mentally bifocal

“Hot! Every word of Aristotle exposed!” These diglot-peddlers lack shame

I have an embarrassing confession to make... when I get stuck, I have sometimes weakened and allowed my eye to wander over to the right-hand pages.

Yesterday, a fellow blogger got me laughing out loud when he'd written these words.  So much of the sarcasm resonates with me; it's his parody of the fear of a both-and world that so many have.  Most would prefer an either-or world.  Especially when it comes to the Bible, especially when it comes to the singular notion of absolute Truth, the fear is that one may be wrong while The Other, so different, just may be right.  Before I'd read my fellow blogger's silliness, with more seriousness, I blogged a bit yesterday on three examples of this fear.

Today, I'd like to blog on the value of the diglot.  There's value in having one original language open to a page in a translation of that original.  There's value as much or more in being "mentally bifocal," as Pearl S. Buck put it.  If we were to read that in her English, we'd find it in her autobiography My Several Worlds.  If we were to read it in Italian, then we might go here to find it also as "La mente bifocale."  If we were reading it in English but were trying to understand it, to translate it, into Chinese (which is one of Pearl S. Buck's languages in one of her several worlds), then we might start here.  The point is that we could not stay just in one place, within our comfort zone, a zone of limited-perception singular monocular objectivity, with the Other over there not having any part of me or mine.

"Aristotle exposed," indeed.  Until you've just begun to struggle, some with others, with how his words are so like and so unlike your own, then what's the value of knowing him?  Maya Angelou, for example, who was raped by a misogynistic gynophobe when she was an 8-year-old girl, listens rhetorically to Aristotle and insists, rather exclaims!:  "One needs to know Aristotle.... One needs it desperately....  Must! I mean desperately... if one is to be at ease anywhere."  How has she come to know this need to know?  There's something on the other side from me, isn't there?

Much more positively if more theoretically, Mikhail Epstein speaks of stereotextuality and of interlation.  He's saying that a diglot (and this might apply to a Loeb classical library edition of any of Aristotle's works or even to the Bible with its "absolute Truth" for the fearful and its multiple languages for the willing) has value.  Do you notice, reading Epstein's essay, however, how he ends up asking questions?

Can an idea be adequately presented in a single language? Or do we need a minimum of two languages (as with two eyes or two ears) to convey the volume of a thought or image? Will we, at some future time, accustom ourselves to new genres of stereo poetry and stereo philosophy as we have become accustomed to stereo music and stereo cinema? Will the development of translingual discourses (or, in Bakhtin's words, "the mutual illumination and interanimation of languages") become a hallmark of our century?

Well, I go back to little Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker, to her century now, not ours anymore.  Reading her autobiography, I notice how in the mornings she was working with her mother on the schooling called the Calvert method (named after Lord Baltimore Calvert).  I remember doing the very same thing with the very same curriculum with my mother.  Then she'd go study, differently, with her Chinese tutor.  And so I remember with my tutors, the Vietnamese ones.  This is her context for her stereotexting, for her interlating, for her bifocal mentality.  She speaks of the "damage" it caused.  But how seriously do you want to take that?  She's also speaking of racism and of sexism.  Let me exclaim.  She's also speaking of racism and of sexism!  Of the need for a kalaidescope, as Jacqueline Jones Royster does:

Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives.

Had Jacqueline Jones Royster and Pearl S. Buck talked, I think they would have understood this together.  Young Pearl began this valuable kaleidoscopic listening and learning early.

I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

Later in life Pearl saw, as Jacqueline feels every day, the double-sided difficulties of people who only see one side, who only understand what it is like to be singularly absolutely in the American majority in the world.  Pearl, in 1941, when America was still very profoundly full of race prejudice, wrote this:

Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.

Is this despair?  Or do you yourself know these sides of things?  The value of them?  Does Pearl S. Buck with her binocular mind and words really threaten the "authority of God's word" as this blogger suggests she does?  Or isn't there value in seeing something beyond your own supposed objectivity, of reading the Bible as a diglot even?

blue like lace underwear

Mikhail Epstein encourages us to experience things very differently from how the monolingual, monological Aristotle must observe the thing. Aristotle couldn’t stand things that were speakeristic: neither poets (whose words were in flux) and translation (which included the barbarian tongue) nor females (either mortals or the goddesses).

Epstein says:

Joseph Brodsky's poem “To Urania” contains the line, “Odinochestvo est' chelovek v kvardrate”--literally: “Loneliness is a man squared.” Brodsky's own translation of this line into English reads, “Loneliness cubes a man at random.” It would be irrelevant to ask which of these expressions is more adequate to Brodsky's poetic thought. They together represent the scope of its metaphoric meaning. A stereo effect is produced, not by Russian or English lines as such but by their figurative relationship. The English “cube” amplifies and strengthens the meanings of the Russian “square,” as a lonely man self-reflects and self-multiplies, growing multidimensional as a compensation for his losses. English “cube” and Russian “square” both serve as metaphors for loneliness, but in addition they are metaphors to each other and thus build up the next level of figurative relationship between languages. Thus bilingualism makes this poem a work of special verbal art that can be called “stereopoetry,” which has more metaphorical layers in it than “monopoetry.”

Stereo effects may be intended by an author or produced in the reading experience . . .

одиночэство эст' чэловэк в квардратэ
Odinochestvo est' chelovek v kvardrate
Loneliness is a man squared
Loneliness cubes a man at random

You can find the poem in Russian in Brodsky’s уранииа, which he translates into English in To Urania. (poemhunter.com offers an ebook of some of Brodsky’s poems in English, including this one, which is found on other sites as well).

What of Ουρανία, read in English, is “blue like lace underwear”?

To Urania

Everything has its limit, including sorrow.
A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.
Loneliness cubes a man at random.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
body's absence at every given
point? That's why Urania's older sister Clio!
in daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,
you see the globe's pate free of any bio,
you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.
There they are, blueberry-laden forests,
rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon
or the towns in whose soggy phone books
you are starring no longer; father eastward surge on
brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing
in tall sedge; the cheeckbones get yellower
as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam
dreadnoughts or cruisers,
and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.