Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter

  In Chapter 5, speech errors are given a lengthy treatment, and any speech error is a unique event intimately linked not only with a particular language but also with a particular individual’s brain. Rather than transcribing such an irreproducible event into a different language, we relied principally on examples that were directly observed in the language we were writing in. But we were fortunate in that, over the years, we had collected sizable corpora of errors in both French and English, and so the translation strategy there was more akin to transculturation. On the surface, totally different speech errors were used as illustrations, but at a deeper level, the mental mechanisms that we described were all the same. For that reason, this important part of our book reads very differently in French and English, and yet in their essence, the two discussions really do say “exactly the same thing”.

  Another striking example of transculturation comes from Chapter 5, and involves the way we found of rendering in French a telephone conversation between two Americans. One of them, a jazz musician, had placed a classified ad in a newspaper in order to sell his old cornet, and the other one had called him to inquire about it. However, the potential buyer was under the impression that the entity in question was a used Dodge Coronet. Despite this considerable disparity in topic, the two had a conversation that lasted a minute or more that seemed to each of them to make perfect sense. Since this misunderstanding came about as the result of a phonetic resemblance between words that are not familiar to most French speakers, a straightforward translation into French of the dialogue would have been heavy-handed, and would in fact have ruined the example for French readers. The analogous conversation that we chose instead for the French version of the chapter was taken from a television advertisement in which two people are having a conversation over lunch about a documentary film concerning “emperors”. The one who has seen the movie knows it was about emperor penguins, and that’s what he has in mind (the ad explicitly jumps back and forth between the private mental images of the two people), while the one hearing about it for the first time is imagining a crowd consisting of clones of the French emperor Napoleon in various scenarios, starting in the steppes of Russia and winding up in Antarctica. Neither one, of course, has any idea for at least a minute of the fact that they are talking past each other. The extended ambiguity in the French dialogue has very much the same flavor as that of the English dialogue, which makes the translation work very nicely. And yet it might seem rather odd that in passing from American soil to French soil, a musical instrument turned into a penguin and a used car turned into a monarch.

  In the original version of our lengthy list of caricature analogies in the current chapter, one featured a French speaker mocking another French speaker for a nonstandard pronunciation of the number word “cinq”, meaning “five”. The mocker, to cast doubt on the acceptability of this usage, spontaneously came up with an analogous but clearly sillier usage involving the number word “six”. This quip was too language-specific to be translated, but by chance, we happened to have observed a strikingly similar case in English, this one involving two bisyllabic verbs, “invite” and “accept”, of which the former, with shifted stress, can be used as a noun but somewhat questionably, whereas the latter, similarly stress-shifted, makes an unarguably silly-sounding noun. The two anecdotes were parallel at the level of their essences, but clearly “invite” and “accept” are not the standard translations of “cinq” and “six” — no more than “birds flying around in an airport concourse” is the standard translation of “un accordéoniste dans le métro”.

  Chapter 3 included perhaps the most complex of all the translation challenges in the book — two poems from the pen of our friend Kellie Gutman, each of which describes one side of the analogy linking Dick and his bottlecaps to Danny and his ants. Originally, Kellie was inspired to write the poem about Dick at Karnak simply because it captured an amusing episode involving her husband during a cruise they made up the Nile. However, since witnessing that episode had triggered in Doug’s mind the far-off memory of his infant son Danny at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and since that reminding incident was featured in our book, we asked Kellie if she could write a parallel poem about the earlier episode. She took up our challenge with verve, using exactly the same poetic form, perfectly matching the syllable counts on corresponding lines and also preserving the precise pattern made by feminine (bisyllabic) and masculine (monosyllabic) rhymes. When we were writing Chapter 3 and were starting to frame the passage about the Dick/Danny analogy, we knew that Kellie’s two poems would make excellent accompanying pieces and thus decided to include them. This fact created a major obstacle — not only were both poems composed in playful English, but they obeyed several detailed formal constraints. Both despite and because of its linguistic virtuosity, Kellie’s performance called for faithful translation on all levels in the French language.

  We will not describe the details of the two pairs of poems, since that could occupy several pages, but below we simply exhibit the final stanza of all four poems.

  At last, the North Rim: strange striations

  with shades evoking exclamations —

  unless you’re Danny… Then you treasure

  the leaves and bugs! While grownups measure

  the grandeur of vast rock formations,

  you play with ants — a simpler pleasure.

  Le Grand Canyon enfin s’révèle!

  Falaises rocheuses, couleurs trop belles —

  à moins d’avoir taille trop modeste…

  or là, tu scrutes, à l’aide de gestes,

  fourmis et feuilles à p’tite échelle,

  et ça t’procure une joie céleste…

  In Karnak’s heat, our guide expounded

  on gods and temples, while surrounded

  by columns far too grand to measure.

  We contemplated them with pleasure,

  but as we gazed on high, dumbfounded,

  Dick stooped to pluck a humbler treasure.

