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?

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.

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.

What do you do with the Visual Thesaurus? No, really. What do you do with it?

When I first stumbled upon the Visual Thesaurus, I was so engrossed that I watched the whole demo -- a flower of synonyms bloomed onscreen, each prose petal linked with a colorful filament indicating hyponyms, hypernyms -- basically all the -nyms you could ever want were on display. I watched, mesmerized, as the words shifted around each other, as if in a cool garden breeze.

And then, slightly dazed from the loveliness of the display, I opened a new tab, went to www.thesaurus.com and started looking through lists of words to actually find the one I wanted.

Because, as beautiful as the Visual Thesaurus is, it does not seem, to me, to serve the actual purpose of a thesaurus, which is to help a lowly mortal like myself make the best use of the absolutely astronomical number of words available to an English speaker. Yes, English has a staggering number of words. It is very hard to remember all of them at once and very easy to fall back on the ones you use most often. But one component of good writing is an innovative and rigorous application of our expansive vocabulary, and to that end, I find combing through lists of synonyms to be quite helpful.

The Visual Thesaurus sticks it to traditional thesauri for the long lists I rely on, claiming that by representing the exact relationships between words in a spatial format this tool is more intuitive and thus more useful than some boring list (I mean, when were lists invented, anyway -- the stone age?). And that by somehow recreating the word maps we have in our brains, it will improve the process of...well, the process of what? I use a thesaurus to find the word best suited to my needs. But is that what the Visual Thesaurus is intended to help do? Or does it have another aim in mind? In truth, I'm not sure.

Ultimately, I think this tool is constrained by its design. By eschewing lists in favor of clouds, the number of words that fit on the screen is severely limited. So instead of getting 50 synonyms, you only get 15. And the relationship information doesn't make up for having fewer choices. I don't need a tool to go out of its way to tell me that an individual is a type of witness. That information is already in my brain. I appreciate that the tool is trying to think like me: it's actually kind of flattering. But I don't see the purpose -- unless the tool can think so much like me that it is actually going to write my essay, I would rather it do things that my brain can't do, like store long lists of words!

Is this technology that is still searching for a purpose? Are there other ways of using a thesaurus that I am ignoring? Or is this an example of form winning out over function, a dazzling design that does not get any job done? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Why Law School is Stressful

There are of course many reasons that law school is stressful: it's difficult; it's competitive; it's expensive. But what I find most stressful -- and most disheartening -- is the way it fuels ritual self-deprecation. Some days I am reminded of discussions that, as a woman, I learned to have in my teens where you go around the table and each woman castigates herself for having eaten a cupcake or failing to do crunches or daring to have hips. I used to speculate about the purpose of this public self-shaming: it seemed like a way of humanizing yourself, offering a piece of yourself to the group, aggressively baring your flaws.

But what happens in law school is, I think, a little different. The truth is that not since high school have I been part of a community that polices itself so zealously. In high school, the monitoring was social: confidants, crushes, companions. Now, it is academic. And it's not just about keeping other people in line but about making sure that you measure up. Thus, again and again I watch one person's sincere question provoke anxiety in someone else: "Why didn't I think of that? I must be hopelessly off-track."

In general, I think that homogenous communities are prone to this kind of searing pressure to conform. And law schools, like undergraduate campuses, are by nature homogenous, or at least homogenizing -- not because of the background of the students, not because of their interests or talents, but because of their goals, fears, and desires. It doesn't matter where you're from or what you read for fun or what challenges you have faced: at the end of the semester, we're all trying to pass the same final and that pressure can squeeze the individuality right out of you. That's why I think that the working world -- where you tend to find age diversity (one of the most important and often overlooked kinds of diversity) -- felt like such a relief to me after college (at least in some ways): in the topsy-turvy dimension outside school, people do all KINDS of crazy things, in any which order, and it's rare for everyone you know to be panicking at the same time, for the same reason.

It just makes me sad to see some of the very brightest people I know criticize themselves on a daily basis for doing something other than reading Examples & Explanations 12 hours a day. And this is my rant about it.

