Translation as the Closest Possible Reading

with a little help from the tiny space cadet in my brain

Sometimes, in the middle of a lecture, I lose myself. It’s a common phenomenon when your faculties are under stress (as ours are, as mine is). ADHD wants to help explain this phenomenon, too, but it doesn’t. Not entirely:

In people without ADHD, it [SPACING OUT] can happen during periods of sleep deprivation or stress. When you have ADHD, though, it happens frequently, even when you are well-rested and relaxed. In all cases, it’s completely involuntary. You don’t consciously decide to stop paying attention, and your brain switches off on its own.

Yesterday, during a lecture called “Translation as the Closest Possible Reading” (covering a wild weave of topics, including the history of handwriting, The Standard Model, and a dash of Wittgenstein for good measure), I lost myself while staring at these Cuneiform tablets. I find it a curious phenomenon: What happens? Where do I go? How do I find my way back? Where was I while I was gone?

Perhaps you’re thinking that I set the bar a little high for the lecture topic and spaced out when I ran into a cognitive deficiency. I wouldn’t begrudge you for this thinking, but it’s inaccurate. I prepared for the lecture, I had my notes; I even said the whole damn thing in my head in the shower, thinking, that’s it! So what happened? Why did these little wedges throw me off?

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I have always loved thinking about the history of writing: about the physical act of marking things down; of symbology; of the neurological processes of literacy— and until today, I don’t think I could have articulated why. Where I went, when I got lost in those wedges, was, I think, me figuring out this why.

In the class I’m teaching, a craft class called Particle Poetics, we’re reading Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What it Seems. So many other books (popular books, text-booky books) have failed to explain our current understanding of particle physics to me where Rovelli has excelled. He has opened up universes of thought that I thought were not ever going to be opened up for me. And I think he was able to do this (firstly, because of artistic genius, but also) because, as he writes in his preface, before he sat down to write the book, he went for a long drive. He allowed himself to space out.

What he figured out in that space is that he needed to take a long view and apply a wide lens. He needed to go back to Greek atomism, and the philosophical questioning that shares DNA with our contemporary confusion about quantum mechanics. I’m so glad he shares the driving anecdote with his readers, because it’s helped me unlock the following truth:

To understand our current understanding of something (fascism, quantum mechanics, handwriting), we have to know the history of our understanding. It’s like we need to have a growth mindset on behalf of humanity, a phenomenon I’m sure a psychologist could readily explain to you, but also one that seems truly revolutionary to me in the present moment. We must also employ this growth mindset in reverse, even as we drive the present moment forward.

If literacy and the advent of a historical “record” causes lots of problems (you know, like seeding bias and institutionalizing racism), it also allows an opportunity for this growth mindset to be developed on a different timescale.

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Who started writing? Not, who was the first writer, but— who was like, you know what? I’m going to figure out a way to just jot this down? Acknowledging the pitfalls of colonial frameworks, rampant in all disciplines of the academy, I want to know: What can we know about the first writing? About the history that follows? Does that history unlock clues to any of the following unanswerable questions?:

• What is a metaphor?

• What is realism? Representation?

• What is the smallest unit of a poem?

I guess my instinct, what I really want to say here, is pretty simple: We (can) learn from our mistakes. But I can’t learn what others have learned unless I have a way of feeling their mistakes alongside them. I learn via the story of the failure. The longest, messiest version teaches me the most.

Rovelli is so good at showing the stickiness of particular problems, and the routes and detours experimenters and theorists have taken as they tried to, say, comprehend the nature of light, or to determine what is the “bottommost” layer of reality.

As I was staring at the Cuneiform, (I think that) what I was thinking, even though my brain looked like a blank page to me, was this: Something magical happens in our brain when we encode our experience, see that code in “reality” using our biologically endowed senses, and then understand our experience will be decoded and lived anew. This is the thrill of translation; it is also the thrill of reading (arguably a kind of translation) and writing (which is certainly so). I was trying to put my finger on that thrill, to name it for my students. But it’s slippery in there.

*

Thanks to a really cool museum called the Letterform Archive, I know that the Cuneiform wedges above were born out of a need for utility. They are ledgers of work: “A record of the basic labor performed by a small crew of workers, this text provides a slight yet suggestive view of the ancient Near East.”

To understand these texts, the exhibit curators had to do detective work. They got in touch with a scholar, Professor Manuel Molina, who runs another exceedingly interesting archive (The Database of Neo-Sumerian texts; go forth and play— don’t be thrown by the very Spanish government website). Molina recognized Letterform’s cuneiform tablets instantly. Because of his work’s focus, he could read these wedges, across pretty unfathomable expanses of dataspace (100,000 texts) and time (~4,000 years).

He knew that “…the tablets he was looking at were created circa 2004–1763 BCE (about when the Epic of Gilgamesh first appears in writing) in the region spanning Northern Iraq, Northwest Syria, and Turkey.”

