If you want to know what the future holds in store in any field, you ask those especially concerned. Is your interest sports? Ask a player. Is it loan rates? Ask a banker. Is it elections? Ask someone who has to run for office. Skip the experts and find a witness whose own life will be affected by the course of events you're inquiring about; find someone on the ground, so to speak. (1)
As Thomas goes on to say, this principle is no more than common sense -- but it throws an interesting light on language. If you have a question about communication, who do you ask? Whose life is affected by the course of understanding? What is the ground of speaking, so to speak? Of course, everybody and his clone uses language, but they are hardly 'especially concerned'; I think we have to look more carefully at what language is used for. Some (perhaps most) of us use it as time-filler, for instance, or solidarity-asserter or action-affirmer -- but there are always other ways to fill the time or to verify one's place in the order of things. But there are some who use it as a thought-translator -- and there are not so many other 'media' that they can be careless with any of them. While we might ponder which comes first -- carefulness or communication (cf Vygotsky) -- Mary Oliver pays attention, below.

In its mathematical, objectively absolute sense, translating is nothing but 'sliding' a finite object from one place to another within a given coordinate system (reflection and rotation are the excluded options). In broader, more comfortably subjective and personal terms, however, we might say that if a phrase fits into or 'generates' a certain perspective, then translation provides both a "sender's" and a "recipient's" point of view. Effectively, one translates the frame of reference instead of the object.

Alfie and Bertie, noting the logical implication that this slide occurs within some 'larger' frame, went and wrote Principia Mathematica about the same thing. However, for the practical person who wants to know what some phrase 'holds in store' (what it "means"), it is enough to look at the (back)ground as well as the object; to locate the experience as well as the figurative words. Oliver gives us, not an abstract assumption of what 'to pay attention' is, but a definition of it. When she cites the classic literature, she is not just 'establishing' her 'legitimacy,' but recognizing her soul's airing-out as part of an experiential tradition. And when we see her relation to the birds as the same as Baucis' and Philemon's relation to the gods, we recognize that translation, after all, goes both ways. It is our listeners' experience which generates what Oliver the writer means.

All Oliver can do is get us to look at, to think about, that experience in a little different way than we used to. That is what I call thought-translation, and (take it from me!) it isnt easy; your whole life is likely to be affected.

Now one could probably produce a couple of volumes on the implications of Internet (I wrote Internate!) access to 'the writer,' the potential of 'virtual immediacy' to link readerly and writerly, angels and mockingbirds, perspectives -- but I will only ask, Why don't we talk this over, on the ground?

Notes


    (1) R B Thomas, The Old Farmer's Almanac, 2000 (Yankee Publishing) p. 63. Back <--
    (2) [A HREF=" http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/atlpoets/oliv9402.htm">The Atlantic Monthly], Feb 1994. <--

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MOCKINGBIRDS
 by Mary Oliver


 This morning
 two mockingbirds
 in the green field
 were spinning and tossing

 the white ribbons
 of their songs
 into the air.
 I had nothing

 better to do
 than listen.
 I mean this
 seriously.

 In Greece,
 a long time ago,
 an old couple
 opened their door

 to two strangers
 who were,
 it soon appeared,
 not men at all,

 but gods.
 It is my favorite story--
 how the old couple
 had almost nothing to give

 but their willingness
 to be attentive--
 but for this alone
 the gods loved them

 and blessed them--
 when they rose
 out of their mortal bodies,
 like a million particles of water

 from a fountain,
 the light
 swept into all the corners
 of the cottage,

 and the old couple,
 shaken with understanding,
 bowed down--
 but still they asked for nothing

 but the difficult life
 which they had already.
 And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
 clapping their great wings.

 Wherever it was
 I was supposed to be
 this morning--
 whatever it was I said

 I would be doing--
 I was standing
 at the edge of the field--
 I was hurrying

 through my own soul,
 opening its dark doors--
 I was leaning out;
 I was listening.