Hello Victoria. On the mystery of Desnos’ poem: I think the creature is the German army. The position of the poet near to a road suggests that he’s keeping his distance to monitor the situation from a place of safety. Hearing not seeing. The clumsy uncertainty of the great creature gives the poet Hope. Leading to the idea that this great intruder will collapse. It’s so huge that collapse is inevitable - failure is inherent to such oppressive invasion. Its collapse will of course leave a squashed and altered landscape, but the great project of imposing external power on France will have failed. That’s my reading for what it’s worth. Tragic that the Nazis got him and he died a couple of years after. I must get back to late Desnos, poems like these. I agree this is a tremendous, intriguing piece. Thanks for foregrounding it. I’m not sure I’ve taken note of it, or indeed read it, before.
Thank you Andrew and sorry for such a slow reply, I forgot that I'd replied to your private message but not to your comment here. In this case, though, the delay is helpful since as I have read more deeply in Desnos it is clear that you are right, or at least that your interpretation is at least part of what is going on in this poem, since the poem comes from the sequence "Contrée" which was written under occupation in 1942-3 and published more or less explicitly as an act of resistance in 1944.
On a slight tangent, one aspect of the limits of translation that I think a lot about but is (for obvious Two Cultures reasons) almost never discussed in literary writing is that of translation from mathematics/physics into `regular' languages. Mathematics is its own language, ideally adapted for communicating certain concepts, and fluency in it tends to be acquired either early in life or never. But, rightly, those of us who live in this world also try and translate these ideas for those who aren't native speakers of mathematese.
How does one convert something written in mathematese into English? What does one try and keep and what must one give up? How much should I preserve from what is important, even crucial, in the original? At the risk of sounding pretentious, I don't think this question is structurally that different from one about e.g. turning quantitatively-scanned hexameters from the ancient Mediterranean world into a stress-based English pentameter at home in glass and concrete megacities.
Fascinating reply, thank you Joseph. It makes me think also of the 'meta-languages' that we use to describe features of language -- the technical terminology that's used to talk about grammar or syntax or indeed metre, but needs to some extent at least "translating" for a non-expert audience. And most of all of Pānini, the ancient Sanskrit grammarian, who developed a kind of code or meta-language to describe Sanskrit grammar. These are all examples where, to a greater or lesser degree, you can unpack the information that is being conveyed into "ordinary" language but in doing so you lose (at least) the precision, concision and also (for Pānini, certainly) the beauty of its expression. I think what's striking about Pānini, and perhaps moves it a little closer to what you are describing about maths, is that unlike, say, knowing the technical words in botany or metrics, it's not just or mainly a matter of terminology but also of syntax -- of expressing the relationship between things. Pānini's Ashtādhyāyī encodes the rules which allow you to generate all Sanskrit forms. I only ever scratched the surface of Pānini (in a course at Oxford with Jim Benson when I was a JRF there) but I found it one of the most profoundly beautiful things I have ever encountered.
That is very interesting thank you! Following your post and looking up Pānini (of whom I was unaware), I found academic discussion about the structural similarities between Pānini’s exposition of grammar and Euclid’s presentation of geometry (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1397332), comparing Pānini to the way Euclid’s Elements build up `classical' geometry as a logical structure starting from axions and postulates: plus comparisons to Frege, the 19th century logician who is probably the founder of modern Mathematical Logic (capitalised to be clear that this is a discipline). There was also discussion of the way Pānini, and the way his grammar was structured, may have influenced the significant developments and achievements of Indian mathematics in the subsequent millennium: they encouraged a certain logically systematic way to think about things.
Pānini and Sanskrit is way beyond my ken, but my experience of mathematical and (English) poetic beauty are quite similar: the sense, almost, that this is the ideal way that something could exist. In a poem, that the words and rhythm fit together such that any change would be for the worse. In mathematics/physics, a similar idea that argument (or relationship between concepts) is exactly what is needed; every step there is necessary, but any additional ones would be redundant.
Exactly. This is linked I think to my very strong sense, which a lot of people find baffling or just eccentric, that the pleasures of the greatest poetry is very closely linked to the pleasure of apprehending grammar itself. (Pleasure doesn't feel quite the right word here: as you say, there is something existential or philosophical or even mystical about the sense of "rightness".) I did no maths beyond 14, which I very much regret, so I suppose grammar -- and especially Pānini -- and also formal logic, which I loved at university, are the closest I have come to it.
