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Philo: the Greek for loving
Logos: the Greek for word, thought, principle, or speech
“Logos, in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning” — Britannica entry
“Philology: the study of literature and of disciplines relevant to literature or to language used in literature.” — Merriam-Webster entry
“La gloria es una incompresión y quizá la peor.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Autor de Quijote”
My tale is a charmed, unrequited love affair with translation into and from the Spanish. The two reasons which tend the flames of my great love for the language are the same two reasons—amados, if I may—which make me a poor Spanish translator. They each became clear to me only when I wrote halting, bilingual comments on Cuentos Completos, by Jorge Luis Borges. Commentary on his short fiction became this tale, this meager monument of a smitten translator who can only translate Spanish poorly.
Borges in his original Argentine Spanish enticed me when I hadn’t sought him. The broad, violet Cuentos Completos offered its spine to me while I searched its neighboring shelves for Ladrilleros, by Selva Almada. Between the Argentine I’d sought and the one presented to me, I took up the second and thought to play an odd, unknown game with myself. I ought to read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “La biblioteca de Babel” as Borges had written them, I thought. What could befall me?
The fogged paranoia of reading like a man who becomes increasingly blind, for one.
“Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar,” begins “Tlön,” and by “espejo” I knew I could not see all I was attempting to read. I didn’t have the Spanish which read capably enough—I didn’t have the ojo de lector, more accurately. Winched behind the narrator as he seeks an encyclopedic entry to settle a drinking bet, and then recalls an English engineer who leaves the “Encyclopedia of Tlön” behind after his death, and then details an anthropological description of this planet Tlön and its obsessive psychological culture of ideals so bloodlessly perfect and abstracted they were practically geometric, and then discovers the “benévola” secret society who produces the volume Orbis Tertius in part to disprove God’s existence, and then reveals that these acts of human documentation may have rendered that illusory planet to be real, I knew for certain I could not tell what was true. No doubt, that is just the certainty of reading Borges for the first time. No doubt, it is also that I was reading the Spanish with faltering eyes.
This surreal reading was not all that I tried in the Cuentos experiment. I wrote out comments for each story that I read, first in my customary English but then in deliberate Spanish translations of those comments. These, too, were ungainly as teenaged love sonnets. “This unreality of meaning on the move” became “Esta irrealidad de significado móvil” as I translated and, hampered in my Spanish by my English-shaped mind, was reduced to word-by-word transcription rather than the fuller interplay between the two tongues which I had desired. Borges in “Tlön” depicts the mind of his narrator as logically straitlaced and orderly along the axes of his inquiry, but in the doubling and echoes of his articles, addenda, and asides, the unreal like a mirage curls the real, which had been more porous than its scholarly exterior ever appeared. My mind, staid between my English and Spanish, had no such heat or skill.
Leer, escribir—by Borges I was learning to read again, learning to write again. Escribir, in particular, was like gathering puzzle shards into my pockets from a disused armoire where thousands of them lay, to then arrange them in ankle-high grass so they depict an unknown portrait. I don’t know the portrait before I collect its components. I only know which colors the pieces must be. Escribir así made my unfortunate Spanish sentences and my importunate Spanish paragraphs. How I loved it, every second of the childlike focus and silly abandon of tilting at such a towering language.
Of all the admirably insane Borgesian characters who take up impossible intellectual ventures because they seem the ultimate acts of faith, I admire Pierre Menard most. He is the nimble minute hand ticking far ahead of my own plodding hour hand. Menard, as the narrator tells it in “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” is the twentieth-century writer who dedicates himself to writing Don Quixote in a perfect line-by-line recreation of the original 17th-century novel by Miguel Cervantes, while never having read the original. His story is an inquiry into a polished, hyper-literate madness, for its narrator—another scholar making his tidy comments in a bilingual mixture of the real and the unreal—believes in Menard’s true authorship as fervently as Menard does, by the story’s end. The narrator has written the tale as a “brief rectification” of other mistaken literary critics, and his crowning proof of Menard’s legitimacy is a side-by-side collation of the Menard and the Cervantes texts: he writes that the phrase “truth, whose mother is History” signals the “amazing” retrieval which Menard makes of Cervantes’s concerns with history, together with a “vivid” contrast of their styles. Of course, Menard’s sentence is the exact same sentence which Cervantes had written four centuries before:
“la verdad, cuya madre es la Historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.”
