PLAYING WITH LIGHTNING - The Loss Between English to Greek Translations

 

PLAYING WITH LIGHTNING

The Loss Between English to Greek Translations

 

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." It's worth pointing out that the first time I saw this quote, it had the middle part cut out ("The difference between the almost right word and the right word...is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning") which I think has a lot to say about the power of editing, which will also be important for this paper. The two sentences are saying the same thing, but one is faster. Tighter. Smaller. I believe that this is an important aspect of English language, one that can be missed when translated to other European languages which have longer and more specific words. The vagueness may be lost (which one may even argue is worth keeping), but also the important punch of English, which is fit into small, quick words.

Someone as important and genius as Nikos Kazantzakis knew this, reported by Kimon Friar, who helped Kazantzakis translate his epic "Odysseus: A Modern Sequel" poem into English. Speaking specifically about an early passage in the story, after Odysseus had killed the suitors:

 

Two slaves prepared his bath, but when they saw their lord

they shrieked with terror, for his loins and belly steamed,

and thick black blood dripped down from both his murderous palms

 

Kazantzakis used to say to me, pounding his table in rhythm to the meter, tasting and emphasizing each syllable, "And thick black blood dripped down! Ah, if only I had monosyllables!" The Greek language, like all inflected languages, is highly polysyllabic and has practically no monosyllables. I am sure you would like to hear this passage in Kazantzakis' own demotic Greek.

 

Δυὀ δοὐλες συγκερνοὐσαν τὸ νερό, μὰ ώς είδαν τόν αφέντη

μπήξαν φωνή, γιατί ή σγουρή κοιλιά καί τά μεριά του αχνίζαν

καί μαύρα στάζαν αίματα πηχτά κι από τίς δυό του φούχτες

(Friar, pg.13)

 

The English version of the last line has 14 syllables (OR even 12, if you read "drip-ped" as "dript" and "mur-der-ous" as more like "mur-drus", both of which are normal English readings). The Greek line has 19 syllables. Kazantzakis believes – and I agree, and I think Mark Twain would as well – that something can be lost with a stretched out sentence, with extensive syllables. Something in the emotional effect of a particular sentence can be numbed for the reader if the sentence is longer than it could be.

Comedian George Carlin speaks about this when he mentions the change in American language from "shell shock" in World War 1 (two syllables) getting changed by the Vietnam war into "post-traumatic stress disorder" (8 syllables and even a hyphen) to make a point about euphemisms; how they seek to lessen emotional packages by making the words unnecessarily longer. I'd even include the tendency to call the "war" (one syllable) in Vietnam as a "conflict" (two syllables) as further proof.

This paper is intended to show that the English language contains multitudes of seemingly small but surprisingly strong emotional effects in its monosyllabic language. I'll be using the opening lines from three works of literature, two in original English and one originally from French into English. Then attempting to translate them into Greek as accurately as possible, both in actual words and the intended emotional package. Each initial sentence uses small, easy language to express deep emotional effects. Some people wrongly believe that since American words are relatively smaller in size compared to their European counterparts that therefore American thoughts are likewise simplified. This is not true.

The inspiration for this paper came from an older man I met with my father while I was in Greece. After finding out that I wasn't fluent in Greek, he declared (in broken English) that English  is a "simple, ugly language." Since I literally not a month before had just finished Moby Dick, I knew he was absolutely wrong. But I also knew I didn't know enough Greek to convince him otherwise, not being able to express the amazing and horrifying subtleties in that American masterpiece well enough at the time. This paper is my counterargument to him.

 

First Example: Moby Dick, Herman Melville

"Call me Ishmael."

Famous first lines of a famous American novel. The first immediate question is why does Ishmael tell you to Call him Ishmael. Not "My name is Ishmael." Is it laziness? Is he trying to be friendly? Letting us know that there is already an openness between us? Is he being mysterious? Is it not his real name? Does he have something to hide? Some of these questions may be answered in the book, but as I mentioned previously, the initial uncertainty may be intentional.

Three words, 5 syllables. Three of those used by the name, which would be unchanged between translations. "Call me..." So much filled in those two syllables. Each word monosyllabic. Now, the question being, how to translate that into modern Greek?

Όνομα μου είναι Ίσμαελ = "My name is Ishmael." This is accurate for the facts, but misses out on all the possibilities and questions raised by the uncertainty of the request. It doesn't make you want to keep reading. There is no unanswered question that demands a second sentence. It has no effect on the eyes. It's boring.

