originals and translations

I’ve always been amused by the report of Jorge Luis Borges that he first happened to read Don Quixote in English (I don’t remember why). Later, when he finally read the Spanish original, he said that it seemed to him like a bad translation of the English.

I don’t think I’ve ever first read an Anglophone author in a foreign language, though maybe it would be an interesting experiment. But I do often have the experience with Nietzsche of thinking he’s better in English than German. Surely that can’t be objectively true. It’s probably just that Nietzsche is the sort of author who isn’t just a content you remember… He launches sentences that burn into your memory, especially if you read him young as most people do. In such cases the exact wording matters, and for me that exact wording is in English.

In any event, Nietzsche in German does feel like a translation to me. I’m still browsing Jenseits von Gut und Böse, and am about halfway through. Five years ago, I read Zarathustra cover-to-cover in German for the first time, and also thought it felt like a translation of an English original.

When I was in Leipzig in the summer of 1994, our German hosts were kind enough to throw a 4th of July party for the American students. Someone even read aloud the Declaration of Independence, another nice gesture toward their American guests. But when he read: “Wir halten diese Wahrheiten für selbstverständlich…” (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) we all burst out laughing, and the poor guy took it the wrong way. It was simply funny to hear that ancient bit of Americana in a different language, that’s all.

harsh comments on another blog

But in this case, the blogger completely deserves it… PHILIP GARRIDO and his wife were just busted for kidnapping an 11-year-old girl and keeping her imprisoned in their California backyard in a tent for 18 years. Now he’s in jail, but he’s still up on blogspot with his bizarre blog about being able to control sound with his mind, and the commenters are understandably giving him a very hard time!

[ADDENDUM: Actually, now I see that the comments become boring fairly quickly. Everyone is basically just saying they hope he gets raped in prison. But that does remind me of an interesting article I read recently on the odd status of prison rape in American culture. It is viewed simultaneously as: (a) a human rights violation, (b) a funny thing to joke about, and (c) a deserved portion of a prisoner’s punishment.]

Composition of Philosophy. August 29.

The book is now done through Chapter 9. Total elapsed time, 45 hours and 45 minutes.

Chapter 9 is the climax; Chapter 10 is dénouement and summary. In principle I should finish off the final chapter now, but since it’s mostly summary I think I’ll leave it until after I go through the existing nine chapters three or four times before sending the whole thing to the translator. I think the translator wants the ms. around October 1, so what I will probably do is revise the manuscript once each weekend in September. It’s short enough for that to be possible.

I’m not going to celebrate until the thing is actually sent, but it feels like a book now.

Incidentally, the music of choice for the final stages of writing was the Bartók String Quartets. For some reason I stopped listening to most classical music in my mid-twenties, and I’m not sure why. But I was a great Bartók fan at around age 20, and I’m glad to have all the quartets on this computer.

But I don’t have relaxation time between now and Manchester, because another time-sensitive obligation has suddenly dropped onto my desk, and it really needs to be polished off in the next three days if possible.

After Manchester, I’m really looking forward to the resumption of teaching. The last time I taught the whole Republic was over a decade ago; always used other dialogues in Cairo.

random piracy

Gibbon on the annual Vandal pirate raids from Carthage, towards the 450’s A.D.:

“In the spring of each year they equipped a formidable navy in the port of Carthage; and Genseric himself, though in a very advanced age, still commanded in person the most important expeditions. His designs were concealed with impenetrable secrecy, till the moment that he hoisted sail. When he was asked by his pilot, what course he should steer; ‘Leave the determination to the winds (replied the Barbarian with pious arrogance); they will transport us to the guilty coast, whose inhabitants have provoked the divine justice;’ but, if Genseric himself deigned to issue more precise orders, he judged the most wealthy to be the most criminal.”

good advice for students and others

If you want to learn a lot of classical metaphysics in less than 200 pages, then read SUAREZ ON FORMAL CAUSATION.

This is the English translation of Metaphysical Disputations XV, and it’s also affordable. More and more Suárez is coming out in English all the time.

