'Existence: A Story' David Hinton

We are looking at a painting by the great Ming Dynasty landscape artist and Chan Master Shi Tao: a scholar (with attendant) on a promontory gazing out over a sea of mist to ridges of hazy mountains in the distance. On the right of the picture is a poem by Shi Tao’s friend and associate, the poet Huang Yanlu, in Shi Tao’s calligraphy. The poem describes a ruined city: images of razed walls, deserted orchards and abandoned houses, none of which can be seen in the picture. From this disjunct between painting and poem, David Hinton begins his investigation of the spiritual roots of Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy and poetry.

Hinton sees the white space and multiple perspectives of Chinese landscape painting as a visual expression of the perpetual movement between Absence and Presence which, according to the first verse of the Dao De Jing, gives rise to the ten thousand things of mental and material phenomena. He reveals how this tension operates within Chinese characters – strokes organized around a void, within the sweeping gestures of calligraphy - in which a balance is sought between the being-in-the-moment of the movement of the brush and the residue of that movement/moment in the ink stroke left on the page. He also shows how classical Chinese grammar itself – with its absence of pronouns, verb tenses and deliberate ambiguity of syntax and word class - is also a manifestation of this dynamic interchange.

Along the way he makes some fascinating observations about the differences between Western languages and Chinese. Western languages impose a barrier between the things of the world and descriptions of them; at the same time as they describe the world, they try to transcend it. The relationship between words and things is arbitrary and mimetic, as Saussure and the Structuralists noted. In our creation myth, language comes before the world and the world is somehow a creation of language: And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. In the beginning was the Word, and so on. Chinese creation myths, on the other hand, begin with the hexagrams of the Yi Jing which represent every possible combination of ying and yang, and which rather than describe the particulars of reality, embody the deeper forces and processes of reality, Hinton writes. The clear division into noun and verb of Western languages imposes a fixity on the world that blinds us to its real nature as a process of perpetual impermanence. Whereas Chinese, in which words can be both neither noun or verb and both noun and verb, retains that fluidity and that awareness of the underlying processes of change.

Moreover, Chinese poetry, calligraphy and painting represent an attempt on the part of the practitioner to get behind the false dualities of Absence and Presence, ying and yang, observer and world, language and reality, to the fundamental essence that lies behind them, represented by the mysterious character 玄 xuan,  ‘dark enigma’ which also appears in the first verse of the Dao De Jing. Out of this dark enigma everything rises, and back into it everything sinks in a perpetual movement of becoming and passing. This is related to the Chan meditation practice of observing how thoughts come and go and in the process, stilling the everyday mind and letting the true mind 本心ben xin come forth. This true mind is our true nature, the true nature of reality, and which exists before all thoughts begin, and which precedes and underlies all duality, the true mind obscured by the fleeting dust of delusion, as the 5^th century First Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma puts it in the Essence of Mahayana.

The book is fascinating, with a wealth of ideas to contemplate about language, translation issues, Chinese art and culture, the relationship between Daoism and Chan, the evolution of the Chinese writing system and the meaning of individual characters, the practice of calligraphy, dragons, the tumultuous history of the transition between Ming and Qing, the biography of Shi Tao. Along the way, Hinton offers us different, provisional translations of the poem in the painting, based on his and our evolving understanding of the deeper issues involved in bridging two widely differing cultures. It’s rather like being part of a translators workshop. What lifts the book above mere cultural commentary, however, is Hinton’s brave decision to use a prose style that reflects as nearly as possible what happens in Chan meditation. It’s one thing to be told that a painting and poem is a meditative practice, and quite another to become a part of that process itself, to be drawn in to the process by means of a style which is circular, elliptic, recursive, and poetic rather than academic, and which never tries to impose (a delusory) clarity of expression onto something that is ultimately inexpressible by means of language and that must be experienced personally. Many readers might be put off by this indirectness, but a reader who is also a meditator will instantly grasp what Hinton is trying to do.

The book is lavishly and beautifully produced by Shambhala, with a full color pull-out of the painting under discussion, 9 more full color plates of some of the greatest paintings in the genre, and copious black and white illustrations of details from those paintings, and examples of calligraphy. A singular and unclassifiable masterpiece by the greatest translator of Chinese poetry and philosophy of our age.

'Eugene Onegin' 5 Translations and A Commentary Part 1

Translators are the post horses of Enlightenment.
Pushkin


Part 1
5 Translations

The rhyming and metrical format of Onegin declare that it is a historical work.
Stanley Mitchell

It’s as if a sound proof wall separated Pushkin’s poetic novel from the English-reading world. There is a whole magic which goes by default: the touching lyrical beauty, the cynical wit of the poem, the psychological insight, the devious narrative skill, the thrilling, compulsive grip of the novel, the tremendous gusto and swing and panache of the whole performance.
Charles Johnston

Confronted with an evident inability to render a work faithfully in either its absolute form or its total sense… the only solution it seems to me is for the translator to try to view the work not as a hopeless dichotomy but as unified whole and to try to be faithful, in some mysterious spirit, to this vision of wholeness.
James E. Falen.

