[syndicate] Colloquy‏

[jeff harrison]

SIGNUM: See that figure there, across the water? In profile? Seated. The reader. That's The Translator.
 
ONYMA: Translator of what language?
 
SIGNUM: You have to ask? You haven't heard of The Translator?
 
ONYMA: Not this one. Is there a story?
 
SIGNUM: This translator, whether by decision or cause, I don't know, neither speaks nor writes any living language.
 
ONYMA: Dead languages, then?
 
SIGNUM: Only one. English. It could even be said that The Translator hears only in English, since words are translated immediately, or with near-immediacy, into English as soon as they are spoken. The Translator has said this, and also says this of written words.
 
ONYMA: Impossible.
 
SIGNUM: Honestly, I heard it from none other than Talu.
 
ONYMA: Then perhaps The Translator is untruthful.
 
SIGNUM: If not truthful, The Translator is guilelessly misstating or willfully misrepresenting. It could be a matter of miscommunication, since someone who knows English is the rarest of rarities.
 
ONYMA: I know a few words.
 
SIGNUM: Veracity aside, as a premise The Translator's condition is thought-provoking. For instance, would The Translator hear an untranslatable word as silence?
 
ONYMA: Hear as silence, or translate as silence?
 
SIGNUM: Would an untranslatable word be replaced from a store of deliberately falsely-translated words?
 
ONYMA: The notion of a store of deliberately falsely-designative words could serve as a definition of language.
 
SIGNUM: Or a history of language. Does The Translator incorporate untranslatable words, or any kind of foreign word, into English? How true is The Translator to the spirit of English?
 
ONYMA: English! What if I were to cry the word "poesy"?
 
SIGNUM: I...
 
ONYMA: Poesy! Unyielding impassivity -- surely, hearing an English word is worth something.
 
SIGNUM: The Translator is out of earshot, I believe. "Poesy"? Isn't the word "poetry"?
 
ONYMA: I understood it to be "poesy". "Poetry" must be a porphyrogene youth of yet another epoch.
 
SIGNUM: Within a dead language, what of anachronism, and what of archaism? Does The Translator change our native language, say, into Chaucerian English? Is what The Translator hears -- or, a comprehensive, converting Echo, instantly repeats -- a melange of English epochs?
 
ONYMA: Different epochs for different days! Different hours! Months! Years!
 
SIGNUM: Is it, as with the possibility of incorporating untranslatable and other foreign words into English, a matter of context and consistency?
 
ONYMA: Does The Translator know all living languages, not an impossible task, and hears English with every word?
 
SIGNUM: Like I said, food for thought. Let's move on.



      
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