, empty: unlike other kinds of speech they lack the force of deriving from and expressing an individual's mind. They are empty and waiting to be filled with intention, without which they may ring and ring like so many open-mouthed bells, in beautiful, meaningless harmony.

A language, most will agree, is not just a static body of abstract relationships between concepts and signs, but also a manifestation, a realization, of a given culture. Within that culture, it functions as both map and city. To speak two languages, well, means being able to navigate (at least) two cultures at will. Translating or interpreting necessitates doing so at the same time. In most contexts, this ability is enviable, sought after, revered.

But in times of war, when cultures meet each other in conflict and the danger of trusting the wrong person deepens and darkens people's sense of cultural identity and identification, this ability, in higher demand than ever, can prove deadly. The intermediary is capable of the unthinkable: discoursing with the enemy without actually becoming the enemy and so they are doubly Other, inhabitants of a realm beyond the binary of the conflict, practitioners of an impossible, an untenable, third way. Instead of being viewed as symbols of the hope they embody, they are often shunned, and their disillusionment becomes the sharpest indictment of our failure to get along.

I urge all of you to read the excellent article by George Packer on Iraqi interpreters published in this week's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer before they take it off-line.

Tragedy and Pathology

One of the central questions posed by scholars of tragedy is whether or not one can write a modern tragedy. Is it a living genre that could nourish itself on our current crises of war, nationalism, and inequality, and could in turn sustain us with its inescapable, compelling contradictions? Or is it fixed, like a photograph of someone turning away from us: an image we can return to again and again but that will never again return our gaze?

Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres (1991: Knopf), an adaptation of or response to King Lear set on a 1970s mid-Western farm, uses the tools of contemporary narrative to pose that question. For anyone who has read the Shakespeare play, spotting the dozens of superficial points of intersection between the two works is an enjoyable diversion. Lear here is renamed Larry, or Laurence, Cook and he is the proud and powerful owner of 1000 acres of land -- by far the largest plot owned by a single farmer anywhere in the area. His daughters, Ginny and Rose, have been raised to fear and obey him; only his youngest daughter, Caroline, feels she can empathize with him, although in the end it seems she doesn't know him very well at all. The action begins when he decides to incorporate his farm and divide it up between his children, even though he is still in good health, and doesn't end until every character has died or lost all recognizable pieces of their former identity. There is a storm, a fool, a blinded man. There is incest, abuse, and poison.

But the book is not just a transposition in which the elements of a well-known plot are renamed and relocated. It is a gaping mouth, an unfurled question mark beckoning to us to put aside our pat understanding of human consciousness and face a darkness filled with everything we don't know and can't control about each other, for nowadays we tend to pathologize difference and so distance ourselves from suffering and loss. Viewing tragic dilemmas as symptoms of a treatable pathology means neutralizing the tragedy, refusing to face it, and instead replacing it with a bland moral.

In A Thousand Acres, the characters grapple with formidable issues. For example, following a church supper in which Larry's friend Harold (Gloucester) publicly denounces and humiliates Ginny and Rose, the two girls discuss what is happening to their father whose behavior has become increasingly erratic of late:

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you? But it isn't even that."
"What is it?"
"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

In this scene, and throughout the book, Rose (the first speaker here) is the angry one, self-righteous and demanding of justice, while Ginny, the narrator, attempts to accept her lot and avoid conflict. Both of them try, in their own way, to incorporate their father's behavior into a narrative framework they can make sense of and they suffer when those narratives don't fit together.

In Shakespeare's play, Lear goes mad. That's not a term we use anymore: we say, sick, ill, disabled, altered. Mental illness belongs to the realm of things we don't understand and can't control, but because of that it is often closed off to us in popular discourse. A diagnosis, whether mental or physical, is, in many stories, an answer. But in Lear, as in A Thousand Acres, there are no words to hide people behind. Larry's madness is a question for his daughters and for the reader, another inscrutable part of his character, just like his aggression, his stubbornness, and, in the fictional past that precedes the narrative's start, his predictability.

Likewise, the law plays a large role in the novel. When the farm is incorporated, papers are signed, lawyers are consulted. And when the family starts to fall apart, again there is a trial in which Larry tries to win back what he gave away. In the original play, too, there is a trial: it is in a barn during a rainstorm and a footstool is one of the main participants. The Acres trial takes place in a real courtroom and seems like it should be more definitive, more meaningful, than the mock version it is based on, but it is not clear that it really settles anything.