I would say that poetry translation is the art of poetic lie-sense.
Douglas Hofstadter



The history of translations of Eugene Onegin in English may be divided into two periods: pre- and post Nabokov, whose translation of 1964 rises like a peak between them. The first period includes Deutsch, Elton with Briggs, Radin and Patrick, and Spalding; and the second period, those translators who came after Nabokov and therefore had the benefit of his scholarship and modern translation theories: Arndt, Kayden, Johnston, Falen, Hofstadter, and Mitchell. A comparison of these last 4 post-Nabokov translations along with the version by Nabokov illuminates the difficulties of translating this great Russian masterpiece into English. At the same time it also raises essential questions about the nature of verse translation.
To help us in our comparison we will use the model devised by Nabokov himself. In his introduction to his translation of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov identifies three kinds of translation. Briefly summarized they are as follows:

1. paraphrastic In this type, Into Language dominates, and Out of Language is sacrificed. Some paraphrastic translations are more faithful to the original, while others are very far from it.

2. lexical In this type, Out of Language dominates and Into Language is sacrificed. The result reads like a machine translation, with Into Language taking on the syntactical properties of Out of Language.

The paraphrastic and lexical types may be seen as opposite ends of a spectrum.

3. literal In this type, an ideal only rarely and fleetingly achieved, both languages are perfectly balanced, and sacrifices and compromises are kept to a minimum.

Now let’s apply this model to three broad elements of language: syntax, lexical fields, and lexical distribution, especially focusing on how, in their search for a perfect compromise between the demands of meaning and the demands of finding English rhymes, translators add or subtract or substitute language present in the Russian verse.

Let’s focus in depth on one stanza, one of the most beautiful from Canto 6, in which, prompted by Lensky’s death in the duel, the narrator reflects on the early death of a poet and what is lost to the world thereby.


Perhaps for the world’s good
Or, at least, for glory, he was born;
His silenced lyre
A resonant, uninterrupted ringing 4
In centuries might have aroused. The poet,
Perhaps, upon the stairway of the world,
Had a high stair awaiting him.
His martyred shade, 8
Perhaps, had borne away with it
A sacred mystery, and for us
A life-creating voice has perished,
And past the tomb’s confines 12
Will not rush up to it the hymn of races,
The benediction of the times.

Eugene Onegin Canto 6 Stanza 37
trans: Vladimir Nabokov 1964


Although Nabokov is loudly convinced that this is a perfect literal translation (type 3), an equal balance of Into and Out Of, his version is in fact closer to type 2, a word-for-word lexical transcoding, according to his own model. English poesy, grace, beauty, even conventional syntax, are sacrificed for an exact rendition of Russian lexis and syntax. Iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme of the Onegin Stanza have been done away with and replaced with a kind of lumpy prose whose syntax is unnatural and whose meaning is sometimes a bit bizarre. Nabokov had a habit -increasingly so in his later translation years- of placing the prepositional phrases between subject and verb, a highly unnatural position in English, but one that is natural to Russian; one wonders how exactly does a hymn rush up a stairway; and why the tautology of resonant ringing? However, in keeping with his stated aim, we can be sure from Nabokov’s pony, that in the Russian perhaps appears three times in the stanza at the beginning of lines 1, 6 and 9; that there is a caesura in line 5; that the strange un-English word order of lines 3 through 5 exactly replicates the lexical distribution of Russian in the same lines; that the stanza consists of three sentences ending on lines 5, 7 and 14; that the word benediction comes before times in line 14 and not vice versa, and so on. We can also be absolutely sure of the specific lexical field (consisting of the terms lyre, stairway, hymn, martyr, shade, mystery, tomb, benediction and time) used in the construction of the metaphor which runs through the stanza. Nabokov’s lexical translation gives the non-Russian reader the most reliable version in terms of how the language of the original works. This version can be used as check for other versions in terms of linguistic closeness to the Russian. However, in skewering the heart of the stanza with the needle of his accuracy, he has also robbed it of life.


Perhaps he was for good intended
Or at the very least for fame;
His silenced lyre might have extended
Its sound through centuries to come 4
With ringing music. There awaited
Perhaps a special niche created
For him at an exalted site.
Perhaps his martyred shade in flight 8
Carried away a holy secret,
Remaining with him, and the joys
Are lost of an uplifting voice,
While from beyond the gravestone’s remit 12
No hymn will rush to where he’s laid,
Nor peoples come to bless his shade.

trans: Stanley Mitchell 2008


Mitchell’s version comes closer to a literal translation (type 3 in Nabokov’s own typology of translations) in which the aim of a perfect balance between the two languages is more nearly achieved. Rhythm and rhyme have been preserved without disturbing the lexical distribution of Nabokov’s pony: perhaps is repeated in the same places; the caesura is in the same place in line 5; the three sentences end in the same places; most of the lexis is in the same place (silence in line 3 martyred in line 8 etc); most of the lexical substitutions are near enough synonymous: holy secret- sacred mystery, benediction-bless (Nabokov would no doubt deplore the substitution of gravestone for tomb and write 3000 words on the difference). The chief deviation from the Russian is in the slight change to the lexical field and the resultant metaphor: the stairway has been replaced with a niche in an unspecified high place. Apart from this, it seems to be a miracle of faithfulness to the original, (as seen through the lense of Nabokov’s pony) with the addition of rhythm and rhyme: a perfect compromise between the linguistic demands of the form and meaning of both languages. It has all the appearance of poetry. And yet, the meaning seems to be packed too densely into the lines to give it space to breathe; and some of the word choices sound prosaic to this reader’s ear: extended, niche, remit, site are ugly workaday words that do not resonate or sing. Mitchell’s literal version is very faithful to the language of the Russian, and a poetic and naturally readable version in English.