  Au Temple de Karnak, le guide

  louait les hauts piliers splendides

  (et nous brûlions), quand, d’un beau geste,

  s’agenouillant de façon leste,

  Richard saisit, d’une main humide,

  un p’tit trésor bien plus modeste.

  Among the constraints governing the two final English-language stanzas is the fact that all twelve of their lines end in feminine rhymes (meaning two-syllable rhymes in which the penultimate syllable is stressed and carries the rhyming action, and in which the final syllable is unstressed and is identical in both words — e.g., “pleasure” and “measure”). In French the concept of feminine rhyme exists but is slightly different: it requires that the final word of each of the two lines involved should end in a so-called “mute ‘e’ ”, which, despite its name, is not in fact totally silent but is pronounced, albeit just slightly (for instance, “modeste” and “céleste” form a feminine rhyme in French). Kellie’s conscious decision to use exclusively feminine rhymes as she crafted the twelve lines in these two stanzas in English wound up, a couple of years later, forcing all twelve lines of the corresponding French stanzas to end in mute “e”’s.

  As if this wasn’t enough, Kellie playfully chose to use exactly the same set of rhyming words in lines 3, 4, and 6 in both of her stanzas — but in one poem their order was “treasure”, “measure”, “pleasure”, while in its analogical mate their order was cyclically permuted: “measure”, “pleasure”, “treasure”. This subtle cross-poem pattern posed yet another thorny translational hoop through which to jump.

  In the end, however, the challenge was met, and all the various hoops were jumped through simultaneously. The meter and the rhyme pattern were preserved throughout, syllable counts were preserved, the feminine-rhyme/masculine-rhyme distinction was preserved, the cross-poem sameness of the rhymes on lines 3, 4, and 6 was preserved, the cyclic permutation of those three rhymes was preserved, and last but not least, linguistic playfulness was pres
erved. A careful look at the three feminine rhymes on lines 3, 4, and 6 of the French version shows that in the lefthand stanza the sounds “deste”, “gestes”, and “leste” are used (the “s” at the end of “gestes” is just as silent as the comma that follows it), while in the righthand stanza these same sounds show up cyclically permuted — namely, as “geste”, “leste”, and “deste”.

  Poetry translation necessarily involves a large number of searches for complex analogies because one is laboring under the combination of many simultaneous pressures, some of which are explicit and quite sharp (such as a precise syllable count or the constraint of rhyming), others of which are anything but explicit and are subject to endless interpretation (such as the meaning of a word or the tone of a passage). The number of pathways that are tentatively explored is enormous, and the number of compromises made is also large.

  But the product that emerges from all this searching, adjusting, and compromising does not have to be inferior to the original poem. The writer of the original was no less subject to multiple pressures, and hence necessarily made a vast number of choices that were also compromises. Compromise is the name of the game whenever constraints are involved, as they are in poetry, and a certain sort of creativity is also a frequent outcome of the combination of pressures under which one finds oneself working. Thus compromise can even at times be a source of quality. And in this context, creative compromise, arrived at through elegant analogies, is what we are talking about.

  Who is Manipulating Whom?

  In this chapter, we’ve shown how analogies are constantly manipulated by people, using such examples as caricature analogies, explanatory analogies, analogies that help people make personal or larger-scale decisions, analogies situated in the microworld of Copycat, analogies featuring various amounts and sorts of frame-blending, and analogies allowing translation and even transculturation to take place.

  The preceding chapter showed how analogies sometimes trick us, manipulating us without our being even in the least aware of it; this chapter, by contrast, has shown how analogies, not content merely to lurk behind the scenes and pull strings surreptitiously, often emerge into broad daylight, where they are then at our mercy. We humans are thus not always mere puppets; indeed, sometimes we are puppeteers who deliberately build or choose one analogy or another, most frequently in order to communicate with others, but sometimes simply to make a situation clearer to ourselves. So in the end, who is manipulated, and who is the manipulator?

  To choose one analogy over another is to favor one viewpoint over another. It amounts to looking at things from a particular angle, to taking a specific perspective on a situation. An insightful analogical take on a situation gives you confidence in your beliefs about the situation while also revealing new facts about it. A teacher, a lecturer, a lawyer, a politician, a writer, a poet, a translator, or a lover may pass hours or days in search of the most convincing analogy, like a goldsmith crafting a beautiful chalice for maximal effect. Such individuals work very hard and very consciously to induce in their listeners or readers the same point of view, or the same emotion or feeling or judgment, as they have.

  On the other hand, sometimes everything happens in just a fraction of a second, as is the case for caricature analogies that people just blurt out. Although these, too, are conscious analogies dreamt up for a specific purpose, they are often less finely crafted than the ones just described, because the person who comes out with a caricature analogy often has no idea of how they came up with that particular one, as opposed to many others that might have worked just as well. And then there is the swirling sea of unconscious analogies constantly churning below the surface of our minds, forming and unforming without cease, pushing our thoughts “hither and skither” at all moments — and yet we are blithely unaware of them. These are the manipulating analogies that we discussed in Chapter 5. Together, then, these two chapters have painted a picture of a continuum stretching between thoughts that we push around and thoughts that push us around, but no matter where one looks along this continuum, one finds the process of analogy-making as the operative principle.