Ultimately, these questions -- who is right and who is wrong, who owns what and for how long, what it means to be sane and how that definition shapes human interaction, what a family is and what holds it together -- are questions that inhabit us. They fill people's lives. Ideas of justice and reason, truth and meaning, are the ghosts we try to net in tomes and textbooks, decisions and diagnoses. Medical and legal code can help us negotiate these questions as a society, they can help people heal and can preserve order to a certain extent. Pathologizing is far better than it's predecessor, demonizing, but not the same as empathizing, or trying to. A jury's verdict, a doctor's prescription, is the beginning of a journey not the end of one. If we are to use these tools to their fullest then we can't treat words like fences to separate ourselves from misery's plot of land: they must be bridges, gateways that open always onto further discussion.

Smiley's book ends with Ginny pondering her inheritance:

"I can't say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember -- the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all others."

At the end of it all, all she can do, all we can do, is continue our impossible struggle to relate.

A Horse to Water Part II

This is the second part of a two-part entry.

I wrote the first part at Christmas-time, before I went to visit my father's family in France. The night before I wrote it, I was sitting outside the coffee shop next door to my apartment reading Alessandro Baricco's "An Iliad" and waiting for some friends to pick me up to go to a party when an old man asked me for some change. He had a pinched face, his features loose and dry, like a lemon squeezed of all its juice. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin. He was thin, with longish hair, and wore a sweatshirt and a knit cap. He looked old, but could have been anywhere from 45 to 75. I gave him a dollar; it was Christmas Eve. He walked away and I continued reading. It was dark out but not cold. Greek soldiers fell to their glorious deaths across the pages in front of me.

A few minutes later, the man came back and sat down at my table. He was now holding a large paper cup full of orange soda. He started to tell me about his life: in and out of rehab, getting by on the streets, adding whiskey to his soda to keep from shaking too much, the disability checks he survived on. I nodded and asked a few questions every now and then when he went silent. I wasn't the one of us who needed to talk.

Much of what he said, I couldn't understand or even hear. The irony of someone opening up only for their words to get lost in the brisk air pained me. I wondered if there were a placebo effect that would make up for it, a release that came just from talking and not necessarily from being heard, as well.

Eventually my friends arrived and I left, wishing him a Merry Christmas.

What distances can be bridged by conversation? The liberal humanist answer is that, given patience, openness, and warmth, any. We are all humans and humans converse, discourse, reach out to and reach each other through words. But what must be in place for such an exchange to function?

When I sat down to write the next day, it was not just Baricco's text that had me occupied with questions of translation, but also the experience of sitting next to someone and not being sure if anything either of us said ever made it across.

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The Bodies of Words

How do we interact with the tangible bodies of words? Most often, it's on a page of some sort, be it a handwritten entry in a diary, a greasy swath of newsprint, or the infinitely malleable page of a Microsoft Word document. Rhetorically, these pages blur into a single one and we often speak of the proverbial page, a plane with no depth, a surface that cannot be penetrated for behind it, beyond it, all is void. A painting may have perspective, but a sheet of text is subject to only two dimensions. What beings could inhabit such a desolate landscape? All species of letters, from the spiny and rigid to the flowery and fluid, thrive on the page as if two dimensions were all they ever dreamed of, and so we come to think of words, too, as being flat and essentially without mass.

We speak of long stretches or large collections of texts as bodies -- we refer to a body of work, a corpus of many documents. But the body of an individual word? Words are more often figured as tokens: objects of fixed value that can be redeemed at any dictionary for their full worth; using a single word instead of the entire sentence that would summarize its meaning is a matter of phonemic frugality. According to this logic, a word with several meanings is actually a collection of separate tokens, each with a different value, that just happen to be printed with the same design. As with other kinds of currency, words are flat. The only information they carry is on their surface, for surface is all there is.

The other night, while visiting a friend in a chic Twin Peaks apartment, looking out over a San Francisco whose net of lights appeared like a pool of reflected stars, I was introduced to the game Password. Something like reverse Taboo, the game is played by several teams, one of whose players tries to guess the word printed on the card the first player has drawn from the deck. The catch is that the first player may only provide the second player with one word per round to guide them; the word may not even be hyphenated. So, player 1 offers a clue, player 2 guesses. If player 2 does not get the word, the word is passed to the next team, where player 3 offers a second clue, and player 4 guesses, and so on. As the word continues through round after round, clues accumulate and guessing becomes easier, until finally someone figures it out. We didn't keep score, but if you do, then fewer and fewer points are awarded the more clues you have by the time you figure it out.

Here's an example:
Luke said plug; I guessed drain.
Heather said market; Kristen guessed traffic jam. (She was thinking of Market St. in San Francisco.)
David said publicize; Matt guessed advertise, and was right.

I said facade.
Matt said offensive.
Kristen said fake.
I said forward.
Matt said door.
Kristen said first.