Hello Victoria. On the mystery of Desnos’ poem: I think the creature is the German army. The position of the poet near to a road suggests that he’s keeping his distance to monitor the situation from a place of safety. Hearing not seeing. The clumsy uncertainty of the great creature gives the poet Hope. Leading to the idea that this great intruder will collapse. It’s so huge that collapse is inevitable - failure is inherent to such oppressive invasion. Its collapse will of course leave a squashed and altered landscape, but the great project of imposing external power on France will have failed. That’s my reading for what it’s worth. Tragic that the Nazis got him and he died a couple of years after. I must get back to late Desnos, poems like these. I agree this is a tremendous, intriguing piece. Thanks for foregrounding it. I’m not sure I’ve taken note of it, or indeed read it, before.
Thank you Andrew and sorry for such a slow reply, I forgot that I'd replied to your private message but not to your comment here. In this case, though, the delay is helpful since as I have read more deeply in Desnos it is clear that you are right, or at least that your interpretation is at least part of what is going on in this poem, since the poem comes from the sequence "Contrée" which was written under occupation in 1942-3 and published more or less explicitly as an act of resistance in 1944.
On a slight tangent, one aspect of the limits of translation that I think a lot about but is (for obvious Two Cultures reasons) almost never discussed in literary writing is that of translation from mathematics/physics into `regular' languages. Mathematics is its own language, ideally adapted for communicating certain concepts, and fluency in it tends to be acquired either early in life or never. But, rightly, those of us who live in this world also try and translate these ideas for those who aren't native speakers of mathematese.
How does one convert something written in mathematese into English? What does one try and keep and what must one give up? How much should I preserve from what is important, even crucial, in the original? At the risk of sounding pretentious, I don't think this question is structurally that different from one about e.g. turning quantitatively-scanned hexameters from the ancient Mediterranean world into a stress-based English pentameter at home in glass and concrete megacities.
Fascinating reply, thank you Joseph. It makes me think also of the 'meta-languages' that we use to describe features of language -- the technical terminology that's used to talk about grammar or syntax or indeed metre, but needs to some extent at least "translating" for a non-expert audience. And most of all of Pānini, the ancient Sanskrit grammarian, who developed a kind of code or meta-language to describe Sanskrit grammar. These are all examples where, to a greater or lesser degree, you can unpack the information that is being conveyed into "ordinary" language but in doing so you lose (at least) the precision, concision and also (for Pānini, certainly) the beauty of its expression. I think what's striking about Pānini, and perhaps moves it a little closer to what you are describing about maths, is that unlike, say, knowing the technical words in botany or metrics, it's not just or mainly a matter of terminology but also of syntax -- of expressing the relationship between things. Pānini's Ashtādhyāyī encodes the rules which allow you to generate all Sanskrit forms. I only ever scratched the surface of Pānini (in a course at Oxford with Jim Benson when I was a JRF there) but I found it one of the most profoundly beautiful things I have ever encountered.
That is very interesting thank you! Following your post and looking up Pānini (of whom I was unaware), I found academic discussion about the structural similarities between Pānini’s exposition of grammar and Euclid’s presentation of geometry (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1397332), comparing Pānini to the way Euclid’s Elements build up `classical' geometry as a logical structure starting from axions and postulates: plus comparisons to Frege, the 19th century logician who is probably the founder of modern Mathematical Logic (capitalised to be clear that this is a discipline). There was also discussion of the way Pānini, and the way his grammar was structured, may have influenced the significant developments and achievements of Indian mathematics in the subsequent millennium: they encouraged a certain logically systematic way to think about things.
Pānini and Sanskrit is way beyond my ken, but my experience of mathematical and (English) poetic beauty are quite similar: the sense, almost, that this is the ideal way that something could exist. In a poem, that the words and rhythm fit together such that any change would be for the worse. In mathematics/physics, a similar idea that argument (or relationship between concepts) is exactly what is needed; every step there is necessary, but any additional ones would be redundant.
Exactly. This is linked I think to my very strong sense, which a lot of people find baffling or just eccentric, that the pleasures of the greatest poetry is very closely linked to the pleasure of apprehending grammar itself. (Pleasure doesn't feel quite the right word here: as you say, there is something existential or philosophical or even mystical about the sense of "rightness".) I did no maths beyond 14, which I very much regret, so I suppose grammar -- and especially Pānini -- and also formal logic, which I loved at university, are the closest I have come to it.