The narrator is so singularly brilliant that he can interpret a great literary advance from a facsimile, writing his comments in prose as straight as a tutor’s pointing rod. And from it Borges extends an admission of Menard’s futility that I recognized in my ambling translations: “There is no intellectual exercise that will not finally be useless.”
It seemed to me, reading that line through my Spanish dictionary and then commenting on it between my pen and that same embarrassing dictionary, that Menard’s great uselessness in writing Quixote was my own great uselessness, in my little besotted Spanish project. Menard attempted to replicate the mind, life, and soul of Cervantes. Translation, too, is the replication of another, one where the translator must bridge with great invention, while simultaneously overlooking like an acrophobe, certain chasms of meaning, connotation, and musicality between any two languages. The chasm between “the present” and “lo presente” looms below, not unlike the chasm between “that which is coming” and “lo por venir.” If the translator didn’t overlook them in the act of bridging them, he would have to admit an inherent futility, an incomprehension.
What a coy darling, la lengua! Of course Spanish can’t be fully touched in English. Even translating my own commentary left me agape at the holes in my own Spanish version, so perfect in their shapes and inscrutability that attempting to plug them would be pointless for me.
At one or two points in the Cuentos experiment, I sensed that the futility between my languages might simply be the futility between language and any subject it attempts to render. A human word may only be a distortion, this side of heaven. And still, I fall only deeper into my passion for such words and their impossible use. I best obsess over things when I’m frequently tempted to abandon them as impossible.
Language poses no impossibility to God, of course. Here, I’ve paced back to my second amado for loving this empresa which does not notice or love me for even a second, and it is a much grander reason than the first: human languages are God’s creation, and I want to imitate His use of them. I desire it, while I know—I know with a fervid, quivering flush—that there are whole caverns of what I don’t know in Spanish, and entire unknown worlds in the non-Romance languages once and still alive in the people of this world. All I don’t know disqualifies me utterly from translation. All I don’t know drags me ineluctably toward translation, happily puckering.
It was God who first created the plum confusion of translators. Circling the ziggurat of Babel, affronted but not threatened by its meager builders who only shared “one language and the same words,” God showed strange, smiting mercy to their vain attempt to name themselves “in the heavens,” a self-naming they somehow planned without reference to Him who had first unfurled those heavens. God exploded mankind with confounding words. Languages arced like plumes of dust from His touch upon the temple which crowned the ziggurat. One word became four, and ten, and twelve, and eighteen. Stone became piedra, and אֶבֶן, and πέτρα, and حجر, and pierre, or камень, and this site of God’s touch became Babel. Only when God had pilloried mankind with all these languages could the site of His touch be called Babel. His mercy was great but also prodigal, also beautiful, for God had given man an explosion not unlike a florid and battering modernist poem, where the verses bulge and arc so that no one reader can give it an absolute, true name.
And so man was first confused by languages, and so we have remained. Languages, in all their intricacy of plumes, caverns, and worlds, have remained as prodigal as their Creator, so that they could bear His words in the shape of their translations, so that they would bless the nations with the Word of His salvation. And so they have. To the unending controversies over correct or proper translations of the Bible, one could reply that languages began in the utter confusion of man-made designs and, puckering so as not to babble, one could add that languages were a mercy. How loving, that touch of God which multiplied consonants and consonance and puns like cells dividing to live and build; the smitten, polyphonous cries up and down the levels of Babel, how lovely.
