J.R.R. Tolkien, born January 3, 1892

(Full-size view available at Strange Maps)

Today would have been the 120th birthday of author, linguist and professor J.R.R. Tolkien. W.H. Auden was a student who listened to Tolkien read Beowulf at university in the 1930s; Anthony Burgess would later write about Lord of the Rings that "Tolkien loved Anglo-Saxon literature because there were no women in it." Burgess was one to know; his own A Clockwork Orange (1962) described a modern dystopia with its own hyper-masculine psychological topography.

Both authors, it seems, were interested in myths created by stories told after the battles are over, and both had ideas involving a previous golden age, if more vicious one, of gods and monsters.

As Roger Lewis writes in his controversial biography, Anthony Burgess: "Tolkien ... maintained it was all downhill after the Norman Conquest -- all that Frenchification despoiling the Old English -- and Burgess had a similar racist philosophy, except he went back further still, wanting to purify us from the influence of the Angles, from the Danish peninsula, who invaded in the fifth century, and of the Germanic peoples, who migrated to our shores at a similar period. ... 'In principle, I'm in favor of Welsh nationalism,'" Lewis quotes Burgess at one point, "'and the Celts recovering England, too."

Quoting Burgess further: "Excalibur would be a rallying cry to drive the bloody Anglo-Saxons out. They are the invaders. But it will never happen." At another point Burgess (who saw himself as a Welsh writer) makes his point by naming Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas as three writers who surrendered their gifts "to the Anglo-Saxon gods of dullness. ... I will beat the Anglo-Saxons yet."

The mythological European setting of Tolkien's trilogy was no accident. Burgess commented on some of Tolkien's themes in The Lord of the Rings: “the flavor of the book is feudal rather than democratic: the theme is loyalty and the willingness to combat pagan enemies. ..." These are admirable sentiments for any tale of victories remembered around the campfire, but for Tolkien they might have had a contemporary resonance.

When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in post-World War II Britain (1954/55) the lessons of a world-under-threat and a recently-vanquished Third Reich, with its own mythological Wagnerian framework, would have been a strong creative agent. To Burgess, there are other echoes in the action of the story: "... The great epic poem Beowulf is entirely masculine, all warriors relaxing in meadhalls before going off to fight fearful enemies. Beowulf’s supernatural enemy is Grendel, a frightening monster, but Grendel’s mother is worse.”

Frank Jacobs, in Strange Maps, posts the work of Peter Bird. Bird, professor of geophysics and geology at UCLA, overlays the current map of Europe with Tolkien's original sketch of imagined land, to locate the "long-gone" geography of the Third Age. Here's part of Jacobs' post, which features Bird's map (above; a full-size version is available at Big Think):

... Created by Tolkien somewhere in the 1930s, the map shows the ‘mortal lands’ of Middle-earth, which according to Tolkien himself is part of our own Earth, but in a previous, mythical era. At the time of the events described in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’, Middle-earth is moving towards the end of its Third Age, about 6,000 years ago.

... The Hobbits are described as inhabiting ‘the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea’, and therefore it’s tempting to associate their home with Tolkien’s own, England. Yet, Tolkien himself wrote that ‘as for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was devised ‘dramatically’, rather than geologically, or paleontologically.” Elsewhere, Tolkien does admit “The ‘Shire’ is based on rural England, and not any other country in the world.”

Tolkien at least compares his ‘Old World’ with Europe: “The action of the story takes place in the North-West of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean (…) If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.”

But, as Tolkien states in the prologue to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, it would be fruitless to look for geographical correspondences, as “Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed…” And yet, that’s exactly what Peter Bird attempts with the map here shown.

Jacobs's post is complete with a kind of Rough Guide to the real Middle-earth, a list of geographic approximations where the action is laid, from the Shire to Mount Doom. As Brian D'Sousa comments elsewhere about The Lord of the Rings, "Sometimes a book or film tells us more about the era in which it was made rather than the fictionalized plot or setting."

After an ultimate triumph over the Nazis in a wracking, bloody, six-year war, It's probably no surprise that in Tolkien's Middle-earth, the imagined Mordor would be geographically located in the dark forests of Transylvania -- the medieval and superstition-filled haunts of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Kenneth Goldsmith of UbuWeb, interviewed at The Believer: "Paradoxes abound"

Kenneth Goldsmith, the nominal chief archivist of UbuWeb, was recently interviewed at The Believer. The interview touches on a variety of ideas: Goldsmith and interviewer Dave Mandl of WMFU in New York carom like pinballs around each other, and in the process open a lengthy dialogue about language, information, and transmission built, digitally, in even more (usually unseen) language.