Perhaps to improve the world’s condition,
perhaps for fame, he was endowed;
his lyre, now stilled, in its high mission
might have resounded long and loud 4
for aeons. Maybe it was fated
that on the world’s staircase there waited
for him a lofty stair. His shade
after the martyr’s price it paid 8
maybe bore off with it for ever
a secret truth, and at our cost
a life creating voice was lost;
to it the people’s blessing never 12
will reach, and past the tomb’s compound
hymns of the ages never sound.

trans: Charles Johnston 1977


Johnston’s version takes more liberties with the text and is therefore a paraphrastic (type 1) version. Although the caesura in line 5 has been kept, and the three sentences end in the same lines, an extra caesura has been added in line 7. Lexical distribution is more or less the same as the original, with stilled substituting for silence in line 3, and martyred in line 8. But tomb (12) and hymn (13) in the original have here switched lines. Lexical substitutions include staircase for stairway, truth for mystery, but these are near enough synonymous. The tomb’s compound, substituted for the tomb’s confines, is an ugly anachronistic image, the word compound suggesting a Soviet style death camp. An extra perhaps has been added to line 2, making four in total, rather than the original’s three, and the perhaps on line 6 has been moved to line 5. The biggest and most jarring addition is the metaphor of price and cost (lines 8 – 10) which is not present in the Russian. Some of the rhymes are not very felicitous; the unfortunate endowed of line 2 introduces an image of Lensky that I would prefer not to glimpse, and the lines are uncapitalised. Johnston’s version is closer to type 1 than Mitchell’s, a paraphrase, in Nabokov’s typology, (and no doubt Nabokov would deplore it for that reason). Although the sacrifices made to the Russian in favour of the English form have been kept to a minimum, as English poetry, however, it is rather inept and not very convincing.


Or maybe he was born to fire
The world with good, or earn at least
A gloried name; his silenced lyre
Might well have raised, before it ceased, 4
A call to ring throughout the ages.
Perhaps upon the world’s great stages
He might have scaled a lofty height.
His martyred shade, condemned to night 4
Perhaps has carried off forever
Some sacred truth, a living word,
Now doomed by death to pass unheard;
And in the tomb his shade shall never 12
Receive our race’s hymns of praise,
Nor hear the ages bless his days.

trans: James E. Falen 1990


Falen’s version (also type 1) takes even more greater liberties with the Russian in favour of a more resonant and sonorous, vowel-laden English stanza which still reproduces all the structural features of the Onegin Stanza, but on English ground, not Russian. One perhaps has been replaced with a synonym and moved; the caesura in 5 has been moved to 3; some totally new images not found in the Russian have been introduced: fire, night, a living word; and substitution has changed other images: stairway- stages, centuries- ages. However, for these additions and substitutions, words have been chosen which have a totemic, universally archetypal quality, (a quality not present in Mitchell’s niche and site or Johnston’s compound). They are, moreover, also entirely in keeping with the common topoi of European Romanticism; and do not jar. As well as end-of-line rhymes, Falen has found internal echoes of rhyme (and metre) on certain vowels: scaled in line 7 with shade in line 8; race’s in line 13 with ages in line 14 (the /ei/ sound predominates throughout the stanza); a pattern of monophthongs and diphthongs is very sensitively rendered and creates an elegiac quality. In the first quatrain Falen explores the ambiguity of masculine or feminine endings on fire and lyre, unlike Mitchell’s more clearly feminine but deadening intended and extended. Falen’s version is more paraphrastic than Johnston’s even, but still retains some faithfulness to the Russsian lexical field and its syntactical distribution. His additions and substitutions are entirely in keeping with the mood and emotion of the original. Falen’s great strength is in his creation of a convincing poetic artifact in English.


Perhaps for goodness’ sake, or glory’s,
Vladimir Lensky, bard, was born;
His silenced lyre perchance hid stories
Untold, which through his magic horn
Blown sweetly, might have mad men gladder.
Some high-ranked rung on fame’s tall ladder
Perhaps awaited him. Perchance
His suffering shade’s deep mystic dance 8
Lies buried with him; thus for us is
Forever lost a vibrant voice.
To thank him would have been our choice,
But our mere mortals chants and fusses 12
Can’t reach across death’s mystic pale:
Our hymns we’d sing to no avail.

trans: Douglas Hofstadter 1999


Hofstadter’s version is the most paraphrastic (type1), an imitation rather than a translation, Nabokov would no doubt say. The meaning, language elements and mood of the Russian have been almost entirely sacrificed to the demands of a contemporary, idiosyncratic American English and a highly personalised vision and reading of the poem. Enormous liberties have been taken with lexical field, and its distribution. Perhaps on line 9 has been moved to line 7, and an extra perchance has been added which is not there in the original; Lensky’s tomb has become death’s mystic pale; the stairway of the world has become a rather precarious and penny- pinching ladder; the hymns of races have become superstitious chants and atheistic fusses. New images have been introduced which blur the clarity of the metaphor and risk rendering the mood of the stanza ridiculous, unlike Falen’s new images, which reinforce the metaphor running through the stanza, and heighten its archetypal quality. In Hofstadter’s version the poet’s name and occupation have been given, perhaps for the benefit of a celestial clerk, while poor Lensky’s ghost seems to have his hands full with a lyre and a horn while he clings precariously to the ladder, dancing. No rest for the wicked there then. Some of the rhymes, while reproducing accurately the Onegin Stanza, are most infelicitous: the gladder/ladder rhyme suggests that the antics of Lensky’s harassed shade might make men madder; the first for goodness sake has a touch of the exasperated about it; while line 11 has nothing to do with anything except to provide the necessary rhyme for voice in 10.