The word was front.

Although I have no experience in geography, I imagine this is what it feels like to stomp off into the mountains with a measuring tape, a set of binoculars, and a calculator and figure out how the hell high up you are, to gather data in the form of several known points or distances and use those to locate another point or distance: to triangulate.

A single word, like a single point, provides very little information because it points in so many directions. A hair plug? An electric plug? A tobacco plug? At the same time, we must guess at the relationship between plug and the secret word. Are they synonyms? Antonyms? Do they fit together somehow? Do they appear side by side in a familiar expression?

But adding just one more word to the equation is like adding a whole new dimension, and so the questions becomes: what line leads from plug to market? Sometimes, even two points are not enough for us to know where we are, and it is only the third or the fourth or the fifth that sets us on our feet. The process of triangulating a word based on its relationship to other words forces us to see the word as a many faceted object. Often, words have faces of similar shapes, like those of plug, all of which refer to a thing that fills a hole, whether the prong of an electric plug that fills a socket or the thatch of hair that fills a follicle. Seeing all the faces at once, as side by side in a dictionary, can be like looking at a cubist painting that flattens an object while preserving its various surfaces by slitting it up the back and spreading it out on the canvas in a Mercator projection of a person or a bowl of fruit.

Regardless of the relationship of a word's many faces to each other, Password confronts us with the relationship of each face to the word as a whole and we begin to see that each word is a landscape of peaks and planes, cliffs and hollows, a body that casts shadows, a body not just representative of but full of, full with, meaning, a round, spinning world unto itself.

En Masse

Somehow, the sight of many people doing the same thing at once -- whether dancing, singing, rising to their feet, falling to their knees, filling the squares in front of balconies in old cities, joining in shouts of protest or cries of celebration, leaping up in applause, cheering for athletes or comedians, or just holding their ground -- brings tears to my eyes. The idea of all those minds and bodies bent to the same purpose at the same time is at once exhilarating and terrifying, and deeply compelling. I cannot help but respond with my physical being; what sets the masses in motion moves me, too.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, (www.etymonline.com/index.php) the English word "mass," as in "lump, quality, or size" comes from the Latin "massa 'kneaded dough, lump, that which adheres together like dough,' from Gk. maza 'barley cake, lump, mass, ball,' related to massein 'to knead.'" It goes on to say that the meaning was "extended 1585 to 'a large quantity, amount, or number'" and that "The masses 'people of the lower class' is from 1837." In Spanish, this word is "masa," in Italian, "massa," and in French, "masse."

However "mass" in English is also used to mean the Catholic Eucharist service. This homonym of the word above is derived from the Late Latin "missa," the feminine past participle of "mittere" meaning "to let go" or "send," because the Latin service ends with the phrase "Ite, missa, est," "Go, (the prayer) has been sent" or "Go, the dismissal has been made." In Spanish, this word is "misa," in Italian, "Mass," and in French, "messe."

Only in English are the two words the same; there is no historical connection between the word denoting a great gathering of people and the formal name of the religious ceremony.

The homophony of "mass" can, apparently, be considered as one of sound's mere accidents, but what an accident it is, housing two such disparate concepts within one string of letters. On the one hand, we have the mass of the physicists, one of the fundamental properties of matter, a word grounded in the material, in the solid, corporeal stuff of the earth. On the other, the mass of the angels, denying the priority of the tangible world, seeking to rise above all that can be measured and quantified. This second sense is particularly curious: who would name something after its own end? The Catholic "mass" is the part (of the mass) that gives you permission to take leave of its whole. The difference between the two meanings of this one word can be crystallized in terms of the different ways they approach bread: it is either the globs of dough that will become actual human flesh or a divine instantiation of the flesh of the spirit.

I do wonder, though, whether the power of a crowd moving in unison might be related to the strange power of the word "mass" itself, a word that unites the crowds of bodies too numerous to count with the breadth of the soul, a distance beyond measure.

A Horse to Water, Part I

One way to describe the process of translation is as an effort to bring a reader and a text together across a great distance. Within this framework, there are two basic options: you can either bring the reader to the text or bring the text to the reader.

According to the first choice, the translated text must be as close to the original as possible along all imaginable axes, including the choice of words, their rhythm and intonation within each sentence, the way these sentences shape, in turn, each paragraph, the pace of the story, the unfolding of events, and the general tone. This method may motivate you to choose obscure words because they are closer to those used in the original, even if they are unfamiliar to most readers. You may favor novel constructions over idiomatic expressions and may end up with a tone that sounds stilted or fancy or crude or just plain bizarre. The resulting text is a projection of the text that might have been had the author only been born in another country, as if language were currency that could be exchanged for only a small fee. The idea is to remind your readers constantly that they are reading a translation, and that the text before them was not composed with their needs in mind but is only the apparition of another text that does not inhabit their world. You must visit the foreign upon them and they are to feel, when they have finished reading, that they have been in communication with the other side of their own language.

