Consider the Bees...

Today's date marks, by one definition, the end of summer (by my own, swift-based definition, summer probably ended last Saturday, when I saw what I'm pretty sure will be my last swift of the year). It certainly feels like the end of summer, as August draws to a close cool, grey and dismal - in the Southeast it has been, they say, the coolest summer since 1993 (ah the paradoxes of global warming). Once again, though, the bees - honeybees, bumblebees and solitary bees - seem to me to have been as busy and numerous as ever this summer, for all the warnings of impending Swarmageddon, to be followed in short order by the end of human life on Earth. The industrious bees seem always to have something to teach us - but do they? Here's the great idler Logan Pearsall Smith, in an early Trivia piece, The Busy Bees:
'Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those honey-merchants, - sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the late sun to their night-long labours, - I have sought instruction from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old industrious lesson.
And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teacher and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of ME? Gazing out at me with composite eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last - could I not finally teach them - a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the shining hours?'

Rivers Reborn

Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, have to admit that in at least two respects life in England has unequivocally improved in the course of my lifetime. One is the range and quality of food available in shops, cafes and restaurants - I'm old enough to remember when olive oil was only available in tiny bottles from the chemist (and it wasn't cold-pressed extra virgin) - and the other is the water quality in many of our rivers. A news report today confirms how transformed these rivers are from their polluted past - and it's good to see 'my' river, the Wandle, getting a gold star.
Actually, before the Wandle became the river that runs through my life, it was the Thames (I spent my first nine or ten years in west London). The Thames of my boyhood was effectively dead in central London and so poisoned that it was said you'd die if you fell in and swallowed any water. Even some way upstream, where remnants of aquatic life hung on, I remember the nose-wrinkling chemical smells (on top of the pong of coal gas from the gasworks) and the sight of great masses of detergent foam sailing along the body of the river and filling up the creeks.
It was much the same on the Wandle when I first found myself in that suburban demiparadise where it springs from the dip slope of the North Downs (no, I don't mean Croydon). As well as the familiar islands of foam floating by, mysterious great lumps of rough-hewn white polystyrene were a frequent sight, and there was no life in those murky waters. Industrialisation had long since transformed what was once a sparkling chalk stream, famous for its plump brown trout, into one of the most comprehensively polluted waterways on earth. And yet today the water is again clean and clear and the trout are back, along with a range of other fishy life, attracting kingfishers, herons, cormorants and even egrets. The Wandle sparkles and teems with life again, and the passing years have, for once, brought nothing but improvement - though the habit of dumping litter and other detritus in the river remains stubbornly persistent. Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile...

Over on The Dabbler...

I put in a word for Veronese. By the way, it's not immediately obvious (at least to a technoramus like me) but there's a handy facility on the National Gallery online image (follows the link) that lets you browse at large on the picture, enjoying the details.

Is That A Fish In Your Ear?

