Malinda Words: Texts are ancient, transcription error-ridden

About fifteen years ago, when I was a visiting lecturer at the Mass Communication Department, Kelaniya University, I gave the students a simple exercise. They were required to write down all the advertisements from the main gate to the classroom. Not many did it and even those who made an effort missed much more than they noticed.

Several years before that, wandering around Times Square in New York City, it occurred to me that this was a place that was made of advertisements. Where there is space, it seems to me, there’s bound to be an advertisement. People selling something, encouraging others to buy some product or service or support some cause. Ads in all colors, all sizes and shapes, and in all kinds of places. You just can’t escape them. City spaces, trains, buses, taxis, other vehicles, television sets, radios and, as of now, electronic devices are ad-ridden.

But it’s not advertising that I want to write about. It’s about what we capture in our writing and how we capture it.

Years ago, I felt that the world is full of metaphors. Just like ads. And that led me to conclude that the world is made of stories and poetry. It’s all there but not neatly arranged. There are verses but they are scattered. Indeed the lines of a single poem are not necessarily organised as one finds them in the pages of an anthology of poetry. There are innumerable scores of music, only it’s as if someone has jumbled the sheets. There are incredible sculptures but they are still frozen in all kinds of material.

I told this to the poet Saumya Sandaruwan Liyanage; just the part about metaphors and poetry. He agreed and proceeded to write a poem about it which I believe is in his latest book of poems, ‘Ithin Kaviyani Hondata Ninda Yanavada Reta (So tell me, poets, do you sleep well at night)?’

So what writers and other kinds of artists do is essentially ‘transcribing.’ They know how to put things together. They gather scattered words and rearrange them. They extract a statue from a rock. They know which arrangement of notes go with other arrangements of notes. They know that color, line and space have been scrambled, so they decode it all. They see movement and draw from it dance.

And so we get literature, art, sculpture, music and dance. Transcribed from the world around the creative artist. And it is always incomplete. We always have to console ourselves with a slice, beautifully expressed no doubt, but still just a part-transcription. There’s text that is readable, photographs that speak a thousand words as they say, music that makes us weep but it is never more than shedding light on some place that’s hidden on account of shade.

There are limitations. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in an wonderfully crafted essay titled ‘Something else on literature and reality’ in ‘The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings’ expressed a truth that is rarely if ever acknowledged: ‘A very serious problem that our disproportionate reality poses for literature is the insufficiency of words.’

In short, exhaustive transcription is not possible. He puts it this way, ‘Just in Mexico many volumes would have to be written to express its incredible reality. After almost twenty years there, I could still spend entire hours, as I have so many times, contemplating a bowl of Mexican jumping beans.’

He goes on, this great writer who was first a journalist and at the end wanted to be remembered for what he wrote to newspapers, and offers this stunning sobering and humbling conclusion:
‘writers have to admit, hands on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are. Our destiny, maybe our glory, is to try to imitate it with humility, and as best we can.’

Arrogance interferes with imitation. It makes us erroneously believe that we have done reality justice and by that very fact we do much injustice to reality and of course the readers who may trust us to have ‘done our best’ and ‘in all humility’ too.

My students probably did not understand the full meaning of the word ‘advertisement.’ I tried to explain later; some may have figured it out. Had I decided to undertake the same exercise, I probably would have fallen short too. We don’t see all the signs. We don’t hear all the music. We miss some words and the lyrics don’t say what the lyricist intended us to read/hear. The artist transliterates the reality-text and some of the transliteration gets lost in reading, which is also an error-ridden exercise even if the reader is determined to read the text closely.

We can be better transcribers of ancient and all-containing texts than we are and that’s good enough since perfect transcription is impossible. Let’s flag the caveat: provided we try to imitate reality with humility, and as best we can.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 278th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

29 November 2023

Texts are ancient, transcription error-ridden

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