Gibbon in a blunt moment

“Such is the constitution of civil society that, whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honours, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance, and poverty.”

sonnets

THINKING BLUE GUITARS adds the sonnet form as an example of possibly praiseworthy constraints in writing.

Gibbon on the shadows of Rome

Read and enjoy:

“A perpetual stream of strangers and provincials flowed into the capacious bosom of Rome. Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law. In such a various conflux of nations, every teacher, either of truth or of falsehood, every founder, whether of a virtuous or a criminal association, might easily multiply his disciples or accomplices.”

more on word/character issues

The allotment I ended up with from the French was 262,500 characters. At some point, probably by empirical tests, I had found an average in my writing of 6.05 characters per word. It was on that basis that I calculated 43,000 words as the approximate length of the book.

Then I was puzzled, this evening, to find that I was averaging only 5.02 characters per word. If that ratio continued, I would actually be able to write a book of 52,000 words rather than 43,000– in other words, two complete additional chapters.

But my version of Word happens to be French, since I bought this laptop in Toulouse. For purposes of comparison, I tried my pages so far on my old version of AppleWorks, and came up with 6.06 characters per word, almost identical to the estimate done in the spring.

A few tests revealed the reason for the difference… AppleWorks counts blank spaces as characters, while the French version of Word does not.

In January I was told by Knox Peden, who is as knowledgeable about French academic practices as any American I know, that the French tend not to count blank spaces when determining the number of characters. And his statement is supported by the numbers given by my French version of Word.

But my publishing contacts with PUF say that blank spaces *do* count when determining translator pay.

However, I will need to double-check on this and ask if they are really really sure. There’s a big difference between 43,000 and 52,000 words.

another thought

This comes from Cameron, who is more at home in French than I am:

“The bit about French translations of English originals being longer than the originals doesn’t surprise me at all. Aside from word-economical idioms being difficult to map between languages, the rhetorical style of French academic prose tends toward a less direct approach than you typically find in English.”

I would have thought the opposite, but maybe he’s right. At least one native French-speaking friend of mine was also surprised, however.

on the problems in the UC system

I’m just another spectator of the problems in the University of California system. But I just saw the following letter from a number of UCSD faculty.

another point about French, contrary to the previous one

But after mentioning a few posts ago that the larger vocabulary of English might lead to a greater tendency toward wordiness in English than in French, I remembered a very surprising fact of which I was informed by PUF before starting this project…

French translations of English sentences supposedly tend to be 5% longer than the English originals!

This came as a great surprise to me and everyone else who heard it. It had practical ramifications, too… Namely, I have to write a book 5% shorter than the available money would seem to allow, because the translator is paid by the length of the French translation, not the length of the English original. (Strange system to me, and to most Anglophones, I know.)

The question is whether that really means that French (counterintuitively) uses longer sentences than English. My suspicion is that it’s an artifact of translation as such. In other words, I suspect that an English translation of a French text would also be 5% longer than the original.

Having translated three whole books myself, I can see why this might happen across the board… Any author is going to be taking advantage of certain economical wording tricks that work only in her/his language and are difficult to render with equal economy in one’s own. Over the course of an entire book, that could easily add up to 5% of additional length.

Deleuze & Guattari’s Souriau reference

Hat-tip to Alex Galloway:

“In 1939 Etienne Souriau published L’instauration philosophique (Paris: Alcan, 1939). Aware of creative activity in philosophy, he invoked a kind of plane of instituting as the ground of his creation, or ‘philosopheme,’ animated by dynamisms.”

(pp. 62-63)” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 220n6).

punching the clock

It occurs to me that it may be interesting to keep track of how long it takes to write this book. (I’m speaking only of actual writing and revising time. If you count the amount of time spent outlining, the number obviously rises, let alone if you count all the background study and thinking needed to generate the ideas in this book. But it would be too grim to time all of that, whereas with writing time there is a good practical reason for measuring it.)

So far, then…

Introduction. 55 minutes, 381 words.

Chapter 1, overview. 43 minutes, 300 words.

