Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (91 page)

Now who would ever have suggested,
a priori
, that a handful of hungry birds fluttering about, hither and thither, in the concourse of some random airport is “the American translation” of an impoverished accordionist who has just boarded a random car on a random line of the Paris métro? Is this really a case of translation? To be sure, our answer is “yes”. To us it was crucial that our book have “the same feel” to native speakers of both languages. To attain this effect demanded, on occasion, not just bland vanilla translation, but rich chocolate mint-chip transculturation. Had we merely converted the opening of
Chapter 1
directly into English, leaving it in the Paris métro, as in the text displayed at the bottom of the previous page, or even had we transposed it to the New York subway, it would have been a wooden, almost mechanical kind of translation (although light-years more sophisticated than today’s machine translation).

Could we not have elected, after having chosen an airport scene over a subway scene in the American version, to go back to the original passage in French and to rewrite it so that it takes place in an anonymous French airport? Indeed,
shouldn’t
we have done that? Well, had we done so, we would have gained some uniformity, but we would have sacrificed elegance. Transculturation struck us as the best choice here. But transculturation is not the choice we would have made if we had been translating a
novel
whose opening scene was set in the Paris métro. To transculturate a novel is to move it completely from one cultural setting to another — it is to uproot it, to create a counterpart story in a different land. That is a much more radical shift than merely transculturating an illustrative paragraph or two every so often in a book of nonfiction. Our book in particular has nothing inherently to do with France or America; it has to do with human cognition, which transcends cultures, and in it we illustrate cognition’s mechanisms in contexts of many sorts, feeling free to dream up scenes that fit the culture of our readers.

For instance, in
Chapter 1
we used the concept
mother
in both languages, but we replaced Zinédine Zidane and his sport, soccer, by Tiger Woods and
his
sport, golf. In
Chapter 2
we had to replace nearly every example involving a compound word or an idiom, since they were totally local, and generally we wound up using examples that were completely unrelated on the superficial level, but nonetheless they illustrated the same cognitive phenomena.

In
Chapter 5
, speech errors are given a lengthy treatment, and any speech error is a unique event intimately linked not only with a particular language but also with a particular individual’s brain. Rather than transcribing such an irreproducible event into a different language, we relied principally on examples that were directly observed in the language we were writing in. But we were fortunate in that, over the years, we had collected sizable corpora of errors in both French and English, and so the translation strategy there was more akin to transculturation. On the surface, totally different speech errors were used as illustrations, but at a deeper level, the mental mechanisms that we described were all the same. For that reason, this important part of our book reads very differently in French and English, and yet in their essence, the two discussions really do say “exactly the same thing”.

Another striking example of transculturation comes from
Chapter 5
, and involves the way we found of rendering in French a telephone conversation between two Americans. One of them, a jazz musician, had placed a classified ad in a newspaper in order to sell his old cornet, and the other one had called him to inquire about it. However, the potential buyer was under the impression that the entity in question was a used Dodge Coronet. Despite this considerable disparity in topic, the two had a conversation that lasted a minute or more that seemed to each of them to make perfect sense. Since this misunderstanding came about as the result of a phonetic resemblance between words that are not familiar to most French speakers, a straightforward translation into French of the dialogue would have been heavy-handed, and would in fact have ruined the example for French readers. The analogous conversation that we chose instead for the French version of the chapter was taken from a television
advertisement in which two people are having a conversation over lunch about a documentary film concerning “emperors”. The one who has seen the movie knows it was about emperor penguins, and that’s what he has in mind (the ad explicitly jumps back and forth between the private mental images of the two people), while the one hearing about it for the first time is imagining a crowd consisting of clones of the French emperor Napoleon in various scenarios, starting in the steppes of Russia and winding up in Antarctica. Neither one, of course, has any idea for at least a minute of the fact that they are talking past each other. The extended ambiguity in the French dialogue has very much the same flavor as that of the English dialogue, which makes the translation work very nicely. And yet it might seem rather odd that in passing from American soil to French soil, a musical instrument turned into a penguin and a used car turned into a monarch.

In the original version of our lengthy list of caricature analogies in the current chapter, one featured a French speaker mocking another French speaker for a nonstandard pronunciation of the number word “cinq”, meaning “five”. The mocker, to cast doubt on the acceptability of this usage, spontaneously came up with an analogous but clearly sillier usage involving the number word “six”. This quip was too language-specific to be translated, but by chance, we happened to have observed a strikingly similar case in English, this one involving two bisyllabic verbs, “invite” and “accept”, of which the former, with shifted stress, can be used as a noun but somewhat questionably, whereas the latter, similarly stress-shifted, makes an unarguably silly-sounding noun. The two anecdotes were parallel at the level of their essences, but clearly “invite” and “accept” are not the standard translations of “cinq” and “six” — no more than “birds flying around in an airport concourse” is the standard translation of “un accordéoniste dans le métro”.

Chapter 3
included perhaps the most complex of all the translation challenges in the book — two poems from the pen of our friend Kellie Gutman, each of which describes one side of the analogy linking Dick and his bottlecaps to Danny and his ants. Originally, Kellie was inspired to write the poem about Dick at Karnak simply because it captured an amusing episode involving her husband during a cruise they made up the Nile. However, since witnessing that episode had triggered in Doug’s mind the far-off memory of his infant son Danny at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and since that reminding incident was featured in our book, we asked Kellie if she could write a parallel poem about the earlier episode. She took up our challenge with verve, using exactly the same poetic form, perfectly matching the syllable counts on corresponding lines and also preserving the precise pattern made by feminine (bisyllabic) and masculine (monosyllabic) rhymes. When we were writing
Chapter 3
and were starting to frame the passage about the Dick/Danny analogy, we knew that Kellie’s two poems would make excellent accompanying pieces and thus decided to include them. This fact created a major obstacle — not only were both poems composed in playful English, but they obeyed several detailed formal constraints. Both despite and because of its linguistic virtuosity, Kellie’s performance called for faithful translation on all levels in the French language.

