Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017505, Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:48:41 +0000

Subject
Re: THOUGHTS: Universality of language
Date
Body
Jerry: appreciate your germane comments. They merit more than this quick
response, hindered by UNseasonable Pagan HumBug distractions. Your ref to
American-Indian languages is quite central to the SWH (Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis) controversy (quod googlet*). Whorf, the amateur (in the kindest
sense) linguist of the S-W pair, declared that Hopi grammar lacked ³Western²
tenses, and deduced from this all manner of fanciful images of Native
American ³timeless² thought-patterns and Pantheistic world-views. Other
³primitive² languages (which, in fact, turn out to have dauntingly
super-sophisticated complexities) were claimed to lack ³Western² verbs for
³having² in the sense of ³ownership/possession.²

These linguistic differences were (still are) so appealing to certain
politically ³progressive² movements that it is considered near-Fascistic,
pro-Colonial to point out the undeniable FACT that Hopi speakers have NO
PROBLEM in distinguishing and articulating past, present and future events.
NLs have so many different overt and covert tense-systems even within the
Indo-European family (cf English continuous and historic-presents; Russian
perfective aspect etc), but it¹s a challenge to deduce any real cultural
causes-effects. John McWhorter offers the wonderful example of DAMON
RUNYONESE, able to convey all temporal modes with the ³present² tense:
³Yesterday I meet Harry the Horse who tells me he is in Florida last week
...² Or should we read some Hopi-like temporal transcendence in the Bronx
Weltenschaaung?

Very good point, JF, about those happy bi- and multi-lingualists who might
well disagree over what¹s ³sayable² in their different NLs! Let¹s first put
aside all those who say ³I have these wonderful THOUGHTS but I just can¹t
put them into WORDS!² Well, we might say ³Draw them² (followed by a painful
VERBAL interrogation: Is that a moon or a saucer? A cloud or a camel?); or
echoing Wittgenstein: ³Whistle them.² Semiotically, of course, pictures and
signs can convey many shades of meanings, but ultimately we need NL to
mediate mutual understanding. Think of NL as negotiated discourse between
Humans. Maxwell¹s equations are sublimely non-verbal but need a few NL-based
seminars before we understand ³all them squiggles.²

Not quite clear how one could define ³perfect fluency² in any single tongue;
even harder to define ³equal fluency² in two or more languages. We need to
separate acquiring (via some form of ³osmosis²) several distinct ³grammars²
(e.g., Hopi from mum¹s knee and English from dad¹s shoulders!) which lies at
the still contentious heart of Chomskyan theory (Noam never quite came up
with a good definition of ³Native Speaker² although that concept is central
in to his notion of competence [langue/parole]), and the ³hit¹n¹miss²
acquisition of lexis, and especially becoming familiar with such volatile
elements as idiom.

Here¹s a thought-experiment: Vladimir Nabokov meets physicist Pyotr
Kapitsa**
Both bi-fluent English-Russian. Both studied at Cambridge. PK, alas, did get
that elusive Nobel (in 1978).
But ³equally² fluent?

KP: What¹s the Russian for ³the magnetic moment of an atom interacting with
an inhomogeneous magnetic field?²
VN: Nye znayiu! Nye panimayiu! I can render each word ³literally² without a
dictionary but the overall concept is outside my immediate comprehension.
KP: I¹m glad you trust me that I¹m not just spouting meaningless
gobbleygook. It wouldn¹t take me long to explain to a fellow scientist in a
different domain (such as you, dear colleague) the significance of the
phrase (it helped me win a Nobel, nudge-nudge, a worthless trinket) but
translating it for, say, a Cherokee non-scientist, would take much longer.
Interestingly, the two words that slip literally and innocently into
Russian are potential False Friends: ³moment² (Russian MOM¹ENT = both
temporal and mathematical objects, not to be confused with VAZHNOST); and
³field² (Russian POL¹E = both agricultural and mathematical objects).

** Why not? Both born St Petersburg; PK 1894; VN 1899 [April 23 btw is NOT
NECESSARILY SHAKESPEARE¹S BIRTHDAY even allowing for calendric quirks! April
23 1564 is a GUESS based on the KNOWN date of the Bard¹s Baptism: April 26.
So much for FATIDIC astrology!

I spot a non-sequitur in Nims¹s haiku anecdote, which turns out to be an
inadequate counter-example to my NL-equivalence ³axiom.² We have two
separate problems (i) the meaning & translatability of Matsuo Basho¹s Frog
poem; (ii) understanding the reason for it being rated so highly in the
Japanese canon. Nims¹s Japanese friend, one might argue, was either
insufficiently bi-fluent/bi-cultural for (i); or did not herself fully
understand it (always easy to wave the hands and claim ³This text is so
unutterably inexplicable!²) For (ii), without knowing a word of Japanese, we
can readily accept the verdict of generations familiar with Japanese
literature where Basho is hailed as the Nippon Pushkin or Shakespeare. In
fact, we are lucky to have at least THIRTY translations of his Frog haiku,
said to be the most famous and repeated EIGHT WORDS in Japanese Literary
History. See
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
Literally we have

Furu ike ya Old pond!
kawazu tobikomu frog jumps in
mizu no oto water¹s sound

Here¹s a few of the many so-called translations -- hardly a major linguistic
challenge, you may think. Yet each of Basho¹s 8 words have been through
centuries of mangles and biddy-combs. There¹s NO Japanese consensus, Some
say it has NOTHING to do with real frogs or ponds! BUT my axiom states that
for each Japanese ³native² interpretation, there¹s an equivalent in English,
Basque and Xhosa.

pond
frog
plop!