Born exceptionally late for a major Scholastic philosopher (in 1548), the Jesuit Francisco Suárez is considered one of the first authors of a metaphysical work that was not just a commentary on Aristotle. He’s clear, comprehensive, and helpful. He doesn’t miss much of importance from his predecessors, so reading Suárez is also a great way to get up to speed quickly on Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and even some of the Arabs.

As mentioned here before, Leibniz read Suárez from youth as though it were a novel, and you can certainly feel the metaphysical depth whenever you read Leibniz (who happens to be my favorite philosopher, much more so than Heidegger).

Google’s opt-out village

Here’s a pretty good ONION VIDEO.

Where it loses me is with the G on the forehead and the bloodied letter from the village. Something needs to be written about how jokes can be undermined.

The two best videos they’ve had, in my opinion, were Kafka International Airport and the Auto Warriors Reality Show.

I think those two escape any substantial problems, whereas some of the other videos (including the Google one) add a few touches that damage the effect. Of any joke, it is possible to ask: “How could it be made better? And how could it be made worse?” I have some half-formed thoughts on the matter and will write about them some time.

Obama campaign bus

This was actually PUBLISHED BY THE ONION LAST OCTOBER, but somehow I missed it at the time. Great photo, too.

checking in

Did I really go a couple of days without making a post? Looks like it. I’ve been really busy finishing up the book, attending pre-semester meetings, and also enjoying the restoration of normal Cairo social life now that people are starting to return from their wise forays abroad. (Cairo really isn’t a good place to be in August, but for the third straight year, that’s how it worked out.)

In the meantime, I received another invitation to speak in Paris, this one for late September. It’s sooner than I felt like traveling again after the upcoming Manchester talk, but only a fool turns down a free trip to Paris.

Also, with mail service finally restored on campus after the August lull, I finally received the long-awaited extra volumes of Suárez and David Lewis.

I’m not sure how much you’ll see me here on the blog over the next few days, but I’ll at least post some semi-final “Composition of Philosophy” statistics before departing for England.

Bogost on McLuhan

Ian Bogost with AN INTERESTING POST ON THE MCLUHAN TETRAD, including Zingone’s claim to have found a fifth media law.

The tetrad really is very important. I’ve written two articles on it already, and that’s far from the end of the subject for me.

Concerning whether or not Zingone actually discovered a fifth law to complicate the tetrad (the McLuhans searched for a long time without finding more than four)… my gut reaction is no, though I want to study the paper more closely (it had escaped my notice too, Ian).

Here’s why I think it’s not… New media, for the McLuhans, are always produced from the obsolescent rubble of old ones, in a movement “from cliché to archetype”. (This takes real ingenuity, which is why McLuhan is absolutely not a technological determinist. Even if we are silently shaped by the medium of the moment, there is no determinism as to which medium comes next; the valor of individual inventors plays a major role in that process, since the current medium can reverse into any number of possible next stages.)

In any case, my sense is that the syncretism Zingone describes is just one possible variant of the creation of new background media out of the visible figures of obsolete or obsolescing old ones. So, my first inclination is to say that it’s just one form of retrieval among others.

Kudos to Ian for using the tetrad in class. It’s tailor-made for students in many ways, and I’m surprised I’ve never used it in class.

mourning Attila

Attila, dead of a burst artery on one of his countless wedding nights, 453 A.D., aged about 47. A vivid description of the reaction of his horde to the death:

“According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins, of gold, of silver, and of iron, and privately buried in the night: the spoils of nations were thrown into his grave; the captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns, who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.”

My sense is that Gibbon does his best writing with major figures who cover 50 or more pages of the history. Otherwise, the sheer amount of information he has to cover in these volumes means that he is often jumping from one name to the next, and if you lose concentration for even a moment, then you are doomed to go back a few pages and start over again. But it’s hard to lose concentration when reading about Attila.

Would a Hun victory in Champagne in 451 have meant the total destruction of Western civilization? The debate continues, but many people think yes. The Huns were known for destroying cities so utterly that even the ruins were difficult to find, and it would have been hard to recover from either Rome or Constantinople simply being reduced to dust in the fifth century.