Procrastinating

Richard Betts, paraphrased in a New Yorker piece about wartime intelligence, says that there is an inverse relationship between the accuracy and significance of information. In other words (and only in some situations), the more precisely we know something, the less sure we are of its value to us. Or maybe, the only things we know for sure are those things that don't really matter. The more certain we are, the less we should care.

It seems counterintuitive and that's probably why I find it so appealing and want to say that it's ALWAYS true. That might be an overstatement.

But I'm sure this applies outside the specific scenario of spying. And once I'm done studying for Con Law, I will try to figure out when...

Semi-colon

I decided recently that if I ever get a tattoo, it will be a semi-colon. It is my most favorite and expressive punctuation mark. It suggests two thoughts are connected without up and telling you how they are connected, forcing you to suss out the relationship for yourself. It is subtle and pleasing to the eye, the delicious fusion of a comma and a colon. What more could you want?

I am not the only one who feels this way. French people totally agree, as manifested by their rampant and glorious over-usage of the semi-colon. It turns out that there is a reason for this. In her brutal review of the new Simone de Beauvoir translation, Toril Moi points out that:

French and English differ significantly in their tolerance of relatively vague connections between sentence elements. The translation theorist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher has shown that English requires more explicit, precise and concrete connections between clauses and sentences than French and, conversely, that French accepts looser syntactical relations. In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

Yes! This is indeed the case. French sentences are often conglomerations of many clauses that could stand on their own, but are instead stitched together with commas and semi-colons. In French, this seems elegant, suggestive, flirtatious. In English, this seems pretentious, misguided, and distracting.

Sadly, I found an example of this in a translation of one of my favorite French authors, and I am trying to decide how I feel about it. Is the translation merely offering the respect due the original? Rendering the delicacy and decadence of the prose in another language? Or is it weirdly attached to empty syntactic structures that weigh the English down instead of dressing it up?

The example I would offer involves commas. The original line is: "Je n'etais pas encore tombe tout a fait, c'etait mon premier poste, j'avais vingt ans." (Note: the accents are missing. I am not going to figure out the formatting nightmare that is inserting accents on blogger right now.)

Translated as: "I hadn't fallen yet, not exactly, it was my first post, I was twenty."

HMM. Thoughts?

Crim Law 101

My first-year criminal law course is not quite what I expected. Instead of Law & Order, it's maybe more like...Deadwood. All the stuff that everyone was excited about -- the right to an attorney, Miranda, unreasonable search & seizure, habeas, the 5th Amendment -- all the good stuff that lends that particular glint to Sam Waterston's eye is Criminal Procedure.

Crim (as opposed to Crim Pro) is more like, how was larceny defined under the common law? Which, OK, sounds a little dry. But it has its moments.

Like the definition of 2nd-degree murder, which in many places includes reckless murder -- when you kill someone in a way that isn't quite intentional but is so deeply thoughtless it means you are probably a zombie. The language that many states use is "recklessness manifesting an extreme indifference to human life and an abandoned & malignant heart."

Abandoned & malignant -- isn't that evocative? It's like you left your heart on the bus one day and it got dumped at the terminal and then it just sat there, growing increasingly enraged, until one day it struck out on its own to do evil. Or like your heart turned to ash sitting right inside you. I think I have seen this happen to items that get left in the fridge...I'm pretty sure that we have some abandoned & malignant pesto from L's birthday that is trying to climb out of its bowl...

Categories & Cooking

From last week's New Yorker article about a Turkish chef --

"His monograph on keskek -- defined in the dictionary as "a dish made by slowly boiling well-beaten wheat, together with meat" -- is less about boiled wheat than about a process unfolding over a certain geography. Musa has identified twenty-four regional names for keskek, which may be eaten at funerals or weddings, on New Year's, Muhammad's birthday, Easter, or Ramadan; in the Turkish bath, during rain prayers, or in honor of special guests. In some villages, keskek is cooked at home and eaten with walnuts; in others, villagers bring their keskek to a communal oven that is operated only seven days a year. Keskek is sometimes cooked in vats with prickle juice, or, like rice, with chickpeas and cumin. 'There are dishes without wheat that are still called keskek,' Musa writes. He later told mea bout a kind of dessert keskek, made with dried fruit instead of meat. The facts of the dish, resisting definition, turn out to be almost incidental. What really interests Musa about keskek is that it embodies a living series of social functions."