A kindly publisher, trusting in the mighty power of Nigeness to spread the good word, has sent me a pre-publication copy of a snappily titled book by David Bellos - Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation And The Meaning Of Everything. This is a fascinating, mostly very readable study of the mysterious art and business of translation. And mysterious it is - one of those things that we take for granted but which becomes stranger and stranger the closer we look at it.
I can say airily, without a thought, that I've read this or that by Tolstoy or Kafka or Homer, when in fact I've done no such thing - I've only read them in translation, and translation, as we all know, is 'no substitute for the real thing'. Actually, Bellos points out, that's exactly wrong: translation is a substitute for the real thing. And then, as we all know, 'poetry is what gets lost in translation' - Robert Frost said that, didn't he? Well no actually, as Bellos points out. Despite some 15,000 citations on the Web, there's no record of Frost writing or saying any such thing. It seems that most of what we think we know about translation is either wrong or but partly true.
Bellos asks big basic questions about translation and comes up with often surprising answers. What Is A Translation? Is Translation Avoidable? Is Your Language Really Yours? How Many Words Do We Have For Coffee? An interesting one, that - as Bellos points out, 'if you go into a Starbucks and ask for 'coffee' the barista most likely will give you a blank stare'. In a chapter headed Meaning Is No Simple Thing, Bellos concludes that 'the only way of being sure that an utterance has any meaning at all is to get someone to translate it for you'. And Meaning Is No Simple Thing is followed by Words Are Even Worse...
A chapter on simultaneous interpreting makes you wonder that it is possible at all. Indeed it had never been seriously attempted until the Nuremberg Trials, which would have been all but impossible without it. There are very few people in the world capable of the advanced mental gymnastics involved in translating while listening, and it can only be achieved in complex multilingual bodies like the United Nations by a complex system of 'relays' and 'retour' (there's a helpful diagram). As for literary translation, that's really the easy end of the work - get it wrong and you won't start a war or make an appliance blow up in someone's face. And, as Bellos points out, in the English-speaking world, it's 'paid at piece rates equivalent to a babysitter's hourly charge'. (It's a different matter in Japan, where superstar translators get equal billing with the author, and there's even a gossip magazine about the translators' glamorous lives.)
Having covered such subjects as The Myth Of Literal Translation, Translating Humour and What Translation Is Not, Bellos ends his book ends with Afterbabble: In Lieu Of An Epilogue, in which he takes a characteristically refreshing look at the origins of language. Here he unveils his 'blindingly obvious' conclusion that 'It is not poetry, but community, that's lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.' But it does 'almost everything else'...
Well, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? is published on the 1st of September. Though the going occasionally gets a little tough for the general reader, I'd recommend this sparky, thought-provoking book to anyone with even a passing interest in translation.

Time

Promising youngster Martin Amis is 62 today (as is his exact contemporary Gene Simmons of Kiss). Elvis Costello turns 57, Howard Jacobson hits 69, and Sean Connery achieves 81. How old does this make you feel?

Ill Fares the Land...

I've been reading Ill Fares The Land by Tony Judt. For some while I'd been meaning to read Judt and, given the recent graphic evidence of how ill the land is faring, it seemed a good time to pick up this highly praised polemic on what is wrong and what needs to be done. Clearly Judt was a good egg, a humane and highly intelligent man, and a pretty good writer - and he wrote this book while suffering the kind of terrible illness that would make most of us give up any such attempt. I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, though, I soon realised that Ill Fares The Land is built on (unexamined) assumptions that I don't share, or rather entirely disagree with - as I went on to entirely disagree with something on just about every page, if not in every paragraph. Nothing wrong with that of course - it was more the growing perception that what Judt is offering, in what is supposed to be a 'passionate polemic', is a collection of dubious and, sadly, not very original or radical thoughts. Basically Judt seems to be a Keynesian (JMK is quoted approvingly throughout), with a strong belief in welfarism, public expenditure and the power of the state to do good. Like him I'm deeply nostalgic for the good old days of the postwar consensus when the welfare state seemed a good thing and society was more or less united in a common moral purpose. However, I'd disagree entirely with his diagnosis of what went wrong and why we are where we are. He barely mentions, for example, the catastrophic collapse of state education in Britain, nor does he seem to recognise the role of welfarism in creating poverty and inequality, or the untiring work of the liberal intelligentsia in spreading ideas and practices deeply destructive to a wider society, particularly the poor and vulnerable. He gives the impression that the state is withering on the vine, whereas, in Britain at least, it has carried on getting bigger and bigger and spending more and more (only once in recent decades did public spending fall year on year - under Callaghan and the IMF). But then, Judt's focus is very wide - perhaps too wide, as it takes in the US and continental Europe, with occasional excursions elsewhere (and it's quite a short book). When he says 'we', as he does repeatedly, it's hard to know who he means - most of the time it seems to be 'Americans'. This country has its own specific problems, and a book called Ill Fares The Land might have done better to concentrate only on them (as Roger Scruton does in his blistering, thoroughly un-Judt-like polemic, England: An Elegy). That said, Judt's analysis of globalisation is interesting, he comes up with some striking facts and figures, and it is hard to disagree with him that society is in need of remoralising - but his proposals for bringing this about seem vague and unconvincing, nothing like as forceful as his critique of what is wrong. In the end, Ill Fares The Land has left me neither shaken nor stirred, just vaguely disappointed. Never mind - I intend to carry on with Judt, as I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy The Memory Chalet a lot more.

Over on the Dabbler...

you'll find me up a tree.