In the Letters section of the April 10, 2006 issue of The Nation, the editors wrote:
"A Letter to the American Left" (Feb. 27) by Bernard-Henri Levy (aka BHL) ignited a firestorm of (mostly) angry mail. Readers described Levy's writing as "inane," "tripe," "blather," "windbaggery," "merde," "condescending and crass," "shortsighted" and "best left to line the bird cage." They called Levy a "fashionable lightweight," "motor-mouth," "posturing populist," "narcissistic" and an "arrogant," "self-promoting" "rock-star philosopher." Kevin Beavers of Freiburg, Germany, suggests that BHL has been "bumbling about America more like Inspector Clouseau than Tocqueville." Many wrote to inform Levy that Susan Sontag is dead (an ambiguity of translation caused some to mistake his complimentary invocation of Sontag as referring to her in the present tense). [emphasis added]
Jan Freeman emailed to ask what the "ambiguity of translation" might have been: "was it something about the choice of possible tenses, the difference in the way French and English express that kind of generalization, what?"
The phrase "ambiguity of translation" suggests that something in the source language could have been construed in two different ways, and the translator made the wrong choice, rendering the phrase in a way that gives a mistaken impression of the writer's intended meaning. But after a bit of investigation, I've concluded that this is not what happened here. Rather, both the French original and the original translation into English were unambiguous. The problem was introduced in the subsequent editing of the English version. Thus it would be more accurate to say that the culprit was "an ambiguity of editing".
Here's how the passage in question appeared in the version of Bernard-Henri Levy's "A Letter to the American Left" as printed in the February 27, 2006 issue of The Nation:
And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in Central Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer applies? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I know you have journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished what our French press still hasn't finished forty years after our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens from their political duties? Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag--or even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other grounds) on this vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of that handful of individuals who, after September 11, launched the debate about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be justified? [emphasis added]
BHL was referring to Sontag's essay "Regarding the Torture of Others" (NYT Magazine, May 23, 2004), and asking why more intellectuals haven't followed her example. But the sentence is indeed ambiguous, as we can see more clearly if we leave out the aside about Vidal and Kushner:
Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag on this vexed and vital issue?
There are two possible construals of the relationship between Sontag and the sets of intellectuals heard from or not. The choices are brought out by the different continuations below:
(a) Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag, who has been the only one to say anything?
(b) Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag, who has been uncharacteristically silent?
I think that both continuations are linguistically plausible. I originally thought that this might reflect a sort of restrictive vs. non-restrictive interpretation of the "like NP" phrase. But a note from John Cowan has persuaded me that this is a vagueness intrinsic to phrases that describe a class by giving a characteristic member. He offers the examples
(a) Birds like the American robin are very common in the Eastern United States.
(b) Birds like the American robin are very common in Siberia.
where example (a) suggests that the examplar is included, while (b) suggests that it's not. These interpretive options continue to exist in phrases such as "robin-like birds".
Apparently many people read BHL's reference to Sontag in the inclusive sense -- "why haven't we head from Susan Sontag and the rest of the intellectuals like her?" -- and were moved to respond "Because she's dead, you dope!" or "We have, you ignoramus!", depending on whether or not they remembered her 2004 NYT magazine piece.
But no such interpretation was plausible for BHL's original French version of the crucial sentence:
Pourquoi, depuis Susan Sontag, n’entend-on pas davantage les clercs sur le sujet?
An interlinear gloss:
pourquoi |
depuis |
Susan Sontag |
n' |
entend |
on |
pas |
davantage |
les |
clercs |
sur |
le |
sujet |
why |
since |
Susan Sontag |
NEG |
hear |
one |
NEG |
more |
the |
scholars |
on |
the |
subject |
And the same is true of the original (unedited) English translation, which is idiomatic but close to the original:
Why haven’t we heard from more scholars, post-Susan Sontag, on the subject?