Καλέστε μου Ίσμαελ = "Call me Ishmael." This is a little better. This is accurate for the verb. Literally, "When you want my attention, make the act of 'calling' Ismael." But it's also an imperative. It's an order. It seems (and feels) like a stronger demand that the original. The mystery is still there, but it comes off as a wall in front of the character. This phrase holds less uncertainty. "You call me Ishmael."

Πηγαίνω από τον Ίσμαελ “I go by Ishmael.” This is the phrase that I would choose. A passing suggestion. It seems harmless, but a moment of investigation would bring up the questions. But that's still 9 syllables, 4 more than the original English. That's four more beats before the small surprise is revealed. That's more time for the brain to work, which we – and Melville, and Kazantzakis – do not want. We want a small package to hide a great surprise. Πάω με Ίσμαελ, is best, since we're trying to save syllables here. Our goal here for this paper is tight, packed, quick words to sneak beyond the brain and hit something else.

 

Second Example: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

"We were somewhere around Barstow, near the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold."

Possibly my favorite opening line in any book I've ever read. Here – in one sentence, 18 words, only five of them with double syllables (none have more than two, 23 syllables in all) – we have your full attention when you start the book. It also tricks you into calm; "somewhere around," "near the edge," "desert." Deserts are quiet, possibly nothing on the Earth is more silent. We have uncertainty about our location "somewhere"; The edge is a vague long line. It certainly is not a point, but they could be anywhere along a line. A line that is made of dust, certainly not a straight line of some kind. Where does Not-Desert end and Desert begin, in any desert? Nothing important seems to be happening. Then suddenly something happens. Something horrible. More Something than you can imagine happening in the middle of nowhere like this. Something you could not have seen coming. The first two sentence fragments make you believe you are at rest, when suddenly by the end you are a lamb to the slaughter. All with using less than two dozen syllables.

How do we recreate this beautiful sudden rocket explosion into modern Greek? I believe it's better to begin by getting the first two fragments put away.

Ήμασταν κάπου γύρω από το Βαρστω, κοντά στην άκρη της ερήμου = An accurate translation, in 21 syllables. You could even delete  από το, bringing the whole thing down to 18 syllables, which would also help. Not much else needs to be done, because nothing is happening, just as planned. There's no emotion to present here, because it's just a calm before the end.

όταν τα ναρκωτικά άρχισαν να πάρουν εμάς = 15 syllables to say “when the drugs they began to take us,” which is somewhat close. With the first 18 syllables, this adds up to 33. With four words that have triple syllables or more. Plus, να πάρουν εμάς is, I think, not as accurate to the original. “To take us” does not mean something as loaded as “to take hold.” You'll also notice that the original in English lacks a pronoun. Drugs could be “taking hold” of anything. Possibly the characters, but not only them. The surroundings, their minds, their eyes, their mouths, their skin, anything. Here we have more of what Ismael was using; we have several possibilities of what could be taken hold of by narcotics. We will need to keep reading.

A possible solution would be Ήμασταν κάπου γύρω Βαρστω, κοντά στην άκρη της ερήμου, όταν τα ναρκωτικά άρχισαν να πιάσιμα όλα – “to catch everything,” but even then we're adding another syllable, ultimately to 35. Unless we would want to drop όλα, which is possible, bringing us to 33. Still, this sentence only works best in English. There would even be more monosyllabic English words to choose from for other things drugs could do instead of “take hold”; hold, drip, stop, drop, grip, clench, snatch, grasp, pound, mess, throw, wail, sound, blast...I could go for dozens more, perhaps a hundred. Even hundreds more if I just wanted to keep it 3 syllables or less, faster to read than πιάσιμα.

 

Third Example: The Stranger, by Albert Camus

“Maman died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I'm not sure.”

For the final sentence, we have a heavy challenge. This is the opening line in my copy of a French work of existential philosophy, a fictional novel with a main character who doesn't care about anything. This first problem is deciding which translation to use. The original French has the sentences as “Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.” I was reading the English version, with some slight order change, spelling changes, and pronouns. Someone before me had to make the same kind of decisions that we're talking about here; how to edit, change, translate, and tighten into something very small but still very strong.

Obviously the emotion we want to maintain is the shock of being inside the head of a character who doesn't know (and doesn't care that he doesn't know) when his mother died. The first thing is to decide between “Maman died today” or “Today mother died.” The first version begins positively (most people would be happy to think of their mother), then goes down in mood immediately very sharply with the second word (died), and then again even deeper in recent horror and pain (today). From up high into deep downward. The second version is neutral (today) – happy (mother) – horrible (died). The first feels sad into more sad, the second feels more chaotic, with medium, then up, then down. It feels like a much smaller (3 word, 5 syllable) version of the previous line from “Fear & Loathing...” above; tricked into calm in the first 2/3 before being destroyed from out of nowhere in the last part, but it works in 3 words instead of three sentence fragments.

