What makes a good story?
What makes a good story?
Where are the men in the arts?
If somebody were to come up to me and say, I know somebody who speaks 15 languages, I would say, If you told me that person was left-handed, I wouldn’t be surprised. If you told me that person didn’t drive a car and got lost very easily, that wouldn’t surprise me. If you told me they were male, that wouldn’t surprise me. If you told me this person was [introverted, pragmatic and independent], that wouldn’t surprise me either. The other part that is potentially controversial is the link with homosexuality. If they told me that person was gay, that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Michael Erard, author of Babel No More, in a recent interview
Love your neighbor as yourself?
From a paper on Twelfth Night that I wrote for a Shakespeare class last term, which focused on Rene Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire:”
If mutual imitation, right or wrong, is at the heart of every human relationship, self love is necessary for its existence. Without self love, the beloved has nothing to imitate in the lover. Of course, too much self love is as unhealthy as none at all. And the surety that comes with self-love is always contingent on someone else. As we are images of God, we are recipients of His love, and so we are required to be lovers, both of ourselves and of others (Matt. 22:37-39).
What to do with dinosaur words?
Translation: A Metaphor
(with dinosaurs)
Whatever you do, do not assume that language is a stable entity that is acted upon by translators. Language is anything but stable. It is constantly in flux. Like, yeah.
It seems that the written word, however, will always slow etymological change. In a book, there is no social correction of language, there are fewer slips and shortcuts. And just the fact that our words are retained in a printed record means that they stop being acted upon.
So what does this mean for translation..?
In early 1992, a team of literary critics made a phenomenal discovery in the depths of an amber mine in the Dominican Republic. Locked within a tiny amber tomb, they found a relic of another world: a complete sonnet, perfectly preserved, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme ABBAABBACDECDE. Although the sonnet was written in an ancient Aztec-like tongue, the find nevertheless rocked the literary community. David Scott, a talented young poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, was given the task of translating the fossil into English, which he did over a period of three years, six months, seven days. The poem was made available to the literary community at large, and then finally, to the general public in an attractive little paperback volume published by InGen Press, Inc. Critics began to rave, and a film adaptation was planned.
But it was not to last. The literary figures and authors involved in the process had failed to reckon with the forces of linguistic evolution. In order to reintroduce the poem into the present day, they had to translate it into a modern language, splice its DNA with the “frog language” of English, so to speak. And once the two had mixed, it became impossible to distinguish one from the other. The content of the poem began to leak into pop culture. It wasn’t long before translator-rockstar Stephen Mitchell came out with a new, “updated” translation, complete with up-to-date spelling and emoticons. Those in the literary community began to say that the integrity of the poem had been “spoiled” and that it was no longer faithful to the original. Organizations tried to eradicate the Mitchell translation, but the damage had been done. Now the purity of the original Aztec has been all but forgotten in favor of the convenience of English.
What are we to make of this woeful tale? Would the poem have been safer entombed in amber? Does the fault of its downfall rest entirely on Mr. Mitchell, or is Mr. Scott partly to blame? Or does the blame rest solely on the poor Dominican amber miners who stumbled upon the unlucky relic in the first place? Who’s to say?
Will I choose carefully?
Translation (n.)
a: a rendering from one language into another
b: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance
But what is translation? Men and women have tried to wrap their minds around this mystery for thousands of years, but the process of expressing the same thoughts in a new language has remained as elusive as ever. It is as mysterious as speech, as the Word, as the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire.
Translation is…
Like writing with training wheels.
Or like writing with an impossible standard. How can you even come close to the original? It’s worse than shepherding wind.
Or like writing with the greatest, most immanent inspiration that you’ve ever experienced. I have fought in the streets of Troy; how can I sing about it in this foreign (English) tongue?
Does the translator find the author’s mold and fill it with a new language? Or does he find the author’s thoughts and pour them into a different mold?
Language, like the Spirit, hates to talk about itself.
When do we come of age?
Longform Improv is a young art form. You might be the one to discover the next cool device. You might be the one to have that legendary show. Any show can by definition be your best one. Believe in that, bring that excitement to the stage. Look down the line, really try to know the people you’re up there with, and understand that you and every other person standing on the stage with you has the potential to do the best work they’ve ever done in the next half hour. Facilitate that by any means necessary.
Chris Gethard on improvnonsense
Really all that bad?
If there is anything that I have learned from reading philosophy, it’s that philosophers are never what you would expect. For example, I have always thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a pretty unpleasant person, but after reading his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, I am feeling much more friendly towards him. Of course, I wouldn’t name any son of mine Jean-Jacques (I’m not that far gone), but I was tempted to frame a quotation or two for my bathroom wall.
By considering what we might have become, if we were left to ourselves, we should learn to bless Him whose beneficent hand, correcting our institutions and giving them an immoveable basis, has prevented the disorder which they would have otherwise produced and made our happiness emerge from methods which seemed as if they should fill us with misery.
“Learn the person God has commanded you to be, and in which part of human affairs you have been placed.”
(end of preface to Second Discourse)
Where do these people come from?
My father wrestles ideas into books and changes the minds of young people.
My mother uses her hands and her voice (reassuring and strong) to help women bring their children into the world.
My brother raises three children who love God, and when he orders books from Amazon, he puts things like “[My wife] is amazing and awesome and beautiful” in the address line.
My sister teaches her daughter how to pray and cook and clean and arrange flowers and make the world beautiful.
My brother loves fiercely, his wife, his friends, his cat, his hobbies, his sports.
My brother watches the world and sees patterns (in light, in sound, in code, in cards, in numbers, in people) and loves to make use of what he sees.
My brother gives his time to young boys, and decides for himself what’s impossible.
My sister is dangerously sweet and kind and quiet and beautiful and smart and will one day fold a piano in half through sheer concentration.
My brother feels music and writes songs without trying.
My sister writes words from her heart and laughs while she’s rolling her eyes.
My sister takes the world by storm, as self-confident as the cherubim.
How do I spell the world?
Poetry is, for the Christian, the art of being a creature; the art of being finite and searching out a relationship with the Infinite in the Most Holy and the Little Holy and the Barely Holy which He uses to make Himself known; the art of being content with the slowness with which the Infinite makes Himself known to finite man. Poetry is simply organized gratitude for creation; if all the cosmos signifies God, as Dante suggests, then poetry is the work of making sentences out of objects, then stories out of those sentences; poetry wants to see how a mountain and an apple rhyme; if all the cosmos is a text which reveals God, then poetry seeks to know the grammar and syntax of being human.
from The Cedar Room
Don’t you just love Gilbert?
The Iliad might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
2 comments