And here is that unedited sentence in the context of the rest of the original English translation of the paragraph:
And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in central Europe, those areas where the law doesn’t apply, that are unworthy of a democracy? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I know that you have journalists who in a few days did work that our French press still hasn’t finished doing forty years after our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens from their duties? Why haven’t we heard from more scholars, post-Susan Sontag, on the subject? And what should we think about those individuals who, after September 11th, in Dissent and elsewhere, launched the pointless debate about the circumstances in which recourse to torture might suddenly be justified?
As you can see, the language of this paragraph was modified quite a bit on its way to the pages of The Nation. Some of the changes are minor: "their duties" became "their political duties". Other are a bit more consequential: "the pointless debate" became "the debate", and the reference to Dissent was dropped.
The only major addition is the reference to Vidal and Kushner, and I think this addition suggests where the misreadable phrase in the final version came from. BHL's original sentence, though complimenting Sontag, suggested falsely that other American intellectuals have been silent about the practice of torture by American forces in the GWOT. In fact, many Americans, scholars or otherwise, have been pretty noisy on this subject -- including some on the right, like Andrew Sullivan and John McCain. The noisier voices on the left include Gore Vidal, a contributing editor of The Nation, and Tony Kushner, an editorial board member. I surmise that (some of) these facts were brought to BHL's attention, and he agreed to add Vidal and Kushner's names to Sontag's -- along with the otherwise-gratuitous parenthetical swipe "with whom I disagree on most other grounds".
The exchange between The Nation's editors and BHL was perhaps a bit strained, and the crucial sentence needed major surgery to incorporate both the two new names and the parenthetical disclaimer. In this difficult process, the phrase became awkward to the point of ambiguity.
And I may be reading too much into the textual tea leaves here, but in the Letters section of the April 10 issue, the editors seem to have been enjoying themselves as they summarize their readers' evaluations of BHL's remarks:
"inane," "tripe," "blather," "windbaggery," "merde," "condescending and crass," "shortsighted" ... "best left to line the bird cage" ... "fashionable lightweight," "motor-mouth," "posturing populist," "narcissistic" .. "arrogant," "self-promoting" "rock-star philosopher" ... "bumbling about America more like Inspector Clouseau than Tocqueville."
[An ironic postscript... Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker was one of those who misunderstood the sentence we've been analyzing. But his interpretation is sadly off the mark:
Clueless liberal intellectuals never fail to astound us with their ignorance. Frenchman Bernard-Henri Levy is famous enough as a philosopher and left wing activist to be known by his initials BHL in chic French intellectual circles, as well as among American Upper West Siders like Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine.
Ignorant pretentious verbiage is the norm on those pages, of course. But usually the lefties keep up with gossip about each other. But The Nation has just published a column (translated from the French) entitled “A Letter to the American Left” by BHL in which the noted member of the nouveau philosophes lists assorted American outrages and laments:
“Why haven’t we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag…?”
Apparently BHL and his editor vanden Heuvel haven’t been doing much reading lately. Susan Sontag died in December, 2004. Her obituary made all the big newspapers, from the LA Times to The Guardian.
Someone has got to break the sad news to these two intellectual giants.
The sad thing is not that Lifson misunderstood the sentence, it's that he sees Lévy and The Nation as indistinguishable "liberal ... left wing activist[s]". In fact Lévy is about as close as France gets to a neo-conservative; and it's clear that he is politically not at all in tune with either The Nation's editors or its readers. I'm not sure whether this mistake is due to Lifson's perspective -- Los Angeles and Beijing are indistinguishable when viewed from Beta Centauri -- or due to his lack of curiosity about political positions that differ even slightly from his own.
This reminds me of something by Glen Greenwald that Andrew Sullivan recently recently quoted:
"It used to be the case that in order to be considered a 'liberal' or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe [sic] to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day ...
Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush."
The same misunderstanding of the Sontag sentence appears in Doug Ireland's attack on BHL from the left, though of course Ireland does not use the same terminology.
As for the implicit dispute between BHL and The Nation, it's tempting to interpret it in terms of Adam Gopnik's riff on fact checkers vs. theory checkers. But I'll resist the temptation.]
[]
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 31, 2006 12:34 AM