Before and After the Two Cultures

Schiller's mountaintop view of history and nature is, like Humboldt's, a source of encouragement, restoration, and consolation, both an escape from the world of human will and action, and a reconfirmation of the viewer's place in that world ... Humboldt offers his readers just the same mountaintop experience of nature in his view of Chimborazo: the same tranquility and consolation, a vision of the inner realm of law, are being vouchsafed them in these measured visions of the tropics. He speaks with Schiller's voice to invite his readers into this space, but rather than finding there Homer's sun, the nature preserved in poetry, we find Gay-Lussac's atmosphere, preserved in eudiometers. The same power to transport, translate, and console that Schiller invests directly in language Humboldt invests in nature, as represented in the Physical Portrait of the Tropics; susceptibility to this power depends in each case on a degree of "aesthetic education," a cultivated sensibility to the infinite contained in the finite form. In the engraving to the Physical Portrait and in the Views of Nature, the reader is educated by the tables and scales framing and backgrounding the explicitly aesthetic domain--without these, and the tension between the two spaces, Humboldt's nature loses the particular aspect of Ruhe, calm and order, that derives from the overcoming of conflict, the reconciliation of strife, the "cooperation of forces." The question is, how is this order produced? how do the spaces of measurement define both the analysis and the synthesis, the strife and reconciliation of physical forces, and thus construct this "organic" vision for the reader?

- Michael Dettelbach, "Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldt's physical portrait of the tropics" (1996)

Similar points are being made all across the spectrum of history of science scholarship. I can't help being inspired, but also, somehow, angry. How is it that so many young intellectuals are shackled so early to the notion that the kinds of things science is interested in can't possibly be the things that concern the humanities? And how is it that this particular disciplinary demarcation blinds us so effectively to the past and potential future complexities of this relationship? We think we know what belongs in the "science" box, just as much as the "humanities" box, but we are unable to imagine a world in which the two boxes are really two proximately-positioned streams--or, indeed, take on any configuration other than the complete victory of one side.

And, of course, once the "fiziki/liriki," "left brained/right brained" divide has been set up, each of these quintessential imagined communities sets about carefully enlarging its own turf. Computers colonize history and literary analysis; science studies chips away at Newton and Galileo. People who are ordinarily comfortable with ambiguity and relativism turn into snarling partisans who use the language of politics because it justifies their emotional investment. (This was, obviously, the dynamic that underlay the whole Alan Sokal episode all those years ago.) I became interested in "theory" originally because I felt the pull of this debate so strongly, and I never even considered the possibility that the emotions I was putting into the argument could be explained by something far less exalted than the need to smash the Dialectic of Enlightenment or whatever it was. I no longer think any of this pathos had any value, either for "scholarship" broadly defined or for history in particular. Evo-psych lit-crit is looking more and more like the transparent cash-in it is, while Popper and Kuhn have roundly trounced Latour and Feyerabend in the eyes of the public and the general academic community. What we have is a stalemate weighed somewhat heavily towards the scientists. (Let's use the word under erasure for now.)

What is interesting is that all this newfound awareness of the historical consilience of the humanities and the sciences, the aesthetic and the precise, the quantitative and the qualitative, was produced originally in the old turf-war context. If you can show that science never achieved the ability to disentangle itself from its surrounding disciplines, the thinking went, you can successful attack its claim to be epistemologically special. It does not seem that anyone was convinced, and for good reasons: scientists do not consider themselves liable for the sins of their fathers. Instead, what we are beginning to realize is that even the presence of some notional distinction between the sciences and the humanities is not a sure indication that one is standing on divided turf. David Hume's essay "On the Populousness of Ancient Nations" is a splendid monument of humanities scholarship despite the fact that its methods and content look, to us, as examples of a crude kind of "science." Hooke's Micrographia inspired the aesthetic sensibilities of an entire age.

This is one of those rare or not-so-rare cases when a positive intellectual advance has produced more rather than less confusion. I, for one, am no longer able to distinguish a "physicist" from a "lyricist" in any consistent or satisfying way, especially if I look outside the second half of the twentieth century. It still seems possible to recognize genres of rhetoric or appeals to particular audiences--but the actual disciplinary place of such appeals is no longer clearly defined. Once one gets rid of the delusion that rigor, precision, structure, and quantity can be invoked only by philistines with no interest in culture, or that relativity, vagueness, ambiguity, and historical embeddedness are the watchwords of degenerate ivory-tower unemployables, this landscape becomes cloudy and treacherous indeed. I can't help but welcome this development, since I'm already finding it hard to imagine sympathizing with either side ever again. The blurring of this particular line is one of the things that will make the future exciting.

