The painter Scott Lloyd Anderson, on his series Paradise Paved:
If beauty is not inherent in the built up, car clogged environment we’ve created, can I nevertheless employ my skills with light, color, and design to create an engaging painting of that landscape? Let me know what you think.
Art often works by drawing our eye to beauty in unlikely places. But it seems that every attempt to create art around suburban landscapes begins with an admission that the suburbs are inherently ugly.
I’m a 1980s American kid, so of course I loved the television show Reading Rainbow. I was, however, unexpectedly dismayed by the Kickstarter campaign that they launched yesterday. I’ve jotted down my thoughts on it over at Thoughtstreams.
What is it we loved about Reading Rainbow? What kind of cultural value did it have? Does the campaign they launched yesterday represent something of a departure for them?
May 26, 2014 — Well, the book was released last Thursday, and I’m still reading through it and enjoying it, but one thing is clear: the translation is absolutely not the “real English poetry” for which I had hoped. Tolkien’s translation is completely prosaic.
In an early draft of the above post, I wrote of my hope that “while Tolkien’s linguistic horse may pulling the wagon, his poetic instincts are holding the reins”, and I was led to this hope by the early sample mentioned. The now-released translation, however, is a thoroughly linguistic endeavour from cart to horse. Tolkien simply wanted to render the literal meaning of the original as accurately as possible in modern English. Much of the original’s rhythm and majesty is carried through due to this approach, but the result is not poetic.
When Tolkien wrote the small excerpt above published in 1940, he was engaged in a poetic exercise. It was appropriate to the book to which he was contributing at the time, but, as it turns out, it was no indicator about the approach he was taking with his own complete translation. Christopher Tolkien addresses this in the Introduction:
Abandoning his fragmentary work on a fully alliterative translation of Beowulf, imitating the regularities of the old poetry, my father, as it seems to me, determined to make a translation as close as he could to the exact meaning in detail of the Old English poem, far closer than could ever be attained by transliteration into ‘alliterative verse’, but nonetheless with some suggestion of the rhythm of the original.
…I have found nowhere among his papers any reference to the rhythmical aspect of his prose translation of Beowulf…he designedly wrote quite largely in rhythms founded on ‘common and compact prose-patterns of ordinary language’, with no trace of alliteration, and without the prescription of specific patterns.
Fortunately I enjoy linguistics, so I’ll get almost as much pleasure out of the commentary and notes, the ins and outs of translation, as I would have out of a good poetic re-creation. But to experience the music of a real Beowulf-themed poem, there may be nothing for it but to learn enough Old English to enjoy the original.
Here I am, hashing out a little revelation I’ve just had. Have you ever felt left out? Have you ever left anyone else out? Of course you have.
I tend to follow people on Twitter who are loquacious, personal in tone, and interesting thinkers. Many of them are well-known (writers, academics, etc) and many of them know each other, and most of them don’t follow me. Being all of the things I mentioned (loquacious, interesting, &c.) and being acquainted with each other, they often carry on fascinating conversations with each other1 on Twitter, right in front of everyone, which is wonderful.
The problem — which I’ve only in the last week or so realized is a problem — begins when the publicness of the conversations, and my interest in the discussion, lure me into thinking I am free to join in and contribute.
Not that there’s anything stopping me from doing so. These fine people are talking out in public, so they must get some juice out of knowing others can hear them; and Twitter’s mechanics explicitly allow me to insert myself into the conversation with replies and @-mentions. But very often — at least when I do it — it goes nowhere; I am left with the weird feeling of being left out cold. I felt I had something helpful to add and a valid context for participating; so getting no response feels especially disappointing.
That inexplicable left-out feeling always results when there is asymmetric interest, meaning I’m really a lot more interested in them than they are in me. People who have symmetric interest in each other form groups whose boundaries are subtle, hard to pinpoint, and difficult to penetrate. C. S. Lewis talks about this in The Inner Ring (emphases mine):
“In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.”
In practice, knowing whether you’re “in or out” is surprisingly tricky even in non-virtual settings, where physical gathering or dress can enforce the Ring’s unofficial divisions and provide cues of some sort. But digital fora — and Twitter in particular — make it even harder to really know whether you are in or out, because Twitter’s “little red book” is so democratic. There is no hierarchy from which you might glean social cues; everyone is in the same public “space” and presents the same. Anyone can speak to anyone and be reasonably sure that the person on the other end will at least notice. We’re all just hanging out together! Except, because of our Rings, we’re actually not.
And, though I have, at times, been on the Very Badly Losing End of this dynamic, I’m keenly aware that I’ve been on the other side too — that I myself have frozen others out, whether or not I intended them to feel that way. The problem of asymmetric interest has always been a hard one, for me, probably for everyone. How do you handle it when someone wants much, much more interest from you than you really have for them? If someone thinks you would be great friends, but you find them annoying, is that a character flaw on your part? Should you really just decide to reciprocate, to care? Are we even capable of deciding to do that sincerely? It reminds me of this snippet from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:
“‘I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,’ Smiley went on, more lightly. ‘Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.’”
