Justin Erik Halldór Smith

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.

The Flight of Curiosity

From the 'Stone' series in the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire article, click here.

Today’s natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult  to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the “real” history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as “Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire,” and “Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as “the magnetical philosophy,” and as late as 1808  John Dalton published “A New System of Chemical Philosophy.” A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his “Philosophie zoologique.” Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

Sandhi and Literacy

In a recent Vanity Fair article a certain influential rhetorician notes, in the course of treating an entirely different matter, that Henry James and Joseph Conrad dictated their later novels, rather than writing them out by hand, "which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time."

This would however put these two fine novelists ahead of the author(s) of the Odyssey and the Iliad, ahead of the comparably masterful raconteurs of Balkan, Caucasian, West African epic masterpieces which by chance never had their Homer to crystallize oral narrative tradition into a textual object. Much of what we think of as 'literature' in fact has its origins in 'vocal achievement'. In some cases, the transcription of the oral was seen as a compromise, a degradation, to the extent that true language is speech (or, perhaps more accurately, the breath that powers the speech), and the works that we think of as books were in fact, in their original, vital phase, recitations. The books that we have left over bear roughly the same relationship to the works themselves as video footage of a dance performance has to the performance itself.

Homer was crystallized in text fairly early, and for complicated reasons this transformation came to fit in the Hellenic world with a growing attribution of significance, and of priority, to the written form of language. This priority seems to have only been strengthened by the appearance of the Abrahamic faiths, which is to say by the various 'peoples of the Book' with their insistence on punctilious attention to every last diacritical mark supposedly dictated by God himself in the composition of scripture.

In trying to understand what it is that sets 'Eastern thought' apart from 'Western', we might do better, rather than looking at different temperaments, different rationalities, and so on, to look at differences in the way writing is taken up over the course of the past four millennia or so, and the way it is conceptualized in contrast with oral language. In the Indian tradition, writing was long seen as a sort of crutch, an aide-memoire for lesser minds that could not absorb the real work, the oral work, without the assistance of arbitrary signs. The great works of early Indian literature are not books at all, but only became books gradually, and perhaps regrettably. The 6th-century grammarian Pāṇini 'composed' the 3,959 sutras of his Aṣṭādhyāyī --the definitive work on Sanskrit grammar and phonetics, for which no equivalent exists in the Greek or Latin corpus-- by having various of his students memorize various chunks. Pāṇini is called the 'author' of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, though he would have thought of authorship in our sense as beneath him.

Accordingly, speech is often exalted as not just a handy skill, but as a cosmic principle, even tantamount to existence itself. My favorite passage from the Rig Veda illustrates this nicely (Doniger's translation):

I do not know just what it is that I am like. I wander about concealed and wrapped in thought. When the first-born of Order came to me, I won a share of this Speech (1.164, 37).

The primacy of speech over text seems to leave a trace in one of the most well-known, and, for the learner, challenging features of written Sanskrit: sandhi, the system of rules governing the spelling of word endings depending on the initial letter of the subsequent word (this is only 'external' sandhi; I'll perhaps treat internal sandhi another time).

'Sandhi' is now the accepted term in linguistics for this phenomenon as it occurs in any language, and not just Sanskrit. In English we have just a very little bit of vestigial sandhi, as for example when the indefinite article 'a' becomes 'an' in cases where it precedes a vowel-initial word. We could have taken it much further. For example, the possessive 's' suffix can be pronounced in vastly different ways depending on the word that follows it. If written English were more influenced by sandhi, we might have written of the eggs that come from hens as 'henzeggs', or of the collected works of a certain Renaissance French author as 'Rabelaizoeuvre'.

Now in Sanskrit such transformations in writing are all-pervasive. Thus, to take the simple sentence 'The king lived in a certain city', the proper translation, in Devanagari script, is:

कस्मिंश्चिन्नगरे ऽवसद्राजा ।

Prior to sandhi analysis, the transliteration of the Devanagari is:

kasmiṃścinnagare 'vasadrājā

After sandhi analysis --that is, after the individual words are separated out and their 'proper' spelling is restored--, we get:

kasmin cit nagare avasat rājā.
[(In) a certain city lived king.]

This is a very simple example, and perhaps not the most interesting one, but it gets the point across: in Sanskrit, writing bends itself to speech, rather than the other way around.

Ordinarily, in the modern West we tend to think of ourselves as 'literate' to the extent that we anchor our spoken language in some potential or imagined written version of it. I can see in my mind the strings of letters that form the sentences as I speak them. I can get off course, I can go argotic and start speaking in a way that would be difficult to transcribe, but I sense this is a deviation, and I know how to pull myself back to proper language, which is to say writable language, language anchored in writing. Chomsky or perhaps someone else said that a dialect is a language without an army, but one might more appropriately say that by our standards a dialect is a language without a regulatory body, without an OED or a Duden to settle the matter of whether one is using the language correctly or not. In spite of recent attempts to crystallize them, creoles remain for the most part pure speech, and are thus, literally (by which I mean literally literally), unanchored.

But what if the sense of propriety came from speech in the first place? What if we had a sense of the correctness of what we write in virtue of its fit with what we know, as if a priori and naturally, to be the proper way of speaking? That would be to conceptualize language very differently, and it could be at the root of a lot of what we take to be the Weltbild differences between 'East' and 'West'.

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Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.