Translated by James Kirkup

old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water

Translated by Jane Reichhold

While an inappropriaate but hilarious switch of genre by Alfred H Marks
gives:

There once was a curious frog
Who sat by a pond on a log
And, to see what resulted,
In the pond catapulted
With a water-noise heard round the bog.

I¹m tempted to borrow from Burl Ives:

Frog went a-courting, wouldn¹t stop ‹ huh huh
Frog went a-courting, would stop
Into the lake went plop, plop, plop ‹ huh huh?


After perusing them all, you may well ask ³What¹s the fuss?² WHERE¹S THE
BEEF? Well, one needs to consider Basho¹s longer works such as OKU NO
HOSOMICHI.

Buddhist Robert Atkinson has a nice reverse spin, hinting that Anglophones
have the advantage over Japanese readers in appreciating the haiku that
Nims¹s friend had so much trouble explaining.

³This is probably the most famous poem in Japan, and after three hundred and
more years of repetition, it has, understandably, become a little stale for
Japanese people. Thus as English readers, we have something of an edge in
any effort to see it freshly.²


Matsuo Basho being a contemporary of Shakespeare, one must note the
problems of language change on top of a verse-form built on Basho¹s
deliberate Zen-like compactness. We have the same challenges in
³translating² our senior, revered Bard into Modern English. Many Anglophones
rate WS highly without a decent knowledge of Elizabethan English. Tim
Henderson recently cited from Timon:

The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:

Hands up if you know what WS USUALLY means by ³excrement?² Hint: in Love¹s
Labour¹s Lost, Don Armado boasts to Holofernes that the King ³with his royal
finger thus dally with my excrement.² There¹s hundreds of similar potential
misunderstandings (naughty, wherefore, silly, revolve, ...)

More on Axioms and VN¹s imagery after the Hols. DV

Stan Kelly-Bootle


* This from WIKI:
Linguistic theories of the 1960s‹such as those proposed by Noam
Chomsky‹focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result
Whorf's work fell out of favor. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to
this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Pinker argues from
a contravening school of thought which holds that a universal grammar
underlies all language. The most extreme proponents of this theory, such as
Pinker, argue that thought is independent of language, and that language is
itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human
beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we
actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any
natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker, calling it "Whorf's radical
position," vehemently denies that language contains any thought or culture,
declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they
make." (1994, p. 60)

On 20/12/2008 02:20, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:

> Stan,
>
> I suspect you chose the word "axiom" carefully in
> classifying the statement that anything that can be
> said in one language can be said (possibly at much
> greater length) in another. After all, if a bilingual
> speaker says something can be said in one language but
> not another, only other speakers of the same two
> languages can argue, and then it's one person's word
> against the other's. So it's an axiom like the aptly
> named Axiom of Choice, which you can take or leave,
> but some find it very useful to take it.
>
> A Navajo woman used to tell me that some things can be
> said (or make sense) in Navajo but not English, and
> yesterday I heard the same claim about other Indian
> languages on Native America Calling (a radio show).
> Another example is a story from the essay "Poetry:
> Lost in Translation?" that begins /Sappho to Valery:
> Poems in Translation" (1971) by John Frederick Nims,
> (which has a remarkable range of original languages).
> Nims describes how at a dinner party a Japanese woman
> tried to explain to him why Basho's frog haiku is "the
> most celebrated of all haiku". After an hour she gave
> up: "But you'd have to live in Japan!" Of course one
> failure doesn't prove something can't be done, but it
> raises the possibility.
>
> Nims also disputes VN's statement in the /New York
> Review of Books/ (Dec. 4, 1969) that "a poet's
> imagery is a sacred, unassailable thing." He further
> quotes "the Russian word, with its fluffly and dreamy
> and syllables, suits admirably this beautiful tree."
> He replies, "...suppose we called the tree a scab-bark
> or a snotch." He gives other reasons to change
> images:
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA16
>
> He doesn't consider Nabokov's approach, namely
> footnotes.
>
> Unfortunately, Nims's translations aren't the best
> arguments for his position that literal fidelty must
> be sacrificed for rhyme, tone, connotation, etc. One
> of his best additions, in my opinion, is in the last
> line of his version of Goethe's /Fliegentod/.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA207
>
> (Limited preview, original on previous page.)
>
> An outstanding howler is in /Natur und Kunst/:
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=SOIxSpnAOzAC&pg=PA187
>
> Unfortunately, my other favorite disaster isn't available
> in the Google Books view of this book, but as Nims says in
> reply to VN, it's a change of weasels to minks (is that an
> example of poshlost?) in a poem by Antonio Machado. The
> weasels' connotations may have been wrong, but the minks'
> are worse.
>
> Jerry Friedman
>


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