Fantasy Lands

My maps called it Troko Tallios. Locally they called it Trogo Taglios, though those who lived here used the shorter Taglios, mostly. As Swan said, the Trogo part refers to an older city that had been enveloped by the younger, more energetic Taglios.

It was the biggest city I had ever seen, a vast sprawl without a protective wall, still growing rapidly, horizontally instead of vertically. Northern cities grow upward because no one wants to build outside the wall.

Taglios lay on the southeast bank of the great river, actually inland a little, straddling a tributary that snakes between a half-dozen low hills. We debarked in a place that was really a satellite of the greater city, a riverport town called Maheranga. Soon Maheranga would share the fate of Trogo.

Trogo retained its identity only because it was the seat of the lords of the greater principate, its governmental and religious center.

The Taglian people seemed friendly, peaceable, and overly god-ridden, much as Swan and Mather had described in brief exchanges during our journey.

- Glen Cook, Shadow Games

I am not ashamed to admit that I love epic fantasy. In some ways, this is an even more suspect interest than science fiction, which, despite being "genre" and hence inherently lowbrow, has accumulated a vast number of undeniably talented writers who have succeeded in making it a legitimate object of intellectual and even academic curiosity. Fantasy, except for Tolkien, has rarely enjoyed that kind of recognition--and even Tolkien looks rather stereotyped and simplistic when viewed alongside the innumerable lesser writers who have copied him. (Of course, that is in no way his fault.)

What the Robert Jordan/David Eddings tradition has succeeded in doing is creating a marketable, engaging formula for the creation of fantasy sagas. This has come with its own obvious disadvantages. Prime among them is their reliance on interchangeable heroes who navigate their way through a world populated by crudely essentialized raced and cultures. (The troglodytic sexism generally transparently obvious in their design is even harder to bear.) When done well, however, epic fantasy can transcend these limitations by redirecting all of its energy towards the development of its plot. A fantasy series written in this style doesn't need ethnographic subtlety or complex characterization: it succeeds when it can deliver page-turning intrigue that keeps the reader from questioning its world too deeply. The best science fiction relies on the question "How does this particular universe operate?"; epic fantasy must usually ignore this question at all costs.

As a Wheel of Time survivor, I can attest that this strategy does work. It is always haunted, however, by the awkward relationship between the worlds it creates and the historical and mythological past of our own world. Most novels in this vein can be picked apart endlessly for similarities to the real world: why do barbarian tribes always resemble the Celts? Why are the institutional and social patterns of High Medieval Western Europe always the ones at play? It is interesting in particular that cultures patterned on non-European ones are always somehow "the other" in fantasy worlds too, except in the rare cases where what is being referenced is an appropriated notion of something like Tokugawa-era Japanese culture. I think the explanation for this phenomenon lies primarily in the roots of the fantasy genre--the chivalric tales and Arthurian legends that formed the foundation for Tolkien's work as well. The relentless exploitation of this tradition has thus shackled fantasy writers to a fixed ethnography which becomes more and more ossified the more its tropes are recycled. When the non-white protagonist of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series was rendered as white in the film adaptations, it was not really the personal fault of the producers: at work was a deep-seated set of expectations about the ideological structure of fantasy writing that Le Guin managed only partially to overcome.

What I like about Glen Cook's Black Company books is the way they shatter this structure without undermining their focus on plot. There are lots of iconoclastic gestures made in these books (notably a near-complete absence of fantasy sexism with its vapid "romantic interests"), but this one is probably the most successful. Of the eight books in the series, four take place largely in a region patterned, not on France or Germany, but on India. What's more, the protagonists, who begin as the standard fantasy-neutral Western Europeans, are gradually replaced by Indians and Vietnamese, and the exoticism that ought necessarily to accompany any fantasy depiction of South and Southeast Asia slowly dissipates as the series draws to its close. Cook clearly cared about this problem--so much so that the generational shifts that accompany this southward geographical movement are actually a major theme in the novels.

To my mind, this can only make fantasy stronger at producing effective intrigue. I don't hold out much hope for a genre-wide reform, but it is hard to see why writers have been so slow to appreciate the interest-generating possibilities of a rejection of the Arthurian idiom. Not only does it produce more convincing and more diverse worlds, it also widens the potential audience for a genre that has long been tightly linked to pasty white nerds. Perhaps what is needed is a little more, well, fantasy.

