What Henley said

Verbatim Bill Kristol:

The way you puncture euphoria is reality, or to be more blunt, fear. I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear.

Jim Henley:

[T]he thing to note here is that Kristol identifies fear and violence (he goes on to tie the fear theme to attacking Iran) with “reality.” Fear is reality in his equation. The national greatness conservatives spent the 1990s arguing that national life without a higher purpose lacked meaning. They’ve spent the Naughts settling for a low one.

Two options

Option 1: The New York Times thinks its readers can’t do basic math.

Option 2: The New York Times relies on its readers to read between the lines to suss out government lies.

You be the judge:

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Let’s see…100 violations in two years…52 weeks a year…sounds like “weekly” to me.

(Yes, yes, you could make a tiny argument that the reporter meant to imply that “these things” were Really Big Violations, not the garden variety of — wait a second, are we actually buying into the claim that some violations of the law are just technically wrong and not, you know, actually wrong? Phooey on that.)

A helpful tip

The inimitable Daniel Davies:

Mahmoud Ahamdinejad’s name is fucking difficult to spell. It’s also difficult to pronounce. This forms the basis for my latest raft of pronouncements on international affairs.

It is based on the Davies BBC Pronunciation Department Theory Of Geopolitics, which basically states that the importance of any foreigner to the politics of the UK can be reasonably assessed by looking at how much trouble the newsreaders take to get his name right. In general, the BBC appears to believe that all foreigners are pissy little no-marks and you pronounce their names phonetically as if they were English words.

I’d say the theory holds for the U.S., too.

Viz, the pronunciation of Ahmadinejad’s name (which is actually much easier to spell than Khruschev’s if you remember that it is actually a double-barrelled name – Ahmadi-Nejad – the Guardian actually used to spell it this way for a short while but seems to have given up). This is basically pronounced as “I’m a dinner jacket”.

Go see what he has to say about the rest of the world’s leaders.

The beautiful words that describe America

Katherine has an extraordinary post that spells out how the soaring idealism of the United States can be tethered by the concrete review of our failures. But unlike other folks, she doesn’t see this as a reason to give up on the beautiful words. Even when they seem to be co-opted by people whose actions make a mockery of their own rhetoric.

Those glittering abstract nouns aren’t sufficient, but they can be damn useful. They aren’t accurate descriptions of this country right now, and probably they never have been, but a lot of Americans are sincerely attached to them. And sometimes, when presented with a stark contradiction between the bedtime stories we learned about this country as children, and concrete effects of our actions, we will choose to make the bedtime story true rather than give it up entirely.

It’s not an easy thing to do, but it sometimes works. It’s worked a number of times in this country’s history.

It’s almost Independence Day. Go read something that will make you proud to be an American.

A geography of Spanish verbs

Are you learning Spanish? Take a look at this excellently useful map of the present tense. Who would have thought that organizing verbs into categories such as the industrial north and the laid-back south would be such a handy way to remember them?

Seriously, go look. (And then check out the companion map for the past tense).

Important stuff said by other people

First, and most significantly, the U.S. government is disappearing people. (Report.) As if this slide towards totalitarianism wasn’t disturbing enough, two of them appear to be children:

In September 2002, Yusuf al-Khalid (then nine years old) and Abed al-Khalid (then seven years old) were reportedly apprehended by Pakistani security forces during an attempted capture of their father, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Extensive citation at Obsidian Wings, along with this analysis:

The evidence that our government held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s sons is not conclusive, and I do not mean to suggest that it is. Still, if you had told me, six years ago, that I would find myself seriously entertaining the possibility that my own government had detained children [...] I would have thought you were insane. Disappearing people of any age, without charges or trial or anything, is what two-bit dictators do; not what we do. But disappearing children, not seventeen year olds about whom one might have interesting debates about when exactly childhood ends but seven- and nine-year olds — that’s so far across the line that it would have been unimaginable to me. And the fact, if it is one, that they are supposedly “handled with kid gloves” and “given the best of care” does not begin to make up for this. Detention is not “the best of care” for anyone. It is certainly not “the best of care” for a young child.

