Lost in Translating
At the beginning of each academic year, teachers find themselves in the enviable position of being professionally developed. It is an occasion that I approach with a certain amount of trepidation. Have I slipped too far backwards since last July? Can this bear of very little brain absorb another educational insight without something important falling out the other side? Have I inadvertently spent the summer becoming professionally undeveloped? Thankfully, this year’s training left me both largely unscathed and, I trust, marginally improved.
In one session, we were reminded of the importance of accurately reporting what students say. Our presenter warned us to be careful when summarising, interpreting or rephrasing another person’s words because, as she memorably observed, paraphrasing changes the meaning.
Which immediately presented me with an idea for the Column.
You see, dear reader, for much of my professional life, students have been asking me to paraphrase. Not, I hasten to add, because my own utterances were entirely unfathomable, but because they were struggling with the considerably more famous words on the page in front of them.
Particularly when faced with Shakespeare or ‘the poetry unit’, there comes a point at which a hand is raised and this question arrives in one form or another: But sir, what does it actually mean? Usually what is being requested is not really an interpretation, but a translation. Could you put it into ordinary English? Could you tell me what Shakespeare is actually saying? Could you explain the poem without all the difficult bits?
It is an entirely reasonable question, even if it springs from a not so subtle misunderstanding of literature. From an early age, students are conditioned to approach a poem as though they were pearl divers, plunging into the murky depths in search of a single, precious ‘pearl of meaning’ buried below the waves. Once the prize has been brought to the surface, the ocean itself can be safely ignored.
I have never really bought into this hidden-vault theory of literature. I have always felt that a poem, like a song, is inherently more than the sum of its parts, and that its meaning cannot be detached from the experience of encountering it.
Yet the pressure to extract a simple message remains immense. It brings to mind Billy Collins’ wonderful Introduction to Poetry, where he describes wanting his students to walk inside the poem’s room / and feel the walls for a light switch, or waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author’s name on the shore.
Instead, as Collins observes:
…all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
It seems to me that the confession is the paraphrase. It is the neat, manageable summary we demand so that we can tick the box, record the meaning, and proceed to the next text with minimal intellectual discomfort.
Of course there is something deeply attractive about the idea that understanding means being able to say something more simply. We take a difficult thing and make it easier. We take a complicated argument and reduce it to its essential point. We take Shakespeare and turn him into something that sounds rather more like us.
As a young teacher, I was not always immune to this temptation. I remember a student once asking me what a Shakespearean speech really meant. Full of the confidence that only a relatively inexperienced teacher can possess, I proceeded to translate the entire passage into ‘modern’ English. The student looked pleased. I felt useful. Everyone appeared to be winning.
Except of course, dear old Shakespeare.
By the time I had finished, one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language had somehow been replaced by a tired talentless English teacher. I had managed to make the passage more accessible, certainly. I was much less sure that I had made it better understood.
Years later, I am increasingly suspicious of the assumption that understanding necessarily means simplification.
In fact, I wonder whether we sometimes make the mistake of believing that the meaning of something can be separated from the thing itself. We talk about a poem as though the poet has placed an idea inside it, rather like a letter inside an envelope, and our job as readers is simply to open the envelope, retrieve the message and discard the packaging. Once we have established what the poet was trying to say, we can put the poem to one side, satisfied that we have got the point.
But poetry does not really work like that. And therefore of course, neither do the best bits of life.
Words are not simply carrying meaning. They are part of the meaning. The rhythm, sound, imagery, ambiguity, structure, associations and even the physical shape of the language contribute to what the poem is. Remove them and you have not necessarily uncovered the meaning. You may simply have created something else.
Think about Shakespeare’s famous description of life in Macbeth: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We can certainly paraphrase it. Macbeth believes that life is meaningless. He has reached a point of nihilistic despair. There, we have the message.
But we have also lost almost everything.
The repeated sounds. The rhythm. The extraordinary compression. The image of life as a story. The bitter irony of sound and fury followed by signifying nothing. The way the words themselves seem to enact the chaos and emptiness Macbeth is describing. We have retained the information while losing the experience.
It is rather like explaining a joke; a social crime of which I have, on occasion, been painfully guilty. I recall once ruining a perfectly good joke not by missing the punchline, but by explaining the mechanics of it to a room full of unsmiling faces. I identified the reversal of expectations, pointed out the linguistic ambiguity, and essentially delivered a brief, uninvited lecture on the mechanics of humour. The information was preserved perfectly. The joke, however, died on the table. Explaining a joke is perhaps the purest form of paraphrasing: something essential disappears precisely at the moment we attempt to dissect it.
At this point, dear reader, you will expect me to be turning to old friend of the Column Iain McGilchrist, and never one to disappoint, here I go (again)…
McGilchrist’s arguments concern our different ways of attending to the world. One way seeks to understand by isolating, categorising, measuring and abstracting. It breaks things into manageable pieces so that they can be examined more easily. This approach has been responsible for some extraordinary achievements. Your ex-Director for one has cause to be very grateful for modern medicine, central heating and the fact that somebody somewhere understands how stuff works.