Trivia

Unless like Guy de Maupassant one had taken to crawling about on a floor and eating one's own excrement, say.

God, poor Maupassant.

Well, but poor Friedrich Nietzsche, too, actually.

If not to mention poor Vivaldi while I am at it also, since I now remember that he died in an almshouse.

And for that matter poor Bach's widow Anna Magdalena, who was allowed to do the same thing.

Bach's widow. And with all of those children. Some of whom were actually even more successful in music at the time than Bach himself had been.

Well, but then poor Robert Schumann as well, in a lunatic asylum and fleeing from demons. One of whom was even Franz Schubert's ghost.

For that matter poor Franz Schubert's ghost.

Poor Tchaikovsky, who once visited America and spent his first night in a hotel room weeping, because he was homesick.

Even if his head at least did not come off.

Poor James Joyce, who was somebody else who crawled under furniture when it thundered.

Poor Beethoven, who never learned to do simple child's multiplication.

- David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress

I am astonished at how universal the praise for this novel is. Everyone seems to appreciate the author's wit and tenderness and sensitivity. Literary-fiction types who would normally dismiss anything experimental right out of the gate fall all over each other in talking it up. The disturbingly smug afterword waves the book's 52 rejections in the air as if the book's quality were now so unquestionable that this total is another mark of its greatness. David Foster Wallace is moved, not uncharacteristically, to flaunt his philosophy BA and laud the novel as "a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism" (although this description seems to me a rather superficial non-sequitur).

I will not say that the emperor has no clothes--disputanding about gustibus is kind of a lost cause anyway--but I will admit to feeling some puzzlement about this critical reception. To put it plainly, I don't think Wittgenstein's Mistress is especially sensitive or tender (certainly it is less so than many works of the Oulipo school, or even those of my own experimental-fiction-writing friends), or even especially philosophical or intellectual. It is true that the novel's constraints, unlike many similar works, are not sufficiently constricting as to seem wholly artificial, and that may explain its cross-genre appeal. For the rest, I am unconvinced that there's a there there.

What many critics have taken for tenderness, I think, is the inherent poignancy of the novel's premise. "Last person on Earth" is a subject--like cancer or drug addiction--that generates emotional response of its own accord. Beyond that, there is little to say. Yes, the narrator avoids sensitive topics by retreating into trivia, but when the trick is sustained over two hundred-odd pages it begins to look less like keen psychological observation and more like arbitrary authorial convenience. This is not, to be clear, a failure of realism: that is not the author's objective and it is unclear what a realistic depiction of this world would even look like. It is a failure of commitment to the world one has created, and especially to its sole inhabitant.

The intellectual "wittiness" and Wittgensteinian references are, I think, even less successful. The former amounts mostly to a collection of rather inbred winks designed to appeal to people who pride themselves on their knowledge of high-culture trivia. It is true, and in fact quite excellent, that the novel puts the ultimate value and meaning of this trivia into question--yet by the end we still have no motion towards or evidence of any interesting conclusions about the subject. Perhaps I am a dirty lowbrow mouth-breather, but two hundred pages of boring stream-of-consciousness punctuated with random proper nouns is not evidence of education or wit so much as pedantry. Talking to Markson's narrator at a party would be a nightmare.

Wittgenstein is there, of course, but this does not seem to help. The sheer strain with which Markson jams the reader's nose into his intertextuality is a sign that what we are dealing with is yet another system of winks that lead nowhere and produce nothing. The novel might use Wittgensteinian language and make Wittgensteinian jokes, but as a confrontation with Wittgenstein's ideas it is a dismal failure. (She has a painting of her house and talks about a lot! Get it? Ha ha ha!). One reason Wallace's "logical atomism" comment misses the mark is that the novel isn't really about those ideas at all: he might provide the excuse, and perhaps the structure, but his presence neither creates dramatic tension in the book nor resolves it. This suggests pretension rather than insight.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is not horrendously bad, and it is certainly not irredeemable. It could work, in fact, quite well, on a single condition: that it be written in the form of a sci-fi short story by Ted Chiang. Here's a guy who has turned his genre into a vehicle for serious ideas and serious emotion--and has never, unlike Markson, been tempted to write more than necessary. (See, for instance, Exhalation, a similar and I think superior exploration of the same theme.) As for the rest--well, wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber müss man schweigen.