At first glance that feels a bit slow… 6.949 words per minute. At that rate, the entire book would take 103 hours of actual writing time to complete, which is longer than it sounds. (Last summer I reread all of Husserl’s massive Logical Investigations, while taking detailed notes, in 34 hours and 9 minutes.)

However…

1. These are highly polished pages, not the rough pages I usually have at this stage.

2. The opening words of any project often go more slowly, since one is always careful about setting the table the right way.

Composition of Philosophy. July 16 B.

I’ve written less than 700 words of a 43,000-word book, but already my planned methods have changed, under pressure from the word-count constraint. (Or rather, character-count, as per the French system, but I will not worry about that until later. Counting words is good enough for now.)

Having decided to split the 43,000 words into 10 chapters rather than 9, this gave a length of 4,300 words for each chapter.

Since the first chapter has four sections, I decided to try an average of 1,000 words per section, leaving 300 words for a brief overview at the start of the chapter.

Problem: 300 words is a lot shorter than you think it is. I wrote what I thought was a fairly minimal two-paragraph overview. It took 25 minutes (I was pausing frequently for thought this time), was split into 2 paragraphs rather than the initially planned 3, and totalled a horrifying 471 words.

I then took 12 extra minutes to shave excess words off of the paragraph, but there were still 388 words.

That’s when I started doing the sort of thing described in the previous paragraph, trying to slim every sentence down by an extra 3 or 4 words, as well as deleting certain whole sentences as completely unneeded. This took 6 additional minutes.

In all, that totals 43 minutes to write a pretty-much-final version of just a page. Normally it should go a bit faster than that, but this isn’t just any page: it’s the first page of the whole book, other than the Introduction. So, it was well worth the extra care and the extra pauses.

A few lessons resulted…

*To fit this book within the allotted length, my style is going to have to be much leaner than usual. That’s fine by me; I’ve wanted to move in that direction anyway, since I think there are times when I overexplain at points where quick allusion would be perfectly fine for most readers. It’s the teacher in me, wanting to make sure that absolutely no one misses a reference.

*When writing the Zagreb lecture, I said that it’s best to write a whole lecture/chapter/article in rough form, and only then go back to give it stylistic polish. In the present case, I feel inclined to do it a bit differently, treating each separate section as an autonomous article. In other words, after writing the Introduction I immediately went back to revise it, and the same with this now single-page overview of Chapter One.

In both cases, I didn’t have to go through the usual “polish the prose” stage, because the word-count worries already did that for me. Merely by shaving words from the first draft, the style was already improved to nearly final form.

My guess is that the prose will have a slightly more austere feel than my writing usually does, but that actually meets one of my subsidiary goals, which was to write in a style that would work well for a French readership. In English we do have the advantage of a famously immense vocabulary compared with French, but this advantage easily turns into a disadvantage. There is a real power to the focused precision of good written French. Who was it in the blogosphere who called Meillassoux (aptly) a “gem-cutter”? Maybe it was Nick (my apologies if it was someone else). Though I don’t really have the gem-cutting temperament, it’s probably a good idea to be be forced to act like one for this particular project.

*So, that’s my new plan… To deal with this work as a series of sections rather than chapters. Since the sections are only 3-4 pages apiece throughout the book, this means I’ll write the entire thing in the same manner as the Introduction and the Chapter 1 Overview. That means, a quick first draft, followed by a mere word-cutting exercise, and this mere act of word-cutting ought to put the style in nearly final form.

The danger with this sort of word-chopping allusiveness, of course, is that certain portions of the argument may turn out to be nearly incomprehensible, with too much being cut. But I’ll deal with that when rereading the whole manuscript at the end.

*Here’s another advantage to working with bite-sized sections rather than chapters… If you’re in a tired mood but feel like you need to write a whole chapter, it’s easy to think “well, no point starting that chapter this late in the day. I just don’t have the strength to finish, and it should all be written at one go.”

By contrast, when dealing with smaller units of prose, there is no good excuse to go to sleep early before finishing at least one more of those little sections. We’ll see how long they take to write.