We will not describe the details of the two pairs of poems, since that could occupy several pages, but below we simply exhibit the final stanza of all four poems.

At last, the North Rim: strange striations

with shades evoking exclamations —

unless you’re Danny… Then you treasure

the leaves and bugs! While grownups measure

the grandeur of vast rock formations
,

you play with ants — a simpler pleasure.

Le Grand Canyon enfin s’révèle!

Falaises rocheuses, couleurs trop belles —

à moins d’avoir taille trop modeste…

or là, tu scrutes, à l’aide de gestes,

fourmis et feuilles à p’tite échelle,

et ça t’procure une joie céleste…

In Karnak’s heat, our guide expounded

on gods and temples, while surrounded

by columns far too grand to measure.

We contemplated them with pleasure,

but as we gazed on high, dumbfounded,

Dick stooped to pluck a humbler treasure.

Au Temple de Karnak, le guide

louait les hauts piliers splendides

(et nous brûlions), quand, d’un beau geste,

s’agenouillant de façon leste,

Richard saisit, d’une main humide,

un p’tit trésor bien plus modeste
.

Among the constraints governing the two final English-language stanzas is the fact that all twelve of their lines end in
feminine
rhymes (meaning two-syllable rhymes in which the penultimate syllable is stressed and carries the rhyming action, and in which the final syllable is unstressed and is identical in both words —
e.g.
, “pleasure” and “measure”). In French the concept of
feminine rhyme
exists but is slightly different: it requires that the final word of each of the two lines involved should end in a so-called “mute ‘e’ ”, which, despite its name, is not in fact totally silent but is pronounced, albeit just slightly (for instance, “modeste” and “céleste” form a feminine rhyme in French). Kellie’s conscious decision to use exclusively feminine rhymes as she crafted the twelve lines in these two stanzas in English wound up, a couple of years later, forcing all twelve lines of the corresponding French stanzas to end in mute “e”’s.

As if this wasn’t enough, Kellie playfully chose to use exactly the same set of rhyming words in lines 3, 4, and 6 in both of her stanzas — but in one poem their order was “treasure”, “measure”, “pleasure”, while in its analogical mate their order was cyclically permuted: “measure”, “pleasure”, “treasure”. This subtle cross-poem pattern posed yet another thorny translational hoop through which to jump.

In the end, however, the challenge was met, and all the various hoops were jumped through simultaneously. The meter and the rhyme pattern were preserved throughout, syllable counts were preserved, the feminine-rhyme/masculine-rhyme distinction was preserved, the cross-poem sameness of the rhymes on lines 3, 4, and 6 was preserved, the cyclic permutation of those three rhymes was preserved, and last but not least, linguistic playfulness was preserved. A careful look at the three feminine rhymes on lines 3, 4, and 6 of the French version shows that in the lefthand stanza the sounds “deste”, “gestes”, and “leste” are used (the “s” at the end of “gestes” is just as silent as the comma that follows it), while in the righthand stanza these same sounds show up cyclically permuted — namely, as “geste”, “leste”, and “deste”.

Poetry translation necessarily involves a large number of searches for complex analogies because one is laboring under the combination of many simultaneous pressures, some of which are explicit and quite sharp (such as a precise syllable count or the constraint of rhyming), others of which are anything but explicit and are subject to endless interpretation (such as the meaning of a word or the tone of a passage). The number of pathways that are tentatively explored is enormous, and the number of compromises made is also large.

But the product that emerges from all this searching, adjusting, and compromising does not have to be inferior to the original poem. The writer of the original was no less subject to multiple pressures, and hence necessarily made a vast number of choices that were also compromises. Compromise is the name of the game whenever constraints are involved, as they are in poetry, and a certain sort of creativity is also a frequent outcome of the combination of pressures under which one finds oneself working. Thus compromise can even at times be a source of quality. And in this context, creative compromise, arrived at through elegant analogies, is what we are talking about.

In this chapter, we’ve shown how analogies are constantly manipulated by people, using such examples as caricature analogies, explanatory analogies, analogies that help people make personal or larger-scale decisions, analogies situated in the microworld of Copycat, analogies featuring various amounts and sorts of frame-blending, and analogies allowing translation and even transculturation to take place.

The preceding chapter showed how analogies sometimes trick us, manipulating us without our being even in the least aware of it; this chapter, by contrast, has shown how analogies, not content merely to lurk behind the scenes and pull strings surreptitiously, often emerge into broad daylight, where they are then at our mercy. We humans are thus not always mere puppets; indeed, sometimes we are puppeteers who deliberately build or choose one analogy or another, most frequently in order to communicate with others, but sometimes simply to make a situation clearer to ourselves. So in the end, who is manipulated, and who is the manipulator?

To choose one analogy over another is to favor one viewpoint over another. It amounts to looking at things from a particular angle, to taking a specific perspective on a situation. An insightful analogical take on a situation gives you confidence in your beliefs about the situation while also revealing new facts about it. A teacher, a lecturer, a lawyer, a politician, a writer, a poet, a translator, or a lover may pass hours or days in search of the most convincing analogy, like a goldsmith crafting a beautiful chalice for maximal effect. Such individuals work very hard and very consciously to induce in their listeners or readers the same point of view, or the same emotion or feeling or judgment, as they have.