Of course it might be unfair to judge the whole work on the strength of one stanza. However, taken as a whole, Nabokov’s pony is a tough little beast, capable of carrying loads and working hard, but without verve or grace; neither poetry nor good English prose: an excellent reference, but ultimately unreadable.

Taken on mass, throughout the whole length of the poem, Mitchell’s dense stanzas and highly specific lexical fields, paradoxically give the most novelistic rendering of this verse novel. Mitchell’s highly readable and engaging translation situates the work within the tradition of the Russian realist/psychological novel, which it indeed helped to engender. Mitchell’s introductory essay and translator’s note are superbly informative, often provoking, and excellently expressed.

Johnston’s workmanlike paraphrase imposes an unfaithful uniformity on the work. In his version, Pushkin’s wild swerves of tone have all been ironed out in favour of a consistency of tone, lexically close to the original, with all the features of the Onegin Stanza in place, but without Mitchell’s density: self effacing and a touch bland. It might be too obvious to mention Johnston’s previous career as a diplomat in this connection. Both Johnston and Mitchell’s alterations are frequently anachronistic and jar.

Taken as a whole, Hofstadter’s modern colloquialisms clash clumsily against the text’s references to Horace and Tasso; they feel crass next to the poem’s Romantic sensibility. Hofstadter believes that as Pushkin’s Russian was the Russian of his contemporaries, a contemporary translation should therefore also be in contemporary English, surprisingly faulty reasoning for an author who won a Pulitzer for his book on the great artistic logicians Bach, Godel and Escher. He maintains in his introduction, comparing his version with Falen's: where he is lyrical, I’m jazzy, where he’s legato, I’m staccato, where he’s flowing, I’m percussive, where he’s subtly seasoned, I’m saucy and spicy, in other words, a joke; and a text book example of what Nabokov and Pushkin would have called poshlost.

Falen’s translation is how one might imagine the work to have been written in English if Pushkin had been an Englishman. It has the elegiac lyricism of Keats, the political anger of Shelley, the clarity of Wordsworth’s metaphysical meditations, Blake’s mysticism and prophetic power, the detailed (but highly derivative from the French) pastoralism of Grey and Thomson, spiced throughout with Byron’s satirical elan and verbal wit. Moreover, it manages to echo these various intonations without ever succumbing to parody. Falen’s version situates the work firmly within the English Romantic tradition, as is only right for a work composed in the 1820s, and turns Pushkin’s Russian into a song of equal beauty in English.

Of these 5 translations, Nabokov’s may be referred to, Johnston’s may be overlooked, Hofstadter’s may be ignored. Mitchell’s may be studied, and Falen’s may be learnt by heart and recited with reverence and love. Of the difference between these last two, it may be safely said that Mitchell is the better writer, Falen the better poet.


Part 2: A Commentary coming soon...

Fragment 1501

The primary aim, for the sake of which all others were disregarded, was to preserve the literal meaning of the original…
T.J.Binyon
Pushkin

When I look at an article in Russian I say: “This is really written in English but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”
Warren Weaver
Translation

In the introduction to his highly controversial translation of Pushkin’s verse novel, Nabokov identifies three kinds of translation. (His remarks do not specify whether he means verse translation in particular, or whether he means literature in general.)

1. paraphrastic, a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of the form
Good examples of this would be Christopher Logue’s renditions of the Iliad in War Music and Ezra Pound’s of Chinese poetry. The original is used as a springboard to launch the translator poet into a more personal flight of inspiration.

2. lexical, rendering the basic meaning of the words and their order
This is the kind of translation that one gets from a machine, such as Google translator, or Yahoo. We can call this a word-for-word translation.

3. literal, rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original
Personal examples of this would be Richmond Lattimore’s Homer, Stephen Mitchell’s Rilke, Auden’s Brecht, Terence Kilmartin’s Proust, Pasternak’s Shakespeare: monumental performances which stand the test of time and which set the bar.

1 and 2 may be seen as opposite ends of a spectrum. In 1, Out of Language is sacrificed in order to make a verse artifact in Into Language. In 2, Into Language (and often meaning) are sacrificed in order to stick as closely as possible to the syntax and lexis of Out of Language. Translations shift between these two poles, even in mid-sentence; they may be thought of as vibrating between them, like a finger on a taught string.

3 is the perfect (unobtainable?) balance of languages and sensibilities, in which nothing is compromised and no sacrifices are made to either language, neither in the linguistic demands they make of each other, nor to the meaning. It is a mythical beast; for Nabakov, the jinni of translation; for Eco, a unicorn.

The perfect literal translation persists as a kind of Ideal towards which all translators yearn but only seldom reach. Let’s look at how language communicates meaning in order to understand the difficulties involved in translation and in the process try to catch a glimpse of the unicorn.