In Praise of Sausages

The behind-the-scenes processes by which things get made — laws, journalism, sausages — are usually said to be so chaotically unhygienic that seeing them in action will put you off the thing itself for good. There are exceptions, though, and in the last few days, mathematics has earned a spot on that second list, at least as far as uninitiated lay people are concerned.

Last week, a young mathematician at HP Labs, Vinay Deolalikar, began circulating a paper that claimed to solve what’s known as the P=NP problem. This is one of the biggest unsettled issues in math and computer science; in fact, the terms “P” and “NP” appear in the titles of computer science research papers more than just about any others. While proposed solutions to P=NP have been common over the years, they are typically offered by amateurs and crackpots. To have a credentialed researcher at a top-flight institution step forward and claim the laurel is rare indeed. In some circles, Deolalikar quickly became even better known than his former boss, Mark Hurd, who was forced out as HP CEO last week after a bizarre non-sex non-scandal.

...In a post yesterday about the Deolalikar paper, I remarked on how civil the online discussion about it seemed, certainly in contrast to most other Internet debates. One correspondent chided me for being too naïve, and reminded me that mathematicians are as capable of catty bitchfests as anyone. A prominent example involves the issue of credit for another math problem, the Poincare conjecture. The controversy was written up in the New Yorker by the author of “A Beautiful Mind.”

I plead guilty to being a slavish math fanboy. But at least I am not alone. As another blog commenter put said about the current discussion

This member of the community at large can’t understand a word you say, but is nevertheless fascinated by every new post and comment. Seeing the review process unfold in public has rekindled my long-dormant interest in mathematics…Thank you.

- Lee Gomes, "A Beautiful Sausage"

Like Gomes, I know nothing about the mathematical details behind this recent attempt at a P!=NP proof. I fled precalculus with extreme abandon in eleventh grade, and since then I have had no exposure to any mathematical concept more complicated than the middle-school-level problems on the GRE. When I read even layman's terms summaries of such concepts, my mind instantly abandons any attempt at coherent reasoning and starts thinking about dinner instead. Does this make me a bad historian of science/technology/mathematics? On a certain level, yes--to the extent that we, even more than scientists themselves, are expected to render the development and evolution of concepts from the hard sciences intelligible to people from other fields. I don't think I'll ever be able to do that well without relying on handwaves that camouflage my own ignorance.

Of course, the fact that I don't understand something is not much of a topic for a blog post. I am interested in something more, well, interesting: the contrast between the mathematical sociability captured in Gomes's post and the scientific mode of self-presentation I described last month. Here's the paradox. By and large, the general public, even the public of educated people, is just as ignorant of mathematics as I am (despite probably having gotten to calculus). So why is there so much interest in the big stories that have shaken the mathematics world recently--Deolalikar's attempt to prove P!=NP and Grigory Perelman's apparently successful proof of the Poincaré Conjecture? These stories are not blips, either: consider the popularity of Pi and A Beautiful Mind and that one documentary about Andrew Wiles. The New Yorker-reading section of the public, it is safe to say, loves math drama.

Contrast this with the reception of similar developments in the hard sciences. Although almost everyone knows something about science, we are generally neither exposed to nor allowed to glimpse the catty infighting and intrigue that surrounds them. The best we generally get is a bare "Scientists have found," whose content, from the point of view of public access to the scientific process, is only slightly above that of an ancient report on the entrails of the latest sacrificial goat. As a result, the public focuses on the findings--which may be interesting and even awe-inspiring--but learns little about their context or significance, and gains little trust in scientists themselves. Science journalism is reviled, and reviled deservedly, because it remains wedded to this model of publication. (Where would science journalists be without press releases?)

The other paradox, which is perhaps even more significant, is that this kind of access to mathematical drama has not lowered the prestige and intellectual authority of mathematicians. Quite the contrary: I would say that not since Albert Einstein have mathematicians inspired so much unmixed admiration. I suspect that the explanation is not too distant from the one I suggested a month ago. When you demonstrate to people that you are not a conspiratorial gang of power addicts and control freaks in league to manipulate the public--and even when you expose, as Grigory Perlman did, the petty plagiarism and priority squabbles that characterize your profession--it instantly becomes easier to comprehend what you are trying to accomplish. Mathematicians have been locked in a self-enclosed world for so long that they have not made serious or visible efforts to construct a public face for their profession; this has left them, paradoxically, better placed than scientists to take advantage of the great reserves of sympathy and interest that characterize our new economy of attention. Let's hope the lesson is heeded.