The problem comes when we assume that this is the only way to understand how stuff works.
There are some things that become clearer when we take them apart. An engine for example. If my car suddenly develops an alarming noise, I would much rather have a mechanic who is prepared to dismantle the relevant machinery than one who stands beside it thoughtfully contemplating the mysterious interconnectedness of all things.
But other things lose something essential when we dismantle them.
A friendship is not simply the sum of a number of conversations. A landscape is not merely a collection of hills, trees and fields. A piece of music is not reducible to its individual notes. And a poem is not a collection of literary techniques waiting to be identified by an industrious Year 10 pupil with a highlighter.
Yet this is precisely the temptation that literary study can sometimes create.
We take the poem apart. We identify the metaphor. We underline the alliteration. We label the caesura. We explain the effect of the enjambment. All of this can be useful. Indeed, it is part of what we do in English, and quite rightly so. But there is a danger that the dismantled components begin to seem more real than the poem itself.
The contents of a watch can be spread across a workbench, every cog and spring carefully labelled and examined. We might then be able to describe the function of every component in impressive detail. Yet it doesn’t tell the time. And neither will it help us understand the feeling that somehow in the cold clockwork of the stars and nations we have become the hand pointing the seconds. But I digress…
The same problem arises with poetry. Consider Wordsworth’s Daffodils. We can summarise it perfectly well. A man comes across a large number of flowers. He observes them in the breeze. Later, the memory of the scene brings him pleasure. This is all true.
It is also not the poem.
The daffodils dance. The waves dance too. The rhythm of the poem begins to move. The sounds themselves seem to participate in the joy Wordsworth is describing. The poem does not simply tell us that the experience was beautiful. It recreates something of the experience.
This is why I sometimes worry when students ask me for the meaning of a poem as though it were a piece of information that can be detached from the poem itself. The paraphrase may be perfectly accurate and still be profoundly inadequate.
T.S. Eliot, in discussing poetry, suggested that there can be a kind of communication which takes place before we have consciously understood what has been communicated. I find that idea increasingly persuasive. We have all experienced it. A poem can affect us before we can explain it. A line can stay with us for years without our being entirely sure why.
Indeed, one of the strange things about literature is that understanding often arrives late.
As a student, I remember reading poems and plays that I dutifully admired because I had been told that they were important. Some of them seemed determined to conceal their importance from me. I finished them, placed them back on the shelf and congratulated myself on having survived the ordeal.
Then, years later, entirely uninvited, they began returning.
A line from Eliot here. A passage from Shakespeare there. An image that had meant very little at seventeen suddenly acquired a different weight at forty. Something that I had once regarded as merely obscure began to seem uncannily precise.
Perhaps the poem had not changed.
Perhaps I had.
That, I think, is one of the reasons literature matters. It does not simply give us information about the world. It gives us forms through which we can encounter the world differently. Shakespeare’s understanding of jealousy, ambition, grief or love cannot be reduced to a list of statements, because part of what Shakespeare is doing is allowing us to experience those things through language, character and dramatic form.
We do not read King Lear merely to discover that old men should think carefully before dividing up their kingdoms. This would be useful advice, but perhaps not quite sufficient justification for four hundred years of theatrical performance.
Nor do we read Macbeth simply to learn that ambition can have unpleasant consequences. If that were all Shakespeare had to tell us, a particularly gloomy careers adviser could probably have saved us the trouble.
We read because the work itself enlarges our understanding.
And this is perhaps where the apparent conflict between analysis and experience disappears. I am not arguing that we should stop analysing literature. Quite the opposite. Analysis can be one of the ways in which we learn to see more deeply. The danger is only in mistaking the analysis for the thing being analysed.
As we have discussed, a map is useful. But nobody confuses a map with a walk.
The score of a symphony allows a musician to perform it. It is not the same thing as hearing the orchestra.
And a paraphrase can help us begin to understand a poem. It is not the poem.
Perhaps this also explains why, despite all our attempts to make literature more accessible, great works continue to resist being reduced to simple answers. They contain more than we can extract from them. They remain capable of surprising us because they are not merely containers of information. They are encounters.
The title of this column may have changed, but A Word in Your Ear suggests a familiar arrangement: a quiet confidence, a little piece of advice passed from one person to another. So, as this new iteration begins, and as your ex-Director steps into a different corner of school life, allow me one small word in your ear.
When reading Shakespeare, poetry or indeed any literature, beware the assumption that understanding always means making something simpler. Sometimes we need to take things apart. Sometimes we need to identify the component pieces and examine them carefully. But sometimes the very act of dismantling prevents us from seeing what the thing actually is.
A poem is an organic structure. Its parts belong to one another. Its meaning emerges from the relationships between them, from the whole that they create together. To remove the words from that whole in the hope of finding the meaning may be rather like dismantling a flower to discover where the beauty is kept.
And perhaps that is the real problem with the question, But sir, what does it actually mean?
The answer is sometimes surprisingly simple.
Read it again.
Listen to it.
Stay with it.
And, just occasionally, resist the temptation to take it apart.
After all, nobody ever fell in love with a paraphrase.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Staying with it!