  Although we have called some analogies “manipulated” or “carefully crafted”, we could still try to look beneath their surface to find their hidden sources. And as we’ve seen throughout this chapter, consciously crafted analogies owe their existence to spontaneous unconscious analogical links. This means that even when you think it’s you who are pulling the strings, the fact is that you are merely a puppet of whose strings you are unaware. You feel that you are deliberately creating an analogy to advance a certain point of view, but actually it’s the other way around: your point of view comes from a myriad of hidden analogies that have given you a certain perspective on things.

  Thus, the baseball announcer who spontaneously said, “Trying to get a hit off of Sandy Koufax is like trying to drink coffee with a fork” came up with this colorful image because unconsciously he was seeing one thing (a bat) coming very close to but slipping right by another thing (a ball), and this hidden abstract conceptual skeleton then gave rise to an analogical bridge linking the actual situation (swinging at a fastball and missing it) to an imaginary humorous situation (coffee slipping off the tines of a fork). In short, though we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned. And thus the powerful “leader” is unmasked and revealed to be merely a very perceptive follower.

  CHAPTER 7

  Naïve Analogies

  Three Anecdotes

  Timothy is watching his father shave one morning. He observes his father moistening his face, spreading some shaving cream across it, using the blade, and rinsing. From his four-year-old vantage point, Timothy categorizes the scene as best he can. The idea that a razor, so different in appearance from a pair of scissors or a knife, might be able to cut something does not cross his mind. On the other hand, Timothy knows very well that certain substances dissolve in other substances, such as sugar in hot water. He is therefore absolutely convinced that the shaving cream dissolves his father’s stubble, and that the razor’s sole purpose is to wipe away the shaving cream once it has done its job.

  Janet is on a local mailing list, and one day she received a message from a chatty neighbor sharing this news: “This morning I enjoyed watching a bunch of titmice feasting on the insects on the branchlets of our tulip tree. There’s such an abundant crop of insects this year that I think it will attract a large population of insect-eaters like titmice and chickadees.” Janet was puzzled by the image of teeny mice scurrying about on the branches of a tree, since she had never witnessed any such thing. When she came to the phrase “titmice and chickadees” she was puzzled yet more, since it seemed odd that mice and birds would happily coexist on the branches of a tree. All at once it hit her that titmice are not in fact teeny mice, but are birds, just like chickadees.

  Professor Alexander is bidding good-bye to a younger colleague who is leaving for Germany for a month. He says, “When you arrive, please send me your email address, won’t you?” Seeing the look of perplexity on his colleague’s face, Professor Alexander bangs his hand against his forehead. “What am I saying? Obviously, your email address isn’t going to change at all!”

  The age difference between Timothy and Janet is about the same as between Janet and Professor Alexander, but despite these large gaps, the same cognitive phenomenon is at work in the young child, the young adult, and the older adult. All three were taken in by tempting analogies, which, just like the categorical blinders discussed in Chapter 5, led them into error. In the cognitive-psychology literature, one finds all sorts of terms for this phenomenon, including “preconceived notion”, “spontaneous reasoning”, “naïve reasoning”, �
�naïve theory”, “naïve conception”, “tacit model”, “conceptual metaphor”, “misconception”, and “alternative conception”. Although these terms are not all interchangeable, they do have in common one key thing, and we will call that core notion “naïve analogy”.

  The idea is that an unfamiliar concept (such as shaving cream, titmouse, or email address, in the three anecdotes) is apprehended plausibly, although inaccurately, through a natural-seeming analogy with a prior piece of knowledge (here, knowledge about hot liquids, mice, and postal addresses). Such analogies allow a person to make at least some sense of the new situation by likening it to something familiar, and yet it is all done in a spontaneous, unconscious, automatic way, without the person’s least awareness of making an analogy.

  This stands in stark contrast to the standard image of analogy-making as a process of deliberate construction of mappings between situations. Naïve analogies lead directly to conclusions without there being any consideration of other options, and without any uncertainties or doubts arising. Thus the shaving cream is taken for granted as a dissolving substance by Timothy, the hungry titmice as a type of tree-borne rodent by Janet, and the email address as a place-specific address by Professor Alexander. The presence of these analogies is never felt explicitly, however.

  Just like other acts of categorization, naïve analogies lead one to a perfectly reasonable (and thus self-consistent) interpretation of a situation, but they unconsciously assume that one is dealing with a typical member of the selected category. However, the situation may well involve an atypical member or even a non-member of the chosen category, in which case the conclusions reached will be irrelevant and useless. Thus if an email address were a postal address (the most familiar type of address to Professor Alexander), then the question he asked would have been totally reasonable, because the colleague was indeed going far away. Similarly, if a titmouse were indeed a very small rodent, then it would have been reasonable to be surprised by an image of such animals scampering about on tree branches, and Janet’s confusion at this image would have been perfectly comprehensible.