Here’s the interesting thing. The night before my lecture— late at night, after putting my daughter to bed, and doing the thing I always swear to myself I’ll never do, which is prep a powerpoint presentation late at night for a class that doesn’t require power point presentations— I got lost in these images then, too. I wrote it off at the moment as a well-deserved sleepiness.

But now, I think my body was trying to tell me something. What you see in this image, sourced from the Letterform Archive, is a “transliteration” of the writing. If you go to this article, you’ll learn that the transliteration was only the first of many steps of a cumulative effort to translate the writing from its original Sumerian into Modern English:

200 bricks (carried by) Unnubum
200 (carried by) Usatum
200 (carried by) Damquanum
200 (carried by) Atalum
200 (carried by) Zabzapum
200 (carried by) Belenum
[200] (carried by) Huli’anum
[200] (carried by) Kakajanum
[200 (carried by) ...]-um—————[...]
[200] (carried by) Išar-...
200 (carried by) Sapanum
200 (carried by) Abirih

13 men carried bricks

Thirteen men carried bricks, and now I know. And more than that: I know that someone wanted to know, and wanted to remember, and that the remembering has taken place; furthermore, the remembering continues to take place, thanks to many minds working together. Molina (via Lambert)’s translation is more magic than even a Shakespearean sense of immortality; he has allowed us to continue recreating a lived experience via lines made from sticks in mud. And around the same time, the Babylonian tablets of Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving poems, were written in a similar fashion:

Is the smallest “unit” of the poem not a line of verse, but more simply, a line? Perhaps the enigmatic unit is rectilinear. My daughter loves writing “l”!

I am embracing my wild side these days, so let’s say that where my brain went as it catapulted through the blank space of dissociation was not nowhere. Or, even: if it was nowhere, it was nowhere in another point of time. I was both in a U of A university classroom in January 2025 and in ancient Mesopotamia, and because I am not a particle and cannot be in two places at once waiting around for someone to observe and thus locate me, my brain couldn’t decide for a flash which was correct. Which was more real.

Rather like particles those wedges were, then— behaving in strange and unexpected ways, spooking me into considering the in-between.

Here are a few lines from Gilgamesh (Tablet XI).

Go up, Urshanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around.
Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly--
is not (even the core of) the brick 
structure of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plan! 

In this version of the translation, “brick” appears three times in the space of four lines. To my ear, Gilgamesh communicates a reverence for these bricks, and what they accumulate to; pay attention not just to the brick, but to the structure of the brick— which is, brick. What is the smallest unit of the great city of Uruk? Why such urgency to understand them?

We want to be understood. We want to understand ourselves. The closest we get to that in a relationship is for someone to ascertain how we’re feeling and mirror that feeling back to us. So it goes with reading; bringing the epic text into English, one of the epic’s translator Benjamin Forestor writes:

I don’t think any language has an inherent advantage over another for translating the epic, though there are certainly passages that sound to me better in one language than they do in another. The Arabs say that every language is a person, and the reader of many translations of the epic will understand what they mean.

When you sit, for a moment, between languages— are you then, metaphorically at least, between selfhoods? Forestor continues:

There is no particular reason why a Semitic language would translate Babylonian better than an Indo-European one, save that poetic lines in Semitic languages are more compact, so the lines are shorter and seem denser. French, for example, generally needs more words than English to express the same thought, so a French translation of a Babylonian line will often be longer than an English one, but if French speakers are the audience, why not express it their way? English is very rich in synonyms, so one is tempted to resort to them where Babylonian uses the same word again and again. And so forth. The pleasure and pain of translation is to try to play well on two difficult musical instruments at the same time.

I’ve followed the track of my Space Cadet. Where has this wandering lead me today? Here, maybe: What I wanted to say to my students is this: When you are reading or writing poetry, you must push yourself to struggle in difficult terrain. You must listen for two instruments. Because each time you read a poem— if you’re really reading it— you are honing your focus, you are firing over a million neural pathways, and you are using your associations with words and images from your life to help you live instead inside the poem’s life, at least for a spell. You’re finding where your understanding of the world can fit inside the poem. And if it doesn’t fit (and it never perfectly will), you either will yourself to reshape your understanding according to what the poem has taught you, or you give up the pretense of trying. When you don’t give up— that’s the closest possible reading of a poem. To me, that act of close reading is truly an act of translation: poet’s unique language —> reader’s unique language—> poet-reader’s new language. I’m beginning to understand how deeply I revere those acts. And why, even in the isolation of a library with a dusty book, those acts of reading feel urgent. Necessary. Decidedly a not backing away.

In her excellent Reader, Come Home, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf considers what happens when we read even a single word, and beautifully illustrates the intricate wonders that unfold when we read a sentence or a line of poetry that is meaningful to us. As an epigraph to that epistolary lovesong, which I highly recommend you read, Wolf includes this quotation from author David Ulin:

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.—David Ulin