Apart from delicious, this passage is also intriguing, because of what it says about categories. My brain is too addled from studying right now to fully articulate this -- but it has to do with a sort of diversion or misdirection. You think you know what the common elements are in a dish -- the ingredients. But you're wrong. The dish is a practice, a habit, an activity. We are what we eat, and what we eat is what we do...

That's about as far as I can take this right now, but I welcome other thoughts and comments.

Living as I do in the palace of the Victorian novel, I have started to see narratives everywhere. For example, last night the three volumes of Paul Ricoeur's "Time and Narrative" arrived in the mail. The first two were translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer -- the third by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. There you have it: some event, a marriage or a divorce, slipped in between Volume 2 & Volume 3. I don't know what exactly happened, but that small change speaks volumes.

Another gloss on "gloss"

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer is a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with executive power. 343 U.S. 579 (1952). You may know it from such recent scandals as John Y*o failing to cite it in his infamous memo.

We just read it in class, and one of the concurring opinions, by Justice Jackson, has some really fascinating language about how life adds meaning to words:

“Deeply embedded traditional ways of conducting government cannot supplant the Constitution or legislation, but they give meaning to the words of a text or supply them. It is an inadmissibly narrow conception of American constitutional law to confine it to the words of the Constitution and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon them. In short, a systematic, unbroken executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned, engaged in by Presidents who have also sworn to uphold the Constitution…may be treated as a gloss on ‘executive Power.’”

This is a fascinating and fairly controversial argument -- that over time, the executive may gain power through a mechanism almost like adverse possession, by exercising that power, so long as Congress does not affirmatively tell him or her to stop.

A textualist or formalist would be disturbed by the idea that present practices or norms could somehow alter our interpretation of the Constitution's words.

This is why Constitutional law is so thrilling -- it's a domain where the stakes of reading and interpretation are tremendously high and words like "gloss" can cause a whole big fight...

Translation Project

I started a new translation project yesterday. I won't tell you what it is and I won't post it here, not to be coy, but because I'm not sure what the rules about such things are (law school has infected my mind already)...I will tell you that my goal is to finish the first chapter by the end of the summer, and then stay up really late one night and make a huge mistake by sending it to the publisher/author as a gift or offering and hope they don't sue and/or laugh at me. I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I wanted to talk about process. So far, I have a first draft of the first section of the first chapter. The first draft is fairly literal, taking into account the word order in the original and the use of prepositions and relative pronouns and the length of sentences and paragraphs. Once the first draft is done, I am going to start a second draft in a new document. The goal of the second draft will be to refine the first draft so it sounds more or less like standard English, and the only remaining departures from familiar idiom are those being intentionally deployed for effect. The third draft, another new document, will tackle the problem of recreating the feel of the original text in English. Successive drafts will follow, as needed, until the summer is over or I am sick of working on it.

As I was mapping out this plan, it occurred to me that the ideal translation -- that mythical beast with iridescent wings and stained glass eyes who flits through our reading minds -- would be a composite of all these drafts, a sort of palimpsest. If I could write on tracing paper and place each revision over the one preceding it, starting with the French original at the very bottom, I could render visible the layers of denotation and connotation composing each phrase. The complexity of meaning would be manifest. And of course, the whole would be totally illegible.

Here's another way of thinking about this -- dictionary.com offers the following definitions for "gloss":

1. A surface shininess or luster

2. A brief explanatory note or translation of a difficult or technical expression usually inserted in the margin or between lines of a text or manuscript

2a. A collection of such notes; a glossary

3. An extensive commentary, often accompanying a text or publication

4. A purposefully misleading interpretation or explanation

5. To give a specious interpretation of; explain away

Moving from literal to figurative meanings, we see a gloss is a decorative layer that adds shine; an artificial coating that conceals fault; a descriptive layer that elucidates meaning; a deceptive layer that conceals meaning by explaining away a problem; or a deceptive layer that misrepresents meaning.