This method is often criticized as being too challenging and too alienating: you can bring a reader to a text, but you can't make them engage with it unless it pulls them in, is how the argument goes.

On the other hand, if you decide to bring a text to a reader, the goal is to recreate as nearly as possible the relationship that an original reader -- a contemporary and compatriot of the author -- might have had with the original text. This method requires that the text be made familiar in any way necessary, ranging from updating the vocabulary, using current slang, relocating the action, emphasizing different aspects of the characters, adding explanatory passages, omitting material that seems repetitive or extraneous, &c. If you're successful, the reader will be able to enter the story freely, without feeling any sharp disjunction between the world of this text and the world they inhabit. There will be no barrier between reader and text, no reminder that they are, for all intents and purposes, strangers.

An example of the latter project is Alessandro Baricco's recent book, "An Iliad" (Knopf 2006, tr. Ann Goldstein). This is not just a translation, but a translation of an adaptation of a translation. Baricco altered and abridged Maria Grazia Ciani's Italian translation of the The Iliad, eliminating repetitive passages and thereby streamlining the narrative, entirely removing the scenes of intervention by the Gods, adding decorative or expositive sentences here and there, and shifting the third-person narrative into a series of first-person accounts. The Italian version was intended for aural consumption and was read aloud in Rome and in Turin in 2004, and has since been translated into a number of different languages for distribution around the world.

The English text is highly readable. It contains few epithets and no repetitions, is not in verse, features no Gods stepping down from the heavens to muck about, and is related in a tone that is smooth and simple overall, if a little formal. Chryseis, a Trojan woman, starts it: "It all began on a day of violence," she says, plainly. In his introduction, Baricco admits some doubt: "The peril of losing the power of the Homeric original is certainly great. I can't imagine what will happen" (p. xi). The force of an original text, like virginity, is something that is often discussed in terms of loss alone, a value that can be subtracted from but never augmented, although I don't believe the equation to be nearly so straightforward and can hardly imagine that Baricco does, either.

So what is it that Baricco and Goldstein have brought to us, the modern readers, out of the past? A roster of the dead, for one.

"Idomeneus killed Phaestus, the son of Borus of Maeonia, who had come from the fertile land of Tarne. He hit him in the right shoulder as he was trying to get out of his chariot. The hero fell backward and darkness enveloped him. Menelaus, the son of Atreus, struck Scamandrius, the son of Strophius...Meriones killed Phereclus, who had built for Paris the well-made ships, the beginning of the disaster...Meges killed Pedaeus, the bastard son of Antenor, whose wife nevertheless reared him as her own son, to please her husband...Eurypylus killed Hypsenor, the priest of Scamander, who was venerated by all the people as a god; he pursued him as he tried to flee, and when he reached him drew his sword and sliced through one shoulder, cutting off the arm." (p. 32-3).

It goes on. Sometimes the Achaeans have the advantage, sometimes the Trojans. Men fall and men cut each other down and men fall. They die horrible deaths; arrows enter eyeballs and necks, stomachs are rent like shirts. I read this text about the glory of war as a reproach of its horrors: I can't help it; the brutality is too deliberate, too honest. I wonder, too, if Baricco wanted to revive this work as a response to the war now being fought, the wars we fear might still be ahead, and if he chose to bring us not the text we expected, purple with heroes and cinematic in scope, but a starker story, in which the clamor of battle is replayed slowly, each moment like a single figure in a flipbook, each death lifted from the madness and frozen, illuminated.

At least, I think, we know their names.

Pity and Fear?

Why are we compelled to watch tragedies when we know they all end badly?

Aristotle tells us that a "perfect tragedy" should "imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (p. 75, Aristotle's Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, Hill and Wang, New York: 1961). He goes on to specify that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves," and that this misfortune "should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty" (p. 76).

His advice is perhaps more practical than philosophical, for he doesn't delve here into why the great poets should aim to elicit pity and fear in the first place. Instead, the Poetics explores the mechanics of tragedy: its constituent elements, its sequential parts, and the irresistible motion of its plots, which proceed, not like flowers unfolding to reveal a single, secret truth, but like strange engines coming to life. Each action -- each lever falling, each gear turning -- emerges necessarily from the preceding action; the end is always inevitable, inscribed both in the very first movement and in the structure of the machine itself. "Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means," he says, "but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way" (p. 78).

