On reading translations

The Internet connection is not always working here in the backwoods — hence the hiatus in posting here, if anyone noticed —

Still not healthy enough to do much walking in the woods, i'm reduced to walking through words. Often this means relying on translators to help me engage with a writer i can count on to shake me out of a mental rut, such as Dogen. So it's cause for celebration to discover, as i did last week, a complete English translation of Dogen's masterwork, the Shobogenzo, at the Shasta Abbey website.

The translation is by Rev. Hubert Nearman, who dedicated 14 years to the task and seems well qualified for it. Of course i can't compare his translation with the original, since i don't read medieval Japanese, so there's no point in my passing judgment on the quality of his translation. But this observation opens a deeper question about the wholehearted reading of ‘scriptures’ in translation.

The question can perhaps be put best in semiotic terms, since translation is paradigmatic of semiosis itself: a sign-process produces an interpretant, and translation is prototypical of interpretation. For example, take one fascicle or ‘chapter’ of Dogen's Shobogenzo: the title, ‘Kokyo’, is translated ‘On the Ancient Mirror’ by Nearman; the Nishijima/Cross translation (the only other one i've seen) calls it ‘The Eternal Mirror’. The whole essay is about this ‘mirror’ — in other words, the whole Japanese text is a sign and this Mirror is its object. Like any sign, Dogen's essay ‘determines its interpretant to stand in the same triadic relation to the same object for some interpretant’ (Peirce, CP 1.541). The original text ‘determines’ the text of the translation by constraining it to say the same thing as the original in another language; if it didn't, we wouldn't call the new text a ‘translation’.

This implies at least that both texts are about something which can be spoken of in either language (and perhaps in any language). The object of these signs is therefore independent of, and external to, any language used to direct attention to it. And each sign of that dynamic object, as Peirce called it, generates an interpretant which works in turn as another sign, generating a further interpretant, and so on — each sign in the sequence having the same object.

The catch is that whatever this object called a Mirror is, you must already have some acquaintance with it before you can interpret any signs as describing, defining or informing you about it. The sign itself can't supply this acquaintance; it can only give you some hints about how to renew that acquaintance and carry it forward. In terms of Dogen's essay, this is equally true of the original Japanese text and of any translation of it. Indeed the original text was itself a translation, namely of the eternal buddha-dharma, as reflected in Dogen's own reflections on his experience of the Ancient Mirror. And your reading of any translation is another translation of these signs directing your attention to the ancient mirror itself.

The word mirror is a symbol of the object of this infinite succession of signs. Most of Dogen's essay is about how to read this symbol, as used by various ancient masters in their koans and conversations. And this blog post is about how we read translations of that essay.

In that last sentence, i put ‘translations’ in the plural for a reason. It is obvious, but perhaps worth noticing for that very reason, that a single text can be translated in more than one way. In practice, this implies that if we compare two translations, we begin with the assumption that they are equivalent, even when they are different. This has to be our assumption because we are reading them as interpretant signs which have the same dynamic object as Dogen's original essay. So our working assumption is that where they differ, they have chosen different ways of directing our attention to that object, namely the Ancient or Eternal Mirror. For example, compare these two translations of a single Dogen sentence:

Nearman:

We should by all means have as our investigation through training and practice an exploration that broadly spans the sayings of all the Buddhas and Ancestors.

Nishijima/Cross:

There must be learning in practice that widely covers the teachings of all the buddhas and all the patriarchs.

We notice right away that latter parts of the two translations, from the word ‘that’ to the end of the sentence, are quite similar. But the part of the sentence before that consists of 15 words in the first translation, but only 6 words in the second. Yet we must assume that both say what Dogen was saying in the source text. We might decide eventually that one says it better than the other, but we certainly can't begin with such an assumption. Besides, the differences may be entirely a matter of style, and quirks of style should be considered innocent of misrepresentation until proven guilty of it. Since ancient Japanese and Chinese tend to be more economical in their use of words than contemporary English, i would guess that the Nishijima/Cross translation is closer to being word-for-word than the Nearman. But that in itself doesn't make it a better or more accurate translation. Nearman's Dogen appears a bit more verbose than the Dogen of other translators (for instance, the famous Genjokoan has a four-word title in many English translations; Nearman entitles it ‘On the Spiritual Question as It Manifests Before Your Very Eyes’). But perhaps Nearman captures more of the nuances of the text this way.

One implication of all this is that a translation can work as well as the original text, or maybe better, for ‘scriptural’ purposes — just as one artist can sometimes perform a song better than the artist who wrote it in the first place. A translation need not be a ‘second-hand’ substitute for the original. It can be the real Word itself, if it successfully ‘determines’ your reading to recognize the universal Truth, or some face of it, which dwells in the deepest layers of experience, which is your own because it is everyone's. Just don't be too sure that your reading is the right one! The trick is to recognize the Truth when it comes to you in another new (dis)guise. Are you ready for that?

Meaning and the logic of vagueness

My work in progress, Turning Words, documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The question is not What do you mean?—although that is sometimes a good question for clarification purposes. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work tends to be ignored because most of us are either too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don't see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn't learn of each other's work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce's mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (which i cite as PW), but copies of this are hard to find, and i only got hold of one recently.

In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education,—of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable,—theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

— Peirce to Welby (PW 11, 1903)

When a theorist like Peirce says that something is theoretically unattainable, he is not implying that it might be attained in practice (because theory is unreliable); he is saying just the opposite, that ‘perfect accuracy’ is unattainable because of the way meaning works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here's a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

That last sentence has inspired scholars to look for a text among Peirce's papers that ‘works out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness’, but as far as i know, nobody has claimed to find it. And considering how well that final sentence works as a pragmatic ‘punchline’ to Peirce's argument, it would be at least a little ironic if anyone did find such a text.

When Peirce says that ‘no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's’, he is talking about what i call polyversity (see TW Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there's a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there's a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (PW 20). I hope that my final draft will not burden the reader too much in this way.

The ‘trust’ in dialog includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly—trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires an exquisite sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.

Polyversity

The more ubiquitous or generic a feature or element of life is, the more names it is likely to have. This comes about because a greater variety of semiotic situations have arisen in which it needed to be distinguished from other features of the current scene. The quality of a concept which demands diversity in its expression is one aspect of what i call polyversity. I recently came across a comment relevant to this which is almost 900 years old. This is translated from the Latin of Peter Abelard's prologue to his Sic et Non, 1120:

There are many seeming contradictions and even obscurities in the innumerable writings of the church fathers. Our respect for their authority should not stand in the way of an effort on our part to come at the truth. The obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and may be discussed without impugning the good faith and insight of the fathers. A writer may use different terms to mean the same thing, in order to avoid a monotonous repetition of the same word. Common, vague words may be employed in order that the common people may understand; and sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement. Poetical, figurative language is often obscure and vague. [tr. Robinson]

Abelard's book went on to juxtapose hundreds of these ‘seeming contradictions’. The authorities of the Church at the time found this highly disturbing, and Abelard's book was suppressed much as the Gospel of Thomas and other ‘apocrypha’ were suppressed 900 years before. But perhaps we have now grown up enough not to panic when we encounter polyversity.