Second, from Pandagon, a fantasy response on an explosive issue. I’d be very interested in any politican brave enough to say something like this:

“Abortion is not fun for any woman, which is why we’d like to keep them rare. I would also like to keep heart surgery rare, if I can help it. But just as we’ll never wipe out heart disease completely, we will never wipe out unplanned pregnancy completely, because women are human and sometimes they have circumstances outside of their direct control. I support prevention in health care. We can reduce the number of abortions and number of heart surgeries by helping Americans have better access to prevention. In the case of abortion, the best prevention is contraception and comprehensive sex education. I’d like to empower women to have the fullest range of options available so they can make the best decision for themselves.”

And finally, a rare example of a judge losing his temper in a stinging footnote to a ruling in the Lewis Libby case. What is most interesting to me is who the judge thought his audience was. I don’t read legal cases as a rule. Do judges write these sorts of insults as a shout-out to their clerks or buddies?

Do they do it as a wink and nod to say “Yeah, I have to rule this way on procedural grounds, but don’t worry, I’m not buying their baloney”? Or is there a more substantive purpose, a way of putting yourself on the record so that there is no later misunderstanding about your allegiances?

(Yes, it’s an annoying PDF, but it’s one paragraph. Click through and read it already.)

Via How Appealing.

(Folks, as most of you have probably figured out, I’m not Nicholas. He’s kindly given me posting privileges, and I’m going to do my best to avoid becoming the kudzu of his blog.)

In translation

I used to think about translation as something mechanical, like a computer. You feed in some words, it spits out some other words. Simple as that. And a bad translation was one that strayed too far from the original, one where the translator tried to get fancy and introduce his own ideas.^[1]

Then I actually learned a foreign language. Blast went a few assumptions, namely:

• Every English word has its equivalent in other languages.
• The best way to get the audience to understand is to literally translate each separate word.
• Translation is pretty much the same, no matter who does it.

Later, in a last-minute scramble to locate a reading for a wedding, I found a collection of Pablo Neruda’s work. Each poem was printed in Spanish on one page, English on the facing page. I was so relieved to find a reading that was loving but not sappy, passionate without being inappropriate, that I hardly glanced at the other books I’d brought home from the library.

Weeks later, I went to return them and came across the same poem again in another anthology. But this English version was uglier, clunkier. This guy clearly doesn’t have as light a touch, I thought. And then I realized that I was thinking of the translator as a poet.

The more closely I looked, the more I was astonished at the variation in translations, not just style but quality.

Consider this line:
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
(Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor, Sonnet XVII)

It can be translated as prosaic:
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.^[2]

or more formal:
so close that your eyes grow heavy when I tire.^[3]

It can focus on the emotion:
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.^[4]

or take flight into the fanciful:
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.^[5]

It all depends on the translator – her background, her skill, her understanding of the world the poet came from. If she likes him she may translate him sympathetically; if she is contemptuous of his politics she may slash at his naiveté. If she is not well educated her own vocabulary may be impoverished. If she is ignorant of his circumstances she may mistake his tone, reading honest devotion for sarcasm, or vice versa.

So now I’m wondering why no one has published a collection that includes poems in their original language, followed by three or four different translations for contrast. Perhaps this already exists, and I am not aware of it. A quick search found an apparently defunct website of a newsletter that invited readers’ translations of a chosen poem.

The community of professional translators must be fairly small. If a book like this exists, it is probably marketed just to this audience. Which is a shame, because it seems like something that would be a good discusson-starter even in a beginner-level language class. And of course there are probably other people like me, who would read something like that for fun.

Suggestions and speculation welcome.

1. “His or her” is awkward, and so I vary pronouns at random. Please do not interpret this as sexism, feminism, or any other ism.
   ↩
2. (Translator unknown.) ↩
3. (Translator David Short.) ↩
4. (Translator Stephen Mitchell, Into the Garden; Harper Perennial, 1993.) ↩
5. (Translator Mark Eisner, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems; City Lights Books, 2004.) ↩