Language communicates meaning in three ways: lexically, grammatically and semantically. In the first, key words have meaning in isolation, and the translator can look for exact synonyms across two languages: green in English becomes vert in French and lu in Chinese. It is this lexical correspondence (usually fortuitous, often suspiciously easy) which does more than anything to cause the perpetuation of the word-for-word translation myth. It is this level of meaning which Weaver talks about, and only this level which is capable of being transcoded.

The second way language communicates meaning, the grammatical, takes us to another level of complexity and difficulty. Here, grammar communicates meanings such as time, gender, number, position relative to other actors in the sentence, transitivity or non transitivity of actions, and so on. This kind of grammatical meaning is usually communicated through affixation, on the vertical axis. In addition, grammatical meaning is communicated through syntax on a horizontal axis: prepositional phrase order, subject-verb-object positions, definitional clauses, embedding, front- or back-loading devices such as the passive (I estimate- it is estimated) and cleft sentences (A man was walking –there was a man walking). Every language has its own balance of how grammatical meaning is distributed between the two axes, and translating from a language where the vertical axis predominates, into one where the horizontal one predominates increases the difficulty for the translator and causes the elusive unicorn to retreat a little further off.

The third way language communicates meaning is the semantic, a third level of complexity, in which the meaning of individual words is elevated or subsumed into some other, wholly conventionalised meaning, which cannot be grasped through the individual words. This area covers linguistic phenomena such as idioms, proverbs, compounds of more or less transparency such as phrasal verb structures, phatic phrases, colloquialisms, slang, euphemisms and so on. Here the unicorn becomes obscured by undergrowth, for an idiom in one language might use quite different words as the same idiom in another, making a word-for-word or even a literal translation impossible.

Now, so far our investigation has been based on three assumptions. First, that we are talking about surface (denotational) meaning only. We have not taken into account other more elusive types of meaning such as connotational: the way words taste and smell, their colour and weight, the way they cause us to react emotionally apart from their denotation; and referential: the way words call out to other words, the way texts echo other texts, either overtly or covertly, the way they refer to a shared knowledge of cultural and historical artifacts.

Second, we are leaving aside all such theoretical issues such as how meaning is created in the dialogue between the reader and the author, who may or may not be dead in Barthes’s sense of the word, how the reader’s response in Iser’s sense of the word may be quite different from the author’s intention in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s sense of the word; how meaning is temporary, highly individualised and created anew with each reading.

Third, our investigation so far assumes also that each language in the translation endeavour shares the same concepts, and that the difficulty of translation simply lies in finding equivalent terms for these shared concepts. However, once we take into account that some languages have concepts which do not exist in other languages; that the conceptual categories, not to mention the linguistic ones, may not even correspond, then we are in very great difficulties indeed.

Once we add these difficulties to the problems of translating purely denotational surface meaning, then we find ourselves in very deep forests, and the unicorn vanishes altogether.

Our translator works in the shadow of two muses: justice and loyalty, both of them blind. His aim is to do justice to both languages; but he is always pulled in either of two directions by his drive to stay faithful to the meaning. He cannot serve both muses all of the time, but must turn to each of them, meeting their insatiable demands, pacifying them, compromising between them, playing the diplomat.

In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the narrator complains about the difficulty of translating Tatiana’s letter from French into Russian. He uses the simile of a young girl attempting to play the overture to Der Freischutz. For Pushkin, translation is like a musical performance, in which a work is created each time anew from marks on a written page, in which the perfect note may be struck. For our harassed translator, this might be a more helpful, a more consolatory metaphor than a decoding.

Fragment 16709

The Common European Framework is a framework for the standardisation of language levels. It works by giving verbal descriptions (called descriptors) of the things a language user should be able to do with a language at certain levels. There are 6 levels, extending from A1 to C2, A1 being elementary and C1 being a native user. Here is an example of the general B1 descriptor:

Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.

This descriptor might look so vague as to be almost meaningless. However, the Framework goes into great complexity, with descriptors for all four main skills, and for many micro skills such as information processing, text management, phonology and conversation monitoring and repair, to name a few, with descriptors for all six levels.
Here is an example of a B1 speaking short turn interaction descriptor:

Can start again using a different tactic when communication breaks down.

The descriptors have been arrived at by three means: intuitive thinking, qualitative and quantitative research. Most of the descriptors have been rigorously empirically tested over a wide spectrum of European languages. They are as accurate and as reliable as any descriptions of language competencies are ever going to get.

The practical benefits of the CEF are manifold.
➢ By emphasising competency (language in use), it shifts the whole emphasis of language teaching and testing towards ability in use, rather than simply knowledge of rules. This is a great step forward.
➢ By its scope and detail, it allows assessors and other users to build a profile of different abilities, rather than assigning a number to an overall, theoretical and largely meaningless level, which is how most previous (and some current tests) operate.
➢ It also is a departure from grammar/vocabulary assessment systems, allowing the Framework to be applied to languages which have widely disparate grammatical systems.
➢ In its sheer breadth and depth, it allows curriculum designers, coursebook writers, teachers and learners to be very selective about what areas of the language, and what abilities they want to focus on, without losing some sense of a common measurable standard in their search for a tailor- made individualised syllabus.

