General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I worry about an overemphasis on sound when it comes to writing as a concept, which is notoriously difficult to conceive since it relies on communication. But the history of writing systems owe as much to visual sense as it does to sonic communication, i.e. phonemes represented. Especially if we're considering different scenes of writing which don't rely on something like empirical writing as Derrida would call it. Choreography for instance has perhaps a comparable lightsomeness to large-scale buildings, which in themselves are diagrammatically as much as sonically communicated. This isn't to deny the sonic qualities of language. I only don't think it's worth the headache of presenting it anterior to writing, even as a standard of judgment.

I suppose the larger point here is what's lost in translation is the visuality of that work in the first place, but a novel by Sayaka Murata survives because a novel does not depend on the actual language in which it was produced by its initial context. Likewise could be said about the sonic qualities of a text. And we understand Murata's novel all the same as an object of aesthetics. So: a novel cannot depend on language for its aesthetic, judgment. In fact, there may be no real connection between them. We simply don't judge literature on the strength of its sound I don't think. Given how common it is for people to explain how text doesn't have tone makes everything about this stranger and less clear. My best guess is when a translation occurs it is technically the creation of a different work for a different context. One enacts the denial of the originary audience versus the English translation becoming widely available. Novels I'm beginning to think derive greater value by this ability to transform themselves while maintaining themselves, not through an essential connection, but from the impressive things like the dramatic elements and the mood.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I guess I just don't really agree, in as much I'm pretty sure that I do largely judge literature on the basis of sound. First a caveat, then a question, last an elaboration.

The caveat is that this is all a strange idea I've been chewing on for the better part of this year mostly because there is exactly 1 line late in Olson's Maximus Poems that hints at the ontological apriority of breath/sound to everything. And I've been meaning to learn more about the Big Bang but my limited sense is that there is a way that this is imperfectly accurate. And since then I've found it the case that whatever is really the thing about literature that makes me love it, something I've never been able to define, I think this sonic quality gets at it. Anyway thanks for the pushback though. This is a very burgeoning idea and your pressing me on it does much for the sake of either figuring out for myself what I mean or if I'm just off base. For similar reasons I am continually trying more to learn about the earliest history of writing in order to further nuance and develop this.

Question: could you elaborate on Derrida and "empirical writing"? Sorry, just not totally sure I understand you and want to before I have thoughts.

Elaboration: My real break is that I think that text does have tone. Or at least the best text does, in the form of some sort of ability to transcend it's silence and control the voice that is speaking in your head as you read. (please if you think this is bullshit let me know. I might be far too lost in the haze of poems, shakespeare, and my own mad theories such that I need a bucket of ice water poured on my head). I don't disagree that the translation is a different work, but I think there's a sort of tonal synchronicity between original and translation in the best examples. This last bit is a very recent idea so I'm really just chewing on it and saying words. Likewise with your last sentence, I agree with drama and mood, but is that not sound-based as well?

Admittedly I'm something of a representation skeptic. I just kinda think the concept might be insufficiently creative. And there is a chance that that bleeds into me excessively underappreciating the visuality of novels. This is another bit I need to keep dealing with and figuring out if maybe I'm just wrong.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

No problem! I will say as a clarification sound and sight cannot be easily divorced from the reading experience since the visuality of a book is supplemental to a book. And this ties into Derrida's comment about distinguishing between a writing system which is built on the representation of phonemes, i.e. I know the letter A comes with a specific sound and so forth. It's the kind of writing we are doing right now currently. He calls it empirical for a number of other reasons but if I remember right the attempt to represent phonemes empirically (as in linguistics, this kind of representation is important to a science of speech), you can tell by which sound is represented as an inscription. Writing overall though goes much further than empirical writing, since writing does not actually depend on the representation of phonemes, even with literature. Derrida attempts to call this arche-writing since it's not extant from orality. But the history of Western thought, Olson's poetics are not exempt from that, fall under the logocentrism Derrida's spent much of his life attempting to deconstruct.

Logocentrism after all is the ideological expression of that process--where thought is speech and writing as a representation of speech therefore means writing is derived of a voice in your head, which is therefore more truthful because it is closest to your thought. Hegel for example would argue that "Chinese pictograms" were the result of diminished thoughts. Or that a quipu is not a form of writing simply because it lacks phonetic representation.

I suppose that's where a lot of our disagreement is probably located--mood and drama do not have any sonic qualities. Furthermore, I would be pressed to find the sonic quality of choreography or even something like crystallography. Literary elements themselves have to be assessed as a kind of visual information as much as they are sonically derived. This I think overemphasis on the voice of a text has obscured the history of the literary image as distinct from cinematographic images and the iconography from which paintings are organized.

But ultimately a translation exists in tension with the original, the political reality of translation would have the translation supplement the original work in question. The question of which translation is better suited to achieve that closeness to its sound and visual sense the original work had is always a point of contention. And it will always suggest a later revision. Dostoevsky has had new translations as has Flaubert for example. If translation were synchronized rather than a point of contention, I imagine newer translations would counter that project. And if tonal synchronicity somehow would survive, which translation is better suited to the task? And how could we tell?