Just to start somewhere, let's go with the initial tighter version.

“Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.” 9 words, 14 syllables. The original French had 16 syllables, so we're still dealing with a very tightly packed group of words. If we follow the closest Greek translation we can, while removing any unnecessary articles or pronouns as we've been doing, we still get “Σήμερα μητέρα πέθανε. Ή ίσως χθες, δεν ξέρω.” At maximum efficiency, we may have 8 words – less than English – but still 17 syllables. Even compared across three languages, trying our very best to make everything as simple as possible, English still keeps the highest emotional economy in its words. 14 syllables instead of 17.  Almost 17.5% more efficient than the Greek version, to be exact by the numbers.

Some of these things – different ways of saying the same thing – are things that only the English language can do. Different possibilities. This, I believe, is an important proof of quality for any language. If a language has something unique about it, that means that it has something about it that is irreplaceable when translated into another language. Just as we know things are lost when translated to English, the opposite is also true. If there were any language – French, Greek, German, Japanese, Somali, etc. – that could do better than English at what English tries to do, then one could make an argument that English is a second rate way to communicate. That it is easily replaceable.

I have to say, I believe that is not true.

 

Conclusion

With this paper, I did not intend to prove that English is somehow automatically superior to Greek, or any other language. If that were my goal, I would be just as wrong as that old man in the beginning who thought English was a simple, ugly language. No language on Earth is simple or ugly, because every language will have people who speak it who will have complex and beautiful thoughts they will need to express. Every language requires a master in that language to show of what it is capable. To show its heights and abilities. I only wanted to prove that English is just as capable of creating its own great works of art, as well as expressing those from other languages when placed into English. I believe there is so much that smaller words can do, and I know Kazantzakis believed it as well, which was why he printed so many of his works in the “simple” dialect of demotic Greek. Smaller words with less syllables can make sentences that are more dense, which leads to greater explosions of emotion.

 

 

Bibliography

Camus, Albert – The Stranger, 1989; Vintage

Carlin, George – Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, 1990 (CD)

Friar, Kimon – The Spiritual Odyssey of Nikos Kazantzakis, 1979; North Central Publishing Company

Melville, Herman – Moby Dick or The Whale, 1996; Reader's Digest Association

Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 2010; Vintage

ONE NIGHT ONLY! (Essay)

 

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Audience Attention as Co-Creation in Stand-Up Comedy

 

Imagine, if you will, a Buddhist Mandala sand sculpture. An austere and silent group of Buddhist monks spend weeks, delicately arranging colored sand, of seemingly thousands of bright and impossibly miniscule hues and living tones. All done in miraculously small detail, for a hundred gods and goddesses, deities and religious heroes, in amazingly tiny portraiture. All in a circle over 10 feet in circumference, every inch patiently and devoutly crafted. All the brightest colors of the visible rainbow, with infinitesimally small arrangements you never thought possible for mere human hands to create. Then, when it's finished, in a visual and chromatic symphony to surpass some of the greatest sunsets you may have ever seen in your entire life, the monks arrive again, gather and destroy this unfathomable work of art. All the formerly meticulously placed individual grains of sand now swept en masse into a solemn bowl and ceremoniously, under holy prayer, now dispersed into a river, so the blessings can spread to the rest of the world. This art imparts a lesson, that even things of great beauty and talent will eventually change shape. Experience requires you to be present, because nothing lasts forever. The mandala, and lived experiences as a whole, is something that can only be lived.

Now imagine that those monks also had to remember to wish someone a happy birthday while they were doing it. And the temple had a two-drink minimum, which leads one guy to "drink 7 cause it's cheaper that way." And there's a heckler who thought that he should "help" the monks do their job. Plus, there's the bachelorette party that's mad that the monks aren't "making the sculpture for her."

This is a rough comparison – to me, at least – for the general feeling of performing stand-up comedy. Say whatever you want about comedy, but I believe one fact of the matter is that it is an art form that only exists as long as it is being performed, and ceases to exist once the performance is finished. Even other tangentially related forms of public performance (theater, for instance) may be made better by the presence of an audience – the performers may draw energy or not from a warm or cold audience – but a play given to an empty room will still contain the same dialogue as in front of a packed house. Plus, the script still survives as a script. A play may be served or improved by live performance, but it certainly can't be said to not-exist, even if it is never performed for an audience. It's still lives in script form.