Here's Goldsmith on the inevitable consequence of the all-consuming digital transformation: "Shh… the new radicalism is paper. Right? Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. "

KG: ... We’re living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we’re working with — the landscape of language — is very different than it was a few decades ago. It seems to call into question the way we write and the environment into which we’re writing and distributing our works. Not only that, but our entire digital world is made up of alphanumeric language (the 1s and 0s of computing).

You know sometimes when you receive a JPEG in an email and it comes in wrong, appearing as garbled text instead of an image? It’s a reminder that all of our media now is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words.

How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn’t find a speck of language lurking below the surface. The interesting thing is that now you can open a JPEG in a text editor, dump in a bunch of language, and reopen it as an image, and you’ll find that the image has completely been changed—all as a result of active language. This is so new, and the implications for writing are so profound and paradigmatic.

Suddenly, language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. Language has many dimensions; we’re seeing the materiality of words emerge in new and interesting ways. But I don’t wish to be prescriptive here. Of course, wonderful stories remain to be told and new ideas to be written. After all, for all my talk of “uncreativity” and “unoriginality,” isn’t what I’m pointing out here in conventional language something new and original? Paradoxes abound.

... I’m going to drop a real secret on you. It used to be that if you wanted to be subversive and radical, you’d publish on the web, bypassing all those arcane publishing structures at no cost. Everyone would know about your work at lightning speed; you’d be established and garner credibility in a flash, with an adoring worldwide readership. Shh… the new radicalism is paper. Right? Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. It’s the perfect vehicle for terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general.

If you don’t want it to exist — and there are many reasons to want to keep things private — keep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon. Expect spiders to pick it up and use it as ad-bait on spoof web pages. The moment you put it out there, all bets are off; it’s way out of your control. ...

I’ve made a move in the Luddite direction recently by trying to remove UbuWeb from Google. I want the site to be more underground, more word-of-mouth. The only way you’ll be able to find it is if someone links to it or tells you about it, just like music used to be before MTV. But you’ll still find UbuWeb on all the bad search engines that no one uses: AltaVista, Dogpile, and Yahoo! Again, everyone wants to rush toward the center: they even write books about how to get your Google ranking higher. We’re headed in the opposite direction. We want to get off Google.

(Photo of Kenneth Goldsmith from Jacket 2)

Adam Thorpe, on his new translation of "Madame Bovary"

Flaubert did strange things, such as eliminating any authorial voice or stable moral centre; he used the imperfect as his main tense, giving a single action the sense of being suspended in time; played with varying shades of irony down to the deepest hues of pastiche; slipped between the subjective and the objective viewpoint without a tremor. The first quarter of the book is more about Charles, the dullest of husbands, than about Emma – whose enamel-like eyes are blue, deep blue, brown and black.

In his new essay, author and translator Adam Thorpe calls Flaubert's Madame Bovary "the Everest of translation," and from his description above, it's easy to see why. Yet it is a deceptively simple story, almost boring in numbing detail, that turns even adultery into despair.

It is this precision with the mundane, the expression of nineteenth-century mores at the heart of a soul-crushing, bourgeois marriage, that Flaubert captured so realistically. What Thorpe calls the novel's "shimmering surface" is a treacherous ice-field of meaning, the difference between Flaubert's intent and his author's realism a thin edge that makes the story the first recognizably modern novel, as well as a nearly cinematic one.

Best to go carefully: in attempting this, the 20th translation of Bovary, Thorpe spent three years not only on linguistics but historical research, and comparing earlier drafts of the novel at the University of Rouen. He thought to use an 1853 French dictionary, and even found a first edition of the novel -- as he writes, the copy was only affordable because "oeuvre immorale" ("immoral work") had been scrawled with a quill on the flyleaf, and an anti-royalist page torn out. But Thorpe found even comparing the author's original drafts could be tricky:

For instance, Flaubert bizarrely uses the plural "jours" (normally "days", less usually "chinks", but also "daylight" in the singular) to describe light filtering in through a trellis on the dying Charles: "Des jours passaient par le treillis." Flaubert had included the following in an earlier draft: "All the sorrows of his life returned to him … from the first day to the last."' He cut this, but persisted (if hesitantly) with the awkward "jours"; I was sure that he intended this to be initially misread as the poetic and ambiguous "Days passed by the trellis", suggesting memories and the changing seasons.