Like any big conceptual structure, it has a few faults.
Chief among these is the assumption that low level users are dependent on set-phrases, while high level users are free from this dependency. The Framework states that grammatical competency is the ability to produce sentences and utterances which conform to the rules of grammar as opposed to memorising and reproducing them as fixed formula. This is wrong. Advanced use is not the ability to construct sentences on the hoof from scratch, utilising the rules of grammar, as the Framework authors think, but a combination of grammatical complexity and low-frequency vocabulary usage. Research in computational linguistics is quite unambiguous in attesting to the ubiquitous presence of pre-memorised set-phrases in very advanced users, in all kinds of discourses. This aside, only a few of the descriptors at C1 and C2 level are affected by this.

These practical considerations aside, what’s most interesting, is the philosophical assumptions that underlie the whole project, in particular its essentially European, humanistic impulse. One can see the CEF as the latest in a long line of Humanistic, Enlightenment projects that sought to encompass, encode and describe all domains of human knowledge: Diderot’s Encylopedia, Grimms’ Worterbuch, Johnson’s Dictionary. The anonymous authors of the Framework go out of their way to emphasise the holistic, individualistic aspect of language use and learning: no two users of a language, whether native speakers of foreign learners have exactly the same competences or develop them in the same way. The accompanying documents, in which the underlying assumptions of the whole project are described, encompass a long tradition of European thought, from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Kant’s phenomenology to the latest research in neurobiology.

The CEF aims at total flexibility of use without sacrificing a useful set of universal standards, and it largely succeeds in this aim.

"The Language Instinct" Stephen Pinker

This book is marred by several major weaknesses, some of them endemic to the genre, and some of them indicative of the wider problems in linguistics.

In popular science books, in order to make the science accessible and interesting to the lay reader, the rigour of the science must often be glossed over. It gives one the impression often that the point has been won by rhetoric, rather than logic or argument; a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, with a well placed joke, or a well chosen example. Pinker is excellent at making the science accessible, but one wonders what caveats and controversies are being left out. The chapters on phonology, syntax, morphology and the evolution of language are very well done, with a potentially boring subject made interesting. There is also very good stuff on the brain, with descriptions of fascinating case studies of various different kinds of aphasias. While his overall thesis is absolutely correct -that language is an instinct (well, of course it is, duh)- the way Pinker goes about persuading us to accept his thesis, and the arguments he uses to do so are not as uncontroversial or as simplistic or as clear cut as he presents them. The book is subtitled: How the mind produces language. But the fact is, no one really knows how the mind produces language. We only have hypotheses which can be disproved or proved by various experiments, and both the hypotheses and experiments are hotly contested by those who have vested interests in creating and pursuing those controversies, i.e. academic linguists.

The major problem of the book is indicative of one of the main problems in linguistics.
In S/Z, Barthes outlines the notion of a cultural or reference code which he describes as: a type of knowledge, physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical etc. Meaning in a text is enriched by a more or less covert reference to this body of knowledge. While The Language Instinct is of course not a fictional work, the reference code in this book is psychology. Pinker describes himself as an evolutionary psychologist. I have no problem with the evolutionary part, but the psychology part is very doubtful indeed. We lost all hope of fully understanding consciousness when we switched our focus of enquiry from philosophy to psychology. The elevation of psychology over philosophy and literature as a vector for knowledge of the mind has taken linguistics down a blind alley. Now that Freud and the behaviourists have been comprehensively discredited, and neuro science has increased our understanding of the function of the brain, psychology has been largely reduced to designing bizarre and puerile experiments and reporting on their results. Pinker is a sucker for this, presenting the findings of psychological experiments as if they cast a sure light into the dark mysteries of the mind and how it produces language. However, what he doesn’t stress is that every study based on a research method can always be contradicted by another study based on a different research method.
For example, Pinker spends a lot of time debunking the Whorf Sapir Hypothesis. He cites a study by Bloom which appears to support Whorf. Bloom concludes through an experiment that because Chinese lacks a subjunctive mood, Chinese speakers are not able to hypothesize. Pinker then cites another study by Au, Tanako and Liu which appears to debunk Bloom’s study. In this second study, Bloom’s experiment was duplicated with small changes, and hey presto, the second study contradicted the first one: of course Chinese speakers are able to hypothesize! The second study proves it!
The problem with psychological experiments of this sort is that very often the researchers cannot see the wood for the trees.
Another irony of this is, of course, that all these studies do prove the Whorfian Hypothesis. Experiments can be designed in such a way as to prove or disprove any question. But the way the question is framed is determined by categories which are themselves determined and reflected by language. Any bilingual person, or a person who lives in another language environment, will have the experience that language determines thought, and that categories and ideas from one language cannot exactly be reproduced in another. One does not need to measure and tabulate every tree to know that one is in a forest.

The ‘evidence’ arrived at from experiments is never as clear cut as it seems. While researchers working in the hard sciences can arrive at conclusions by study of the evidence, researchers in the soft (or pseudo) sciences cannot because the nature of the evidence is simply not the same. The scientific method works for the natural sciences because natural sciences are based on observable, external phenomena: plants, animals, physical properties, atoms and the forces of the world out there. But language is not like this: it is not only an external phenomenon. It is a creation of the mind and of the community, and unlike the objective observable phenomena of the external world, it lives both inside us and outside us: it indeed constructs our minds and constructs our worlds. Language is of course a tool for communication, but prior to that it is a tool for thought.