Literary Offenses

Consequently, the only dog I have in this fight is a philosophical one. I agree with D’Vorkin that any writer who puts pen to paper for money is self-evidently turning out “product.” But that isn’t all he’s doing. Deep down inside, most writers, even the most cynical grub-street hacks, flatter themselves that they’re Speaking Truth to Power or, hell, spinning a good yarn, at least.

The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.

At True/Slant, D’Vorkin told Observer reporter Zeke Turner, “We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine?” From a managerial perspective, lowering overhead by doing away with the Middlemen Formerly Known as Editors makes spreadsheet sense. But who minds the store? Self-editing and self-publishing are fine if you’re Matt Taibbi or Susannah Breslin, reporters who roll over in their sleep and snore out perfectly parsed sentences and triple-sourced statements of fact. But what about the guy in the next cubicle, quietly sculpting the equivalent, in obsessive prose, of Richard Dreyfuss’s scale model of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming? Who’s watching him?

- Mark Dery, "Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant"

I read this piece when it was posted to MetaFilter, and then I read it again when the author showed up and made a nasty, sneering ass of himself in an accompanying thread. The whole business did not help me feel any less conflicted about the article's message. On the one hand, I am tempted to take it seriously, because the aesthetic observations it makes are difficult to refute: the corporate Twitter as a genre has not, as far as I can tell, produced any Fénéons, and the enormous universe of recipe sites is still short on MFK Fishers. On the other hand, it's not as if Dery's article is in any meaningful sense an example or an evocation of the old, pre-eHow journalism. Bathetic laments for lost cultures of reading and writing are by now well-established on the Internet, and their proliferation, like Rousseau's printed complaint about the trash-preserving qualities of print, is a sign of the medium's inescapability. One cannot have Dery without Wikipedia prose.

There are a lot of things that ought to make me sympathetic to Dery. When I first started this blog, I made some half-hearted, semi-conscious attempts at writing "high style" prose, and told myself that if it looked bad it was because Internet philistines were incapable of appreciating anything that did not read like the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook. I go through cycles of favorite, obsessive targets, and at that particular point my most fervently imagined opponents were libertarian atheist anime fans with EE/CS double majors (apparently Dery has not yet graduated from this particular antipathy). I would show them that I, as a Highly Cultured and Literate Individual, was better than them, because I could produce something "craftsmanlike."

Actually, as any look into the archives will attest, what I wrote was mostly just bad prose: prose that relished its own bathos, that drew attention to itself, that alluded unnecessarily and left all its wires exposed. (I like to think I've gotten better, but I suspect the improvement is not really that substantial.) I don't think the problem lay simply in the fact that I was or am a bad writer; I was, after all, still capable of producing perfectly readable and unadventurous pieces of academic prose. The problem was that I was trying to achieve or imitate the journalistic style of a nineteenth-century writer without either the education or the ecosystem to do so convincingly.

I suspect I am not alone. Dery's economic explanations, which see the dead hand of content-farm kulaks wringing all the life out of Internet prose, do not satisfy, if only because the idea of writing colorless prose for money is as old as writing itself. Even the first wire service must have seemed corporate and faceless to the reporters it threatened. No. What's missing on the Internet are simply the traditions and social influences that had once preserved a simulacrum of classically-educated prose on the pages of printed newspapers. In reality, very few people even in long-form journalism can approach the elegance of a Carl Becker today, but thanks to editorial tradition and imitative habit, many produced a semblance. On the Internet, all of that is gone. One searches for antecedents and finds Wikipedia or Reddit, and in that ecosystem the only legitimate-looking style is the plain-spoken idiom that writers on these sites adopt almost instinctively.

Is that bad? I don't think so. I have seen this idiom succeed at expressing things the genteel old greats would never dream of protraying. It deals well with changes of register; it instantly exposes falseness and pretention; it forces no educational litmus tests upon its readers. Mark Dery's prose, by contrast, is unapologetically purple, and to compete with plain-spoken content-farm yokels it always needs to convince itself that their way is culturally more harmful: they're nerds, they're scientists, they all have Asperger's. The problem is somehow never that the prose is ill-adapted to the time or to the medium, that it often looks artificial even to sympathetic literary readers, that it smells from a long way off of ressentiment. (Just look at how he gloats about making his readers go to the dictionary!) In short, Dery's alternative is not the Grand Old Writerly Style he wishes and pretends it to be. If anything, it's unsightly growth on what is basically, despite all his protestations, a sound and vigorous literary trunk.

A Translation Quandary

Мне хочется домой, в огромность

Квартиры, наводящей грусть.