According to Aristotle, the end of a tragedy, although inevitable, is evident neither to the characters as they stumble forward nor to the audience, as they watch, riveted. The end thus lays bare our collective ignorance and our inability to understand the genealogy of events, to anticipate the progeny of our decisions.

And yet, the majority of tragedies, even in Aristotle's day, were based on popular myths and the histories of a few well-known families. Imagining an audience watching "Medea" without knowing how it ends is like imagining Eve in her garden, lounging, willowy, among the trees , deciding she's really just not that into fruit. The myths founding most tragedies are defined by their endings: Oedipus is guilty from the start, as Medea, as Eve; they are made up of guilt, as days are made up of minutes. Furthermore, although Aristotle points out that fear is stirred by identification with an ill-fated hero, there are few characters in these classical plays I can relate to. They are all noble and rich, damned and lost. Theirs is a passion distilled. There is no "everyday" in tragedy, none of the familiar routines or patterns or moods or moments that I recognize. Without surprise and without identification, whence the pity and whence the fear?

I think the pleasure of tragedy lies entirely elsewhere, and I would analogize it with the pleasure of S&M. It is the pleasure of aesthetic awe and structured excess. The aesthetic awe is inspired by the poetry of tragedy, laced tight along the spine of the characters' desire, and by the careful design of the plot in which each element is necessary and none are missing. The excess is of emotion, structured by both the plot and the verse. This structure, in which we know the fate of each character, allows us to experience -- even to wish for -- their demise without being afraid that their misfortune will spill out of the play and onto us. Their loss is contained. Even the ir passion, infinite, reaches the edge of the stage and drops off. We can sink into emotions we might not otherwise have access to, condemning the frail, reciting their downfall, grieving for those whom we chose to watch fall. The characters' pain, and our own, is sharpened through constraint, but the points of its constraint, like the ribs in a corset, are also objects of beauty.

The more things change...

How do languages change? Certain errors persist; words, expressions, conjugations, entire tenses fade. Perhaps we hear something new, snatch up a cute saying on a trip abroad or adopt a locution we hear on TV. Scorn gives way to apathy: soon we can't remember how we used to say things, and what was once an exception is now accepted; soon, everyone else is saying it, too.

Some people assume that one of the driving forces behind language change is laziness, and that more difficult constructions will always fall away in favor of easier ones. I'm not sure that's true: after all, two of the most common verbs, "to be" and "to have," are irregular in all the language I know, and therefore more difficult to learn and retain, but because we use them so often we remember their forms and aren't tempted to police them into the standard mold (I am, you am, he/she/it ams, we am, you am, they am; I ammed, I was amming, etc). So I think frequency has something to do with forestalling language change, or at least with helping difficulties endure. Perversely, frequency can also lead to language change, at least according to wikipedia, which blames the irregularity of "to be" on its very prevalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be). The more something reproduces (ie, the more a word is spoken and written), the more chances it has to mutate.

Recently, a coworker of mine who studied historical linguistics explained the phenomenon of language change to me in richer terms. According to him, there are two forces constantly pushing against languages that work to change them: the first is the set of phonetic rules that dictate which sounds precede or follow one another. Now here's where it gets sticky: sometimes, through chance, a verb conjugation that is inflectionally correctly may be phonetically incorrect. This verb conjugation will have to be modified: it will become irregular. So the force of phonetics is a central source of irregular verb conjugations, plurals, possessives, etc. In an attempt to regularize the sound patterns of the words themselves, morphemic patterns are disrupted.

The other force at work is the tendency that speakers have to regularize verbs by analogy. It's why little kids say "I sleeped." Why should some words not follow the rules that others do? As these two forces do battle for the souls of verbs, irregularities rise like air bubbles, only to be smoothed out down the road.

Furthermore, certain changes are cyclical, occurring and reccurring like seasons. The example he gave was a comparison between the French passé composé and futur simple tenses. The first is what we refer to as the present perfect in English: I have burnt the pie, and is made up of the conjugated auxiliary verb "to be" or "to have" followed by the past participle of the main verb. The second is a future tense for which we have no equivalent. Je brûlerai le gâteau means "I will burn the pie" but looks something like "I burnill the pie," in that the ending of the auxiliary verb has been stuck onto the end of the main verb. In the passé composé , only the auxiliary verb is conjugated. In the futur simple, the main verb itself is conjugated.

So learning and using the passé composé is in some ways easier than the futur simple, because there is far less conjugating to do, and, as everyone knows, conjugating is a pain.

HOWEVER, some of you may have noticed that the endings of the verbs in the futur simple are the same as the endings of the various French conjugations of "to have." The reason for this is that long ago, in Latin, the future was formed like this: "I read will." Over time, those words got smushed together, so what was a simple conjugation (infinitive + auxiliary verb) became a somewhat messier affair. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, the passé composé will be a similar mush; perhaps other complicated tenses will sprout auxiliary verbs only to absorb them further down the line.

