Ashmole, Eco and Weaver – a chain of thoughts
The methodology of syllogistic logic is designed to emphasize the efficiency and reliability of thought processes: If A is true and B is true, then it follows that C is true.
This doesn’t, however, describe how we think. For example, it’s funny how, sometimes, individual thoughts, (A, B, C …), can combine into a chain of interconnections that lead from one idea to another so that we end up a long way from where we started, (at Z), and so we find ourselves wondering how on earth we started at A and ended up at Z. Take, for example, the train of thought that took me from a birthday cake to the conclusion that you can’t always translate word for word via the trio of Ashmole, Eco and Weaver …
First of all, the Birthday Cake: Today, May 23rd would have been the birthday of Elias Ashmole, except for the fact that he died in 1692 just a week short of his seventy fifth birthday. Now, everyone likes a celebration and birthdays tend to be very important here, so that’s an occasion to get yet another cake for those in the office.
I suppose most people, including like those in the office who will be tucking into that cake, will be asking themselves, Why?, Just who was this Elias Ashmole? and Why is he so special?
OK, I understand, not everyone will have heard of Elias. To be honest, the only reason I know about him is that I spent seventeen years teaching at a school in North London that was named in his honour. I have to admit that I hadn’t even heard of him in when I was in Oxford where one of the other institutions named after him, The Ashmolean Museum, is to be found.
At the back of the school hall, hanging over the door, was a large portrait. It was dark and in need of a clean, virtually no details could be made out. It looked out of place so asked a few of my colleagues who it was a portrait of, and no-one seemed to know. It was just there. Then one person told me it was of Elias Ashmole after whom the school was named, but he could tell me no more. So I set out to do some research.
My first port of call was the Dictionary of National Biography, which brings together more than 57,000 specially written biographies of the men and women from around the world who shaped all aspects of Britain’s past. I then found some references to him in books on local history. Here’s a brief summary of what I discovered:
Elias Ashmole … seventeenth century … royalist … born in Litchfield … friend to the son of the local squire who sponsored him as a student… became a solicitor … and later a customs official at Worcester … took up a military post in Oxford where he also studied at Brasenose College … antiquarian and collector … founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford … landowner in Berkshire and East Barnet, Hertfordshire … owned a mansion called Belmont in what is now Cockfosters … has two schools named after him
I should add that he was also a Free Mason. Admitted to the order in 1646, his diaries record him attending a number of meetings, but it is not clear how deeply involved he was in the affairs of the order. However, when he attended a meeting in 1682 he noted that he was the senior fellow present, having been a member for some 35 years. His diaries provide us with the earliest references to Freemasonry in England.
It was this facet of his life which was to startle me one day some years later when I sat reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco and there was a reference to him as one of the leading lights in the organization before the founding of the Grand Lodge in 1717, when four separate lodges combined.
OK – I can almost hear the question … Umberto who?
Umberto Eco is an Italian historian who specializes in the medieval period, a linguist, philosopher, literary critic and novelist. If that seems a bit esoteric, then he first came to the attention of the general public thanks to the film of his 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. This was an historical mystery, a detective story set in a fourteenth century monastery where they were debating such vital issues as how many angels can sit on the head of pin, and whether Jesus owned his own clothes. Inspired by the film I went out and bought the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, so that when Eco’s next book, (Foucault’s Pendulum), was published, I went out and got that too.
This second novel was a much more difficult and multifaceted read than his earlier opus. It centered around a conspiracy theory involving a secret order descended from the Knights Templars, (something like that appears in the later “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown), with references to the philosophy of the Kabala, to alchemy and something like sixteen secret (not so secret) societies all intertwined. Indeed, the plot was so complex that Anthony Burgess suggested that it really needed an index, (although I don’t see how that would have helped). I must admit that there were times when I felt that it was just too much and I began to feel like putting the book aside, but the reference to Elias intrigued me and I persevered.
Now, if Elias Ashmole and Freemasonry leads me Umberto Eco, then the next link in my chain of thought takes me to William Weaver. He is a American who works as a translator from Italian into English. In a career spanning over fifty years he has translated many books, both fiction and non-fiction, and also poetry by a wide range of contemporary Italian authors. He is most famous, however, for his translations of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco.
I remember hearing an interview with him sometime after Foucault’s Pendulum, (which was one of his translations), was published. He was talking about the work of the translator, and he pointed out that it was far from being an easy task. He cited the case of Foucault’s Pendulum, which presented him with huge difficulties as the story ranged over a huge variety of time and geographical locations. Before you can translate a passage, you have to understand the subject matter, and he found that, sometimes, he needed to do an inordinate amount of research in order to understand exactly what the author had intended to say.
However, the most important thing I took away from the interview was the idea that “you can’t just translate word for word”. It’s a message I have been trying to get across for some years now. It just doesn’t work.
The other day, for example, I was talking to someone and used the idiomatic phrase, “it’s a chicken and egg situation.” He looked bemused so I stopped and explained that we have a saying “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” His eyes lit up and he said, “Yes, yes, we have the same!” In this case, his confusion was simply because he didn’t make the connection between my statement, “it’s a chicken and egg situation” and the saying, “Which came first …?”
On the other hand, take the idiom, “The grass is always greener …”. This is the first part of the proverb, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”. The image behind the saying is of the householder looking over the garden fence at his neighbour’s lawn and complaining that his grass never seems to do as well as other people’s. If you translate the phrase into Russian, even if you explain it, there will no “yes, yes ..”, response. The problem is that in Russian the equivalent phrase has nothing to do with grass or colours, (green pink or whatever …). The equivalent is “Vse horosho gde nas nyet”, “everything is good where ever we aren’t”. They could both be summed up as “it’s always better somewhere else.”
Weaver, however, has a much better example: “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, ‘buon giorno’ for instance. How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning’ or ‘good evening’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’ You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place, because in some places they start saying ‘buona sera’ (‘good evening’) at 1:00 P.M. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say ‘buona sera,’ but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3:00 P.M. You need to know the language but, even more, the life of the country.”
Bishkek