Pinker makes no mention at all of corpus linguistics, which is the one area of evidence that is incontestable in linguistics. He makes a bizarre assertion several times, that every stretch of language is unique, put together on the spot, minted freshly anew each time out of rules that are the language instinct. Now, anyone working in corpus linguistics knows this is patently untrue. A simple KWIC search will show the existence of millions of prefabricated strings, from two word collocations to complete sentences, stored in the memory and produced on demand. The vast proportion of human speech is highly formulaic, clichéd and unoriginal. You know what I mean? That was the point of Flaubert’s whole project, to liberate language from the cliché. And if our language is clichéd and formulaic, what of our minds?

Another ludicrous assertion is that language is tool of precision: simply by making noises with our mouths we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds. If only! There would be an end to misunderstandings, an end to ambiguity, punning and humour if that were the case. By this assertion Pinker wipes out whole schools of current literary and linguistic theory: hermeneutics, reader-response theory, most of Wittgenstein’s work, Austin’s, Searle’s, Stanley Fish’s and Iser’s…. As Iris Murdoch most pithily puts it: Only very simple things can be said without falsehood.The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Pinker obviously has a great relish for language and includes lots of interesting and quirky examples. But somehow I get the feeling that he has missed the soul of language.
Many of the ‘discoveries’ of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics are either borne out or contradicted by the great thinkers and writers of literature and philosophy, and for this reader at least, it is those writers who get closer to the mystery of how the mind produces language. Lilly Tomlin got closer to the truth than any psychological experiment can reveal when she says that language arose in the first place because of man’s deep felt need to complain.

From the lost papers of Dr.Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr

Grammatology Lecture Notes

Let us now consider the nature of Chinese verbs, and what they tell us about the Chinese historical world view. In order to fully understand the nature of the Chinese verb, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the verb in English.

Verbs in English –and all European languages- convey two meanings in one word: an action (go, walk, read) and the time when the action happens: (went, am walking, have read). The time of the action is signified by the verb tense. In the European mind, therefore, action is seen as inseparable from time. Our conceptual existence is time-bound, and our languages reflect this in the immense complexity of our tense systems. Our very actions and the states we inhabit are always contextualised as part of a time span. Our world is a linear progression from the past through the present into the future, and on. Time therefore takes on the metaphorical dimension of space, in which these two abstract concepts are understood as metaphors of each other: it’s high time, in next to no time, time flies, bring an event forward, put it back. The prepositions in at on are used for both time and space: in March/in the room, at 8.00/at the window; on Monday/on the table.
We exist suspended in a crux of time and space.

Chinese verbs, on the other hand, only give information about the action. Chinese has no tenses. Information about the time of the action is either signified elsewhere in the sentence, by means of a time chunk: yesterday, tomorrow, before, after and so on; or is left ambiguous and inferred from the context. Inconceivably, actions do not take place in time but in a timeless world. There is no orderly linear progression of time from the past to the future. Instead there is a timeless, static state, in which space and time are not metaphors of each other. The language does not allow the possibility of a conjunction of action and time, but specifically prevents it.

Along with the absence of tense, is the absence of any subjunctive mood. Chinese draws no grammatical or conceptual distinction between if I win the lottery, and if I won the lottery. The language (the mind) cannot hypothesise; it cannot imagine an alternative state of affairs, one that could be changed, one that could be bettered by actions taking place in time.

It is tempting to see in this an explanation of the tremendous inertia of Chinese culture, where things have remained basically unchanged for 5000 years. The Chinese mind exists in a timeless state of inertia, where actions are not seen as time-bound, time is not linear or progressive, time and space are not metaphors of each other, and there is no possibility of improvement.

On a more mundane level, the Chinese are notoriously bad at timekeeping, at time management, they have extremely limited spatial awareness, and most of the time have no idea where they are.

"Functional English Grammar: an introduction for second language teachers" Graham Lock

Reading this book has induced in me a kind of giddy nausea. Here’s why:

“Note also that the speech act exclamation is also often realized by a clause with no Subject, Finite, or Predicator (technically a minor clause) as in the following.
(28) What a mess!
(29) How stupid!
Such clauses cannot be analyzed for mood at all.”

This little extract chosen at random reveals the underlying assumptions behind this book: a) grammar is a discrete, unified conceptual system onto which all languages can be mapped; b) it is useful and correct to analyse bits of language in terms of their single word units Subject, Predicate etc; c) analyzing grammar consists mainly of sticking labels on bits of language: exclamation; d) the close analysis of grammar in the way put forward by this book is useful for language learners.

Hence the nausea.

For a book which purports to "be intended for teachers rather than linguists or text analysts", Lock does a truly dreadful job of clarifying grammar for those involved in the pedagogical process. His book covers much of the same old ground in the same old way as other descriptive grammarians, and it is hard to see why his understanding and presentation of grammar merits the title 'functional', or why we needed this book at all. However, dear reader, all is not lost, for the book has brought into articulation my own thoughts on the answers to three questions: What is grammar? What is it for? Who needs to study it? (Normally I despise rhetorical questions in writing as being the mark of a lazy intellect, but as Lock has allowed himself so many errors of analysis in his exposition of English grammar, and so many errors of judgement in the pitching of his tone and content to his audience, that I have decided to allow myself a little leeway in my review of his book). It might be useful to start by answering in the negative.