I thought about this news for a while; I found it somewhat astonishing. All of a sudden, the thick, static bodies of verbs flew apart and their inner bits seemed to fill the air, and all these shreds still shift before me, joining and shedding each other like the shapes at the end of a kaleidoscope.
But the question remains: who, exactly, is turning the lens?

According to Legend

Myths rarely end in surprise. I am speaking of the Greco-Roman myths, the ones I grew up reading, the ones so often adapted by authors of the Western cannon. We do not read them for their unexpected twists and turns. Like classical tragedies, many of which are based on myths, we fall into them and they lead us back.

Myths have an interesting relationship to time. They posit origins, offering us the stories behind the things we can't not remember being part of our lives. Their writing necessarily post-dates the objects they create. There was no myth to explain the Earth before the Earth was here, and even once it arrived, how could there be a myth without people to tell it and people to hear it? All myths explain, then, at least indirectly, why we are here. We are here so someone would tell the story of how we got here.

I have been rereading recently Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, called "Tales from Ovid." The first time I read it, a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of people enacting rhetorical figures: the lean, ragged man, as fierce as a wolf; the willowy, tearful woman, as clear as a stream; the vain, young hunk, beautiful as a flower. I decided that some of the heroes' transformations were metaphors and some similes.

A metaphorical death was sudden, it would cast you up into the stars. Your constellation had little to do with a particular attribute. Rather, one minute you were a person, and the next, a cluster of stars. Your forever arrived swiftly.

Metamorphosis by simile was the gradual process of your new shape engulfing you inch by inch, first grabbing a finger and then slithering up your arms, over your head. Your new form was either a punishment or a gift, but it stemmed directly from whatever was most true about you.

Two rhetorical figures, metaphor and simile, like two sides of a silhouette with one meaning: the afterlife of fiction is reality.

Now I am more interested in the fact that a myth is not just the story of a thing but the story of that thing's name. It is etymology personified. Are they really separable, a thing and its name? Or are they two sides of the same coin, two incarnations of the same being? Narcissus was a man, long ago, and now he is a flower. Or was there a flower, long ago, and now there is the story of a man? Can you recall which you heard about first -- the flower or the man? Are they really separable, a thing and the story of how it got there?

Some conversations are like bridges. Conscious of the steep drop into the unsaid and unsayable on either side, we put one word gingerly in front of another, concentrating. It is easy to lose your balance. It is impossible not to think about falling.

Often these conversations are somehow formal: they are discussions with or in front of a group, with people you respect or admire or who are just older or more important than you are. Sometimes they are about admittedly delicate matters that people might not agree on or might take very seriously, and require all parties to come to a fragile and fiercely won agreement about what is proper to say and what is not. It seems we walk over a carpet of toes.

And sometimes these conservations or situations tempt us -- practically beg us! -- to jump.

I would characterize these jumps as different than Freudian slips. A Freudian slip is supposed to reveal a deep-seated truth. Writing "girlfiend" instead of "girlfriend" indicates a marked lack of affection, bordering on resentment and, perhaps, fear. It's not an accident or a joke or an unmotivated burst of vulgarity. It's a bit of yourself peeking out from behind your words. A jump is compulsive or pathological or just plain absurd.

One night in my German class we were discussing the way that telephones are answered in Germany. Instead of just saying: "Hello?" or "Hi, how are you?," the German on either end of the line says their name, generally their last name. eg:

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg.
Hallo, DiCaprio.

or

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg hier.
Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sort of like characters in a film noir. In any case, our teacher, an Austrian woman so sweet and gentle she makes Peppermint Pattie look like Kim Jong Il, was demonstrating this exchange and she said:

Ring ring. Ring ring. (holding hand up to ear as if it were a phone)
Hallo. Eva Braun.

After she said it, she kept talking at the same pace, as we exchanged slow glances: "Did she really just say that? But that's...I mean..." And then the moment's formality broke and she apologized profusely, pinkening, explaining that she didn't know why she had said it, that she didn't mean it. I believe her. I don't think this was a slip in the traditional sense, nor that she secretly harbors Nazi sympathies, nor that she revealed anything about herself. Instead, I think she jumped, intentionally or not, into the tempting space of the worst way to end a sentence her brain could produce. If we learn anything from such a jump, it is not what lies hidden within us, but what lurks in the waves below.