This word evokes our desire for a transparent commentary (or translation) that would act as a lens we could look through to see a text more clearly. But it also betrays our deep mistrust of any screen inserted between reader and text, no matter how alluring or seemingly clear.

I want to write on onion-skin, I want to write a pathway to the center of the text that a reader could walk with her eyes open. But in the end, there will be just one version in black letters on plain white paper and it will have to stand on its own.

Question

Why does "discernible" mean something that can be discerned (the object of discernment) but "sensible" means something that can sense (the subject of sensing)?

Will anyone ever figure this crazy language out?

An Argument for Guilt

When taken in moderation, anxiety can be a productive emotion. Pick the motivational metaphor that appeals most -- it could be a type of fire, or fuel, or motor. When everything else is in balance, a small dose of anxiety gets me up early in the morning, helps me focus in class and on tests, keeps me going through long afternoons of reading, reminds me to study my music, and provides a backdrop against which the relief of slipping into the pool or singing an open fifth in a wood-panelled room is all the more pronounced.

I don't mean to advocate anxiety, and certainly not in its more pathological forms -- all I mean is that, if everything else is in balance, anxiety is not merely wasted energy, but is a sort of creative force in its own right.

But what about guilt?

I recently failed to participate in an event -- a protest -- that I felt very strongly about and later wished I had been a part of. The more I sought to justify (to myself) the reasons I had flaked out, the more ornate my reasoning became, until finally I was captivated by the extent to which my mind would go to protect me from the discomfort of my remorse. I felt frankly (and unexpectedly) like an oyster (which has never happened to me before), diligently coating a tiny displeasing grain until I had a smooth-shelled jewel, an opal drop of rationalization.

Of course, one could dispute the value of such a trinket -- are excuses, no matter how intricate, worth anything? Are they anything more than diversions at best? I don't have an answer. I was just astonished to find, at the heart of an emotion I had long viewed as entirely dispensable, a generative spark.

I heart the federalists

How about that James Madison! What a writer, huh?

Full disclosure: I haven't read the Federalist Papers before, so taking Constitutional Law this semester promises to be a MAJOR thrill from start to finish.

An initial taste of mind-destroying eloquence: "As far as laws are necessary to mark with precision the duties of those who are to obey them, and to take from those who are to administer them a discretion which might be abused, their number is the price of liberty."

BAM. Could you write a more perfect sentence about the balance between regulation and individual liberty?? I dare you.

On Being Philip Larkin

Does anyone know what happened to Philip Larkin in his mid-twenties to sour him to such an extent on the age-bracket? His poem "On Being Twenty-Six" uses both "putrescently" (an adverb so obscure that blogspot declines to recognize it) and "putrid." I remember the moment when I realized, with a sensation of falling swiftly, that I could no longer say I had "just graduated" from college. The very young are perhaps always shocked by the notion that they may one day become merely...young.

But I don't know yet what to make of this poem...my outlook is certainly not so glum as his and I can't imagine that a mere age -- and a pretty decent age at that -- could bring on such a flood of desolate imagery.

Any Larkin experts want to weigh in with biographical or textual insights?

Did Anyone Else Know that Dickens is Funny?

I was turned off to Dickens early. I read "Great Expectations" in 8th or 9th grade and frankly I didn't get it. I mean, I got it -- class differences, abandonment, unrequited love, old wedding cake...I saw the movie when it came out and I got Ethan Hawke & Gwyneth Paltrow and all those lovely green subway seats...but I didn't get it. I thought it was dull. And besides, I was busy worrying about all kinds of other things, like what exactly I would have said to Kurt Cobain had I met him backstage at a concert and where I could buy black lipstick before Tuesday or whether I could just mix eye shadow and chapstick instead.

Then last year, when I was still waiting to hear back from law schools, two of my best friends bought me "Bleak House" for the holidays. I was apprehensive. It was long. And I feared it would be dull. And that it would lead to a sort of sinking disheartenment with the law -- something I still didn't know very much about -- before I had even started school. So I thanked them and put it on the shelf and went back to reading the New Yorker.