What is grammar?
Grammar is not a discrete, unified conceptual system –like a Platonic form- onto which all languages can be mapped. It is rather the underlying structure of each language and each language has its own grammatical concepts. The only grammatical concept which I suspect has any real transferability across all human languages is the noun/verb distinction (I name the object I see, I name the action I do). Other concepts such as adjective, predicate, clause, tense and aspect etc may not exist for all other languages. Chinese, for example, has no linking verbs, no tenses and no articles. Any attempt to impose these so-called universal grammatical constructs onto all languages, or to map divers languages onto one grammatical system ultimately derived from the Latin language is an act of grammatical imperialism. Ahem.

What is grammar for?
Grammar is not for deciding what is correct or not correct. It is not for passing tests and getting good grades. It is not a system of rules, but a system of laws, as in the laws of physics, or the law of gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics.
Grammar is for clarifying meaning. Grammar is meaning. ‘I go swimming in the afternoon: I went swimming in the afternoon’. The selection of tense allows both sender and receiver of the message to understand whether the action was carried out on a particular afternoon, or on every afternoon as a matter of routine. Of course, on a deeper level the grammatical categories that underlie each language give fascinating glimpses into the profoundly foreign ways that other cultures see the world. (c.f. Lakoff & Johnson).

Who needs to study grammar?
Native speakers do not need to study grammar. They already know it. It already informs and creates the structure of their mind, the way they communicate with themselves. Writers do not need to study it. Most writers can manipulate language on an instinctual basis for certain effects. Shakespeare went to grammar school certainly, but he did not study English grammar. Dickens did not go to school for very long or very often. He also did not study English grammar. If the two greatest verbal artists in the language did not study grammar, why should other writers bother with it? Children do not need to study it beyond the mere fixing on of labels: verb noun adjective adverb sentence clause, and perhaps other labels of other parts of speech. Why? Because it will help them to learn other languages. In fact, the only people who need to study grammar, are grammarians, and language learners, and grammarians only need to study it so that they can produce grammars for language learners!

So if the only people who need to study grammar are those people learning and teaching languages, then why is it that all grammars fail so dreadfully in their aim of clarifying how a language works for a person learning or teaching it? (Another rhetorical question, note how I indulge myself.)

The answer is the absence of understanding of the pedagogical process. There is lacking a pedagogical grammar; in other words, a way of describing the laws of creating meaning in a foreign language which can lead the learner to accurate and fluent production of that language. Grammar should be a simplification. Not a dumbing down, but a stripping down to the bare essentials. Grammar is a tool for learning language. Any tool must be simple enough to effectively perform the task it was designed for. The problem with most grammars is that the tool is so complex, that all attention is focussed on learning how to use the tool, rather than what to use it for. Lock’s functional grammar is no exception.

Bearing in mind that (probably) 95% of English teachers in the world are non-native speakers, and that the 2% of native speakers who decide to become EFL teachers are only doing it until something better comes along, Lock is hopelessly, madly, burningly naïve if he thinks teachers are going to be able to understand much less be able to use in the classroom descriptions of the language such as he puts forward:

"…clauses like 63 through 65 do not simply assign an Attribute to a Carrier. They identify one participant by equating it with another participant. This is why they are called identifying process clauses. And if participant A equals participant B, then of course participant B also equals participant A. "
(Got that, class?)

While the applied linguist in me (perversely perhaps) enjoys this kind of stuff, the pedagogue in me is literally sickened by it.

From the lost papers of Dr.Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr

Some inadequacies of Mandarin ChineseThe language has no words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’.Agreement or disagreement is signaled by repeating the verb, or repeating it with the addition of a negative prefix. This keeps you on your toes as you have to remember the auxiliary spoken by the other person. The catch all ‘duei’ (‘right’) is not always appropriate.

'Question' and ‘problem’ are expressed with the same word.This means that conceptually, an inquiry is problematic and should be avoided. Hence nothing is ever questioned, nothing ever changes and nothing ever improves.

'make someone do something’ and ‘let someone do something’ are expressed with the same chunkThis means that there is no conceptual distinction between obligations and freedoms.

The language is absurdly tautologous, with phrases like ‘drive car’, ‘sing song’, and ‘blue colour’.
Clarification is offered in trivial areas where none is really needed, while more important areas of meaning which are shrouded in ambiguity and crying out for further explication (such as gender and time) are ignored. The most important point is so frequently missed, and prioritization unknown.

There is no distinction between ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their pro forms.Which means that if you are gossiping about two people of either sex, your listener has no real idea of whom you are talking about. What does this reveal about gender relations? That women are completely invisible, or that gender difference itself is completely invisible?

The writing system is totally inadequate and should be scrapped in its entirety.
In the primeval linguistic choice of how to represent spoken sounds graphically, the West chose to represent phonemes by an alphabet, while the East chose to represent meanings through pictures. From this mistake (an example of Neanderthal intellectual laziness?) stems the entire, contrasting histories of our hemispheres, with the Western capacity for adaptability, flexibility and horizontal, adaptive thought, its capacity for metaphor, and the Eastern necessity for the vertical preservation of received knowledge, its imprisonment by metonymy. This contrast inherent in our two linguistic systems appears also in -and perhaps causes- our incompatible conceptual systems.