"Ich weiss jetzt, was kein Engel weiss" -Damiel, The Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ film The Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, literally "The Sky [or Heaven] over Berlin," in German) takes place in Berlin, but the film's characters speak and think alternately in English, French, and German. The female lead, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), works as a trapeze artist at a run-down circus in a dusty field beneath an overpass in some abandoned corner of the city. She wears a leotard and wings in her act, a mortal sketch of the transcendent figures invisibly circling the city.

In her first scene, the ringleader tells her the circus will be closing the next day. Shaken by the sudden disappointment that tonight’s show will be her last, she retreats to her trailer and, before climbing inside, looks up at the gray sky and thinks, “Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst,” alternating between her native French and the language of the city around her. Unexpectedly earthbound, Marion is scared.

English subtitles might unhelpfully translate Marion's private lament as “Fear,” or, worse, “I’m afraid;” a more literal translation would read: “Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear.” But her irreducible plaint cannot be dissolved in the medium of any one language. Her fear does not transcend both French and German but is instead located in the fact of their irreconcilability, the dim space they each shadow without shaping. She does not articulate her fear as a single being, a monster or a dark wood, because her fear of leaving the circus, like her safety as a trapeze artist who is part of it, suspends her.

When I first moved out to San Francisco, when I was still looking for work and a nonsubletted apartment and had just started taking German, Marion became an important figure for me. My first attempts to write about her were in an essay on prepositions and how I found them to be the most intractable parts of my new German vocabulary.

She led me to remember an afternoon in Paris when I overheard a conversation that sounded like English while riding the Metro. I tried to follow, out of habit, and found I couldn't. I strained to catch even a single word I recognized, but none stuck out. The familiar sounds refused to fall into recognizable words. That's when I panicked. What if I had lost my fluency and would only speak now as if my mouth were full of sand, hear as if underwater, read in thickened, muddy light? What if the words never seemed themselves again? What if I were lost?

The moment passed: I realized they were speaking Dutch. But I remembered the feeling and so when Marion said, "Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst," I said, "Aha. I know this. This is the fear of no longer belonging, of being trapped between worlds."

It was many weeks before I began to see her statement as hopeful, too. The medium of Marion's art is uncertainty: she flings herself, a brief arc, into.

And becomes the very preposition she must cross over.

1337

I came to 1337 (pronounced "leet") late.

1337 is an orthography (a "sociolect variety" or a cipher or a language, according to wikipedia) invented and used by online gamers and computer hackers in the early days of computers that has been expanding and evolving ever since. I call it an orthography because, although it has certain words and affixes that don't exist in standard English, English leetspeak (note that leet can be used to modify many languages and is not just an English phenomenon) largely sticks to English grammar but betrays its alphabet by replacing letters with numbers, symbols, and keyboard functions. 1337 or l33t, is an example; so is: 7h3 qµ1(|{ br0wn ƒ0x jµmp$ 0v3r 7h3 £42¥ Ð09.

Leet (short for "elite") seems to have evolved in part because of the difficulty of typing quickly on early machines and the need for a shorthand, but also because of the desire for a mode of communication exclusive to hackers and gamers, which would sift out the truly devoted from the mere dabblers. It is also used in order to evade online software that limits certain content from discussion boards, filters spam, or prevents the selling of pirated material.

Leet is a product of the relentless evolutionary pressure the internet exerts on language, as emails, instant messages, and chatrooms breed written words: spellings mutate, slang is passed down from blogger to reader, and new species of sentence are born. This evolution both brings us together and is a symptom of our togetherness. Leet changes quickly, is highly unstable, and yet remains readable. In part because it looks like English, in part because it is being developed in communal spaces by many minds at once.

What I find most interesting about leet are the challenges it poses to our conception of the alphabet. In leet, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and the platonic idea of a letter, ie, many characters can be used to indicate the same "letter" and vice versa: I, i, l, 1, 7, /, and ! are essentially interchangeable as more or less narrow, vertical beings.

Even more interesting is the fact that in leet, the method of producing a given character often comes to represent the character itself. For example, on a keyboard, an exclamation point is produced by pressing the "shift" key at the same time as the number "1" key. When a user wants to communicate excitement using many exclamation points, the string often looks like this: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11" because, in their excitement, they fail to hold the shift key down as long as is necessary. This typo has now been incorporated into leet. Not only do users intentionally type "!!!!!11!!!!1!1!!!!!," an intention that is hard to discern from the original accidental production, but also: "!!!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven!!!!!!!!!!oneone!!!," or even: "!!!!!!!!!!one!!!!!!shift+1."

