Homophonic Translation

Among the many games devised by the OuLiPo group of writers was a variety of translation that preserves not the semantic features of the original text, but instead preserves its phonetic features while altering its meaning.

This is something that can be done within a single language, or from one language to another. French seems particularly well suited to intralanguage homophonic translation, since there are so many different ways of combining letters to produce one and the same phoneme. To give the most obvious example, -é, -ée, -és, -ées, -ai, -aie, -ais, -aix, -ait, and -aient are all pronounced the same way (provided that we do not have to worry about elision with an initial vowel of a following word).

This feature of French makes it possible to come up with homophonies such as the following:

Queneau (Raymond), très haut pape, l'a répété:
Que nos raies, montrées aux papelards, aient pété.

That is:

Queneau (Raymond), most high pope, said it again:
That our rays, shown to the hypocrites, farted.

In the French version, the first line is pronounced identically to the second one, in spite of enormous differences of both spelling and meaning.

I have tried and tried, but I have never been able to come up with so much as a single pair of homophonous English sentences, both of which, however obscure, are at least syntactically correct and both of which at least mean something or other. If intra-language homophonic sentences are so difficult to come by, it might seem nearly impossible to produce a proper homophonic translation between languages. But OuLiPo managed to come up with a few of these as well. For example, Catullus's famous lines

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

can be rendered in French as:

O diète à mots couards! Raide face et âme forte acérée qui rit ce
N'est ce qui, ô cède fière, hisse, haute Io et tais ce que crus ci-hors.

At the level of meaning, there is nothing in common between the two sentences, yet they are nearly identical with respect to pronunciation (at least following the usual French conventions for Latin pronunciation, which Anglo-Saxon Latinists reject). The original text from Catullus can be translated (in the traditional sense) as follows:

I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perchance you might ask?
I don't know, but I feel it happening to me and I'm burning up.

The French, in turn, is so obscure, indeed is so near-nonsensical, that I can't translate it with any confidence. What's more, the homophony breaks down at at least one point ('sentio' is not homophonous with '-se haute Io').

The obscurity and difficulty of homophonic translation shows, I think, how restricted one's expressive range becomes when highly demanding formal constraints are placed on language. This restriction almost functions as an argument against working with such formal constraints, and so against the entire OuLiPo project.

But as I understand it OuLiPo's argument was always that formal constraints have been part of the poetic or artistic use of language all along (e.g., rhyme, meter), and that it is only a certain 20th-century laziness, associated in particular with the rise of surrealism and with the idea of 'the unconscious', that made writers and readers think that free expression of whatever flows out of a person might have some artistic value. For OuLiPo, such 'free' expression is simply operating under other, external constraints, of which the author is unaware; much better to set one's own constraints, to be the master of one's own limitations.

More generally, this particular game raises questions about our presumption that the conveyance of meanings is the supreme purpose of writing and in particular of translation. Why should the meaning of a sentence be the sole feature of it that one aims to preserve in translating from one language to another? What if meaning is just one of the features that might be selected to be conserved and made accessible to readers of another language? Doesn't the French sentence convey something of what Catullus said, to readers who have access to French but not to Latin?

Obviously, the preservation of non-semantic features in translation will be more important for poetry than for prose, and it's the overwhelming dominance of prosaic language in our age that gives rise to the presumption that translation can have only one aim: to carry meaning over.

Comments

[ombhurbhuva]

The Mimamsa folk would never agree with that. There the sound is integral to the meaning, 'go' is cowhood, the word was uttered by Brahman and the pale interloper that grazes the meadow is merely a feeble instantiation.

I had a curious experience of translation with respect to yourself. On this 8.9" computer I thought I was clicking on your name on a blog roll but instead read the story of an academic who had been invited to a Logos (Templeton) conference (Revelation, Authority and Canon) in Notre Dame. Why not, I thought, there should be someone to ply the bladder. It showed an admirable willingness to boldly go. But you've been there and undergone that. Your story Midwest Peace is very good. Impact of Philosophy, quite! If you had used your full name Justin Erik Halldor Underwood Smith it would not have gone so well. For my next witness I call Jehu Smith. One done tom turkey.

[Ian]

Well, the trouble with interlinguistic homophonic translation is that the thing it conserves and renders accessible to readers of another language was already accessible to them! I can sound out Romanian or Icelandic even though I can't understand them at all. So a homophonic translation into English of Romanian or Icelandic poetry, if you could somehow manage it, wouldn't give me anything of the original that I can't have without it.

Also, it would seem to me that most of the progress we could make on creating homophonic English sentences would depend on homophonic words. (Weak example that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago while using a hand auger, aka 'plumber's snake', to try to unclog my kitchen drain: This hand augurs ill. This hand auger's ill.) Building homophonic sentences out of homophonic words isn't nearly as excellent as what French permitted the Oulipans to do.

[Sargondj]

Hi Justin,

I just saw your post, which was forwarded to me by a friend. Fun stuff! If you haven't already, you should definitely look up the book "Mots D'heures Gousse Rames," which is (as you might expect) a collection of Mother Goose rhymes in the homophonic "translation" that you describe. Indeed, dozens of our childhood poems (e.g., "Humpty Dumpty", "Hickory Dickory Dock") are all "translated" homophonically into French. They are worth a read -- either to be viewed as an impressive display of literary talent, or to be shown off as a fun text for bilingual dinner guests.

http://www.amazon.com/Mots-dHeures-Luis-dAntin-Rooten/dp/0140057307
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures

Enjoy!

-S

[Sargondj]

I should also mention that that book is actually annotated with tongue-in-cheek footnotes that try to explain the nonsensical French meanings. The text is presented as an authentic manuscript, and so coming up with explanations for the syntax/obscure vocabulary is where the fun comes in!

[Ray Davis]

I must patriotically point out that America's own Louis Zukofsky beat the OuLiPods to the game, writing homophonic versions of the Book of Job, a Plautus play, and, oddly enough, the complete works of Catullus, and inspiring a separate tradition of experiment which includes this homophonic/ilic Iliad: http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/AIDA/aida.html

[Lex Armero]

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