I think this is deeply true, and that it shows us how to adjust our expectations of ourselves, and of others. My better instincts tell me that it’s no good pushing into a Ring, that simply telling ourselves we all ought to be more inclusive wouldn’t solve anything. In the end, nothing good can come of telling people to act in opposition to an immutable fact, especially an immutable fact about their own natures — in this case, the fact that we simply do not have the ability to really care about more than a few dozen things and people at a time.
That might sound cynical, but it isn’t — I feel no disappointment when I express it, no sense that it should be better. I mean to be as big towards others as my heart will let me; and when others don’t easily find room for me, to be content to listen and observe.
Note that I’m specifically talking about public Twitter conversations between people who follow and know each other, and are maybe in some loose sense colleagues; I’m not talking about cases where they’re thinking aloud and clearly open to input from pretty much anyone. ↩
Translating poetry is nearly impossible; you can retain something of the literal meaning, but the music and nuances of the original language are, by definition, not portable to other languages. As an example, take this straight translation of one stanza of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám from the original Persian:
Everywhere that there has been a rose or tulip-bed,
It has come from the redness of the blood of a king;
Every violet shoot that grows from the earth
Is a mole that was once on the cheek of a beauty.
Try reading that aloud, and you’ll experience the poetic equivalent of a rotting melon hitting the sidewalk. With translations like this, it’s no wonder Khayyám was ignored for centuries by English-speaking audiences.
The best that can be done is for someone with a poetic ear to take up the translation as raw material and reform it completely, using the music of the new host language. This is what F. Scott Fitzgerald did for the lines above:
I sometimes think that never blows so red,
The Rose, as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once-lovely Head.
As poetry, this was and is a huge success, despite being something of a travesty as a translation. Fitzgerald summed up his own approach in few words: “Better a live Sparrow than a stuffed Eagle.”1 The new poem is much less Khayyám and more “Fitzgerald, inspired by Khayyám”. He has drawn criticism for inserting so much of his own creation into his “translation”, but I much prefer that poetry be poetry; it cannot be the same poetry it was in the original, so let it be changed into a new thing that can still live.
From the little I have seen, I have hopes that J. R. R. Tolkien’s soon-to-be published translation of Beowulf may do the same thing for the Old English poem that Fitzgerald did for the Persian. For example, here’s Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation:
Fyrst forð gewát flota wæs on ýðum bát under beorg
beornas gearwe on stefn stigon -- stréamas wundon,
Time went by, the boat was on water, in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eagerly up the gangplank, sand churned in surf…
Tolkien does something much better with his version:
On went the hours: on ocean afloat under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithely brave man aboard;
breakers pounding ground the shingle.
How much of this is Tolkien and how much is the original? At the time of this writing, we don’t have much to go off of2, and I know very little Old English, so I could be mistaken; but if Tolkien can look at, for example, “stréamas wundon” and derive, in English, the music of “breakers pounding ground the shingle”, it seems reasonable to hope that the rest of the thing will be real English poetry: that is, a living sparrow rather than a stuffed eagle.
Further notes to this page will focus on other examples of translated poetry (what about the German hymns? what about Dante?), as well as more thoughts links about Tolkien’s translation once it is released next week.
These lines are about half of the excerpt that is currently all we have to go on: a few lines Tolkien included in an introductory chapter to a 1940 edition of John R. Clark Hall’s Beowulf translation. (Notably, Hall, too, took the poetic approach to translation we are advocating here, and was criticized for it.)↩
The “Norrell approach” might not be all that bad if one judges by Tolkien’s example and his literary results.
“Tolkien was often criticised by his academic colleagues for wasting time on fiction, even though that fiction has probably done more to popularise medieval literature than the work of 100 scholars. However, his failure to publish scholarship was not due to laziness nor entirely to other distractions. He was an extreme perfectionist who, as CS Lewis said, worked ‘like a coral insect’, and his idea of what was acceptable for publication was several notches above what the most stringent publisher would demand.”
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), from The Suburbs album by Arcade Fire, mentioned by Lorde in the above note.
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,
That we can never get away from the sprawl,
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,
And there’s no end in sight,
I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.
I find it notable that the song cuts to a Shepard tone midway through: a sound that always descends without ever actually going anywhere.
Tavi Gevinson’s interview of Lorde this last January touches on suburban aesthetics:
That movie [The Virgin Suicides] has informed a lot of how I see growing up and looking back and trying to make the awful parts of being a teenager feel beautiful. On that note, you have a very unique way of looking at the suburb where you live, which I think you’ve called “the Bubble.” When did you realize the suburbs could be a source of inspiration?
[…] I am into that whole Virgin Suicides vibe of making even the bad parts bearable. I hate high school so much, but there’s something kind of cool about walking around on the coldest day listening to “[Lindisfarne]” by James Blake or something and feeling like something has happened, even though it’s the worst thing ever. The album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire was influential to me in that as way well. I just think that record is really beautiful and nostalgic and so well-written. It’s a super-direct way of talking about what it’s like to grow up [in the suburbs], and I think that’s quite lovely.