These permutations draw attention to a user's knowledge of common typing patterns and establish her as an elite hacker. They're more than a little snarky. However, they also highlight the fluidity of signs and the performative possibilities of written language. Using the signifier "!" to indicate excitement is standard; typing "!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!11!!!" unintentionally is a performance of excitement; typing "!!!!!!111!!!!!one!!!!!!!!eleven" is a mime of that performed excitement. The mime adds layers of meaning to the original sign, indicating a user's participation in a given community, referencing the emotions and behaviors (excitement, carelessness) of other members of that community, and revealing the mechanics of the production of the sign itself.

When the way you create a sign comes to stand in for the sign itself, it becomes a meta-sign, signifying both the original meaning of the sign and the bare fact of the sign, the fact of the signer. Really, it's quite exciting.

I went to college with an individual named Craig Plunges. He was an English major, interested especially in contemporary poetry, and quite tall.

I bring this individual to your attention because of the remarkble fact that his name is both a proper noun and a full sentence. What if your name were "Bobby Goes to the Store"? Or "It Rains"? In his natural state he's both grammatically correct and ambiguous -- either a name or a sentence; however, once you try to add him to a sentence, you have to decide which is which. Either, "Craig Plunges is coming over" (name) or "Craig plunges for a living" (sentence).

I once worked briefly with someone whose full name, though not spelled this way, was pronounced "On the Loo," but that's just a prepositional phrase and so not at all in the same league.

My own last name is an adverbial phrase, though I assume by accident. "Schön" in German means pretty or beautiful, and if you drop the umlaut in English, you're supposed to add an "e" -- schoen. But "schon" means "already," so my last name -- Schonberg -- now means "already mountain," which doesn't mean much, as far as I can tell. Not only am I far from sentencehood, but the pieces of name I do have can't even be cobbled into recognizable phrases, a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps if my middle name were "is"...

The Corrections

I definitely made up the word "declent." It should be "decline," as observed by astute reader, Liztraut. I'm feeling quite foolish right now. Thank you Mz. Traut, wherever you are.

"She likes her hair to be real orange / she uses tangerines" - The Flaming Lips

An orange is orange and that's what makes the word orange into not just a fruit or a color but a state of being: the state of being in which you feel no disjunction between what you are and what you're called, the state of filling your name completely, perfectly, so that no gaps of doubt, of "what if I were..." or "will I ever be...," remain. Who is lucky enough to count their name as an objective and recognizable condition? Even those whose names have other meanings -- Grace, Claire, Auburn. Can they claim to be contained within those words and can those words claim to be satisfied by them?

An orange is orange. And that's what I envy.

Translator, Adulterer

I used to wonder whenever I met couples what they were like when they were alone. I assumed they behaved differently alone together, that they shared a secret private life, a life of shorthand references to oft-mentioned stories and of solid, true explorations of whatever was most important to them, whatever defined them. I used to wonder what they saw when they looked at each other's faces, what they understood in the cadences of one another's voices, what meaning each of them bore for the other in their material details alone. I was fascinated by this projection of the intimacy between them and by the fact that although I could see them, I would never see them as they saw each other.

There is, however, no intimacy to rival that between a speaker and her native language. Sometimes I imagine English fitting me as skin, not just covering me but holding the spilling and glistening parts of me together, making a solid out of so much liquid and slime. Other times, I picture English as a liquid or gas itself, a lake, the air of a city. Too, I like the image of a small, curled thing, a kitten or a bird, snuggled within me, wrapped tight against the curve of my skull. Closer than any confidant is what makes confidences possible, and lying closer to me than anything else is English.

This is not to say that I feel affection for English itself; rather, that English is inseparable from what I experience, constituent in all my evaluation, interaction, emotion. And so none of these spatial metaphors really works: English is not a reed I whistle through, not a being within me, nor a layer around me. I don't know how to figure it, exactly, except to say that its sounds transcend sound. I cannot peel the words back.

If this intimacy exists between each speaker and her language, then learning a foreign language is the closest we ever come to being inside someone else's head. When first introduced to us, a new word has no meaning, seems random: why should "langweilig" mean "boring" or "marrant," "funny"? They shouldn't for any particular reason, and the first time we hear them, they don't. A new language is a mess of sounds that we have no particular attachment to. But with enough repetition, those sounds become words and those words become...objects, states, causes, effects, loved ones, lost ones, memories, stories, desires: the trail of our fluency.

In those moments when we start to hear a foreign word as a meaning but still remember when it was just a sound, when we speak a language proficiently but not instinctively, it is as if we are entering someone else's mind but without having to leave our own. We feel what it might mean to be a French or German or Arabic or Japanese speaker but we feel too a certain thrill that no native speaker feels. We have broken out of ourselves. Suddenly, the features that seemed so foreign are suffused with a familiar blush.

Put another way, learning to speak another's language is like sleeping with someone else's lover.