BUT. I finally started it this fall. And it's hysterical. And now I get it -- I get Dickens. He's funny. I mean, and also a great writer, master prose stylist, etc. But just fucking hysterical. And I don't even mind that the butt of the joke is often the British legal system. After all I'm not planning to work in a 19th-century Court of Chancery. If you can't laugh at Chancery, who can you laugh at?

My favorite sections by far are the descriptions of the lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is introduced as follows: "The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences; of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble Mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks, among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what is called the old school -- a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young -- and wears knee breeches tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black clothes, and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is, that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself."

Just phenomenal. All of which has led me to start making some pretty inane dinner-table conversation with Luke, along the lines of: "Did you know that Dickens was funny?" To which, as a PhD candidate studying the Victorian Novel, he has no choice but to reply: "Yes, literary scholarship has progressed far enough that we can now confirm that Dickens is, in fact, funny." At least, my inanity would deserve such a dry response. Luke is usually too sweet to supply one.

But who cares. I have 800 pages left and I'm excited about it.

Why Didn't Ian McEwan Just Become a Scientist?

Ian McEwan's recent New Yorker story, "The Use of Poetry," is all about a British physics major in the 1960s who seduces his first wife after a week-long crash course in Milton. That it only takes him 7 days of reading before he can seductively quote and converse about the poet fills him with a certain disdain for the humanities. (In case you're wondering, the "use" of poetry is that it helps you meet chicks. That part might be true.)

Of his protagonist, McEwan writes: "His Milton week made him suspect a monstrous bluff. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily in his course...He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thoughts. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week. He suspected that there was nothing they talked about at those meetings that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superior, these lie-abeds, and he had let them intimidate him."

So that was sort of a long quote. But seriously, what is the deal with Ian McEwan's total persistent hang-up about not being a scientist? He is one of the leading fiction writers of his whole generation and he's good and his novels sell and I understand being fascinated by science but his preoccupation seems to go deeper than intellectual curiosity or admiration. Like he has this need to constantly compare the very nature of the humanities and the sciences as if there were some crucial difference or shimmering similarity that, if only he could locate and embody in a character, would set him free forever.

Well, I am tired of this fight. If I had the sciences and the humanities in a room with me right now, I would say exactly what you would say to two-year-old cousins: you are each special in your own way; there is no need to fight over who is more special. No one is more special. Now go play outside.

My Favorite (Legal) Words

Just a smattering:

feoffment
escheats
untenantability
consanguinity
tortfeasor

It doesn't even matter what these words mean. They are just fun to say.

And on that note, there are some phrases I like because by virtue of word order they just sound so old and dusty, and you can almost hear the quill pen scratching in the background:

subject to a condition subsequent
within 21 years of a life in being
an action for trespass on the case

OK, so all those are from property...maybe property law is just really old...

The Article I Wish I had Time to Write

This might be the first of a whole series of posts that could be subtitled "if I had time." It goes like this:

If I had time, I would love to write a law review article about asylum & narrative. This is because the central piece of an asylee's application is a declaration describing the persecution they suffered in their home country. This might seem to be a reasonable request on the part of the U.S. Government -- after all, your life story is free and when everything else has been taken from you, it is likely to remain.

Or is it?

The irony or tension here is that many if not most asylees suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is what happens when you are persecuted and/or tortured. One of the main effects this has is to disrupt the coherence of your past and even yourself, and part of the healing process is taking the fragments of traumatic experience and assembling them back into a narrative that allows you to move forward.

So you can look at the asylum process in a very positive way -- that lawyers are facilitating healing in the form of narrative reconstitution. Or you can look it in a more cynical way that SOMEHOW the Government has contrived to ask for the one thing that may be impossible to give.

I would love to write this article but obviously I can't due to the fact that I am spending all my time trying to collect the various springs and moving parts that keep popping out of my brain. BUT if I had time...

Actually, if I had time I would probably start by doing laundry and taking a seven-hour nap...but that is a topic for another post.