What do you mean by that?

‪Yesterday I spent twelve hours transposing a 400+-year old document.  ‬

‪The deeper I get into this project, the more I appreciate the efforts of my favorite Russian, Old English, French, and German translators. When reflecting upon their work, these men and women have regularly expressed their inability to milk pure, raw meaning from a culture’s language.  

To some extent, a language is bound to its meaning. For example, in Elizabethan English, the manner in which a single word is used may unfold like a fractal, revealing assumptions about the essence of humans, truth, goodness, God, or the mechanics of the universe. 

And even beyond connotation and denotation, the ideological presuppositions of a people are reflected in the gears of grammar, usage, and mechanics. While doing this work, I’m increasingly aware that language is both reflective of the values of a culture and formative for the same. It’s breathtaking, really.

If this principle is so integral to Spenserian English written only 400+ years ago in a culture generally affiliated with my own, what have I been missing in reading translations of documents thousands of years old, composed in vastly different milieu? 

And what have I been missing when listening to contemporary humans as they struggle to express ideas and beliefs with words they have learned in native environments utterly different from my own?

Sayers once wrote that all language is metaphorical, and hacking through my own transposition has been been such a great reminder of the inevitable space between meaning and words. 

In many ways, we still live inside that heartbreaking moment in Babel, in which humans looked at one another and realized their words no longer produced resonance in others.

What do we do with this? I’m still thinking that through.

To start with, perhaps as listeners, we should make a conscious effort to perceive these gaps soberly and realistically, accepting that we will continually need to go back to the labor of defining and clarifying.  We cannot just presume that our words will stir up our intended meaning in others. Nor can we presume that what we hear is what was intended.

Certainly, there are ways to make the transference of meaning easier by appealing to common elements of style. But in teaching simplicity of composition, we should not negate critical cultural differences that must impact how language inevitably works inside human beings.

I think linguistic anthropologists are correct to acknowledge connections between cultural dominance and languages. And as many problems as I have with Derrida in general, there’s at least some truth in certain binaries reflecting power within a culture.

What do we learn about the values of a culture when inanimate nouns are gendered? What do we learn about the values of a culture when variance in verb forms indicates past action completed vs. past action continuing? How do we look at what exists (and doesn’t exist) in a language as revelatory?

The more hours I spend in trying to retrieve meaning from a forgotten epic, the more I realize how complex hearing actually is. Are we humble and patient enough to learn philosophical and anthropological frameworks that exist inside and around what others say to us? How much do we demand others to accommodate our defaults?

I’ve definitely been challenged thinking this through day after day. The concept is a foreign as Akkadian to most of us. Like Goethe’s hot takes on translations of Chinese or Arabic literature, we too easily presume that catching the gist (the plot, the logos, the sum) of a translated text is equal to mastery of it. This is a standard colonial presumption, I know. But it’s one I think should be examined carefully—both in reading past and in listening present.