Войду, сниму пальто, опомнюсь,

Огнями улиц озарюсь.

Перегородок тонкоребрость

Пройду насквозь, пройду, как свет,

Пройду, как образ входит в образ

И как предмет сечет предмет.

Пускай пожизненность задачи,

Врастающей в заветы дней,

Зовется жизнию сидячей,-

И по такой, грущу по ней.

Опять знакомостью напева

Пахнут деревья и дома.

Опять направо и налево

Пойдет хозяйничать зима.

Опять к обеду на прогулке

Наступит темень, просто страсть.

Опять научит переулки

Охулки на руки не класть.

Опять повалят с неба взятки,

Опять укроет к утру вихрь

Осин подследственных десятки

Сукном сугробов снеговых.

Опять опавшей сердца мышцей

Услышу и вложу в слова,

Как ты ползешь и как дымишься,

Встаешь и строишься, Москва.

И я приму тебя, как упряжь,

Тех ради будущих безумств,

Что ты, как стих, меня зазубришь,

Как быль, запомнишь наизусть.

- from Boris Pasternak, "The Waves" (1931)

I've translated this wonderful fragment of a poem, not very well, before. It was, I won't lie, a slog: the poem in general, and this fragment in particular, hangs together loosely enough that puzzling out the interrelationships between the lines--a must for a decent translation--seems like an impossible task. But one decision I made that I felt confident about at the time, and to some extent still do, was translating the final verse as "And I will take you up, a harness,/For those insanities to come,/That you will learn me, like a poem,/Like you know histories, by heart." See how it doesn't make sense? That "that" juts out of the third line without doing any noticeable work--and without mending the chasm between the two halves of the verse. I put it there because it is an exact parallel to the Russian "что," which occupies the same place in the original and serves an equally opaque end.

The verse has bugged me for a long time, so much so that I was eventually driven to consult my philologically-inclined family about its meaning. We held a council of sorts. My grandmother, who knew the poet way back in the day, suggested that the "что" was a standard poetic replacement for "которое" ("which"), typical in this case of Pasternak's frequently sloppy grammar. (It's hard to explain the difference in normal usage between the two words, but this was clearly a strange and marginal case) In other words, the sense of the verse was that future insanities were learning Pasternak by heart.

This still did not make sense to me. My theory, admittedly an unsatisfactory one, was that the verse was simply deliberately nonsensical, the "that" left in there deliberately like a false street on a jealous geographer's map. (I was thinking about the "avec" (line 10) in Mallarmé's "Tombeau d'Edgar Poe.") But I, too, was forced to yield: my stepmother pointed out that in that case the first two lines of the verse would have no meaning or purpose at all, which was a much more serious issue. At last, my father declared that "что" could be used in a poetic context to replace not only the singular "которoе," but also the plural "которые" and even the instrumental-case plural "которыми." I had never encountered such a usage before, but I deferred. The line was thus to be understood as follows: "I will take you up, a harness, for the sake of those insanities by which (or through which) you will learn me, et cetera." (The "you" here is still Moscow, of course.) At last, an interpretation which makes sense!

It is this moment that reveals my inadequacies as a translator and reader of poetry. For, even if I wholeheartedly accede to my father's reading, I still have no goddamn idea how to fit it into the context of this fragment. Sure, apocalyptic and historical themes appear elsewhere in the poem, but here we are supposed to be dealing with something different! The vagueness and uncertainty of my original "that" (which I had been unconsciously interpreting as an analogue to "que" in the sense of "may") not only papered over the difficulty in the interpretation of the original text, but also created a kind of meaning for the poem that it seems not to have had at all. I had been reading Pasternak as hesitantly expressing a hope that Moscow would memorize him like a poem or a story; if my father's reading is correct, he is in fact implying that Moscow will memorize him whether it likes it or not.

This creates a new difficulty for me. What do I do with the translation? It would not be hard to change "that you will learn me" to "with which you'll learn me." But with that move, the charm and beauty of the lines, which had originally inspired me to translate the fragment in the first place, disappears entirely: desperate and touching hope is replaced by unexplained posturing. Which of the text's claims should govern my choice of reading? The most correct interpretation, although it is dubious here even on the most basic level? Aesthetic appeal, although it is horribly presumptuous to substitute myself for the poet (and yet this is something that I, as a translator, am forced to do all the time)? Or simply the euphony and coherence of the translation? I still have not been able to make a decision, and so the poem remains as I once read it. Maybe it's for the best.