For a translator, language and the various meanings of words have to be evaluated in context, their shadings examined as well as the author's intent. Of course it helps to have original notes, if you're lucky, but there are passages in Flaubert that depend on the sound of the language as well as meaning. Here's Thorpe describing Emma's waltz at the chateau:

In the French, the whirling dissolves the words into a streaky, clicking blur of vowels: "Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d'eux …" It seemed essential to mimic this mimicry, but how? Previous translations had not even tried: "They turned, and everything turned round them …" (Alan Russell); "They were turning: everything was turning around them …" (both Geoffrey Wall and Davis). I felt the key was to use stretched vowels and to find an equivalent echo between "tout" and "tournaient": "They were reeling round: all reeled round and about them …"

Then there is the fact that Flaubert himself revised the novel on subsequent printings, a translator's ultimate challenge. Thorpe admits that, faced with Flaubert's changes, he may feel just as free to alter his translation in later editions. Ultimately, however, the translator describes Flaubert as the "disappointed romantic" who wrote his realism with a kind of "quasi-scientific exactitude." As he points out, "Flaubert created an autonomous parallel universe: fiction as refuge from an outside world full of pain, peevishness and bourgeois vulgarity."

Even more is at stake when the very genius of the novel lies on the shimmering surface. This is not to do with ornament, but meaning. Flaubert wished to close the gap not just between words and emotional truths, but between words and things: the sound of Hippolyte's wooden leg in the church ("They heard on the flagstones something like the sharp click of an iron-shod pole tapping them with even strokes"); the lumbering sway of cattle; the scoop of a hand in sugar-white arsenic.

Today most readers would recognize Emma Bovary as a contemporary figure, caught in the demands of a culture filled with its own bourgeois vulgarity. That authorial awareness which Thorpe describes as exactitude -- Flaubert's triumph -- eventually became a hallmark of literary realism, familiar to most readers who expect stories these days to present life in some kind of real-life versimilitude. Unfortunately, that more often than not results in much fiction being as dreadful and boring on its own, which makes Flaubert's "shimmering surface" all the more remarkable.

Pierre Joris: "Why do I translate?"

Pierre Joris, globetrotter

The Nomadics blog of Pierre Joris is one of those truly rare things on the internet these days, a delight to read on a regular basis. The author, teacher, and translator (not necessarily in that particular order) has interesting things to write on many topics, from linguistics to melting Arctic ice, with a global perspective welcome in America's ever-more-parochial age.

He also, very obviously, enjoys writing in many different forms. From his own biography, Joris has written more than forty books (poetry, essays and translations) while also teaching at SUNY Albany. He's translated Picasso and Kurt Schwitters into English, Kerouac and Corso, Pete Townshend and Sam Shepard into French. Forthcoming in late 2010/2011 arePaul Celan: The Meridian (Stanford University Press), Exile is my Trade: The Habib Tengour Reader (Black Widow Press), and The Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems).

And, of course, he blogs. Here's a recent post showing that even a polymath ransacks his files looking for material and occasionally finds something that illuminates not only his writing but his personality as well. By way of introduction to his entertaining blog, here's an excerpt from "Seven minutes on translation" which is worth a mention.

Why do I translate?

Because it pleases me.

Because it beats watching television, except when the Mets are on, but they play so lousily much of the time that I avert my eyes & continue to translate looking up only to check the score.

Because, to be frank, I want to know what the poets in Ghana are up to.

Because I am foolish enough to believe the 16th C philosopher & poet Giordano Bruno who said that all science has its origin in translation, and was burned at the stake for that and a few other peccadilloes in 1600 on the Campo Fioro in Rome. Bruno is of course the patron saint of translators.

Because by accident of birth I was blessed or damned with a batch of different languages and a perverse pleasure of pitting them and their different musics against each other.

Because I can.

Because I love doing it.

Because I have to because if I and everybody else don’t translate the world will be a way shittier place than it already is. ...

Because I speak with many-forked tongue and always wanted to be a Mescalero Apache healer.

Because the congealed mass of anglo-‘merican ugliness, greed & basic Christian fascism will continue to blow up the people & libraries & homes & museums of a hundred Baghdads unless we can make enough American citizens realize the beauty of the other, of the poetry of the other, of the speech of all the others. ...

Because, although I gave up translating into French a number of years ago, last year I could not resist saying yes to translating 25 pages of Allen Ginsberg’s poems for a French version of Philip Glass’ opera Hydrogen Jukebox, given that the last time I saw Allen in Paris he asked be to be involved with the translations of his work, something I had neglected to do until now when the occasion to pay back my dues presented itself out of the blue.

Because the Mets are losing again.