Whereas even if a comic may have an ideal set – either written or in their head, with salient points they might hope to deliver – the show is far more co-created with the audience, at least when compared to every other art form. There is far more (let's call it) pivoting, and therefore creation, that one might be forced to do at showtime. Creation that very likely was not planned for, nor will ever happen again. Surely, thinking on one's feet is appreciated in a theater actor, but that's only in the case of something going wrong, in order to bring the show back to where it needs to be. Comedy has the always latent potential to veer into some totally undiscovered and exciting country for both the performer and the audience.

This is even more evident if you compare stand-up comedy to any of the more (we might say) static art forms, such as paintings, books, and movies. Even attending a movie with a screaming baby nearby does not change the foundational celluloid that is being projected onto the screen. And of course, that's not to say that those art forms can't have a different meaning over time – growing old with a work of art in your life that means a lot to you, and grows with you, is one of life's miracles – but these things do not physically change between viewings. How you interpret or view art may change as you age, but that is not that same as the art itself changing. To extend the analogy, it would be as if you opened a book from the library, and a cascade of penis straws from a bachelorette party kept falling out the whole time while you were reading. It'd certainly change how the work affected you, to say the least.

For the Work of Art known as a comedy show – like the sand sculpture – is created communally in the empty between-space of the artist and the audience in the seats. To reiterate and make clear: the audience is not the sand, they are fellow monks; but without them, The Show does not exist. The room always exists. The stage and chairs exist. And the audience members may be said to exist, as well as the performer – they all have lives outside of this space, of course. But the show does not exist whatsoever in a complete freestanding form, away from any of the components in proximity. The Show does not exist, it is only Maintained Until It Isn't. If any human part of the equation stops giving it their full attention, it struggles, and might wither and die. Or, at the very least, certainly not reach the heights of its potential.

Of course the final point is whether it's a foregone conclusion to desire to pursue that maximum potential, and I submit that it is. Firstly, if you pay the ticket for a comedy show, and then don't do your part by paying attention, you are throwing away your own money. You are literally giving yourself a worse night. By not doing your part to support this vocabulary and auditory alchemy, you are directly affecting how good of a time you will have. There is an amazing amount of creative agency at hand, comparatively speaking, as a comedy audience member. To not pursue that to the best of your ability is economically counterintuitive, so say the least. There are several (previously mentioned) public entertainment art forms that can be idly attended, without affecting the end product. Comedy is not one of them.

Secondly, due to that enormous amount of agency, you are also getting something out of it. This is not only to help the comic get a better response from their artistic expression – you're not just helping the person on stage – but it's also a feedback loop that is returned back to you. This is obviously not to say that being an audience member for a comedy show is work. Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the performer would also like to keep this whole endeavor as far as away from the concept of "Real Work" as possible, as well. But it can definitely be thought of as a serotonin reward center. The more you put in, the more you are likely to receive. A helpful analogy would be if you were to compare it to going dancing; it's fun and lovely, but one must also be ready to dance. And there are obviously different kinds of dancing – waltzes, slam dancing, mosh pits, polka steps, and rave humping – but regardless of what style you might want to sign up for on any particular night, one thing for sure is that it's certainly no place for lethargy. Just think of comedy as Brain Dancing. I'm not exactly sure which types of comedy align with which types of dancing I just listed, but I think the analogy still holds well enough to make my point clear.

Of course, I'd be a fool and a tyrant to suggest going to comedy shows without drinking, or to even ask performers to be sober. And, admittedly, I have had shows (for instance) where I was asked to congratulate someone's birthday, and the rest of the show ended up going very well, especially since now I had secured an immediate simpatico with someone in the audience – a new friend I was on a first name basis with – to commiserate with if things went strange, or express pride together if something killed. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that The Unplanned Weirdness is a large reason that comedy continually strikes me as so beautiful. But I think there is something to be said to remember the important distinction that exists between one thing being a challenge and another thing being an intrusion. Buddhist monks obviously don't make sand sculptures because they're easy, but that's still not a green light invitation to try your best to intentionally make their job impossible. Your help and concentration as audience is genuinely and deeply appreciated, but it's important to remember that – metaphorically speaking – we're still dealing with sand. This whole endeavor can still be surprisingly delicate. But when it's done well, it barely even feels like work – for all the parties involved. Which obviously largely feeds into why it's probably the best job I've ever had.