Borges takes the name of his famous Library (“que otros se llaman el universo”) from Babel’s explosion. His biblioteca fits hexagonal galleries of an undefined number, but as an architectural image, it more perfectly fits his larger conceit of the world-as-text, where an infinite library contains all that was, is, and will be. Biased though I am toward floral or biological metaphors when I discuss language (and almost anything I like, for that matter), I admit that this architectural image also demonstrates the permanence of human languages through time, maybe better than even the perennial moonbeam flower and its annual resurrections. Even the languages which have died are preserved, even if invisibly, in those motes of their meaning which they smuggled into other more fortunate languages whom they embraced in the dim corridors of history. They remain, tiny pillars to God’s prodigal mercy.
The polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz apparently theorized on this monumental value of language, proposing that our variations of languages, rather than our physical texts or architectural works, are the truest monuments of man. I’m awaiting the forthcoming book on the subject by Leibniz’s descendant, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and thus I can’t say much of intelligence about it. Naturally, this short philological tangent spurted free in Smith-Ruiu’s larger history of Leibniz as the court philosopher of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, but I’ve continued to think on the concept for some months now, if only because Smith-Ruiu likened it to “languages pressed into books like so many flowers.”
I don’t know much more of Leibniz than that image, though I do know of the British philologist Sir William Jones who roamed the Indian subcontinent and and translated every flower in sight to better name the spikenard plant in the local dialects where he found it (this, as he simultaneously learned Sanskrit), and I do know the life’s work of the 18th-century Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges, who compiled a 32,000-word dictionary of the Yaghan language, named after the indigenous tribe who once lived and hunted in the southernmost, semiaquatic lands today called Tierra del Fuego. Bridges sought and learned these words from the Yaghan while he lived among them for three decades, so he could translate the Gospel of Luke and present the salvation of Christ, the Word Himself, over the abyss between his tongue and theirs.
How loving, the linguistic attention of this man who never did translate the entire Bible for the Yaghan, as he’d intended; all that is contained across history in their language, in English, in Sanskrit, in German, and in Spanish, how beloved. I will almost certainly never learn 32,000 palabras amadas, though to be fair I may never learn 32,000 words in English either. Still, I yearn for them all like they are memories or tomes I’m never to enjoy or recall, just as I yearn for their language from afar and in greatest chastity.
Coda (or, the Tale’s End)
There are people who write because they cannot bear not telling the story they have set out to write, and people who write because their imaginations gush free of their neuronal routes and through their fingers, and people who write because people will read them. I am not among those people, exactly, because the word original speaks English, Spanish, French, and Latin while only barely scuffing its Italian because it lacks the final e. I am not among them because my favorite detective stories are the etymological interrogations of original or piedra or boligrafo or pluma, which, when they detail the untidy grids of their ancestry that span beyond prehistory, confess the unforeseen raiders from the Greek or Arabic or Norse, whose cognates remain influential interlopers even to my Texan-Carolinian-slanged ear some centuries later.
In labyrinthine passages only outdone by divine providence which still lays and solders them, languages intersect their words and so enhance their music, their very meanings. They are confounded and found anew. I’m still smitten by that smiting sound upon Babel’s crown. When I pen a pun, I am penned and punished as a ponce but pursue the pun-ishment of others nonetheless, that they might see how a pun might be as infinite as el aleph in a Buenos Aires basement.
Spanish, or English, or Hebrew, or Latin; it’s all too pleasurable not to love. The forking and fighting amados for which we love literature fit within the languages that enable their enactments, and as I must love the God who is the first source of the Word and the world He spoke into being, so I must love this first source of all literature. Love, even if I am only to ever be an unschooled philologist.
Que dulce, to tote my weak villanelles like the idiomatic fool for the idioma that will never love them, or me. How dire, to love all that I can’t know, particularly because I can’t know it.
Thanks for being here, y’all. And thank you also for allowing me to see where some of these reasonings might go, and how, and why. I’m not generally as obsessive as I’ve written myself above, but I’m often smitten with ideas.
The original is a very uncertain concept, in Borges’s fiction. Nonetheless, the English quotations I’ve included above are my own translations from his original Spanish. Que sean precisas, si no sean verdades.
Please find a unique Understanding of the tower of babble/babel in which we are all trapped
http://beezone.com/current/awakenfromword.html
http://beezone.com/adida/mind-is-artifical-intelligence.html