Sunday. I’m coming down with something. I don’t know what it is but it’s something. Probably just a cold. Perhaps the flu. Perhaps not. Either way, I feel it in my body, a weakness, my mind foggy and throat scratching.
I spent the latter half of the afternoon walking roads I haven’t been down before. Around the bottom of the 12th and across the river into the 13th. There are few better ways to get to know somewhere. Further expanding your internal map of a place by aimlessly wandering about. Seeing it anew. Who lives where. What public transport it’s most served by. Learning new things about the whole by experiencing a fragment.
The more modern part of the 13th is one of my favourite parts of Paris. With its glass towers and new build apartments, the motorway so nearby, and the last remnants of industry here and there, it has nothing of our idea of Paris about it. That’s what interests me. It isn’t particularly pretty, and it doesn’t have much going for it in terms of vibes or anything, but there’s just something about its non-Parisien-ness that I like. This is why I try and take whoever’s visiting me there. It’s another vision of the city.
But what is Paris? What is any city? Just as I’m not sure what I’m coming down with other than an illness, I couldn’t really tell you what Paris is other than a city. Just as I couldn’t tell you what Glasgow or Manchester, or anywhere else I’ve lived is. It’s there and you experience it. It’s made up of its past and present, of its living and of its dead. But that’s the same for anywhere. Everyone’s city is different.
Over the new year period I read Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and one line stood out to me as something I associate with what I write about on here, and with what I write about no matter where I’m living, or how I think about where I am.
“Paris est un véritable océan. Jetez-y la sonde, vous n'en connaîtrez jamais la profondeur. Parcourez-le, décrivez-le : quelque soin que vous mettiez à le parcourir, à le décrire ; quelques nombreux et intéressés que soient les explorateurs de cette mer, il s'y rencontrera toujours un lieu vierge, un antre inconnu, des fleurs, des perles, des monstres, quelque chose d'inouï, oublié par les plongeurs littéraires.”
“Paris is a veritable ocean. Cast down the lead and you will never fathom its depth. Explore it, describe it: however careful you are to do so, however numerous and interested the explorers of this sea are, you will always encounter a virgin place, an unknown cavern, flowers, pearls, monsters, something incredible, forgotten by literary divers.”
I’ve only lived in Paris for a few months so I’m not even close to knowing the place. But how long does it take to get to know somewhere? I’ve never lived anywhere longer than six years. Most places no more than two. Have I ever really known where I’ve lived? What is it to know somewhere? My friend Oscar moved to Glasgow at the same time I did, and we both interact with the city in a totally different way. I know more street names, more bus routes and restaurants; he knows where more artist spaces are, where to buy painting supplies, how to get around Yoker. Does one of us know the city better than the other? Or do we just know it differently?
These different versions of a city, born out of experience, that each of us live in, means that when it comes to describing them, you can take all the care in the world to describe it and yet will only ever describe your version of it. Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, translated here by William Weaver, sums it up nicely, when he says that ‘The city must never be confused with the words that describe it.’
***
On Wednesday night I went to a talk in which Étienne Gomez and Bérengère Viennot spoke about their bizarre experience translating a book about the Jan 6th storming of the Capitol. There were technical and beaurocratic oddities, but what stood out the most was that during the process a newspaper took it upon themselves to publish part of the original English text, only they hadn’t communicated with any of the translators, and instead just used DeepL (an online translator). The result, naturally, annoyed them; and the woman (whose name I forget) responsible for the chapter that was machine translated, found herself in a strange position, where for the first time in her life she was having to compare her own work against that of a machine’s.
Unsurprisingly, the machine provided some decent, some unnatural, and some flat out wrong translations.
When I got home I decided to run the above Balzac passage through DeepL, and the result was as interesting as it was heartening.
At first I used the American English option, which gave me:
Paris is a veritable ocean. Throw a probe into it, and you’ll never know its depth. Explore it, describe it: whatever care you take to explore it, to describe it; however many and interested the explorers of this sea may be, there will always be a virgin place, an unknown lair, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by literary divers.
Then I used the British English option, which gave me:
Paris is a veritable ocean. Throw a probe into it and you’ll never know how deep it is. Go through it, describe it: no matter how carefully you go through it, describe it; no matter how many interested explorers there are in this sea, there will always be a virgin spot, an unknown lair, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by literary divers.
The different verbs, nouns and sentence structures each one has are interesting, but it’s the ‘Throw a probe into it’ line that actually needs addressing, because it’s wrong. While the French word sonde, used by Balzac does translate to probe, at the time of publication (1835), the correct technical terms would have been sea-gage (using the spelling of the time), and depth-gauge. To probe, primarily, is reserved for the human body or outer-space. So to ‘throw a probe into it’ makes no sense. Hence my choice of ‘cast down the lead,’ using the nautical phrase ‘cast a lead,’ which is what was said when one threw the lead depth-gauge into the water.
At first I’d made the same mistake as the machine. It was only the day after, when I was editing the paragraph, that I realised what had gone wrong. ‘Throw a probe into it,’ or however you phrase something similar (I’d initially said ‘Toss down a probe’) makes sense at first, but given that, according to the Google Ngram viewer for word usage over time, ‘depth probe’ only came into English a hundred years after Balzac was writing, it’s absolutely the wrong word to use in a translation aiming to work in a similar language of the time. If your goal was to present a modern translation, then all power to you; but that’s a whole other argument.
Here again the fragments teach new things about the whole.